College basketball's silly season

The end of the college basketball season always fires up the coaching carousel, and now that K-State has a high-profile coach in Bob Huggins, we can expect to hear talk each spring of the programs who would love to lure him away from Manhattan.

That talk appeared yesterday when news broke that West Virginia coach John Beilein is talking to Michigan. Today, ESPN is reporting it's a done deal between Beilein and the Wolverines. Of course Huggins appears to be a natural replacement, having been born in Morgantown and playing his college ball at WVU. There's no official word out of Morgantown who the replacement is likely to be, but of course the early message board talk is focused on Huggins.

I'm not really worried about this for several reasons. First of all, the timing for Huggins is horrible. He's only been at K-State this year, and has a bunch of players he's cultivated for the last several years coming in next year. Leaving those guys high and dry would be a tough call to make, although not because Huggins is all that concerned about his media image. Also, the players coming in happen to comprise the #1 recruiting class in the nation, which gives Huggins a chance to have a contender in the Big 12 this year.

Of course, all this talk has brought up one subject that always gets me started. All fan bases have ignorant fans, and West Virginia and K-State are no different. Some of the talk the last day has centered on Huggins wanting to get out of "the middle of nowhere" to a place that's "nicer" than Manhattan. Unless you've ever been to Manhattan...shut the fuck up.

Manhattan isn't for everybody. If you like the fast-paced, congested city life, you'll hate the wide-open spaces and slow pace of a town of (almost) 50,000. It's more of a rural atmosphere, with an element of redneck thrown in. But if you're from West Virginia, you have no room to talk about rednecks. We see it all the time in the Big 12, the fans from Nebraska call the fans from K-State call the fans from Oklahoma rednecks (or fucking hillbilies, in Nebraska's case). K-State fans are just as guilty of it from time to time, but that doesn't change my overall opinion of all of it. The point is, every place has its positives and its negatives, and you're never going to convince me that you have some special knowledge about a coach or player that demonstrates they won't go to a certain place because of certain "characteristics."

Not to mention, Huggins doesn't appear to be having any problems recruiting to Manhattan. We even hear he likes it here.

***

Last night's national title game certainly lived up to my expectations of giving me a severe case of the yawns. Congrats to Florida on winning a second consecutive national title, that's an impressive accomplishment. Also, congrats to the players who passed up guaranteed millions to come back and have fun as a college athlete for another year.

Now, a word of advice to Joakim Noah. When your dad is a famous tennis player and your mom is a well-paid model, don't act like you're a hardened thug from the streets in your postgame interview. I'd try to describe it, but I'll just let the video speak for itself.



***

Surprising news out of Omaha yesterday, as long-time Creighton basketball coach Dana Altman left to take the head coaching job at Arkansas. I suppose my status as a casual Creighton fan (have family at the school, native Nebraskan, etc.) made me a bit blind, but I did not see this coming. Altman has always acted like he had it made in Omaha, and indeed he was the coach of one of the best programs among the non-BCS conferences in the nation. He had a beautiful facility in the Qwest Center, and he had a fan base who loved him for bringing their program back from the dead. I was actually more worried about the Iowa opening than Arkansas, because I didn't think Altman would go to Fayetteville. However, it's not as far from his Nebraska roots as I thought (about 430 miles from Omaha), and the Sows do have money and tradition, and they play in a major conference.

Time will tell if this was a good move for Altman, as he already showed once he couldn't handle the spotlight of a major college program, at K-State. Of course, he's older, wiser, a better recruiter and a better X's and O's coach now. I wish him the best. It sounds like the early front-runner to replace Altman at Creighton is Oral Roberts' Scott Sutton. This might be a good fit, as Scott is the son of former Creighton coach Eddie Sutton (yes, THAT Eddie Sutton), and at least in my opinion, Creighton would be a step up in money, exposure and opportunity from Oral Roberts.