Friday Fryer (March 16, 2007)

It will be interesting to see whether Tank will learn from this. If I were a betting man, I would say no, he will not learn and will end up in jail again in the future (assuming he does not first end up in the morgue). But to honor Tank’s first few days in jail this time, he gets a Friday Fryer’s Chair nomination.

Lets face it, Duke was not a 6th seed to begin with. They had a .500 record in conference play. They lost in the first round of their conference tournament. Going into the big dance, they were on a 3 game losing steak, and had lost 6 of their last 11. Really, if this were any other school, the team would not have made it to the dance.

After the game last night, Coach K stated that “it is not a birth right, you got to earn [a spot in the tournament].” This is true, unless you are Duke. By the way, I wonder if this season marks the beginning of the end for Coach K at Duke. Time will only tell about that. Nonetheless, Duke, for the second week in a row, gets a Friday Fryer nomination.

There were 16 games played on Thursday. There was one upset, VCU over Duke. There was one other close game, matching 8th seed BYU against 9th seed Xavier. The other 14 games were not close. Hence, we may have just witnessed the worse start to an NCAA tournament in history.

The problem with this year’s tournament begins and ends with the Selection Committee. This year’s committee went with middle of the pack, vanilla teams from the major conferences, instead of top tier mid-major teams. These middle of the pack teams from the major conferences are what they are: quite average. Almost all of them play the same style of game. They also do not have the hunger to go all out and win, since getting to the dance is all that they wanted.

The result of this are games that are not only not interesting, but are simply boring. The Selection Committee must wake up to this fact, or they will destroy the NCAA Tournament.

Second, the Flyers announced that GM Paul Holmgren was awarded a two year contract extension. The reason for this extension was that he did a good job with the fire sale that the Flyers undertook last month. It is true that Holmgren was able to bring in a few prospects via these trades. This, however, does not make up for the fact that his fingerprints were all over the Flyers team that started this season. Nonetheless, it looks like Flyers management can only remember the here and now. So, Homer gets an extension.

What frightens me the most about the Flyers is that they are talking about all of the money they will have available for this year’s free agency period. Seeing how the Flyers are now run, there is a good chance that the Flyers will become hockey’s version of the Washington Redskins. Therefore, the Flyers organization once again gets the Friday Fryer’s Chair. Until next Friday, AMF!