The Friday update, Part I

Well, I'm not one to put a silk hat on a pig --- this has been a disappointing day so far. Only one of the early games had any competitive fire, the second-gen games have been interesting but hardly compelling, and I nearly had a catastrophic failure with my cable box, where the sound just stopped working and I had to spend 10 minutes switching it out with the cable box in the room without the computer. Of course, I get the malfunctioning cable box plugged into the other room, and it starts working perfectly. Whatever.

Let's check the notes out for the day so far:

- If this Florida State team were a software program, it would need about 16 repair patches in order to be fully functional. What a flawed team. Great promise, great athleticism, but terribly terribly flawed. They got behind UNC and that was pretty much it, allowing the Tar Heels to coast. (Note: Just because FSU is flawed, it doesn't excuse that terrible sequence by the officials at the end of the first half, where they blew an obvious foul call on UNC, then T'd up Leonard Hamilton.)

- Kansas looked a little sketchy in the first half, but they really rolled over Oklahoma to finish off that game. I understand that Bill Self is on the sidelines and the big game implications therein, but there's no other team that's winning with the type of verve that Kansas is demonstrating right now.

- Ohio State needs to stop screwing around and just win games. Toying with your opponents may seem fun, but it's a monumentally stupid idea come tournament time. That said, OSU is safely through, having beaten Michigan by 10 today.

- Purdue is handling Iowa right now in the 4/5 game. So much for my Big Ten sleeper pick! (Although to be fair to myself, my sleeper in the Mountain West is looking quite good right now.)

- Kentucky lost...again...to a team they should've beaten. Mississippi State, undersized and with the refs fouling out seemingly half their team, managed to force overtime on a three at the buzzer, then took advantage of a truly terrible clear-out playcall by the Wildcats where Crawford had his shot blocked down low. How low can the Cats sink in the seeding? I'm all giddy at the mere thought of it.

- Nice to see that Jarrious Jackson showed up for Texas Tech today against K State. Now, where are the rest of his teammates? K State leads by 7 at the break, and is playing at least marginally like a team that wants to go to the tournament.