Did You Miss Me? (UConn/Rutgers, baseball, etc.)

Sorry about going AWOL for the past week and a half — on-call tends to do that to you, as evidenced by such thoughtful posts as this one from an April week of primary pager duty. There’s more exciting stuff coming soon, including VT-Cuse pregame, but first I’ve got to clear decks on post-UConn and Rutgers observations.

One demotivator toward writing post-UConn was the fact that, well, the game didn’t mean much. For that matter, neither did Rutgers. Both games confirmed existing trends: our offense can be explosive when it wants to, our defense isn’t quite up to the man-eater standards of 1999, but it’s pretty darn scary all the same (it takes second- or third-stringers before people start scoring), and our special teams are about at ‘99 level, except for placekicking (and Warley’s getting better).

I’ll mention Marcus Vick’s performance in the Rutgers game not because he played a significant part in the game (he didn’t), but because his two interceptions just highlight one thing: he’s not Michael — nobody else is. VT fans and the national media expecting a Second Coming apparently failed to recognize the uniqueness of MV1. Most freshman QBs are going to have rough games. It’s the nature of the beast. (Even Michael threw 3 INTs against Clemson in ‘99.) I’m grateful that we don’t have to throw Marcus out there ahead of his time. Hopefully the pressure will eventually subside.

Speaking of VT QBs, let the Bryan Randall for Heisman 2004 campaign begin now. KJ will leave at the end of this season barring an unusual turn of events; VT’s PR machine (such as it is) will be focused on him for this season, as it should be. But people are noticing Randall’s accomplishments, and a strong bowl run this year certainly won’t hurt him any.

Moving on, a quick note to the Red Sox: I’m rooting for you guys, but shooting off champagne bottles after winning an AL Division Series was not entirely necessary. Save the celebrations for getting back to the World Series — especially since that requires beating the Yankees. On the other hand, at least the Sox and their fans appear to care, as opposed to the Braves. Seeing 10,000 Cubs fans in the stands at Turner Field was downright disgraceful. I’m disgusted with my Braves over this one — I’ve gotten rather tired of having my baseball done by hockey’s opening night.

Speaking of hockey, Wednesday night marks the NHL’s opener. And what better way to get your season started than with a good brawl, courtesy of Harv over at Rink Blog? My opinion on fighting in the game has swung a bit from my idealistic childhood days (hmm, I voted for Clinton in my middle school’s mock election in ‘92, too…), and I think it started to move when I began to play the game in 10th grade. Hockey is a physical game, and to pretend otherwise is foolish; fighting is, almost always, a reaction to accumulated physical slights over the course of a game (or a rivalry, to recall one memorable Claude Lemieux-Darren McCarty brawl at the start of the 1997-98 season). An overt scrap or two helps blow off steam, keeps players from doing something stupid with sticks out of frustration, and (by the way) entertains the fans, which hockey could use more of. I recognize the concern with stoppages in play, but if a better flow of play is what you want, widen the rink slightly to reduce the effectiveness of the neutral-zone trap (say, to 200’ x 90’ — international width is 200’ x 100’, which is too much). (And no-touch icing on the professional level, as is now found in the ECHL, is an abomination before God and man… but I won’t go there right now.)

I’ll give y’all a day or so to recover from the whiplash that reading this disjointed article may have caused, then I’ll have some VT-SU pregame comments for you. Really. (Read this article on the VT-SU series from the Roanoke Times if you need something to hold you over.) You can also pop over to Fanblogs.com: Big East for plenty of good stuff.

Oh, yeah: hail to the Governator!