Beavers and Snow all around

After watching the college basketball season and some of the teams this year, I was excited about the tournament this year. There are a lot of teams that I know nothing about, and some I know a lot about. I was looking forward to seeing Gonzaga make a run in the tournament, and at least they made it to the Sweet 16. I've watched Duke throughout the season, and they're maddingly inconsistent, but were playing well through the tournament. I have to ask myself how a team like Bradley got into the Sweet 16 at all after they got dismantled by Memphis last night. The only thing I can come up with is the officiating. This small conference teams(as well as some large conference teams) that know they have little chance of making it anywhere play helter skelter defense. They bump, grab, set illegal screens. Worse yet, they know they can get away with it. There's been a track record of officials, especially in the first 2-3 rounds swallowing their whistles and "letting them play." This just equates to letting teams that have above average defenses kill teams with decent offenses. At times they even beat teams with great offenses. I know, I know the players and coaches should adjust accordingly and make free throws, play harder defense, etc. etc. etc. My point is should they have to? If the refs have been calling games one way all season long, shouldn't they be consistent in the post-season as well. A blocking foul is still a blocking foul. I do understand not calling a ticky-tack loose ball foul to put a team at the line to win the game with .2 seconds left(refer to the Baylor-Tennessee women's game a couple years back). Watching the Duke-LSU game last night, LSU got away with several no-calls on blocks which really threw off and intimidated the Duke offense. The refs set the tone early saying you're not going to get the call down low unless it's blatant. It gave LSU free reign. It's exactly how Bradley got into the Sweet 16. The refs shouldn't be obvious in the game, either by making too many calls, or by not making enough calls. It's a fine line. I hope the NCAA addresses this.

I finally got my Xbox360 after a couple months of waiting. I'm super impressed with it. A couple of small features make it really nice. Apple and MS have buried the hatchet and allowed the ipod to connect to the 360 and play aac files. So you can listen to your music during gameplay. That's a spiffy feature. You can also connect to your home computer and play videos, view pictures, and play music through your xbox. As of yet you can only play aac files off your ipod and not off your computer, which is odd. I'm not sure why they won't allow aac off your computer library yet. Maybe we should count our lucky stars that you can even listen to aac files off your ipod.

One thing that does get me is that you can only play certain original xbox games on the 360. Rumor has it that MS isn't going to port anymore of the original xbox games over the 360 either. Oh well, that's only an issue for about a year or so anyway. Then 360 will be standard and no one will care about the whole backwards compatibility issue.

I do have to give a little shout out to Untitled. He made an xbox360tracker utitily. It goes and checks the inventory of BestBuy and Circuit City's near you. When they have 360's in stock it alerts you, by pop-up on your system tray, through email, or through sms text to your cell phone. Pretty slick utility and it works! Friday it said there were xb0x's in stock at the local BestBuy. I walked in 45 minutes later and bought myself an xbox360! It was a very cool little deal. Anyway, check it out if you're still waiting for that ever elusive xbox360.