(03-13-2015 09:51 PM)blazing tiger Wrote: Quote:It's funny to see a fan of UAB calling realignment discussion crazy. Oh wait...no it isn't, that is a sore subject for you due to what happened to UAB. Gotcha.
How's that for a discussion?
If you read, I am a fan of UAB and Auburn. I was just saying that it's disappointing to see this thread spend nearly all its time on realignment when there's such good basketball going on. (the UAB comment was just rude).
Are you an Auburn alum? It's nice to see Pearl breathe life back into the program. It would be a miracle if we won on Saturday. Other than that I've been to Auburn basketball games long enough to see John Mengelt play, Fast Eddie Johnson, Pepto Bolden, Charles Barkley, Chuck Person, and everyone after. For that matter one of my in laws was one of Charles Barkley's tutors and that side of the family are long time tip off club members.
I lost interest in the game when they quit playing defense and added the shot clock. It's like everything else in life now, no smarts, no effort, just chaos until a winner is declared. I must admit however that the Kentucky team this year is actually fun to watch because they are talented. But don't get wound around the cord because football is headed the same way. It is happening because fundamental instruction doesn't begin now until high school and most coaches there are teachers as well and don't have the time, or the assistants, to teach fundamentals. It's just easier to put the ball in the hand of our true athlete and hope the support cast doesn't screw it up for them. The spread offense in football was born out of the same desperation. I'm glad Auburn hired Muschamp as maybe some semblance of balance will return to the team this fall. Pearl is doing some of the same. They are finally playing defense for the first time since Cliff Ellis and Sonny Smith before him.
As for realignment there have only been less than a handful of SEC posters on this ACC saturated board. Since the main board is about realignment that is what most folks around here talk about. That is unless they like to flap their gums about their political opinions, which in most cases lack any semblance of understanding the intricacies of politics and how it relates to the power brokers and the lobby efforts of fortune 500 companies as they jockey for perks and policies favorable to their businesses. If that's the case then knock yourself out in the Spin Room with the rest of the misinformed conservatives and liberals who can't even tell you the derivation of those terms let alone how they apply to macro economics. But truthfully there aren't many sites anywhere on which anyone actually discusses the intricacies of the games. I chalk that up to the fact that the games lack those intricacies for the most part these days, and that is compounded by the number of so called sports fans that never played High School or College basketball or football, or even baseball for that matter (I did play all 3 and enjoyed the experiences).
To talk about what actually goes on in the D Line or O Line, or how to actually make a pick and roll work, or the techniques employed in the various blocking schemes and when to use them, or how to run an effective switch in a press, or to discuss the lost art of the drag bunt, or how the rotation of umpires is supposed to work with runners on base and how that influences the fielders' positioning for coverage, are all lost on a generation that only wants to talk about how big the score is, or how our team beat the crap out of yours, or some other nonsense like that. Their only game experience was piled up on a XBox and that is why they can't discuss the games in any other way.
You know why basketball lacks conversation? Go to the ACC board right now and read the thread about the woeful attendance at the ACC tournament. That's right "the basketball first conference" is suffering in interest.
U.A.B. had great basketball under Gene Bartow, not so much since. But then Bartow learned from John Wooden. Now that is worth talking about. Basketball is in trouble today because it is 1 dimensional and lacks the ability to hold the average fan's interest. And more importantly because those who can afford the tickets never played. The same thing is going to happen to football pretty soon and has been happening to baseball. Your generation will sit your grandchildren on their knee and talk about the day you had your best session of Atari.
So pardon the old guys who prefer to speculate about realignment because it represents the dearth of public funding going to schools, the interloping of corporate media looking for cheap and easily produced live product (the watching of which makes it hard to cut the commercials out and is therefore still quite profitable) and how at a time when states are cutting funding to education in general, and higher education in particular, it is leading to old line institutions prostituting themselves for the bucks. Compared to basketball, realignment is much more interesting, and quite frankly as a canary in the coal mine, much more informative about the general direction of business and education in particular in a slowly dying economy.
Hell it even leads so called brilliant people to try to impress their fans and viewers by putting up the world's largest video screen complex at a game where the dumb asses are supposed to be actually watching the events on the field. After 40 plus years of holding tickets at Jordan Hare I gave them up this year because of the farce of it all and because the artificial noise has ruined the experience of being with and talking to the people I've sat with for over 4 decades. And by the way we gave partial scholarships over the years as well. Therefore we not only gave up a cultural experience, but one in which we had invested. So go facebook your little buddies and tweet about how a geezer brushed off your desire to talk basketball, or hurt your feelings on a chat room because he didn't want to talk about a boring basketball game in which there weren't many set plays, no discernible defense was played, people were out of position all game long, and Auburn won because its, and the conferences' best scorer, essentially carried the day. Uppy do! That's not basketball. Discuss that. And I might add no Auburn Alum or serious Auburn fan puts the Blazer Logo up as their Avatar.
Now as to the board, look at the hits on the topics. Realignment accounts for close to 90% of the hits on this board which is only populated by a few people, and then mostly during football season. What does that tell you about who's interested in what? The thread on who we might take from the Big 12 gets 80 hits a day and is over a year old. Hits earn the site revenue. When people quit reading about realignment we'll talk about something else, but probably not about basketball. Even the NBA is bleeding supporters and fans at an alarming rate. When the ACC doesn't sell out its conference tournament, and then those who bought tickets don't attend it either, that should tell you something as well.
