You may have noticed

Basketball Insider Board
#1

That I’m not too fond of that school in northern Kentucky that fired its basketball coach and AD yesterday.

That observation would be correct. I regard Louisville with the kind of disdain most here reserve for Bama or Texas.

You might also suspect that that disdain has to do with their choice of football coaches. That, however, is not the case. My antipathy for the House of Cards goes back to a time when Bobby Petrino was still playing option quarterback for his daddy at Carroll College. (However, their choice of football coaches doesn’t help any.)

My first encounter with U of L (it’s never just UL there) was in Austin, Texas, in 1981. Many of you remember that game; it had a rather noteworthy ending. I had a media pass that afternoon and was wandering in the bowels of the Super Drum before the game when I encountered a group of Louisville student managers. They were loudly and emphatically planning their shenanigans for the next weekend at the Sweet 16 in New Orleans. Like the game they were about to play was a lead pipe lock. Their arrogance infuriated me. I didn’t say anything, but I stewed. And it made the celebration (and my own shenanigans the next weekend in New Orleans) that much sweeter.

Fast forward two years to our next encounter, this time at the Sweet 16 in Knoxville. Louisville won that game on a tip-in at the buzzer. I was sitting in the stands then, and their fans were just as arrogant as the managers I’d heard in Austin. Instead of selling my ticket to the Elite Eight game, I hung around two days to see the first meeting of U of L and the Jellycats in decades. The arrogance was just oozing out of the Stokley Athletic Center on that afternoon, from both fan bases. It would be interesting to see who learned their arrogance from who. I suspect the blue ones were the teachers and the red ones the pupils. Regardless, I decided that I didn’t like either school. Nothing has changed in the intervening 34 years. So yeah, I’m enjoying a little schadenfreude this week. Even the Cardinal head on their mascot is dumb.

#2

So you are saying that their arrogance ranks right up there with the tea sippers and the land cheaters? That seems about right.

#3

I’ve never had any interaction with their fans ever, but I always liked the style that Denny Crum teams played. They were one of the more uptempo teams in that era. Once teams to which I had any emotional ties were eliminated I would root for the Cards, not that I was particularly devastated when they lost or elated when they won. Georgetown and Indiana fit into the same category if I had to choose a side to make it more interesting.

#4

Yep. Sippers and paperclips. And elephants. Can’t forget elephants.

#5