Tuesday, September 9, 2008

The basketball schedule

The 2008-09 Wisconsin men's basketball schedule was released last week ... finally. It's a decent enough schedule. Some of the highlights:

-Our game against Marquette, scheduled for December 6, is on ESPNU. No, not ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic, ESPNews, ESPN 360, or ESPN Deportes. ESPN freaking U. How many of you get that? Time for me to get all worked up like a lot of you did when your cable carriers didn't carry the Big Ten Network a year ago. Then again, the Marquette game gets me so volatile — especially in front of MU's crowd of dentists and xylophone players — that I haven't watched the game live for the past three years, so what does it matter for me? Thanks ESPN, for going easy on my blood pressure.

-The late November Paradise Jam features some good potential opponents in UConn, Miami, and San Diego.

-We play at Virginia Tech in the Big Ten-ACC challenge. Better win this one, or we forever lose the right to bitch about not getting to play Duke at home when we're good.

-Texas at home December 23, should be a nice game.

-Open Big Ten play at Michigan, and home against Penn State and Northwestern. The opposite of the football team's Big Ten schedule.

-Most challenging stretch? I honestly can't come up with one. We play Michigan State and Ohio State once apiece next year, and with the expected overall crappiness of the rest of the conference, I never go more than two games in a row thinking "those games are toss-ups."

Barring injuries or other unforeseen disasters, this looks like a 20-win regular season team easy, 25-win team playing well, and maybe a 30-win season if everything goes right again.

3 comments:

Mr.Man said...

I honestly don't know what the deal with ESPN and Marquette-UW is. Unless both teams are ranked, they hardly ever give it any attention, even though I can't think of a better intra-state non-conference rivalry game. I think it must be some East Coast bias shenanigans. You know damn well that if BC played UMass every year, they would put that on ESPN or ESPN2. Bastards.

I remember in '04 it wasn't broadcast nationally in any way whatsoever. It wasn't even on ESPN's gameplan package. Wisconsin bars in Chicago couldn't even get the game. We had to go to a Marquette bar in Roscoe Village (a Northside neighborhood in Chicago), where they were picking up a terrestrial signal from a Milwaukee TV station.

Coach Scott Tappa said...

Another blogger, I think it was Phil Mitten of Hoops Marinara, compared ESPN pushing ESPNU to the NBA pushing the WNBA. Not exactly apples to apples, but I get the point.

Just goes to show you how spoiled we are nowadays. When I was growing up most games were not televised, and today the opposite is true.

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