Shula, roundball, etc.

OK, so no Iron Bowl recap today. Apologies. Thought I had today off, but the Man informed me otherwise Monday. His fault, so no water balloons.

Instead, the usual random responses:

1. Shula stays, Shula goes, whichever. Still believe giving the guy who took the job no one else wanted one more year—sans Rader—is the gentlemanly thing to do and would pay off big-time karma-wise for the Tide. But Shula’s “OK, this week we’re turning the corner” demeanor and non-aggressiveness (regressiveness?) sure don’t look like the stuff of SEC titles. I’d hardly blame Mal for cutting bait now given that we know Shula’s simply never going to be a great coach, the only kind that will make Bama fans happy. Speaking of which—I’m probably not the first person to ask this, but what kind of name is Mal? Is it short for Malbert? Malfred?

2. If they’re so inclined, Bama fans can console themselves in that their roundball team is a Final Four candidate. Watched most of their win over Xavier (themselves a top-25 team) Monday night on Fox Sports-Virgin Islands and can tell you that 1) Ron Steele is still a stud 2) everyone else on the team is a freak, this new guy Riley included, unfortunately. It’s a damn dangerous combination. LSU’s got the hype, but they don’t have a point guard, as to this point Tack Minor has shown as much passing ability as I have ability to post consistently. If Steele stays healthy and Gottfried can get Davidson to stop bricking 10-foot jumpers (he missed half-dozen during that game), they’ll win the SEC West.

3. Oh wait, the sidebar says this is an Auburn football and mid-major hoops blog, doesn’t it? Well, not much going on with the former, unless you count twiddling thumbs until the team finds out if it’s going to Dallas or Tampa. (My thoughts? I think Penn St. in the Outback would be an easy mark, but beating JoePa’s bunch in 2002 didn’t do much for us the next year, did it?) And I’ve got plenty of hoops thoughts—most of them along the lines of “Goodness gracious do I hate, hate, hate Jay Bilas”—but got to get the Iron Bowl recap out of the way first.

4. While we’re on the subject of basketball, though, I will point out that it’s hard to get excited about Auburn basketball when they do things like lose to AUM. I know it was an exhibition. But it was AUM’s basketball team playing Auburn’s basketball team, they had officials and a regulation-sized court and everything, they played for 40 minutes, and in those 40 minutes AUM scored more points than Auburn. This is not a good sign for the Jeff Lebo Project.

Iron Bowl recap up in the next couple of days, I hope. Happy Thanksgiving.