Saturday Night Rambling--Basketball, Baseball, Football, and Ice Sports

Basketball:  Clemson basketball really needs a victory against FSU after the poor performance the Tigers put together after their collapse against UMd earlier in the week.  Clemson has lost a few games this year in which the opponent overcame significant leads to win.  This is not championship quality.  This is not acceptable.  Clemson needs to sack up defensively and play tough for 40 minutes.  The Tigers have to quit celebrating and start doing.  Clemson is not out of the woodwork and still has a long way to go.  Clemson must win 2 of their last 3 ACC regular season games to ensure entry into the big dance.  This team is lackadaisical and really has shown no urgency this season.  Trevor Bookermust spearhead this effort.  The senior needs to start acting like a senior.  TBook plays soft when he does play defense and is more concerned about jogging around, flailing his arms around, and expressing a look as opposed to playing like a beast as shown in previous years.  We will need to see one of the freshmen give the Tigers some meaningful minutes from here out and will definitely have to get production out of Young.  While the season is by no means lost, Clemson needs to hunker down and take care of business down the stretch.  Hopefully Jerai Grant can pass along a few words of wisdom from H Grant to his teamates.

Baseball:  Clemson picked up its second win against Wright St. today, 8-6.  Obviously, we will not know too much about this team for a week or two.  We really are not too excited about giving up 6 runs to a team out of Toledo, but it is baseball.  You will hear much more about our staff as we get into the meat of the schedule.

Football:  Cortez Davis from Daytona Beach has switched his allegiance from Clemson to FSU during the Seminoles' Junior Day.  This Scout 3 star safety committed to Clemson immediately after the Tigers' victory over Wake Forest last October.  We will be watching the recruitment of a few QB's this year and we expect to bring in a couple of signal callers in the '11 class.  QB Jeff Driskel (Oviedo, FL) has been offered by the Tigers (Rumph) and now has accumulated quite a few offers from some nice sources (Florida, LSU, Auburn, and Va Tech to name a few).  We are obviously after Christian LeMay (Matthews, NC) and Suwanee, GA's CJ Uzomah.

We are starting to get amped up about some spring ball and will surely expand our opinions and prognostications as we enter and exit Spring practice.

Off Topic:  Over the past two weeks I have been enthralled with the World Curling Championships (aka, the Winter Olympics).  While I really don't think that half this crap is worthy of an Olympic medal, Curling is jam-freaking-up.  I know most everyone is put off by gold medals given to a bunch of stoners skateboarding on ice, but Curling has renewed my Winter excitement.  The Canadians are obviously the class of the word (as they should be) and have really shown out over the course of the games.  Norway rocks some ridiculous threads and the British team features one of the best skips in the world--and easily one of my favorite players--Dave Murdoch.  The American team, however, sucks.  This US embarrassment was exemplified by skip John Shuster and his poor play over the course of the competition.  Shuster blew four 10th ends while holding the hammer, eventually getting benched during the competition.  In conjunction with poor work by the skip, there appears to be no good planning committee to get this bad boy going.  Accordingly, the crowning of an olympic team moreso resembles a beer-pong tournament, not an assembly of a world class group.  I have even heard rumors that a Minn. based club squad rolled up the US team, and am really not surprised.  Thus, congrats to the Canadians and we will hope that the US contengency will get corrected to build a world-class team for the 2014 World Championships.