Powered By: Championship Week
Let's start with Durant's ankle, which he says "will be fine." Head Coach Rick Barnes told the media yesterday he also thought it "would be fine." So, all's fine in the world.
We hope. Durant is supposed to return to practice today, and he'll have all of the next three and a half days to recover from the injury before Texas takes the court on Friday night. As of now, every indication is that Durant will be out there to tip for Texas, but I'm more than a little nervous about him getting out there and aggravating the injury before the Big Dance. I'd love for Texas to get a comfortable lead on Friday and play Durant less than 20 minutes.
Staying with the hoops team, the AP and Coaches polls were released yesterday, and Texas checks in at #15 and #14, respectively. Elsewhere, great news for bubble teams yesterday, as VCU rallied to beat George Mason and Gonzaga won the WCC tournament for the eighth time in the last nine years. Bubble teams will continue to hope for a dearth of conference tournament upsets. AW's got your full rundown of March Madness notes below.
If you missed it in the diaries, ESPN Page 2's Bomani Jones' most recent column is another hack job on everyone involved with Texas hoops not named Kevin Durant. According to Jones: Barnes can't coach, Augustin's a lousy point guard, and AJ Abrams doesn't do enough to create his own looks. He uses these "facts" (along with injury risk) to support the conclusion that Kevin Durant should leave for the NBA after this season.
This is garbage, and it's pretty sad to see columnists - who fancy themselves up a peg on the food chain from shock jocks on the radio - write this sensationalistic crap. Trashing Barnes is juvenile, bemoaning Augustin's contributions is just ignorant, and wishing that Abrams wouldn't drift to the corner to wait for shots exposes a fundamental misunderstanding of what he's good at. What's more, there are a LOT of good reasons for Durant to go to the NBA. Like, 55 million of them. It's just sad that these mainstream writers are going out of their way to tear down everyone around Durant, in an effort to boost him up. It's wrong, and I'm sick of it.
Mack Brown chatted with the press yesterday, but if you're hoping for substantive commentary from spring media interviews, you're headed for disappointment. The next big Texas football report will come after the official spring scrimmage on March 31st. Speaking of which, a spring game tailgate is in the works.
Some quick notes from around the blogosphere. . . Card Chronicle is tough to beat for updates and commentary on all the conference hoops tourneys. . . Corn Nation has posted its Big 12 baseball week in review. . . Jamie Mottram and Dan Shanoff unveil their Top 20 Most Influential Sports Bloggers, and I'm proud to see SBN's Tyler Bleszinski checking in at #2. Not only is Athletics Nation the standard bearer for individual team blogs, but his work presiding over the expansion of this network has been a thing of beauty. And, of course, helped bring AW and I here to BON. Kudos to Tyler.
--PB--