Breathe Easy, Duke: There's a New Most-Hated Team in College Basketball

My first foray into sportswriting! Let's hope it's mildly tolerable:

The University of Connecticut defeated Purdue last night 72-60 to advance to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament. Analysts everywhere have labelled them the favorite to win it all in light of recent struggles plaguing fellow top seeds Pitt and Louisville. I can't really disagree with their assessment; no other team has looked so consistently dominant in the tournament, turning in a token manhandling of 16-seed Chattanooga, destroying a perfectly good Texas A&M team by 26 points, and fighting off numerous rallies by a tenacious yet doomed-from-the-tip-off Purdue squad. But in the spirit of everything still good and honorable about college basketball, here's three reasons why you should be furiously rooting against UConn during the final few rounds. Unless of course you have them in your bracket pool; otherwise continue to root indiscriminately for all your predictions to come true, even if it means going against everything you believe in (just one of the many reasons I love March Madness...)

Top Three Reasons To Hate on UConn

1. They're not as good as you might think

I know, I know, I just got finished shamelessly trumpeting the unparalleled dominance of UConn in this tournament. But on closer inspection, it becomes apparent that the Huskies are little more than a one-trick pony. Their team is comprised of highly-recruited yet shockingly unspectacular players with the exception of one Hasheem Thabeet. Thabeet is a 7'3" behemoth who can easily outplay most opponents due to the increasingly diluted quality of his competition, an unfortunate consequence of the yearly mass exodus of collegiate talent (particularly big men like Thabeet) to the NBA. The success of UConn this year is not so much a result of redoubtable playmakers, physical/mental toughness or brilliant coaching. It's more of an inevitability that arises whenever a college team has such a towering presence at the center position that it leaves every other team to rely on things like execution, athleticism, and basketball intelligence, only to be foiled by the sheer magnitude of the other team's best player.

Now don't get me wrong, height alone isn't enough to engender success for your team (see Ohio State's BJ Mullens). To his credit, Thabeet has great agility for his size, a tight grasp on the game's fundamentals, and I have little doubt that he will be a formidable player in the NBA for years to come. But for all the talk about how this is Jim Calhoun's best team in years, it bears mentioning that they only have one player (maybe two if you count the injured Jerome Dyson) who could have longevity as an NBAer. It's hard to attribute their success to coaching and chemistry, since pretty much every play they run involves feeding Thabeet the ball underneath the basket. And as the NCAA goes through an unprecedently severe drought of true big men, it's just not as impressive as it used to be to win 30+ games when you've got a near fool-proof wild card like Thabeet in the paint.

2. Dirty recruiting tactics

Granted, we can't blame UConn for capitalizing on the dearth of big men in college basketball. However, we can blame them for revelling in the profilgate yet unavoidably ubiquitous sins of recruiting that are just now catching up with them. Earlier this week, a Yahoo! Sports report prompted the NCAA to launch an investigation into whether or not the university violated monthly limits for phone calls to prospective recruits. Now I know that making excessive phone calls sounds like a pretty innocuous offense. But because phone records are empirical evidence, I imagine it's one of the best ways for the NCAA to prove that a university has engaged in less-than-responsible recruiting tactics (it's analogous to throwing Al Capone in jail for tax evasion, even though everyone knew it was because he killed all those people). Coaches and agents are usually too clever to get caught when they buy SUVs, prostitutes, and cocaine for high school prospects, but they can never seem to figure out how to cover up their phone records (maybe they could take some tips from the dealers in "The Wire" and only use pre-paid cell phones that are more difficult to track. It makes me wonder if there are guys like McNulty and Bunk working tirelessly for the NCAA ethics committee to bust all these dirty coaches. I really hope there are). Now anybody who's seen He Got Game knows that every program scoffs at recruiting mandates and so it's important to keep that reality in mind before villifying UConn. But if a school gets caught, then there's a good chance it was either a. careless, b. arrogant, or c. steeped in a corruption so abject and complete that it was only a matter of time before it got what was coming (as was the case with Indiana's cancerous ex-coach Kelvin Sampson)

3. Jim Calhoun is the least classy coach in the NCAA

That might be a bit of an overstatement since there's only one instance that concretely supports this claim. Nevertheless, Calhoun displayed a pointed lack of class back in February when a freelance rabblerouser named Ken Krayeske asked the coach if he would consider giving back any of his 1.6 million dollar annual salary to help alleviate the state of Connecticut's ever-growing budget deficit (UConn is a public university making Calhoun a state employee). Calhoun snapped, "Not a dime back," before calling Krayeske "stupid" and advising that he "Get some facts and come see me!" Calhoun punctuated his rant with a prime example of his undeniably trenchant wit ("My best advise to you: shut up!") and later made sure to brag about all the charities he supports along with the fact that he brings in "$12 million a year for this university" (by the way, that's $12 million gross, which according to Courant.com, ends up being about $7.3 million net profit so, you know, maybe Calhoun should get some facts himself).

In Calhoun's defense, I'll admit that the coach was caught completely off-guard. A post-game conference isn't exactly the appropriate venue for Krayeske's line of questioning (in fact no one's quite sure how Krayeske, a UConn law student, got into the press room in the first place which, depending on your viewpoint, either totally discredits him or makes his guerrilla journalism tactics all the more admirable). But the fact that Calhoun never apologized for his greed-fueled outburst makes it pretty difficult for me to shake my image of him as an angry capitalist dinosaur who feeds on the souls of amateur journalists and poor people. I don't mean to impugn Calhoun's philanthropic endeavors, nor do I think he should be required to give any of his salary back (despite my bleeding heart, the school does have a contract to uphold). But Calhoun's handling of the situation isn't doing his team any favors. And if he manages to keep his job after this recruiting scandal is over, his team will have achieved a level of ignominy reserved for the great hated teams of all time.

So be sure remember all of this if you're watching the games this weekend. Go Missouri.

DVD: Let the Right One In

I wrote a review of this unsettling vampire flick a few months back for FilmSlash, but it was never published (unfortunately that site is, at best, on indefinite hiatus and, at worst, totally defunct. More details on that as they come in). With the film now on DVD however, the review is worth revisiting. Be careful though; according to an article posted yesterday on the AV Club, first pressings of the DVD featured subtitles that were "dumbed-down" from the ones used during the film's original theatrical run (follow this link to find out how to tell between the new-and-improved 2nd edition and the much-maligned first version). Anyway, here's the review:

Among the criticisms leveled at quasi-vampire movies like 30 Days of Night and I am Legend is that these films emphasize only the feral, animalistic tendencies of vampires, down-playing the more human attributes that arguably make them so scary in the first place. While sharp teeth and inhuman strength are clearly redoubtable traits, it’s the seductiveness and feigned innocence of the vampire that is most threatening (after all, according to many histories of the monster, a vampire can’t even enter somebody’s house unless invited). This last bit of peculiar lore provides Let the Right One In with its title and also hints at the film’s subtext. Its story is a wintry gothic love tale that recounts the friendship between a tirelessly-harassed schoolboy named Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) and a centuries-old vampire named Eli (Lina Leandersson) stuck perpetually in her eight-year old form. Their strange union is forged by varying degrees of affection, loneliness, and mutual necessity, and under the subtle direction of Tomas Alfredson, the audience is left to determine themselves the extent to which each of these elements makes up the basis for Eli and Oskar’s relationship. Meanwhile, Eli herself will surely meet the approval of more reactionary fans of the vampire genre as she is capable of both gentle coyness and ferocious violence. With her saintly Anne Frank resemblance and sober demeanor beyond her years, Leandersson provides an added edge to this methodically paced, slow-burning chiller that recalls the prickly storytelling of another classic of modern European horror, The Devil’s Backbone.


“Squeal pig, squeal,” are the film’s first words and they come from Oskar as he toys with a knife and imagines torturing the bullies who regularly assail him with physical and verbal barbs (this unsettling combination of whimsy and sadism continues throughout the plot’s fanciful yet disturbing twists and turns). That night, new neighbors move in next door and the audience is introduced to Eli and her mortal caretaker, Hakan (Per Ragnar), who collects fresh blood for his thirsty young companion with the gloomy efficiency of an adept deer hunter who’s also a closet animal lover. Both outcasts in their own way, Eli and Oskar become fast friends, absconding each night to the frigid yard surrounding their apartment complex to play with Rubix cubes and discuss retaliation against Oskar’s tormentors. Paradoxically, Eli’s presence is calming to Oskar even as she encourages and prods his secret violent tendencies. The nature of her influence is ambiguous; Oskar’s own taste for blood is evident before he even befriends Eli. And although she is the first to suggest a counterattack, the deafening blow Oskar lays on one of his cruelest classmates is largely a manifestation of the newfound confidence he receives from her companionship. Nevertheless, as her own personal bloodmaid Hakar becomes less and less effective with age, it is difficult to deny the incentive for Eli, under the guise of her affectionate precocity, to unleash Oskar’s darker side.


Beyond the director’s intricate focus on Eli and Oskar’s unconventional friendship, Alfredson also proves to be a skilled purveyor of horror-show thrills, indulging in jump-out scares and even a few scenes of reasonably nauseating gore while never letting these haunted house conventions overwhelm or cheapen the power of the story. When Alfredson’s not decapitating his characters, having them spontaneously combust, or disfiguring their faces with acid (in a scene that makes Two-Face from The Dark Knight look about as scary as, well, Two-Face from Batman Forever), he employs a quiet and reserved approach. At times, the pacing is so diligently slow, lingering on long shots of wintry night skies and snow-blanketed expanses, that Alfredson seems to intentionally dampen the drama of the story for the sake of cultivating realism and emphasizing the film’s fiercely unexpected climax.


Though firmly rooted in the traditions of classic vampire cinema, there is little else you could call conventional about Let the Right One In. The film is predominantly concerned with presenting the joys and perils of intimacy, as Oskar risks both body (the explicit danger posed by Eli as a vampire) and soul (the implicit threat of making sacrifices for a love that may or may not be pure). The film is no more certain of Eli’s intentions than Oskar is, but Alfredson bracingly puts the audience into Oskar’s head as the director charts the boy’s leap of faith into the arms of a possible fiend. Let the Right One In merges the thrill of falling in love with the thrill of our worse nocturnal fears, creating a dark and exciting vision that will please hard-core horror fans along with arthouse moviegoers. And if you’re both of these things? Well, it doesn’t get much better than this.

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What It Is

Oh hey, it's "Crosseyed and Painless." I don't really know where to begin since I haven't a clue what the tone or content of this endeavor will be. I'll probably write about a lot of bad movies I like, whip up some top ten lists now and again, and maybe throw in some politics and sportswriting. My point is that I can't properly introduce this thing until I know what it is, and I won't know that until I start writing. And until that time, why don't you check out this fine throwback to Web 1.0, BigPoopCornPoop. That will get you started on everything you need to know about the internet in 1997. Enjoy!