Ostensibly Hoops

[Jungle Rat]

Pay it

[eCat]

yes

our AD should be fired immediately for putting us in this situation

[Jungle Rat]

Yep

[hedge]

Went to the Carolina game today, I liked the 11:30 start. UK get that aissss whupped...

[hedge]

Where's eCat? Give us your assessment of the UK game yesterday, and the state of the program in general...

[eCat]

$52m buyout for a coach that hasn't won a tourney game against a p5 opponent in 5 years

[The Anti k*]

That’s insanity. How can anyone sign off on that contract? Well, except Calipari.

[DooKSucks]

Re Carolina

This team should have beaten Notre Dame by 25+. Instead, the lack of a killer instinct allowed Notre Dame to remain in striking distance. Thankfully, Notre Dame sucks and couldn’t take advantage.

[The Anti k*]

Re Carolina

This team should have beaten Notre Dame by 25+. Instead, the lack of a killer instinct allowed Notre Dame to remain in striking distance. Thankfully, Notre Dame sucks and couldn’t take advantage.

Yep. Love played within the team concept in the first half. Then he goes on tilt and takes ill advised threes and those stupid ass floaters.

[hedge]

Notre Dame just isn't very good. Or tall. We probably should've beaten them by more, but I never felt like ND had a chance. Seemed like quite a few of the bench players got some burn yesterday. I think Jalen Washington could end up being very good...

[eCat]

I'm watching the USA dodgeball championships

they are actually running an ESPN 8 "The Ocho" banner on the screen

[eCat]

this is hilarious to watch

apparently the strategy is to ball fake 10 times before you throw

[hedge]

Sounds like Cal's strategy for winning a national championship since the last one. The good news is it's been 10 years since his last one, so maybe this year is the year...

[Jungle Rat]

I'm watching the USA dodgeball championships

they are actually running an ESPN 8 "The Ocho" banner on the screen

You call yourself a Bengals fan?

[DooKSucks]

Mr. President, Governor Hunt, Chancellor Hardin. I speak for all of us who could not afford to go to Dook and would not have, even if we could have afforded it. We are Tar Heels born and Tar Heels bred, and we are glad to be alive on the 200th anniversary of the establishment of public higher education in the New World. And immeasurably proud that this occurred October 12, 1793 here on the crest of New Hope Chapel Hill.

What is it that binds us to this place as to no other? It is not the well or the bell or the stone walls, or the crisp October nights or the memory of dogwoods blooming. Our loyalty is not only to William Richardson Davie, though we are proud of what he did 200 years ago today, nor even to Dean Smith, though we are proud of what he did last March. No, our love for this place is based on the fact that it is, as it was meant to be, the University of the people.

In trying to define its spirit, I find my thoughts wandering back always to Frank Porter Graham. My own family's experience of the University may be much like your family's experience. My father, who is with us tonight from a hospital bed in Elizabeth City, came to Chapel Hill by train in those hard depression years carrying little money and much hope for the future. He hired a man with a mule and wagon to transport his truck from Carrboro station to the campus, and soon became aware of the dominative professor who was known even then as Dr. Frank. This professor scurried everywhere, seemingly always late for an appointment. It didn't take long for my father to understand that Dr. Frank was, in fact, always late because of his habit of stopping to talk with everybody he met, grasping new students by the arm, and inquiring about their hometowns, their ancestors, their ambitions, and their general welfare.

I say this for those who were not acquainted with Frank Porter Graham. He was a saint. Those who knew him will not have to be told. He became the spirit of the University which he never forgot had been created for the people. He was one of the greatest Americans of the middle years of the 20th century, no doubt, and the most remarkable human being I ever came across.

I believe the church requires evidence of miracles, however, before elevation to sainthood. Frank Graham performed miracles too. In the midst of that great depression of the 1930s, he took the leadership of a poor university in a desperately poor state and transformed it by tact, diplomacy, iron persistence, and steady strength of character into a model of public higher education and a light for the nation. If building a great University when and where he did it wasn't a miracle, then miracles don't exist.

He was a Christian in a time when so many who called themselves Christian appear to us on television as pinched-faced bigots. It is good to remember the genuine item, an open-handed lover of the world and all its people. However, nobody ever mistook Frank Porter Graham for one of those passive saints resting beside still waters. No, this one drove a speedboat, darting furiously around the estuary, creating a huge wake, and rocking all the other boats wherever he went. Ignorance, poverty, and intolerance were among the home-based boats that got a good rocking. They are still on the pond in Frank Porter Graham's North Carolina, but they have not quite recovered from the good swamping he gave them. If North Carolina is among a good many of its citizens a shade more liberal and kindly than some of its Southern neighbor states, that is the legacy of the University president, United States senator and speedboat driver we once had.

Hundreds of people he knew were swept up in his great wake. Some of them are on this platform. Bill Friday, first among all of course. His own weight has rocked a few boats. Here is our governor who has gone into the boat-rocking business himself. In fact, hardly anybody up here has failed to be touched by Frank Graham's influence on this American region, including probably you, Mr. President, whether you are aware of it or not.

I think of Terry Sanford, John Sanders, Al Lowenstein, Tom Wicker, Jim Wallace, Joel Fleishman, Tom Lambeth, Eli Evans, John Eli, author of a forthcoming book on Dr. Frank, and many more I did not know but have heard of. All men and women whose lives were touched and changed in this place, and who went on thus touched and changed to lead in politics, to head up corporations, to direct great universities and foundations and to write and think and serve their state and nation.

Frank Graham had no children. We are all his children. And so, in time I came here, as my father had done before, and my brother Wallace after, and here we found something in the air. A kind of generosity, a certain tolerance, a disposition toward freedom of action and inquiry that has made of Chapel Hill, for thousands of us, a moral center of the world. This was the atmosphere that Frank Porter Graham created and left behind him. The liberating and liberalizing air of Chapel Hill, breathed deeply by Bill Friday all those years. And now in the care of Dick Spangler and Paul Hardin, and of the teachers and students of the present day. It is the air that we breathe here tonight. And so, on and on we might hope through the life of the University that it yet to be lived. Two hundred years to the day since the founding of the first state university, we can read again the words on its seal... light and liberty, and say that the University of North Carolina has lived by those two short noble words and say that in all the American story, there is no other place like this.

-Charles Kuralt, October 12, 1993, UNC Bicentennial Convocation

[eCat]

Cal has been contacted by Texas.

Some outside of Kentucky are speculating that if Texas makes him a "strong ass offer" he'd take it given the heat he is under at Kentucky

I can't believe Texas wants him but more power to him.

[Jungle Rat]

That would be a gift

[eCat]

we'd suck still for a couple of years but with the right coach we could get back to actually caring about the program again

[hedge]

"I can't believe Texas wants him"

They want to win some recruiting titles...

[aTm]

Cal's salary is so high that it seems crazy. Are they going to pay him like twice the contract that they are currently paying Sarkisian to coach football? Other than that, it does seem like exactly the kind of move they would try to make. As much flash and sizzle as possible.