When the EAST is in the house...

In case you forgot or missed it, six years ago, three NCAA Division-1A conferences realigned, changing all three drastically from what we knew them to be.

Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College moved from the Big East to the ACC

Louisville, Marquette, Depaul, Cincinnati, and South Florida moved from Conference-USA to the Big East.

Rice, Tulsa, Southern Methodist, Central Florida and Marshall moved from the WAC, and MAC to Conference-USA.


At the time, the sports world thought that the moves would shift the balance of power in college football to the ACC (the rulings were made while Mike Vick was in college at Virginia Tech), by placing three more competitive football schools with a team like Florida State, a regular national championship contender. Six years later though, the ACC had the most football bowl appearances, and the conference's basketball schools kept the conference relevant in both sports.

But the change altered college basketball forever. If people felt that the realignment made football unfair for those schools losing teams to the ACC, then the current power of the Big East in basketball shows that they are the only true super conference in any sport (even the Pac-10 in women's softball).

Louisville, Pittsburgh, and Connecticut are all number-one seeds in this year's NCAA tournament. In addition, Syracuse and Villanova also made the round of sixteen. In addition to those teams, Marquette, Georgetown and Notre Dame were all ranked in the top-ten at some point this year.

Before you wonder how this happened, think back to the old Big East. Think back to Virginia Tech never being able to get past Miami in football, think about the wars between the basketball schools, the conference tournament with all daytime games. think back to Donyell Marshall. This was done purposely. I live in New York City, a place that was once an intense college basketball town. A market that had dried up in the era of dome tournament games and Duke propaganda. Markets like New York, Philadelphia and Washington nearly forgot about the Big East. Teams with large on-campus fan bases like Connecticut were fine, winning within the reinforced bubble of Stores, Connecticut and Syracuse, New York, delivering players from recruit to professional.

The other teams though, well they disappeared. Georgetown went away and rebuilt twice. Providence went into hibernation. New York City no longer cared about college basketball. So they realigned and brought better football to the ACC and better basketball to the Big East. The Big East tournament became important again, and in the scope of college basketball, so did New York.

Flash Fiction

Living Longer


A long time ago, or a short time ago, a young man without sufficient direction found out that exercise, especially lower-body exercise can extend life. Well, in many young men, life-extending knowledge is a cause for boasting. There is nothing that young men want more than to outrun and outlast those around them. To him, outlasting everyone was the best way to outsmart them. He thought that if he lived the way others wanted to-if he ran for many miles per day, if he played multiple endurance sports, and if he strength-trained as if he were planning to be trapped under a razed building, that he was living far more intelligently than anyone he knew. So for the next ten years, people leaving stores and walking their dogs commented to each other that they should be jogging the way he was. People who played basketball, tennis and soccer against him always conceded to the idea that no one trained as hard as he did, and those who lost to him did so with the awkward smile one always has when their opponent cares more. The most beautiful women he met were attracted to him, and he went on dates where women spoke about nothing but his looks, his biceps and trapezius muscles. He searched for other things to speak about, but conversations in restaurants went from food and nutrition, to how food effects the body. There was nothing else. He saw exercise differently from those who exercised for a living. A woman who overlooked the fact that he'd never lost his youthful and obnoxious boasting about living longer, and who thought he was the most beautiful and inspirational man she'd ever come into contact with, had his child, and all he could think of as he ran and lifted and pressed during her pregnancy was how he could teach his son to learn to live as he did much earlier in life. The woman had a daughter. It took three years for her to realize that his obsession with exercise and himself were nothing special, and she moved five states away. After that, his looks seemed to matter less to women, and he generally saw men with pot-bellies walking around with families and wives. Men with money had the even prettier wives. He was alone. Alone in exercise and alone in the clanging of weights and the calculation of breaths. One day when his hair was beginning to turn gray, a message came from his daughter that the woman who had his child had died of cancer. His daughter died in an automobile accident fifteen years later and someone who had access to her address book sent him an invitation to the funeral. On both occasions he did sit-ups until the creases in his abdomen bled, and he could not leave his home, but he quietly never let go of the idea that sadly, he really had outlasted everyone. He continued to exercise, even after it was understood that he would live far longer than anyone he'd ever even knew, he continued to exercise. He was an old man who was known to be crazy-crazy in the park and crazy in his basement and too obsessed with living longer to be around anyone. So no one was around when his arms gave and those weights fell on his head. He was hurt badly when he made it to the street, and when he fell asleep in the ambulance, it was into a three-month coma. He awoke fifty pounds heavier, and after taking one look at his body, and trying his best to move it to exercise right away without any success, he began to cry, and when his crying ended, he was dead.

The Price of FAME

Curt Schilling

MLB Service: 20 years (1988-2007)

Wins: 216

Losses: 146

Earned Run Average: 3.46

Strike Outs: 3116



When I was twelve years old I watched most of the games in the World Series in my living room with my mother, and we watched the gem of the 1993 Series, Curt Schilling's five-hit shutout that beat Juan Guzman and the Toronto Blue Jays. When the game ended, my mother asked me why I had such a sour look on my face.
"What the hell is your problem? You like the Phillies right? Almost as much as you like the Yankees..."
I shook my head and looked at her with the corners of my mouth folded and creased.
"Yeah, yeah I like 'em. I just wish it wasn't Schilling who just did that though. I can't stand that guy!"

It was pretty consistent throughout his career. Even before he had decided to open his mouth to try to become famous, he was just that guy you knew you wouldn't like if he ever did. It made you sad because he was pretty good. I was sad because the Phillies were an upstart team who needed a dominant starting pitcher after they traded him in 2000, but I still didn't like him enough to actually miss him.

Then he got better (after three down years in the late-nineties he nearly doubled all of his totals and did double his win total...but no, he's never taken steroids), and started to pitch well in the post-season, destroying the Yankees on two famous occasions. All of a sudden, he was a republican Bostonian, connected with Kennedy town if only in their hatred for the New York nine. By then everyone who didn't root for the Red Sox hated him. They listened to sound bytes from his radio show just to find reasons to hate him more. In the end, he was spewing enough racist, xenophobic propaganda over the airwaves to equally combat every loud, selfish and disruptive minority professional athlete out there. He tried his best to champion every cause he believed in, and after all of the mutual hatred between him and his many haters, after painting a sock to make it appear to be bloody, after someone hated him so much that they asked Ben Davis to lay down a bunt in the seventh inning of a perfect game he was pitching, he got his points across and that seems to be all that satisfies and completes a man in America.





Well, a man like Curt Schilling. People who think NASCAR is a sport and wear fanny packs and yell on television to America (on "Good Morning America") to "Vote, and vote Bush" the morning after winning the 2004 World Series.





Someone listened to you Curt, and like always, you were wrong for opening your mouth. You are wrong for your jealous rages directed at Alex Rodriguez. You were wrong for telling him outright that you'd throw him only fastballs in the 2002 All-Star Game. Did you feel like a big man when you called the guy out for no reason and then struck him out in the All-Star Game? How did it feel when the Red Sox were experimenting with you as a closer and you came in to save that game on July 14, 2005 against Alex Rodriguez and he bounced that little dead duck you threw at him off of that hideous triangle in center field of Fenway in a game that counted? I saw your face when you heard that sound. Did you hear how everyone gasped when it BANGED off the wall? Did you see how long Rodriguez looked at you after he hit it? Oh my brothers, it was real horrowshow...

That's how everyone should remember Curt Schilling: as the jerk who is a winner and could be remembered as a winner if he'd have just been a good guy, which deep down, he never even had in him. He just wanted to be famous, and he realized early in this decade that the fame aspect of the Hall of Fame might be important if a player's numbers won't ever make the grade. So he opened his mouth and for nine years nothing but hatred came out, and for it, others hated him. And he's famous, so some baseball writer without a brain and access to statistics on the Internet may vote him into the Hall of Fame.

Please keep good baseball players out of the Hall of Fame with great ones...

Please