I Guess I’ll Do a Tom Dienhart Column

Tom seeks to answer the age-old question, “Are you a football school or a basketball school?” Yeah, I’m already bored too.

With Tennessee’s ascent to No. 1 in the hoops polls, are you thinking what I’m thinking?

I seriously doubt it.

You know: Tennessee is a football school, southern fried in Saturday afternoon tradition. It has NO business being this good in basketball.

Hey, I was right! They have all kinds of business being that good. They have maybe the best scorer in college this year – Chris Lofton – and a solid team surrounding him.

Here’s what I was thinking: I don’t think they’re the best team in the country, but as unpredictable as the NCAA tournament is, I could see them winning it.

I also thought about Chris Lofton being really, really good and the fact that they’ve played a pretty tough schedule. I thought about how winning ugly against another good team is a good sign come tournament time, where you will inevitably have to win on a night when the shots aren’t falling against a team that’s roughly as good as you are. I did not even come close to thinking that they were a football school who had no business being good at basketball, because that makes absolutely no fucking sense.

But here is Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl, snatching the white “T” hat from Phillip Fulmer’s head.

Bruce later gave Phillip a wedgie, because he (Bruce) is a raging asshole. Sorry for the image of Fulmer digging a wedgie out of his voluminous posterior.

Men’s basketball is king in Knoxville! I never thought I’d type that.

I would have advised against it. Particularly when you follow it with this:

Maybe not.

Recent history has shown us traditional football schools can build strong hardwood complements, with Florida, Ohio State and Texas leading the pack.

No shit! Why do sportswriters insist on opening with something that is patently false only to contradict it a couple of paragraphs later? I submit that it is because they are bad at what they do, but I’m open to other suggestions. Like, they are all indeed functional schizophrenics.

Still, even though Florida, Ohio State, Texas and now Tennessee are enjoying hoops renaissances, they still ALWAYS will be labeled football schools.

To counter this, I present Yale and Vanderbilt. If you’re unaware, they were both good back around the time of prohibition. Georgia beating Yale was a huge deal once, which demonstrates how permanent labels are.

WARNING: Once a label is affixed, it’s almost impossible to change.

Neat, so your arbitrary labels are pretty much incontrovertible by your own rule.

And finally we get to Tom’s grouping of football and basketball schools by BCS Conference. There’s actually not that much wrong with his groupings, though if I didn’t think the entire topic was so pointless I’d question a few. Like, Rutgers and Northwestern as football schools or N.C. State and Kansas State as basketball schools. Those all seem like plain old schools.

Man, I’m already tired of the off-season. At least Spring Practice is here.