Loss for Words

During the first week of College Basketball's season in mid-November, we are forced to recall a few things: how peeving and repetitive Richard J. Vitale is (prompts an instant channel change from Dave Scott), how Doug Gottlieb somehow resurrected his life from a credit-card wielding burglar into a credible news source, and how distressingly awful DePaul basketball has become. When the Demons dropped a game to the Division II Lewis Flyers of Romeoville, Ill on November 7th, I was still optimistic. After all, when the 'Cuse lost to D2 foe LeMoyne last season, everyone wrote off the Orange as national title contenders. Then, Boeheim and the boys from upstate NY rattled off 12 straight to start the regular season. It's just an exhibition game right? In the first regular season game of the year against in-state rival Chicago State, DePaul ran up 114 points on Kanye's alma mater--"how could they be so heartless?" Needless to say I was inspired by the Demons season thus far. In theory, if DePaul somehow finagled its way into normality this season, I could sit in the upper bowl at Allsate and watch some decent Big East basketball and dispatch a plastic tray of lukewarm, stale nachos all for under the price of a rail drink at HUB51 (9$)! As it turns out though, the Demons are not who we thought they were, and the OPP (Oliver Purnell's Press) era is off to a rocky start--I'm not sure I'm down with it.

The first game of the year at Allstate Arena for DePaul's Men's basketball team was sandwiched between an Australian Pink Floyd Show and the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, so right from the jump, skepticism was at an all-time high. If Jeff Foxworthy would have hosted an abbreviated set of "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?" at halftime of the DePaul/Western Carolina contest, Ticketmaster would have received more traffic for a DePaul basketball game than the southbound Kennedy at 8:30 AM. But, it turned out to be a commonplace home game for the some 7,000 DePaul faithful that made the trek from Lincoln park to Rosemont only to sit through an agonizing home-opener loss to the Catamounts of Western Carolina. It is often times said that an eye-opening performance is hard to follow up on. Still, I'm not sure anyone expected the eyesore that DePaul put on the floor Tuesday evening. The Demons fell behind early and found themselves down 12 at recess and eventually 21 points heading into the games home-stretch after the 10 minute mark. Whenever you shoot 15.4% from deep (2-13) and give up 17 O-boards, you're not going to climb out of many holes. No matter whether the lead is forged by a sub-.500 member of the SoCon (W.Carolina), or one of the Big East's elite, it's not in the cards if you can't stop giving up lay-ups to a team who just got run by 23 points by Clemson.

On a lighter note, Western Carolina's leading scorer (Harouna Mutombo) shares his surname with one of the NBA's all-time great low post defenders and interview candidates of all time. Not to mention their second leading contributor (Mike Williams),apparently doubles his time catching errant passes from the quarterback carousel in Seattle with the Seahawks. If we somehow find out that their starting forward, Blake Gallagher, is related to Liam and Noel of the brit-rock band Oasis, we'll just have to chalk it up as a defeat in character.

As for Pick of the Day, all of the hair product in the world couldn't save Steve Lavin and St. Johns against St. Marys as they dropped Tuesday's game by 5, missing the spread by a point and a half. For tonight, the Pulse Man likes both the Capitals (-190) and the Wild (-160) getting W's tonight against Buffalo and Anaheim respectively at (+148).

Pick of the Day: PARLAY: Sabres @ Capitals- CAPS, moneyline (-190) and Ducks @ Wild-, WILD, moneyline (-160). Total: (+148)

Record:(31-24-0)

Now I'm done. Rack me

Frost