Fred Glass, Tom Crean, Kelvin Sampson, Mike Davis, Myles Brand...Robert Montgomery Knight

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh....

That is me sighing. And continuing to breathe. Slowly.

Some month. For me. I guess for a lot of us. But this blog is primarily about me.

Some of my interests, like sports.

Funny how sports work: they can be a distraction from the real realities of life, like...

Dating, working, striving, sweating, thinking, pounding, graduating, traveling, dying, fighting, running, bleeding, sitting, sleeping, and a bunch of other things that might be hard. Or mundane. Or tedious. Or too hard to dwell on all the time. Like death. And taxes. And love. And faith.

But watching sports can be elating, and distracting, and fun. Different than a lot of real life.

Or not.

Enter Indiana basketball, 2014.

And I have said this before, related to the team: Ugh.
But now it is in a special section of Ugh-liness.

We didn't make the NIT!

I was shocked. And then Fred Glass, current well paid Athletic Director for Indiana University, announces we will not go to the CBI ( and that rules out the CIT as well).

For those that didn't know, these are lesser tournaments than the NCAA (Big Dance) and NIT (Little Dance). Maybe the CBI and CIT are not even dances, in his opinion, just light jogs.

Whatever the case, IU should be playing against someone this week.

But no.

Ugh. In my mind, that makes us big losers. Yep. Big losers.

And it makes me, and a lot of IU fans, how good a coach Tom Crean is. He and his teams have choked a lot. With less talent, and with more talent.

Too much choking away games IU should win. There have been a few good ones. But...

Sampson choked before him, breaking now obsolete calling and texting rules that he was censured for at Oklahoma and fired at IU for.

Meanwhile, Mike Davis has his current team in the Big Dance. And former IU player Maurice Creek is there with George Washington U., too.

It was Myles Brand who fired Knight (Coach Knight, to you, son!), and then later led the NCAA that sanctioned Sampson, briefly relieved at the end of 2008 by Dan Dakich, who is a prattling talking head on ESPN, which I like when IU wins.

The Boston Red Sox were cursed for decades after letting Babe Ruth go about 100 years ago.

Maybe IU basketball is currently suffering such a curse.

We need to reverse it.

Reverse the curse.

And if you are a Cubs and IU fan, as a few million inevitably are, I just think that winning may not be the only thing that gets you excited.

Or for that matter, competitive spectator sports.

Blog on. EMC