Tee's Weekly
By Tee Kane
February 14, 2008
Here's the updated Top 10, as voted* on by our unique collection of Tee's Weekly staff, Wilmington cousins, rehabbing Grammy award-winners, and perjurers. So without further ado, here again for week number seven is our Tee's Weekly Top 10, a Valentine’s Day edition. A Happy Valentine's Day to all the special women of Newtown.
*Voting is determined by the same sophisticated model Dr. Old School uses when he’s calculating a dinner tip.
10.) Drake (747 votes): The Dukes remind me a lot of my beloved Colonials in 2006 when they only had one loss in the regular season and were shafted by the NCAA selection committee. Despite only losing once in the regular season, GW was given an eighth seed in the NCAA tournament and had to play two North Carolina teams in Greensboro (losing the second game to top-ranked Duke). I hope the same fate doesn’t await Drake.
9.) Xavier (828 votes): Xavier continues to pile up the victories in conference play. A number two seed for the Musketeers in the NCAA tournament is now within reach.
8.) Wisconsin (1,056 votes): The Badgers lost to a surging Purdue (this whole team might fail a drug test if it was taken anytime since conference play started) at home, but countered it with a big win at Indiana to stay at number eight in the Tee’s Top 10.
7.) UNC (1,105 votes): The Tar Heels have really struggled without point guard Ty Lawson. The Tar Heels are like an Italian super-car with Lawson running the offense and only a nice upscale German sedan without him. I don’t have the encyclopedic knowledge of cars like Dr. Old School (he can almost identify the car he owns), so please excuse the extended metaphor, but without Lawson the Tar Heels have a number of nice, shiny offensive weapons and no supercharged engine to make them run up to their full potential. Lawson pushes the ball up the court faster than anyone in the country and gives the rest of his the teammates the extra space to fill up the stat-sheet. Without him, the Tar Heels are your run-of-the-mill Mercedes. It may be enough to get by Clemson at home, but it will not get them anywhere they hope to in March.
6.) Georgetown (1,328 votes):6.) I got seven text messages within 20 minutes of the end of the Villanova game crying foul (err no foul) on the last 10th-of-a-second whistle on Corey Stokes. Yes, it was a terrible call. It was the same situation as a soccer referee awarding a questionable penalty kick for a foul committed on the edge of the box at the end of the game. However, throughout the whole game, Villanova benefited more from the officiating than Georgetown in what was one of the worst refereed games I have ever seen in person. There were more whistles than in an Eastern Shore high-school field hockey game. Referee Karl Hess, the most egregious offender, called a combined 867 fouls, most of them on the floor and most of them questionable. Hess looked like he had been on the phone with a Gambino family member before the game started. Bottom line, yes, it was a bad call, but on the whole Villanova has no right to claim they were shafted.
5.) Tennessee (1,492 votes): The Volunteers have a decent argument that they should be ranked above UCLA and Kansas since they picked up their last loss at an earlier date.
4.) UCLA (1,560 votes): Of the top seven teams, UCLA’s loss at Washington this past Sunday was the worst loss of any team. Many people have pointed to the travel distance from Washington State to the University of Washington as a cause of their slip-up, but there were two days’ rest in-between those games. Georgetown, on the other hand, had to travel farther and had one less day of rest in its games against Louisville and at home to Villanova.
3.) Kansas (1,776 votes): The Jayhawk Express suffered its second loss of the season in a close loss at Texas. Losing to the Longhorns in Austin should not be reason for anyone in Lawrence to panic. Don't count on the Jayhawks going 4-17 from the three-point line again. They are still by some measurements the best team in the country.
2.) Dook (1,896 votes): Duke deserves ample credit for remaining undefeated in the ACC so far this season (they’ve only had one game within 10 points). However I wouldn’t take them on a neutral court against any of the top eight teams on this list. That may be blind prejudice, but that’s the reason they pay me the big bucks.
1.) Memphis (1,916 votes): Memphis continues to be the only untainted team in the country, unless of course you ask the former girlfriend of Robert Dozier.
Others Receiving Votes (total votes are in parentheses):
George Washington University (3 votes): The Colonials tripled their vote total from last week with their second A-10 win of the season over Dayton. Since shooting into the Top 10 in week three, Dayton has imploded and is now in real danger of missing the tournament. GW is locked in a struggle to secure membership in the A-10 tournament in Atlantic City. It seems inconceivable that the team that has represented the conference in the NCAA tournament the past three years (two of them as the automatic qualifier) wouldn’t even get a chance to defend its title, but that’s exactly what might happen.