Category: Sports

So the question being bandied about the blogosphere these days is whether Zion Williamson should return from a mild knee sprain to play again for Duke?

I’m seeing it here, and here and here.

It’s a question I’ll answer with a few questions of my own.

Question 1: Why should anyone other than Zion and his family even be asking the question?

Question 2: What’s it to those asking the question?

Question 3: Are they so certain they know what’s best for Zion that they’re telling him how to spend the next two months which could potentially be the best two months of his life?

Question 4: Are they so convinced that the NCAA is a corrupt body that exploits “student-athletes” for power and greed that they’re calling on Zion Williamson to expose that corruption and greed?

Question 5: And even if the NCAA is a corrupt body that exploits “student-athletes” for power and greed, why is it up to Zion Williamson to fight a fight he’d rather not fight?

Question 6: Just what do they know about Zion Williamson’s relationship with his teammates or the bonds they’ve formed over the past nine months?

Question 7: Is it possible that in Zion’s mind, the risk of injury is worth a solid crack at a national championship?

Question 8: Is it possible that Coach Mike Krzyzewski and the Duke training staff actually do have Zion Williamson’s best interests in mind?

Question 9: Would it not be folly for a man of Mike Kzyzewski’s accomplishments and stature to push his own self interests over those of a player with Zion Williamson’s promise and ability?

Question 10: Could Mike Krzyzewski — already a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame and considered by many to be the greatest coach in the history of college basketball – really need a sixth national championship that badly?

Question 11: What will Zion Williamson do the next two months if he doesn’t play basketball for Duke?

Question 12: Is there any chance that Zion Williamson will not play basketball at any gym in the the world between now and the June 20^th NBA draft?

Question 13: Could it be that playing pickup games in local gyms might be a bigger risk to Zion Williamson’s future NBA earnings than playing the next two months for Duke?

Question 14: Is there enough bubble wrap in the world to cover Zion Williamson’s 6-7, 284-pound frame between now and the June 20^th NBA draft?

Question 15: Has the game of college basketball been so degraded that players with NBA potential should weigh throughout their freshman season whether to keep playing or not?

Question 16: Is there anyone remaining outside the NBA Player Association who thinks a player should be 19 to be eligible for the draft?

Question 17: Is Charles Barkley right for wondering when was it that everything in our society boiled down to how much money there might be to be made?

Question 18: Is Charles Barkley right for saying that a basketball player plays basketball because that what basketball players do?

Question 19: Is there anyone maintaining that Zion Williamson shouldn’t play again because they don’t want their own preferred team to have to play against him anymore?

Question 20: Why should anyone other than Zion Williamson and his family even be asking the question?

Embarrassed was a word we learned to tread carefully around, those of us who wrote sports for the Winston-Salem Journal while Terry Oberle was our editor.

Every time the word showed up in our copy, Terry would strike it out.

“To say a person was embarrassed assumes you know what they were thinking,’’ he explained. “You can’t assume you know what someone is thinking.’’

“But Terry,’’ we’d sputter, “they just got annihilated at home by the the worst team in the league. They were never in the game. The fans were booing. Even the cheerleaders were holding their noses. Of course they were embarrassed.’’

“I’m not saying they shouldn’t be embarrassed,’’ Terry would saying, sticking to his guns as he was known to do. “I would be embarrassed. You would be embarrassed. But that said, you still can’t assume you know what’s in someone else’s mind.’’

So bless Jaylen Hoard’s heart last night after Wake’s 82-54 blood-letting at the hands of Louisville. He came right out and said what everyone knew to be true.

“Obviously we lost – it was embarrassing,’’ Hoard said. “It was just an embarrassing loss.’’

There’s so little I find worth watching on television these days that I was chagrined to find out that Wake would be playing at the same time as the season finale of The Vikings. I’m a sucker for history – especially early British history for some reason — so I’ve really gotten into the tale of Ragnar Lothbrook and his sons on the History Channel.

It can get pretty gory at times, but nothing I saw when I watched the repeat at midnight matched the carnage I witnessed from Joel Coliseum. The Cardinals made the return of Chris Mack and Dino Gaudio one to long remember by scoring on 28 of the first 42 times they had the ball en route to a 64-29 lead.

You read that right. The Cardinals, picked to finish 11^th in the ACC and playing for a first-year coach, led 64-29.

If Danny Manning was embarrassed by his team’s performance, he did his usual superb job of hiding it. Of course he’s had plenty of practice over his 147 games (62 wins and 85 losses) as Wake’s head coach.

He even kept his cool while fumbling with the microphones in front of him as he sat down to address the assembled media. The questions, you’ve probably noticed, have gotten sharper as the losses have mounted, as should be the case given the Deacons’ 1-7 record in ACC play.

But there was nothing Manning said that we haven’t heard so many times before.

We heard how the Deacons have to win each possession.

We heard how Manning played 15 years in the NBA, despite blowing out his knee three times.

And we heard how Wake has a young team. In fact, we heard the word young five different times. Young team. Young group. Young this. Young that.

I don’t know about you. But to me this stuff about how Wake is a young team has long since gotten old. There are plenty of young teams in this day of the fly-by-night player who are faring far better than the trainwreck know as Wake basketball.

Manning came up with a new spin last night, how his senior class is playing professional basketball. That’s a deft way of saying it, considering only one of them, John Collins, is living his dream of playing in the NBA.

Another, Doral Moore, is playing in the G-League, and yet another, Bryant Crawford, is playing in Egypt. Both chose highly uncertain prospects over another season of playing college ball for Danny Manning.

What Manning didn’t mention, mind you, were the six other players he and his staff recruited – Donovan Mitchell, Melo Eggleston, Rich Washington, Jamie Lewis, Samuel Japhet-Mathias and Keyshawn Woods – who would be on the roster if they hadn’t either transferred or been dismissed.

The best question, to my mind, was asked by Les Johns of Demon Deacon Digest concerning what Manning himself might do to get the team on track down the stretch.

“Yeah I’ve got to continue to – I’ve got to do a better job,’’ Manning said. “I think we all have to do a better job. It’s not – it’s everybody. Obviously I’m the head coach and it starts with me.’’

If he had stopped there, I wouldn’t have been as bothered as I shortly thereafter. What I heard next sounded mighty close to “Don’t blame me. Blame the players.’’

“But when we go into the games, we have an understanding of what the teams are going to do,’’ Manning said. “We just have to go out there and do a better job of executing it.’’

Sitting on the opposite bench were two coaches – head coach Mack and assistant coach Gaudio – I had the pleasure of getting to know fairly well during their times at Wake. It was good to see Dino back in the game after sitting out the eight seasons following his dismissal as the Deacons’ head coach..

I thought Dino handled the build-up to his return to Joel Coliseum well when Conor O’Neil caught up with him for the advance story. He took the high road, and came off looking all the better for it.

That said, I know there had to be some satisfaction for Dino to know what one person in the stands was suffering through as the Cardinals ran the Deacons out of their own building. That, of course, would be Ron Wellman, the director of athletics who extended Gaudio’s contract in the fall of 2009 and fired him in the spring of 2010.

Wellman never sufficiently explained the dismissal, leaving one to assume that Gaudio’s 61-31 record at Wake wasn’t good enough.

Sorry Terry. There I go assuming again.

As down as I am on the NFL about now, I’m even more disappointed in myself.

See, if there’s anybody who knows that sports should be about enjoyment and fun and not frustration and angst, it should be one who spent a professional life writing about sports for a daily newspaper.

The best lesson for any sportswriter to learn is to not become emotionally invested in who wins or loses a game. You can be a fan or you can be a sportswriter, but you can’t be both if you want to do your job the way it should be done.

I’ve seen too many try, but in my eyes at least, they all failed.

But here I sit at age 66 all wound up about the way the NFC Championship between the Saints and the Rams came down. The taste is so sour in my mouth I’m not sure I can even tune in to the Super Bowl – not that anybody cares, or should care.

The big joke on me is that I’m not even all that into pro football. With each passing year as a sportswriter, I drifted further and further from those sports that I wasn’t directly responsible for covering, to the point that I rarely, these days, watch NFL until the playoffs begin.

If it’s every other year and the Panthers are on the prowl, then I might tune in. But invariably by the third time Cam Newton is called for delay of game my mind has wandered off to my music, some computer game or the two or three books I’m reading at any point in time.

But other than the Panthers, my favorite team is the Saints. I love the city, I love how the city has rallied around its team and I really love how Drew Brees and Sean Payton, et. al., rallied around the city after Katrina stomped through.

Plus they do gold and black better than any sports franchise I can think of.

So to see the Saints get so close to the Super Bowl, and to see how they were denied was such a bitter pill that now, even two days later, I’m having trouble choking it down.

Speaking of choking. . .

No, we’ll get to that later.

By now we’ve all seen the play and replays and heard all the commentary. The verdict is unanimous. The Saints got screwed. Even the perpetrator, Nickell Robey-Coleman, the cornerback who steamrolled receiver TommyLee Lewis, acknowledged that the Saints got screwed.

“Yes, I got there too early,’’ Robey-Coleman said. “I was beat, and I was trying to save the touchdown.’’

Of course that’s a bit like Bill Buckner admitting he botched the grounder in the 1986 World Series. Robey-Coleman is only telling everyone what everyone saw.

Everyone, apparently, except those who matter most – the officials responsible for making the call.

What’s mind-boggling is that replay should not have even been needed. We all saw what we saw. And when we did see the replay, the no-call was even more egregious — in that a strong case could be made that Robey-Coleman should have been called for helmet-to-helmet contact.

A distraught Peyton revealed his conversation with Al Riveron, the NFL’s vice president of officiating, and how Riveron admitted both penalties should have been called. But I have to say it bothers me to no end that the NFL has yet to officially address the issue.

And had they been called, the Saints have the ball inside the 10-yard line with 1:49 remaining. With only two timeouts remaining, the Rams would have had no way to prevent the Saints from running the clock almost out before attempting a short field goal to win the game.

Here’s where I admit that I was impressed with the Rams, and how they capitalized on their great fortune to take control in overtime. They’re a great team, and if they can beat the Patriots, they’ll be a great champion.

And I also freely acknowledge that there were other blown calls in the game. But seldom in my career have I seen a call or no-call so directly affect the outcome of a game.

My heart bleeds for the Saints and their awesome fans, the fans that simply wouldn’t let their team lose in the NFL semi-final against Philadelphia and who made life so miserable on the Rams. But to be charitable, I also feel sorry for the seven officials who called the game – and particularly the one (ostensibly either the back judge or the side judge) who was most responsible for making the call.

In their gut they have to know they they or he – and not Jared Goff or Drew Brees or Sean McVay or Sean Payton – were most responsible for extending the Rams’ season and, as Saints’ owner Gayle Benson put it, unfairly depriving one team from playing in the Super Bowl.

And that has to be a horrible feeling.

To date I’ve not seen the official or officials most responsible outed, and I’m glad for that. No need for lynch mobs, whether it be on social media or in public.

That said I really don’t see how the official or officials most responsible should ever call another NFL game. I know that’s harsh, in that we’re talking about people’s livelihood.

But to pursue a livelihood, one has to prove they’re up to the responsibility. And faced with that responsibility, at least one official and possibly two choked for all the world to see.

They can’t be counted on not choking again.

I wish I could say I felt a little better after getting all this off my chest, but in my mind, until the NFL improves its officiating it will remain a joke – a bad joke at that.

What I’d like to write is that I’ve evolved past the point where an outcome of an athletic event could get me so riled up.

But one no call in New Orleans clearly proved I’ve not.

Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that in the modern game of college basketball there are only two reasons for a coach to play as much zone as Wake played in Tuesday night’s 71-67 victory over No. 17 N.C. State.

One is by design. Go the Syracuse route and recruit enough active, long-armed players to make the zone a real pain in the posterior to face.

The other is by necessity. Play zone because your man-to-man presents no more impediment than a busted turnstile on the Green Line.

Danny Manning, by lineage, is a man-to-man guy. He said so when he became head coach at Wake to the surprise of no one who knows his background at Kansas – one of college basketball’s most staunch man-to-man programs.

But desperate times call for desperate measures and Manning has seen the need for this, his fifth team at Wake, to be a zone team. Good for him. Something had to be done as the Deacons sunk ever lower in rankings of defensive efficiency and shooting percentages and point totals of the opponents continued to soar.

And if he can find a few more teams that attack the zone as poorly as N.C. State did in the first half last night, he might even win a handful of ACC games in this – again – his fifth season as the Deacons’ head coach.

I’ve been really impressed with what Kevin Keatts has done in his first two seasons as the Wolfpack’s coach. He’s one of many examples why it doesn’t always take three, four, or even five seasons to turn the fortunes of a program around.

But I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand why he didn’t get more grips on his team in the first half last night when Wake packed its zone back and just dared N.C. State to heave it up from outside. Not until halftime – by which point the Pack had missed 13 out of 14 3-pointers to fall behind by as many as 22 points – did Keatts get his message across that the way to beat Wake is to take the ball to the hoop.

N.C. State took the ball to the hoop after the break and roared back into contention, scoring on 13 of the first 19 second-half possessions to tie the game at 58. If you were like me, you probably thought Wake’s goose was cooked. But to the Deacons’ considerable credit, they showed enough grit and fortitude to get six straight stops in winning time and make the plays needed to pull out their first ACC victory over.

Yeah, I know. Markell Johnson, probably the Pack’s best player, missed the game with a back injury. But my position is and has always been that you play with and against who is available. Once you start factoring in the impact of an injury you’ve entered the hazy, slippery realm of conjecture.

Say Johnson had been available, and was as bad against Wake as he was against North Carolina, when he 1-for-7 from 3-point range with five turnovers? We’ll never know, so it’s useless to speculate.

The team Danny Manning put on the floor beat the team that Kevin Keatts put on the floor, and that’s all that matters. And he did so by out-coaching Keatts. His strategy of playing a compacted zone worked.

And maybe you also noticed that with the Deacons clinging to a 67-66 lead, Manning called timeout and hustled Torry Johnson into the game for Sharone Wright, Jr., and that it was Johnson who not only sank the runner but also nailed the two free throws with 13 seconds left to all but clinch the victory.

Manning also showed flexibility on offense with a lineup that had freshman Jaylen Hoard essentially playing center for key stretches. Hoard was certainly up to the task, finishing with 16 points, 10 rebounds, three assists, three blocks and two steals for a stat line that would have done Josh Howard proud.

Danny Manning hasn’t had all that many good nights as head coach at Wake, but he had one last night. Good for him.

Now if he can just carry that momentum into the next two games at Virginia Tech on Saturday and at Virginia on Tuesday.

And maybe, just maybe, he can pack his zone back into the lane and tempt Buzz Williams and Tony Bennett to allow their teams to launch one brick after another from 3-point range.

If there’s another way Wake can escape falling to 1-5 going into the Jan. 26 home game against Boston College, perhaps you can see it.

Because I certainly can’t.

Wake sports, or at least the two Wake sports that mean much of anything to the rank-and-file among us, were on full display Saturday, front-and-center for all America (and for that matter, all the world) to see.

And what all America (and for that matter, all the world) could see by tuning into ESPN and ESPN2 was two programs heading in decidedly different – some might say opposite – directions.

On the Mothership, we could see one of America’s scrappiest teams coached by one of America’s scappiest coaches, doing what needed to be done in a most heroic and improbable fashion to beat Memphis 37-34 in the Birmingham Bowl. To watch Dave Clawson will his team to an unprecedented third-straight bowl victory brought to mind the highest compliment one coach could ever bestow on another.

In the immortal words of Bum Phillips, Clawson “could take his’n and beat your’n, and then he can turn around and take your’n and beat his’n.’’

I’ve always loved that quote (spoken in respect of Bear Bryant) because it reminded me so much of the way my Papaw Collins of Waynesville, N.C. used to talk – before he died.

And if that was all there was to see from Wake yesterday, it would have been a golden moment for the black and gold on national (international) television.

Sadly, any satisfaction (not to mention pride) in what is taking place at Wake sports-wise these days has to be tempered by what could be found just next door on the Deuce, where the Deacons’ basketball team was getting steamrolled by Tennessee 83-64.

There’s no shame in losing on the road to the No. 3 team in the nation, or at least there wouldn’t have been if the loss had not come in such a predictable and unequivocal fashion. But what those of us who switched over to the Deuce saw was what we’ve seen so many times before, with the Deacons melting right before our eyes.

As mentioned a number of times, I watch Wake basketball these days with a pad in my hand to chart the Deacons’ defensive stops.

And Wake was right there, trailing only 22-21 after Torry Johnson’s layup with 7:25 left in the first half.

That was before the soggy bottom of Wake bag broke open and the Volunteers scored on nine of their final 11 possessions of the first half and nine of their first 11 possessions of the second half. It’s along about that time that analyst Jimmy Dykes made a comment as astute as it was obvious.

“From Wake Forest, there’s not a lot of resistance right now on defense.’’

It’s a quote to be clipped and saved, for it sums up up so succinctly the Danny Manning era of Wake basketball. For the second half, Tennessee scored on 23 of the 34 times it brought the ball across half-court.

The difference in the state of the two programs can be boiled down to two words – hard and soft.

Clawson is a hard coach to beat. He played Memphis yesterday without his best player (Greg Dortch) and with a third quarterback (Jamie Newman) who was filling in for a second quarterback (Sam Hartman) who was filing in for a first quarterback (Kendall Hinton).

And he won when the guy filling in for Dortch (Alex Bachman) caught two clutch passes from the guy filling in for Hartman and Hinton in the final 75 seconds.

He won when his team kept playing hard enough to overcome an 18-point deficit.

He won because that’s what good coaches do.

Good coaches win.

By now anyone paying attention can see that as far as football coaches go, Dave Clawson is a keeper. The question now becomes how long can Wake keep him?

Meanwhile, over on the Deuce, the word that kept coming to mind was soft. If there’s a softer team than Wake playing in the ACC these days, I don’t know who it would be. And the Deacons just happened to be going up against one of the most physically mature teams in college basketball, and the results were not a pretty sight.

Olivier Sarr, the great hope in the middle, played as soft as he has been playing since showing up before last year, with just one field goal, two free throws and three rebounds to show for his 25 minutes. But we all knew that about Sarr long before yesterday.

What was particularly sobering was how soft Jaylen Hoard, the supposedly next great star, played for all the world to see. Hoard contributed three rebounds and seven points in 25 minutes while somehow managing not to get himself hurt down there amid the rough and tumble of major-college basketball.

Danny Manning got blown out of another game on national television because that’s what bad coaches do.

Bad coaches lose badly.

Ron Wellman, who calls the shots at Wake, is apparently willing to stick with his bet that a bad coach at sometime after four seasons will turn out to be a good coach. But by now, who can believe him?

And whereas Mike Norvell of Memphis was the latest to realize that Dave Clawson is not a coach to be tangled with, I’d imagine there’s no end to the number of basketball coaches who would relish taking on Danny Manning.

Take Brad Brownell of Clemson, for instance, who is 5-0 in his chances at beating Danny Manning in ACC play.

Can you imagine Dave Clawson being 0-5 against any ACC coach not named Dabo Swinney?

If so, that makes one of us.

Back when Wake was a team to be reckoned with in the ACC, a home victory over Davidson would be nothing to email or text home about.

Of course that was so long ago, folks were still writing letters.

Not really.

It just seems that way.

Many seasons have passed since Wake was a team to be reckoned with in the ACC, which made tonight’s 67-63 victory over Bob McKillop’s Wildcats its best effort of the season.

Yeah, I know Davidson was playing without its best player, Kellan Grady, a second-team All-Atlantic 10 guard averaging 19.4 points. But it’s always been my contention that a team plays with who’s available, no excuses. And I’ll remain consistent by saying Wake took a nice step tonight, Grady or no Grady.

Dave Odom always loved exam break, because it gave him a chance to go back to basics and correct all the mistakes from the season’s first brace of games. And it certainly appeared tonight that Danny Manning put the 11 days since the Deacons last played to good use.

The defense – the Deacons’ most glaring shortcoming over Manning’s four seasons – was really, really good tonight. Or at least it was until it wasn’t. The Wildcats closed the game by either scoring or getting fouled (or both) on their last seven possessions, and 10 of their last 11.

But over the first 36 minutes, while they were building a 14-point lead, the Deacons were downright suffocating on defense. By my count, Wake got 18 stops on Davidson’s 28 first-half possessions, and then came back out and stymied the Wildcats on 15 of their first 26 trips across half-court in the second half.

Davidson shot 37 percent from the floor for the game, made seven of 24 shots from beyond the arc and got to the line for only 12 attempts.

That’s a showing against a good team that Manning will take any time, if he can get it. The biggest reason he’s failed in his four-plus seasons to turn the program’s fortunes around is that he has got that kind of showing so few times.

The late-game largess has become so routine as to be predictable. But the Deacons were able to overcome their generosity tonight because they kept scoring themselves.

As I’ve mentioned, I watch games these days with a pad in hand, charting Wake’s defensive stops. But over the 11 days since the Deacons last played, I decided to also keep tabs on another problem that has saddled Wake in the early going.

After every loss, it seems, Manning has decried his team’s inability to get enough paint touches. Teams assemble these days during the first semester of summer school, back in May, so if six months later a team is not doing what the coach wants, then whose fault is that?

But for tonight I decided to also chart the possessions that Wake got the ball either to the basket, into the lane, into the key or in the short corner along the base line. All teams strive to break down the defense, because it opens up so many more ways (foul shots, follow shots, kick-out jumpers) to score.

Bad teams – and Wake would certainly qualify over most of Manning’s tenure – tend to settle for jump shots without making the defense work. We’ve all seen the Deacons lose games because they quit getting the ball inside, and we’ve all heard Manning grumble about it later.

My bet is that another major point of emphasis over the past 11 games has been to be more aggressive on offense and attack the defense more. If so, the concentration on that facet of the game paid off tonight.

Again, by my count, the Deacons got the ball inside on 28 of 34 first-half possessions, and on 29 of 37 possessions after halftime. The ball moved, and so did the players, allowing Wake to shoot 48 percent from the floor, get to the line for 20 attempts and mount a balance attack.

On a night no player took more than 12 attempts from the floor, Jaylen Hoard (16 points), Brandon Childress (16 points), Chaundee Brown (13 points), Torry Johnson (10 points) and Olivier Sarr (8 points on 4-of-5 shooting) all had offensive games they could feel good about.

Those who have found me at My Take on Whatever know I’ve been pretty critical of Manning and his inability to pull the once-proud Wake program from the doldrums of the Jeff Bzdelik years. And I’m not about to declare after one nice victory over Davidson in mid-December that the Deacons have turned the corner.

A much more telling test will come Saturday when Wake travels up I-40 to Knoxville to face Rick Barnes and his third-ranked Volunteers of Tennessee. If the Deacons show the same improvement at Thompson-Boling Arena, then I’ll begin to wonder if maybe Manning is finally building something worth watching at Wake.

Of course it’s been so long, it might be hard to recognize. But we’ll see, and we’ll all see together.

It would be terribly remiss of me to not acknowledge and thank all the folks who have found their way to My Take on Whatever these past few weeks.

And heaven forbid it be said that Country Dan Collins has ever even once in his 66 years on this planet been remiss. I shudder at the thought, wondering just how I could sleep at night.

So thanks from the bottom of my heart, and welcome aboard. To expand the circle means more fun for everybody.

Upon launching this blog a little more than year ago, I wasn’t exactly sure what I intended to do with it other than write about whatever interested me at the time I was writing it. But I had just retired after 40 years spent writing sports for the Winston-Salem Journal, and I did know I get off on writing too much to just stop.

And I don’t have the patience, discipline and focus to write all those novels I was so bent on writing “One of these days.’’ So I decided to go with the next-best thing.

One of my many close friends from our Thursday night gatherings for Open Mic at Muddy Creek Cafe is a wise soul named Nancy Burney Douglass. And in this case, NBD knew me better than I knew myself.

“Most people blog their way into a career in journalism,’’ she observed. “Well, you’re blogging your way out.’’

Bingo.

No singer-songwriter has been covered more than John Prine over our 4 ½ years of making music the way it’s meant to be made among friends down at Open Mic at Muddy Creek. And that’s a good thing. No complaints here.

On Prine’s latest offering, Tree of Forgiveness, there was a couplet that really hit home, off the tune Lonesome Friends of Science.

“I live way down inside my head,

Well, long ago I made my bed.’’

John Prine and I share the same address, but I’m not so deep inside my head not to know what has driven so many of you my way. That would be the anguish and utter despair over the demise of a once-proud basketball program at Wake.

And some of you might even know I was on hand to chronicle so many of the golden moments in the history of Wake basketball, from the time I was assigned to the beat in 1992 until my retirement in August of 2017. There was a time when I was known to brag to anyone who would listen about having the best college basketball beat in America.

Sadly, those times are long gone, buried beneath the rubble of losses to Stetson, Winthrop, UNC Wilmington, Presbyterian, Wofford, Delaware State, Georgia Southern, Liberty, Houston Baptist and – as recently as last night – a Richmond team so bad that Chris Mooney will have to hustle like hell to survive his 14^th season as the Spiders’ head coach.

Losing at Richmond wouldn’t be so devastating except for three reasons. One, this is, again, a really, really bad Richmond team, bad enough to lose – AT HOME — to Longwood (63-58) and Hampton (86-66). Two, the loss was just so utterly predictable for a team so disjointed and hapless as to be a team in name only.

And three, and most important, the yet-one-more ignominious setback came in Danny Manning’s FIFTH season as head coach. Not his first, not his third, but his fifth, when he has had all the time any coach worth his mettle would need to rectify whatever problems were left over from the program-crippling hire of Jeff Bzdelik on that fateful day in April of 2010.

Along the way the link to My Take on Whatever surfaced on enough sites on social media – Demon Deacons Sports Nation on Facebook, DemonDeaconDigest and that mother lode of all Wake sites, Old Gold & Black Boards — that my number of hits exploded exponentially.

The number exploded from the 50 or so hits I was lucky to get on a good day to where two recent posts have roared past 2,000. I recognize that’s small potatoes in the greater blogosphere of the Interweb, but it’s one big fat spud for this old grizzled retiree sitting on his ever-widening behind in his cluttered den out in Oldtown.

And, again, it’s greatly appreciated, as are the comments flowing in from one and all.

What I hate, for you as well as me, is that I couldn’t be writing about the stirring success of a Wake program battling back from the doldrums into ACC and national contention. I hate that the hire of Danny Manning hasn’t worked out. I really do. He was a great player, and seems to be a decent man – though I have to admit I was never really given the opportunity to get to know him.

But an explanation I always had for those who found fault with my coverage of Wake sports came in three words. Cause and effect.

If Manning was 7-0 right now instead of 4-3 against one of the weakest schedules in school history, if Manning were 52-20 in the ACC instead of 20-52, if Manning had ever finished better than 10^th in the regular season, if Manning had really followed through with his promise of making defense the strength his program would hang its hat on, then my thesaurus wouldn’t have enough nice words for me to write about the man.

Which leaves me having to write what’s going on, and what’s going on is Wake keeps losing season after soul-crushing season in basketball and those who have a say in the matter have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they don’t care enough about their ever-dwindling core of fans to do anything about it.

And to me, that’s what’s really sad.

Lest you newbies get the wrong idea, my blog is not devoted exclusively to Wake sports. Again, I write about whatever interests me, and my interests are wide and varied.

My deepest passion is music, which has resulted in the aforementioned Open Mic sessions down at Muddy Creek Cafe. And although I have been writing sports forever – since my junior year of high school, going on 50 years ago — I’ve been writing songs even longer.

All my life I’ve threatened to record a CD of original songs, and I’m proud to say I am, at present, finally making good on that threat. I’ve enlisted a sharp young engineer, musician and recent graduate of Wake named Geoff Weber (He of the band Bad Cameo, hottest thing going) and we’re laying down tracks at his home studio that I’m increasingly excited about.

For those interested, I’ll keep you apprised of the progress, and make sure you have a chance to listen to how it comes out.

What I don’t want to do is spend all my retirement taking a metaphorical cudgel to Danny Manning’s kneecaps. Honest I don’t.

But if I didn’t write what was going on, what reason would anybody have to read anything I write? And if nobody read what I write, that would be sadder than Wake losing to Houston Baptist in basketball.

Well, almost.