Amateur Hour

It has only been a month since Virginia cut down the nets, and I already find myself missing college basketball.  I know there are plenty of other sporting events to look forward to between now and November; but no such spectacle fills the void that the tournament's end leaves.  Maybe it's the inevitably of another Warriors NBA title. Or another Patriots Super Bowl.  Or another Alabama-Clemson CFB championship game... Or perhaps it's the fact that UNC added a top five recruit, a top 70 recruit, and two impact grad transfers over the last two weeks that has me excited and anticipatory. Who knows? Regardless, I'm ready to see Coach K scowl , Penny Hardaway make unfounded, bombastic claims , Will Wade inexplicably maintain a job at LSU, and all of the other goodness that comes with college hoops.  However, since I don't have access to any such Jimmy Neutron-type invention that can fast forward time , I guess I have to be patient. But I'm always down to do...

I am telling you nothing new when I say that Duke's Zion Williamson has captured and controlled the headlines more than any other college basketball player in my lifetime. No one in the nation can match his combination of size and explosiveness; and his defensive versatility, his passing ability, and his overall feel for the game transform him from an athletic anomaly to the best player in the country. Zion creates enough of an advantage for Duke off of his talent alone. But there is one extra dimension to his game that could  easily be taken away with a little meticulousness and attention to detail; I'm talking, of course, about the amount of perspiration he leaves in his wake.  Three times this year, I have witnessed an opposing team slip on what I'm assuming to be a mini-pond of Zion sweat. The man is a mammoth. At 285 pounds (let's be real...Duke 100% exaggerates his weight to give him that extra mystique. He's probably closer to 260), we can reasonably esti...

This post should probably just be titled "Riley Davis' All-Conference Teams," but I wanted to make it sound like these selections came from a legit sports media collective. But it's really just me. Maybe some day.  (Some insight into my thought process: when I made these teams, I heavily factored in team success--I want to reward the good teams as much as possible and not just hand out awards to guys putting up empty stats for hopeless units. I also tried to weigh a player's defensive impact (or lack thereof). That's why you see someone like Texas Tech's Tariq Owens on the All-Big-12  Second Team , despite only averaging 8.6 points and 5.7 rebounds per game; he controls the paint for the best defense in the country. A similar principle applies to Kentucky's Ashton Hagans, who routinely locks down the opposition's best guard.) Without further ado, here are my All-ACC, SEC, Big 12, and Big Ten teams... ACC 1st: RJ Barrett - G/F, Duke...

In my eleventh grade AP Literature class, I remember learning about the importance of avoiding cliches in my writing (shoutout to Mrs. Szymborski if you're reading this). That principle proved especially helpful in college, as I chose to major in English. Yet it seems to me that a good chunk of folks in sports media would benefit from Mrs. Szymborski's lesson. With basketball coverage in particular, we're peppered with cliches like paintballs, each one imprinting itself on our brains like a paint stain. You probably don't have to think too hard to know what I'm talking about: "make some noise in the tournament," "high upside," "nonstop motor," "peaking at the right time," "live and die by the 3," "lid on the basket," "spark off the bench," and "giant killers" all come to mind.  One of the first times I heard a famous sports cliche occurred on my middle school football team. I had a ...

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, ...

Nothing quite like watching your most hated rival lose at home to get you to finally write another blog post.  Going into Monday night, I had very low expectations for Duke vs. Syracuse. I mean, Duke pulled out a huge road win at Florida State this past weekend, while Syracuse lost to an awful Georgia Tech team in the Carrier Dome. I told my wife Natalie that the Orange would score no more than 45 in Cameron.  In fact, I had gone out to play trivia with some friends, planning on casually watching hoops in the background. The bar was showing Pitt vs. Florida State (even when the Vols are ranked in the Top 5, Knoxville isn't exactly a basketball town), and I internally debated if it was even worth asking the waiter to switch the TV to ESPN.  Twenty minutes or so passed, and fully expecting a bloodbath, I checked my phone to see Duke only up two with 9 minutes left in the first half. Mildly intrigued, I requested for the game to be put on; but I've watched enough of Du...