The Dagger

But I never thought [he] would take it this far ... far ... But what do I know? (Flashing ... Lights. Flashing ... Lights.)

Brandon Jennings is awesome. There. I said it. Not only did he have the onions to say goodbye to Arizona and college basketball and its relatively malignant control over young American basketball talent. Jennings -- through both academic inability and a desire to start making money -- chose Europe instead. That was awesome.

Perhaps even more awesome is having the confidence to unironically wear the hottest sunglasses fashion from like six months ago: Stutter Shades. Brandon Jennings has that confidence (HT: The Sports Culture):

Not just anyone can do that. For example, Luke Harangody. Great basketball player. Deserving talent. Goofy white dude unable to wear sunglasses without an Oakley label on them. Sorry Luke. I don't make the rules. I just blog about them.

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OK, so I made Joker references yesterday. Look I'm not proud of it. I know there's nothing more played out right now than quoting the Joker in a post about "crime." Yeah, it's an awesome movie, but it's been out forever, and if I can't come up with something better to please the blog gods than maybe I just don't deserve to be ... wait a second.

...

You've got to be kidding me:

After being arrested in his family’s Minnetonka, Minn., home hours after the robbery, DiLoreto, a recent graduate of Hopkins High in the Minneapolis suburbs, waived extradition rights Wednesday and will be transported back to Wisconsin to face armed robbery and shotgun possession charges today or Friday.

He was less than a month away from moving to San Luis Obispo to start classes at Cal Poly.

Dude. OK, the Joker robs banks too, ha ha, very funny, but seriously: DiLoreto (allegedly) robbed a bank. A bank! That's what I get for using The Dark Knight references. They come a day too early, when the real sinister crime -- robbing a bank! with a shotgun! -- is right around the corner, just waiting to happen.

Self-interest aside, I highly recommend reading the story. The clear sense of confusion and madness brought on by all this is palpable:

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Anytime you hear "gun" and "college athletics", it's worth taking a moment to pause and decide if this is something you really want to make fun of. Gun deaths are senseless, stupid, and one of the most destructive facets of our society, and there's absolutely no reaction to them besides despair. Unless ...

Unless it's just a BB gun! Those things are barely even guns, anyway, right?

Markieff Morris, an incoming freshman basketball player at Kansas, is facing a battery charge after allegedly firing a BB gun from his dorm window. The 18-year-old, a member of coach Bill Self’s 2008 recruiting class along with his twin brother, Marcus, has been ordered to appear Sept. 10 in Lawrence Municipal Court, the Lawrence Journal-World reported Wednesday on its Web site.

Campus police said shots were fired about 11:15 p.m. Saturday from a room in the Jayhawker Towers. A 47-year-old Wisconsin woman was in the dorm’s courtyard about the same time and reported being shot in the arm with a plastic BB. The woman suffered minor injuries, according to the newspaper.

Morris is also suspected of using alcohol during the incident.

"Morris is also suspected of using alcohol ..." I would say that's a fairly safe suspicion. What else, besides hilarity, causes someone to shoot BB's at a 47-year old woman in a dorm courtyard other than alcohol. That's a plan no sober mind could ever hatch.

Still, it appears we've entered a new era of crime in Lawrence, Kansas, where crime is not performed merely by driving home drunk from the bars, or puffing the occasional marijuana cigarette. It's not about the money, or about partying with coeds, it's about ... sending a message.

Lawrence deserves a better class of criminal. And Markieff Morris' BB gun is going to give it to them.

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Not pictured: Tom Crean, puffing cigar and laughing. 

It's been a big off-season for college basketball coaches looking to stack bread and/or cheese. First, UCLA coach Ben Howland got his money. Then Bill Self, avoiding the lure of T. Boone Pickens' money-burning wind turbine technology, won a national title and snatched a huge deal from Kansas.

Now, it's Tom Crean's turn. The coach just officially inked a wow-where-does-Indiana-get-that-money contract extension today, nabbing 10 years and $23.6 million from the beleagured school.

After taking over for the deposed Kelvin Sampson, Crean has been smiley, energetic, and altogether far too enthusiastic to deal with the still-unknown fallout of an ugly recruiting scandal. What's more, Indiana's situation has gradually worsened, as players have defected and poor grades have left others out in the cold. It's been ugly, and Crean is stuck.

But like any shrewd businessman, he used it to his advantage. The contract is a reward for Crean's dedication -- and the likelihood, barring abject failure, that he'll be at Indiana for a very long while. If the past four months don't make him want to quit, nothing will.

Anyway, I want to be a college basketball coach. They officially make more money than rappers.

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Ah, the saga of Derrick Caracter. Even when you think it's going to quiet down forever, it keeps rearing its ugly head, begging you blog about it. Come on, Eamonn. You know I'm entertaining. There's nothing else to blog about in August. You don't really like football that much anyway.

You win, Derrick Caracter Saga. You win.

According to Card Chronicle, which has been, should we say, chronicling all things Caracter forever now, has a juicy rumor that should surprise nobody: Caracter has decided to leave Louisville once and for all. If that seems like a small deal, keep in mind that just a few weeks ago, Caracter wanted nothing more in the world than to be back at Louisville.

Rick Pitino struck a deal with the talented center, saying Caracter would be forced to spend a year fending for himself and paying for school and all of the things everyone doubted Derrick Caracter could actually do. Apparently Derrick doubts himself, too.

Where will he end up? Card Chron doesn't seem to know, though they do point to a rumor at Inside the Ville suggesting Caracter could end up at an NAIA school, somewhere he could play immediately. Which means, if any of the above rumors are true, that we are now at the point where Derrick Caracter -- a center once regarded as second only in talent to Greg freaking Oden -- won't even be playing Division 1 college basketball. And no one is even remotely surprised. Unbelievable.

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It was just the other day that Mike Krzyzewski took a potential opportunity for foreign diplomacy -- an olive branch, if you will -- and flossed his teeth with it. I believe he then threw it back at the horde of foreign journalists with "diplomacize this, b----." Nice guy, that Coach K.

That was a genuine issue, one that probably deserved to be talked about a little more. The new U.S. basketball team is supposed to be humble, and classy, and all of those things that people usually cite as the (silly) reasons they dislike the NBA. Krzyzewski's comments weren't any of those things.

Today, there's a new mini-controversy, though I'm not sure if it matches the one that preceded it. Judge for yourself: Coach K is aware that Duke-haters -- and they are legion -- are probably rooting against the U.S. men's national team. What does he think of such people? Not much:

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Mike Krzyzewski -- maybe you've heard of him? -- has something of a reputation. He's abrasive. Mean. Likes to swear. Is good at having those swear words picked up on national television. Is also good at somehow never losing control the way his mentor, Bob Knight, always did. Coach K is a smooth operator, but under all that calm there's a pretty violent storm.

National journalists get to experience it all the time. If you work for ESPN, USA Today, The New York Times, or any of the local papers that cover Duke and North Carolina, you've experienced the iciness in the room when Coach K needs to address an eager media. It's not pretty.

Along with (most) fans and players, those that haven't experienced it are foreign journalists. At the Olympics, though, they're getting a pretty good taste. The Kansas City Star's always-brilliant Joe Posnanski shared the following scene this morning, in which Generic Accented Foreign Journalist No. 1 tries to ask Coach K if his team was showing off by dunking repeatedly at the end of their rout. And cue:

“There was no showing off,” he said with an edge in his voice. “You dunk when you have to dunk. They have 7-footers. If you don’t take it hard, Yao would block it. He did block one. … I don’t know your definition of showing off, to me that’s hard basketball. I thought we played very hard. I thought we took it to the basket hard. Don’t confuse hard with showing off.” He then glared at the person who asked the question, a reporter with an accent. And he said: “Maybe it’s a difference in our languages. Maybe in your language playing hard means showing off.”

Ahh! Don't look directly at him or HE'LL DESTROY AHHHHH!! No! The power of gray tweed compels you! The power of gray tweed compels you!

...

Phew. That was a close one. And now you've learned, earnest foreign reporter: Never ask Coach K an honest or thoughtful question about the nature of his basketball team. Answering those does not sit alongside "filming AmEx commercials" and "wearing Duke polos" in his job description.

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Hey, you remember Stanley Pringle. Why, he was the Penn State basketball player caught masturbating in the school library. Oh, THAT Stanley Pringle! Yes, he (allegedly) masturbated there while a girl was present, and -- in a move that surely shocked Stanley -- the girl, presumably studying, was slightly off-put by this brazen display of affection. Instead of praising Stanley for his no-nonsense approach, she reported him to the police. Prude.

The police, being the police, wanted to know why. Why, Stanley? Why masturbate in the library? Why, that was merely how he "chills", according to Pringle. Not a great explanation. I kind of understand what he's saying, but hands + down pants + libary + female presence almost always = police. Life lessons, these.

Now, one of the great stories in the first season of The Dagger is back, sort of: Stanley Pringle will complete a rehabilitation program as part of his punishment. No word on whether the details of Stanley's progress in the program will be available for blockquoting, but we can hope:

As part of his acceptance into the Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition (ARD), Pringle will receive one year of probation and be required to complete the program before he can request that his record be expunged, Centre County District Attorney Michael Madeira said. Pringle's acceptance into the program does not constitute a guilty plea, Madeira said. However, he described it as "punishment without a verdict." "I view ARD as accepting a responsibility for something," he said. "There needs to be a willingness to change your actions."

I agree. Willingness to not masturbate in front of others in a public library -- that's an important willingness. That's the sort of thing that, if you don't really want it, deep down -- if you don't really want to not masturbate in the library -- it might never happen. You could doom yourself to a life of chronic library masturbation, and a life of cat-and-mouse with the world's best regional investigate reporter. That's a fate I wish upon no man.

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For the purposes of this post, I'm assuming Todd Bozeman's blog is, indeed, real. It seems real. It feels real. I want it to be real. Thus, until further notice, it is real.

That's how good this thing is.

Remember Todd Bozeman? Of course you do: He's the former Cal coach that left the Bears in dishonor in 1996 after admitting to paying a recruit's parents $30,000, and was effectively banned by the NCAA with an imposed "show-cause order" until 2005. Bozeman spent the decade as an NBA assistant -- the preferred career choice of rulebreaking college coaches -- before landing a head coaching job with Morgan State in 2006.

All of that history is now moot, though, for Todd Bozeman has a blog -- "Blogging With Boze" (which I first read as "Blogging with Booze," and I must say I was immediately interested). Anyway, it's awesome. Take the eternal enthusiasm of Pete Carroll and add just a dash of Tracy Morgan's character in 30 Rock, and I think we're getting close. For example, in this post, Bozeman quotes Nelly before explaining the finer points of air conditioning at Morgan State:

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