Empty Weekend

In what has to be one of the most confusing things to happen this year, I didn't see an entire basketball game the entire weekend. Save for about five minutes apiece of the Gonzaga-Stanford game on Saturday, the Ohio State-Illinois game yesterday, and last evening's Miami-North Carolina game, I completely missed out on basketball. I blame it primarily on two things. First, I wrongly assumed that yesterday's Marquette-Rutgers game would be on television, and planned to make that my game of the weekend to enjoy. Of course, that assumption overlooked the fact that the Milwaukee School of Engineering seems to have a better television presence than Marquette since joining the Big East. Seriously, who do I have to pay in order to get a Marquette game on local TV? It's been weeks since I've seen these guys play, and I sort of miss the Golden Eagles.

The second issue was that of winter sports. My Saturday was spent watching the Wisconsin-Ohio State hockey game in Green Bay. It was a crowd of 40,000+, 25,000 of which were probably like me, and knew nothing more about hockey than that it's fun to watch guys skate fast and hit one another. Combine that with the time that one must spend during the winter Olympics waiting for a horrific luge accident to appear on television, and it just doesn't leave much time for basketball.

But the good news is that this week is full of big games just about everywhere, with the Lawrence University-Carroll College game this Wednesday still standing as the crown jewel. For fear of burnout, I've been neglecting trips out to games of late, but this week I'm turning the burners on. We're almost to March, and if there's a time to ramp up my game-watching, it's now.

Back tomorrow, after I've actually seen a game.