PowerMizzou.com - The Cougar Lounge

March 2, 2008

"Obviously, the three-ball was great for us, go figure."

- Wazzu head women's hoop coach June Daugherty after the Cougar women won their first conference road game of the year over Arizona, by hitting 13 treys.

"We still love the guy, and if he wants to come back and coach here, we'd sure take him."

- Montana Tech [where Kelvin Sampson began his coaching career] athletic director Joe McClafferty offering Sampson unrequited love, a career opportunity and unlimited phone usage.

"I must say, I personally gave him a wide berth because I thought he was nuts."

- A technician who had worked with Academy Award-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis and heard about his dedication to - well in advance of actual filming - becoming the character he would play in films.

Memo to the Pac-10: The University of Washington will be playing a men's basketball game against Washington State University on Saturday. Head coaches are not allowed to comment on officiating and the Lounge is sure that whatever crack officiating crew is assigned to Pullman this week will not possibly overlook this, because they have probably seen it 418 times already, but we feel compelled to be proactive and mention that Husky forward Jon Brockman has an itsy-bitsy, teensy-weensy tendency to implement a forearm shiver [let's give it a name and call it Big Betty] and push off anybody who has the audacity to be attempting to defend him. According to the rules of basketball, this is not allowed and should be called an offensive foul. But we are sure you already knew that. If this is the same crew that was relegated [we can only use this term, since that crew was obviously not the best the Pac-10 has got and appeared to be on double-secret probation] to the game in Palo Alto last week, we can only say one thing - there's a sale at LensCrafters!

Before we fully enter the realm of hoops, the Lounge must make a small post-Oscar reference. The awards went - mostly - to who everybody and their grandmothers thought they would go to, so there was not much of an element of surprise to the show. Even the jokes were safe, except for one from host Jon Stewart, which may have offended the sensibilities of the easily offended politically correct America as well as professing not to possess even an ounce of sophomoric humor in their bodies. We speak, of course, of the tragedy of the failed 1944 presidential campaign of Gaydolf Titler.

A more recent failed campaign embracing sophomoric humor has come to a somewhat humorous finale as the founder of Enzyte was convicted of fraud - which means, naturally, no more Smiling Bob waving happily from the love rollercoaster.

The Lounge did not have a strong opinion one way or another but some in the clientele evidently experienced some convulsions whenever listening to ABC college football commentator and former Oregon quarterback, Dan Fouts. Make that "former ABC college football television commentator" as ABC decided not to renew the contract of Fouts or his frequent partner, Tim Brant.

Now that Fouts is out of a job, perhaps he might want to hit up the British guy who hit the jackpot with a winning wager of $2 million on a one dollar bet. Either that or he could get wagering advice for March Madness.

The Wazzu athletes need no such advice - they are already a smart group. We know this because team grades are out and nearly every team GPA is at or near a 3.0 for their cumulative marks. Soccer is the top academic program at Wazzu with a sparkling team GPA of 3.46, followed closely by the volleyball team at 3.36 [an admirable effort given the current circumstances with a new coaching staff not yet in place], then the women's golf team at 3.35, the women's track and field/cross country team at 3.32 and swimming at 3.29 to round out the Top Five. The good news is found in the middle where men's hoop and baseball - traditionally, under-performing programs at the national level - both improved with baseball closing in on a 3.0 at 2.93 and men's hoop sitting tight at 3.0 even. Bringing up the rear are football and women's hoop at 2.69 - both programs that have recently undergone coaching and personnel changes. Women's hoop enjoyed a slight increase that is expected to rise with each year that head coach June Daugherty is at the helm. The sole concerns are in football where losses of non-graduating athletes are threatening to incur APR penalties - despite carrying the lightest load of semester credits as a team [11], the team GPA still considerably decreased in the last grading period. But the team will have two semesters to rebound before the next season begins.

"There I was shooting pool in the pool hall and then the Pac-10 refs came in and said I was using an illegal cue and took my eight ball!" reports e. e. sneezelle, claiming to be at the forefront of an epidemic of poor Pac-10 officiating after the Cougars' split in the Bay Area.

Well, just be glad you weren't throwing dice in the alley, e.e. - those Pac-10 refs always roll snake eyes. It appears the only way the Cougars can escape poor Pac-10 officiating is if they shoot 53% from the field like they did in the blowout win over California because as poor as they have typically have been over the years, they still lack the authority to call off good shooting. The Cougars got the shaft ["he's a bad mother…shut yer mouth!"] from the Pac-10 refs in Palo Alto as Wazzu chopped down the Trees for an 11-point first half lead and the Pac-10 refs could almost audibly be heard at halftime in their locker room thinking - "Oh my goodness, what have we done!? We're completely screwing up again! We'll mess up that big UCLA-Stanford game that Fox will undoubtedly want to hype next week if we let this continue!" Fortunately, they saved face in the second half by simply allowing Stanford's Lopi - the Trees' twin seven-foot chest-beating caveman brothers - to run rampant over Cougar players for rebounds and shots and if a Cougar player had the temerity to try and stand their ground and get in the way of the Lopi's "death or glory!" charges - why then, the foul must be on one of those saucy and impertinent Cougars. When in Palo Alto and faced with out-of-control and/or whining big men, always err on the side of the Lopi.

"How does this leave the Cougars for the NCAA?" asks Miss Fortune, delicately, so as not to upset the fragile sensibilities of any Pac-10 ref who might be listening.

Much clearer, Miss F, much clearer. Wazzu is looking at anywhere from a 3-7 seed depending on how they finish. With a win over the Huskies on Saturday in front of Dick Bennett and an unlikely run through the silly, Los Angeles-based, UCLA/USC-favored Pac-10 tourney - they could get a 3-seed. If they don't win another game, they will likely receive a 7-seed. The consensus of the Lounge clientele is that neither of those scenarios are very likely and the Cougars will have results somewhere in between those two extremes, resulting in a 4-5-6-seed with the more wins they get resulting in a chance at a higher seed. There are twin aspects of intrigue for Wazzu. First, to get as many wins as possible and hope that means the NCAA selection committee will put them in either Anaheim or Denver - closer for Cougar fans and well-wishers to travel. Second, a 4-5 seed will - potentially - put them up against a top seed in a bracket while a 3, 6 or 7-seed will put them in with a bracket's 2-seed, where, in theory, they will have a better chance to advance. With one of those 2-seeds currently being projected as Stanford - and that potential game not being played neither in Palo Alto nor with Pac-10 refs - the Cougars might relish that opportunity with a healthy Daven Harmeling.

With March having officially begun and the Madness right around the corner, it is time to pull on our oversize turtlenecks and begin calculating who will win. But who will win what? Why the best name in America, of course. For the first step in that process, we must go to the Best Name of the Year. Clearly, the bar has been raised from the beginning - when professional boxer Hector "Macho" Camacho won the inaugural contest in 1983 to last year's winner of Wall Street employee Vanilla Dong. This year, the regionals are tough, tough and tough. But the Lounge is going to go with a Final Four of Destiny Frankenstein, Hurtis Chinn, Danger Guerrero and Elrazor Sharp with a darkhorse of Spaceman Africa with Destiny avoiding the pitchforks and coming away with the title.

Finally, the Lounge Scientists were intrigued by the Name of the Year contest because they have discovered that certain words can prompt strong mental images and distract a person from the task at hand - which we see as a distinct problem for Johnny Moustache, Wacey Rabbit and, naturally, Poony Poon. In a study conducted by scientists, students were asked to identify a moving "target letter" on a computer screen, then they were temporarily distracted with a word that popped up on the screen, causing a slower response.

"It's like putting two pictures on top of each other - it's difficult to see either of them clearly," says Lounge Scientist #16, Zachary Estes, a researcher at the University of Warwick in the UK, attempting to explain the brain's process in the result and who concedes that he was distracted by the letter Z.

Exactly the problem we are having with Baffelly Woo and Pansy Ho in the Chrotchtangle Regional - but we are counting on Elrazor Sharp to be on his game this year.

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