Amateur Hour

Growing up in Charlotte--and this may sound obvious--most everyone I knew had an allegiance to one of the schools in the Tobacco Road Rivalry. Because of local Charlotteans' investment in college hoops, the city will always be considered a small market in the NBA. That won't change regardless of  how much Charlotte's got  and how much the population grows.  Yet, as a kid, I was in the minority: I had no preference for either UNC or Duke. This was due in part to my parents being from New York and Texas, respectively, in part to going through a weird skateboarding phase in middle school, and in part to a devotion to football in high school ( here's a lovely shot of me donning the ol' helmet and pads in 2011). As a native North Carolinian, neutrality in the Carolina-Duke rivalry made me a bit of an outsider. A renegade. A pariah. (these are overly-dramatic descriptions, but you get the point). I was only 2 years old when Jerry Stackhouse dunked all over

It's wild to me how quickly this season has gone by. But so much has unfolded since Duke smoked Kentucky on opening night--and subsequently launched the nonstop coverage of Zion: Man-child of the 21 Century --that it feels like the game occurred eons ago. I got some things right in the preseason (pegging Iowa State as a team that could make a leap, ranking Virginia Tech just outside the top 10, sticking with Gonzaga in my top 3 even after Killian Tillie's injury) and I got some things very, very, very wrong (West Virginia, UCLA, Oregon, and Syracuse all ranked in my top 15...yikes). And now, with most teams nearing or pass the halfway point of conference play, we at least have an inkling of who is actually good . Although we find little to no certainty in a sport as spastic as college hoops, one thing I do know for sure is that I want to drop every Volvo on the planet into Mariana's Trench after seeing their opera-themed commercial roughly 19,225 times on ESPN. Anyway,