A Call to Arms

Alums NC State Administration NCS Basketball169

 

If you didn’t believe it early last week, then surely you did late Thursday night. And if you didn’t believe it then…well, certainly your eyes were opened by Karl Hess on Saturday afternoon, or by the league office later that night. Now, there can be no going back.

NC State is no longer a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference. Neither is Wake Forest, Virginia Tech, Clemson, Maryland, etc. NC State just happened to be put on notice first. Lucky us. It’s a four member league now, and has been for some time – Duke, North Carolina, ESPN, and John Swofford’s ego. No more room at the inn. It doesn’t matter that this is the house that Everett Case built. If you’re not wearing blue, you are no longer welcome.

Each NC State student, alumnus, and fan has a responsibility. Under no circumstances can you let this go, let this blatant disrespect stand. If you do, you’ve announced to the Swofford cabal that you will absolutely swallow absolutely anything…then smack your lips and ask for another helping. This goes far beyond sports – the cabal has pissed all over your alma mater, your diploma, and the diploma of your fathers, mothers, siblings, and the future diplomas of your children. If you’re headed to the RBC Tuesday night…be creative. And angry. Really, really angry. Make sure the chancellor hears you. That the athletic director hears you. That the Board of Trustees hears you.

Don’t expect to hear happy words. Expect, nay, demand action. Watch for signs that things are building to a crescendo behind the scenes. And don’t throw in the towel, no matter what. To live on your knees is not living at all. Fight for the legacy of Everett Case and James T. Valvano. Fight for your honor and dignity. Fight for the student athletes past, present, and future who have given and will give blood, sweat, and tears to wear the red and white (and sometimes black). If you don’t fight for them…why would you expect them to fight for you?

About BJD95

1995 NC State graduate, sufferer of Les and MOC during my entire student tenure. An equal-opportunity objective critic and analyst of Wolfpack sports.

Alums NC State Administration NCS Basketball

169 Responses to A Call to Arms

  1. tann84 02/20/2012 at 12:36 PM #

    “If you’re an ACC team and you want to make the NCAAT, you ought to be able to score more than 12 points in 11 minutes.”

    So you are saying that Florida State isn’t a NCAAT team? because they def couldn’t score more than 12 points in 11 minutes against Virginia Tech the game before ours, if your memory is that short. If I recall that game final score total from both teams combined was 95 points. that is about two points score per minute for both teams which means each team scored about 11 points in 11 minutes.

  2. tann84 02/20/2012 at 12:37 PM #

    “Acc basketball is kind of like boxing. You won’t dethrone duke or unc if it’s close. You either have to knock them out or so dominate the game you can overcome the bias.”

    You mean dominate the game and have a long, deep bench with minimal talent drop off?

  3. nouveau wolf 02/20/2012 at 12:46 PM #

    “Do our current players let incoming recruits know that they will not be allowed to win? That they will win a few games to keep the fans buying tickets, but in the end, the BLUES are the ones that matter?”

    I pray to God that their competitive nature would never allow them to believe that. I’m sure they get frustrated, but if they are that cynical and accepting of their “fate”, and that callous to poison the minds of an excited incoming class, I’m gonna have to start rooting for the Pirates or NCCU.

  4. GAWolf 02/20/2012 at 12:47 PM #

    Not sure who used the carnival game analogy but that, too, was a good one.

  5. UpstateSCWolfpack 02/20/2012 at 12:47 PM #

    All South Carolina residents, early April you should see a State tag on cars here in SC. If you see number 1 or 2, stop and say hello, that will be me.

    http://www.alumniblog.ncsu.edu/2012/02/20/south-carolina-dmv-set-to-offer-nc-state-specialized-plate/

  6. GAWolf 02/20/2012 at 12:48 PM #

    Hopefully kids are naive enough to still believe. That’s what we carry our hope in until there’s a change.

  7. nouveau wolf 02/20/2012 at 12:57 PM #

    This might cheer some of you guys up. At least we’re not Iowa.

  8. Packfan28 02/20/2012 at 12:59 PM #

    To further add fuel to the fire, I understanding the ACC is sending Roger Ayers our way for tomorrow’s game. We must put those rabble rousing Wolfpack fans in their place. We’ll send our hit man to do the job. This is going to get really interesting. How many technicals is he going to call on us? I would put the over/under at around 5.

  9. sockerne1 02/20/2012 at 1:05 PM #

    My vote for the unc game would be to have our pack play with fire and really take it to unc. If they get in foul trouble, do not alter the game plan at all. With a chance to win, we go for it…but if not, take it to unc until there is not a man left on the bench that has not fouled out.

  10. bluelena69 02/20/2012 at 1:48 PM #

    I see this whole situation in the light of how it reflects on our society as a whole. Certain people have been given too much power over others, often, for little real reason. The end result is that a few individuals have the power to impose their will on others, often to the detriment to the reputation and well-being of said others. This damage can have real consequences and those who violate the rights of others are not forced to answer for their actions.

    Cops and referees, to me, are one and the same. I generally do not like either, as, in my mind, they represent more of a threat than an attribute to society. They both have too much power and are not forced to answer for their actions. Few other groups of people in this world can perpetrate actions that can ruin the lives of others without facing consequences.

    In my view, a just society has engrained standards that protect the innocent or wronged from those who do harm against them. I don’t care if those doing the harm are cops, drug dealers, or housewives. Upstanding, good citizens in a just society make amends for their mistakes perpetrated upon others. And a just society has institutions (whether it be the police department, the ACC, a large corporation, or a small business) that ensure that their agents act accordingly and are held accountable for their actions and mistakes.

    In this equation, why am I, as an employee of a large corporation, ultimately held responsible for my mistakes, while cops and those such as ACC referees are not. It is this “rules are rules”/black vs. white (degrees, not race) mentality that I find threatening and detrimental to our just society. It is why I dislike cops and refs.

    Granted, their will be no lasting impact on the reputations of Googs and Corch. If anything, it does little more than update their hero status, making said status more contemporary. It also serves to further alienate NC State fans from the league we founded.

  11. virginiawolf 02/20/2012 at 2:01 PM #

    I have no idea if the “Wolfpack Unlimited” award was in the works before hess showed his ass, but the timing and selection could not be better. Give ’em hell Yow!!!

  12. nycfan 02/20/2012 at 2:06 PM #

    Let me just interrupt this revolution to point out that Scott Williams, former UNC walk-on and son of coach Roy Williams, was tossed out of the Dean Dome by Larry Rose back in 2005 for yelling repeatedly that Rose was in Coach K’s pocket. Which is not to say that Hess (or Rose, for that matter) was in the right, he rather obviously was not, no matter how much crap he took from Corch, just that this is not some unprecedented and pre-planned attack on NC State by some cabal. It is just a thin-skinned ref being thin-skinned.

    That said, carry on.

  13. freshmanin83 02/20/2012 at 2:22 PM #

    I am not in favor of leaving the conference just because things are tough. Never give up? Overcoming adversity builds character.

    I wonder if the b-ball recruits would want to play in another conference or if part of the draw is the ACC? I would think that the recruits we want, want to test themselves against the best.

    We wanted a coach who was not scared to take on the blues. Now we face some adversity and the responce is to bail? It has been my experience that once you start to run and find excuses it is easy to keep running and finding excuses.

  14. gcpack 02/20/2012 at 2:36 PM #

    BJD may be correct in that it would be nearly impossible to get enough acc members to take Swofford out. But wolf74 ‘s suggestion to boycott the acc sponsors may be the best alternative. How many times do we see corporations pull ads once the publicity of a negative event and customer loss potential hits them square in the face?

    Companies like Food Lion, pepsi, Dodge, etc will not want that publicity. Of course that would take alot of organization from us fans but more likely than conference kicking ego head swofford out.

  15. EdMar 02/20/2012 at 2:48 PM #

    Let me see…our two legends were kicked out of the Dean Dome? Cameron?. What Mickey Mouse operation do we run that there is no one person in charge of OUR Arena that knows the rules. Had anyone ever instructed the policeman as to his role and what can he do at the ref’s request. Before we totally blame the ACC and that idiot ref, let’s look inside at OUR lack of knowledge and preparation.

  16. virginiawolf 02/20/2012 at 3:03 PM #

    @EdMar unless I’m mistaken the ACC ref’s work for the ACC and follow the rules set forth by them … not the particular venue. The ACC rule book has been reported to state that the ref requests the venue’s manager to toss someone. It is the ref’s lack of following the proceedure at fault, not the RBC manager and certainly not STATE’s fault. If some drunk 16 YO with a bad driving record, crashes through your front yard hedge and smashes your house … should YOU have had a better hedge/fence/wall? NO … the kid (ref) is wrong as are his parents (ACC) for letting him to continue to drive.

  17. EdMar 02/20/2012 at 3:18 PM #

    That is what I mean. Did the venue manager agree to toss the two legends? Why? Did the policeman know that the venue manager did the tossing not the ref? Either the venue manager agreed to toss them or the policeman did not know the rules. Either way OUR fault. If the venue manager or the policeman had been properly trained they could have told the ref “YOU DO NOT HAvE THE AUTHORITy” end of issue.

  18. TruthBKnown Returns 02/20/2012 at 6:14 PM #

    We wanted a coach who was not scared to take on the blues. Now we face some adversity and the responce is to bail? It has been my experience that once you start to run and find excuses it is easy to keep running and finding excuses.

    If the adversity was ONLY from the Blues, I would agree with your post. But we’re not talking about competing with the Blues. We’re talking about not getting a fair shake from the conference, and the officials.

    I would be fine and dandy, even in losses, if I thought we were getting a fair shake. But when your team constantly gets called for ticky-tack fouls and the Blues are allowed to get away with bloody murder, then the problem is not the Blues. It’s the officials. And that’s my ONLY problem with any of this. I can handle losing, as long as the game was fairly and reasonably officiated. But it’s a rare day that we get that with those two teams. The only time it’s fairly officiated is when we are so over-matched that they don’t NEED any help from the zebras to beat us soundly.

    That was not the case last week against Duke. They needed (and got) a little help from their friends.

  19. sholtzma 02/20/2012 at 8:07 PM #

    I have claimed for years that ACC refs are biased. But it is also the case that they are simply not consistently good at their jobs.

    Year ago, Lou Bello (former ACC ref) told me that the game was getting too fast for refs to follow. He didn’t just mean too fast for his tiring old eyes. He meant too fast for anyone to follow accurately and make good calls consistently on the fly (without slow motion replay). The move from 2 refs to 3 was supposed to help, and I suppose it did.

    The point I am raising is that the game may simply be beyond good officiating. Even if that is true, though, the refs’ responses to this have been unacceptable. They have responded by getting into the habit of expecting calls and no-calls, anticipating them and then calling what they anticipate instead of what’s real. They have also responded by relying on their bias toward and against some schools/coaches/players. And now, we are finally told explicitly, they have also responded by “finding tendencies” of players and teams and making calls on the basis of these perceived tendencies. All of these responses lead to biased calls and in general to poor officiating.

    Consider a possible explanation of what happened at Duke. Duke opens the second half with much increased defensive intensity. What did you expect Duke to do? Did you think K would tell his players at the half that the same level of defensive play from the first half would work? So, now Duke is playing much more aggressively defensively, more physically, pushing, grabbing, stepping in front of players hoping for a charge, etc. Why should Duke employ this strategy? Well, they are not yet in foul trouble, their bench goes deeper than State’s, their “perceived tendency” is to have better players who are less likely to foul than State’s, and the increased defensive intensity should fuel a greater energy on offense that Duke badly needs. So, now Duke is fouling more, flopping more, pushing more, upping the physicality of the game.

    What happens to the officiating? It changes from the first half, as it should. The officials start calling more fouls, as they should. But two things happen. First, State players allow themselves to become frustrated, in part because the officials aren’t calling everything, and to foul in return. Second, once this greater physicality emerges in the game, the officials begin to worry (again, rightly so) about the game getting out of control. So, the officials begin to call the game much more tightly and on both sides. Now the fouls mount on State and on Duke, but the effect is felt much more by State’s team.

    Stop here, and ask if it matters who is consciously doing what. Perhaps Coach K knows that his second-half strategy will lead to the officials clamping down on both teams and therefore to State’s foul trouble and therefore to a strategic advantage for Duke. Or perhaps K is simply focusing on what his team needs to do to increase its intensity. Perhaps the refs are consciously trying to call it evenly, even if Duke is fouling more than State is. Or they are simply focused on making more calls to keep the game from becoming ugly. Conscious intentions aside, the effect is to create a sustained advantage for Duke.

    Who’s to blame? The refs for not calling consistently what is there to call. Using “evenness” as a measure of fairness. Allowing themselves to get focused on keeping control of the game instead of what fouls are or are not happening on the court.

    If in fact they are unable to ref the game of basketball consistently well, then it remains true (as I pointed out above) that their responses to this situation are unfair and destructive. If they can ref consistently well, then we should see many more games that are consistenly called well. Forget your own team, about which you are undoubtedly biased. How many times have you seen games not involving your team in which the officiating was poor/bizarre/outrageous?

    These are some issues that may be worth exploring.

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