So this morning I got paged at 6am and was working the issue until 9am. Suffice it to say, I majorly slept in.
By the time I turned the TV on, the Braves were well on their way to being dominated by Zack Wheeler, and they didn’t put up much resistance after he came out. It was a moribund 4-0 loss.
Naturally, the off day yesterday that should have been boring wasn’t. As anyone who is reading this knows, MLB pulled the All-Star Game from Atlanta for this season as a protest against the Georgia legislature’s latest attempts to keep anyone who isn’t a white Republican from voting.
There were ways to register your disappointment with MLB’s move without embarrassing yourself. Indeed, local politicians like Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock did just that. Unfortunately, the Braves themselves did not. Despite likely knowing about it before anyone else, the statement they issued had was more along the lines of a child throwing a tantrum than a reasoned response to the issue. It will be interesting to see if they follow they same “crackdown, then backdown” line that other major Georgia corporations like Coca-Cola and Delta did over the past week. I’m not holding my breath, though.
You can make a reasonable argument that the new law isn’t that bad. Most of these arguments say that things like not being able to distribute food or water to voters waiting in line are gratuitous but not actually that big of a deal. Perhaps in a vacuum, they are now. But let’s consider that the same Legislature that created those lines also passed this law, and then let’s consider that this is just the latest in a long line of attempts at disenfranchisement that has been going on for over a century. I think it’s completely reasonable to consider this context, and when you do, you’re not going to get the benefit of the doubt.
Going to try something a little different. Anyone who knows me knows that my favorite sports team on the planet is the Atlanta Braves, but I don’t write about them very often on the site. So this is just going to be a little column about what I was doing and my thoughts about the course of the game.
The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been base-ball.
I post that quote before the first game of every season on my social media feeds. I don’t know if the original script calls for baseball to be hyphened like that, but James Earl Jones says those two syllables like there’s a hyphen there, and who am I to argue with James Earl Jones?
Naturally, I’m still working from home and the first pitch of this game was around noon, Pacific Time. Generally a Braves game will start well into the afternoon for me, which I find pretty ideal as I try to get stuff done near the end of my day. It was also in the 70’s in San Francisco today, which is pretty rare even in the summer, much less on April 1. It was significantly colder in Philadelphia, with temperatures in the upper-40’s/low-50’s and a stiff 20 mile an hour wind. The players, just recently in Florida, looked as cold as the conditions.
I finally had a gap between meetings during which I could actually watch some of the middle innings, which was just in time to see Pablo Sandoval crush a changeup from Aaron Nola. That was no Citizens Bank cheapie – it was well into the second deck, and one of the hardest hit balls the Panda has had in years. (And due to the conditions, it had to be – almost every other fly ball was affected by the stiff wind.) Even better, it tied the game. The Braves eventually lost in the 10th, but that shot will be one of those we look back on the end-of-year reel in late September and go “man, he crushed that ball”.
The conditions were crummy, but not crummy enough to necessitate the backup opening day, so there’s no game until Saturday. I put together the schedule that you can see on the right last night, and boy howdy we have a lot of nationally televised games this season. That’s what coming within a game of the World Series will do for you.
Today was an interesting day for me. It’s not every day I hike what winds up being 9 miles and then I watch the ACC title game from a rooftop deck in Oakland.
But Saturday, March 13 was like that.
I feel like getting a bit introspective, so you’re just going to have to bear with me here.
Likely the only reason I care about college basketball at all goes back to my freshman year at Georgia Tech, 2003-2004. I didn’t attend a single basketball game that year, so yeah, it’s sufficient to say that I didn’t take much notice. But I did know about the NCAA Tournament, and we were a three seed.
Suddenly, the basketball team became a thing to me. Jarret Jack was definitely the best player, but everyone’s favorite player was probably Will Bynum (whom I know for a fact is shorter than me, we’ll get to that in a bit), plenty of folks liked BJ Elder, and, of course, Luke Schenscher Has a Posse. (And boy howdy could Ish Mohamed dunk a basketball.) That team got through the bracket, with some scrapes closer than other, but the team reached the final four. The RA’s in my freshman dorm put together a watch party in the basement of my dorm.
We entered the semi-final against Oklahoma State as underdogs to one of the last Eddie Johnson Oklahoma State teams, at least according to Jim Nantz and Billy Packer. (And boy howdy, nobody misses Billy Packer, eh?) The game was tight, and tense, with Tech gradually giving up a lead in the second half. Here’s the end of the game:
(Yeah, definitely pumped my first again after Bynum’s layup goes in.)
After the horn sounds we all cleared out of the basement and began wandering out West Campus thinking that we should all be doing something but having absolutely not idea what to do. Which, yeah, it was Georgia Tech, that makes a certain amount of sense.
We don’t need to talk about the national title game.
The next season was equally exciting, but the high point for me was the 2005 game against Wake Forest in a regular season ACC contest. You see, Wake was good then, as they had a guy named Chris Paul manning the point for them. I had joined the Swarm for both football and basketball, with basketball tickets back then being pretty hard to get, even in the Swarm. (I’m pretty sure I camped out for Duke tickets at least once.) The main benefit is what we got to stand on risers right behind the court. It’s hard to describe how much fun that was and how much I miss it.
Anyway, the 2005 Wake game went into overtime. 7 points were scored. 4 points by Jarret Jack, 3 by Chris Paul, and we won. It was the first and only time I had stormed a court. In the milieu of standing on the court with basically everyone else, I found myself standing right next to Will Bynum. Georgia Tech’s media guide had him listed at 5’11”, and I’m here to tell y’all that he was not taller than me, and I’m 5’10”.
The other thing I remember is that the next day was kinda rainy and I was taking the shuttle bus back to my dorm, and I saw Jarret Jack just sitting on the bus just like everyone else. He wound up being an NBA lottery pick after that season and richer than I’ll ever be. At a lot of schools now, at least in football, athletes are fully remote, even in the absence of a global pandemic. But I can report in 2005 he went to at least one class.
The years since then turned to underachieving and Tech trying to make the most of the terrible contract we’d given Paul Hewitt after the final four run. We haven’t made the NCAA tournament since 2010.
That will change now.
The past four years have been rough for Georgia Tech basketball. Starting over under Josh Pastner, he almost immediately got in trouble with the NCAA for poor decision making on his part, that ultimately resulted in the team taking a postseason ban last year. There’s been a player that I’ve liked almost as much as Will Bynum, and he’s unquestionably the heart and soul of this team: Jose Alvarado.
It was extremely appropriate that the ACC title game essentially ended with Alvarado stealing the ball from FSU and passing off for the game sealing assist. I have just known that this dude does not like to lose for the past four years. He’s definitely a guy that most people would describe as “scrappy”. But he guys his way through injuries, and unlike a lot of guys who do, he still makes the team better around him.
Tech suffered two awful losses to begin the year, losses that hurt their shot for an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament. The team acknowledged after the game last night that it was extremely low moment for then. Alvarado admitted that he wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told him they’d be ACC Champions after the loss to Mercer.
But here we are. I know that there will be those that say that Tech only played two games in the tournament because UVA had to bow out. That the ACC is down this year. Sure. Fine. But a conference record above .500 – a rare thing indeed. Eight straight wins.
Well, I was pretty off about how the course of the game would go. Naturally, I had a meeting during the first hour of the game, which was about the amount of time that it was a competitive game. Alas.
For my bowl predictions this season, I went 0.500 (13-13), which took my lifetime percentage down from 55.4% to 54.9%.
Otherwise, I’m not sure what else to say. I hope we have something approaching a normal 2021 college football season. If I don’t post any other updates to the site before then, well, stay healthy and safe and I’ll see you in August.
As usual, all times eastern and all predictions wrong.
Monday, January 11
8:00: Alabama vs. Ohio State (CFP Championship Game @ Miami Gardens, FL; ESPN): There are no shortage of variables going into this game. Ohio State is very, very good, but they don’t have the body of work. I mean that in two ways, and I’m not necessarily docking them credit if they do win because they didn’t play enough games. I mean it purely from an analysis perspective. How do we weigh factors like them them running roughshod over Clemson but looking pedestrian against certain other Big Ten teams? What is the extent of Justin Fields’s injury? The latter could be key in the run game if Alabama doesn’t think he’s a credible run threat. That said, he also was presumably no longer a credible run threat in the Clemson game after taking the hit, but that didn’t seem to slow the Ohio State offense down, especially in the second half. But that said, I’m here to just pick winners and losers. I suspect many thing this will be a blowout in Bama’s favor, as though that feels inevitable. I don’t think so. I’m optimistic this will still be a close game that will definitely see the Buckeyes with a chance to win at the end. But… I will still go with the majority in that I don’t think they’ll quite get there. So perhaps if I were a betting guy, I’d go with Ohio State to cover but Bama to win. SP+ line:Â Alabama by 4.3 Vegas line:Â Bama -8 Watchability tier: IV Previous meetings:Â Just four all time. The first was in 1978, a 35-6 Alabama win in the Sugar Bowl. The only regular season meeting was the Kick-Off Classic in the Meadowlands at the start of the 1986 season, and Bama won that one 16-10. For the 1994-95 season, they met in the Citrus Bowl, and Alabama won 24-17. And finally, their most recent meeting was the only Ohio State victory so far in the series, a 42-35 win in the 2014-15 Sugar Bowl that took the Buckeyes to the national title game in the inaugural College Football Playoff. Last bowl game:Â Alabama defeated Notre Dame 31-14 in the “Rose” Bowl. Ohio State defeated Clemson 49-28 in the Sugar Bowl. Announcers:Â Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit, Maria Taylor, Allison Williams