Do Your Job, Mike Patrick!

Saturday was a rarity for me, as living in the midwest I almost never get a chance to see a Temple University basketball game. Of course, since they played the media darlings from Duke this past weekend, they were allowed to be seen outside of the East Coast. I must say, I was rather pleased with the way my alma mater played, despite the fact that they came up short by 8 points. They probably needed that game to have any at-large hopes for the tournament, and they played with the sense of urgency that such a situation demands. I also don't want to take anything away from Duke, who has a bunch of very good players who played in a manner that reflected their Hall of Fame head coach, Mike Krzyzewski. The only part of the game that I really had a problem with was the play-by-play, regrettably suppplied by ESPN's Mike Patrick.

Patrick's "analysis", simply put, is the reason that I sometimes watch sporting events with the mute button on. His job is to tell me what is happening on the court at any given time, and nothing more. I do not need to know what his position is on the "Duke conspiracy" that college basketball fans sometimes suspects the existence of. I certainly don't think that ESPN was too thrilled when he brought up the alleged conspiracy in the middle of a game that, between Temple's NCAA dreams, Mardy Collins's individual brilliance in a game his team had to have and J.J. Redick's quest for the all-time ACC scoring record (although, in my opinion, that was a bit overplayed as well), prompted plenty of other things to talk about.

I personally think that the color commentator for the game, Len Elmore, deserves a raise for talking Patrick down from his sermonizing and minimizing the damage to his colleague's credibility. As an N.C. State alum, Elmore has a lot more reason to be passionate about the topic than does Patrick, but Elmore simply stated in conciliatory tones that it may sometimes seem as if Duke gets all of the calls because they sometimes get breaks at crucial moments in games (my individual viewpoint is much the same, by the way). He acknowledged the fans' perceptions without being accusatory, which seems like pretty good journalism to me. That's more than I can say for Patrick, who made plain to me what I had suspected for years, that his head is firmly shoved up Krzyzewski's rear end.