"Vitale is Back" or A Long Defense of the Voice of College Basketball"
Time to predict tonight's big games! But first...
As longtime Sweaters* will know, I (heart) Dick Vitale. The voice of college basketball returns tonight to call the Duke-UNC game. He's been gone since having surgery on December 18 to remove lesions on his vocal chords.
What I love about Vitale is all his energy and enthusiasm is real. He actually does get that excited about the game, and goes bonkers over being able to blab about it on television. He's not much more insightful about game tactics than the average color man. But he certainly does live and breath the sport more than perhaps any other human. Plus, because of his personality, everybody knows him, so he's in tune with the pulse of the sport.
I can sympathize with people, like my dad, who find him obnoxious. If your team is getting thumped, the last thing you want to hear is some commentator shouting from the bottom of his throat about how scintillating your opponent is playing. Over time, we've all been on the wrong end of that scenario. But if I turn on a random college basketball game that I don't have much of a stake in, I'm only going to get as excited about the game as the announcers are. CBS's Gus Johnson always sounds excited because he really is excited. He admitted as much on the Sports Guy's podcast a few months ago. I think ESPN's Mike Patrick is good at that too. (He'll be calling tonight's game with Vitale.) If the game itself actually turns out to be exciting, these guys take it to another level. That's why I wish Vitale could call some NCAA tournament games, at least for the first weekend. He was born to call one of those crazy upsets, but CBS never brings him in.
Instead, we're stuck with Billy Packer all the way through the finals. He's the anti-Vitale. Imagine one of those games when your team is getting crushed, and you're about to throw your remote through the TV because Vitale is on the verge of tears worshiping the play of the opposition. How much more annoying is it when Packer is calling one of those games and he starts harping on some random critique that popped into his brain about your team? He keeps bringing it up every time you get scored on, right on through the post game show. That's the difference between the two. Vitale is a vomit-inducing bucket of positivity. Packer is a crotchety old Negative Nancy. I'll take the positivity every single time.
Now, I guess there's still probably some people out there who think of Vitale as "Dukie V." Here's my theory on that: Dick Vitale has been calling games on ESPN since the early eighties, and he's been their number one color commentator for almost as long. The ACC has been the best conference in college basketball since the early nineties, and ESPN has had rights to their games for just about as long. Thus, Vitale has been assigned to a particularly high percentage of ACC games. Acknowledging that North Carolina is right there with them, Duke has been the best team in the ACC since 1990. (They've won the regular season title 10 times since 1991, and the conference championship 8 times in that same span.) Thus, Vitale has been assigned to a particularly high percentage of ACC games. It follows that Mr. Vomit-Bucket-o-Positivity will have said more positive things about Duke than any other team. There WERE more positive things to say. Once you tack on the fact that Coach K is longest serving coach in the ACC right now, and that Vitale is a personal friend of Coach K... Yes, it's reasonable to suggest Vitale is partial to Duke. But I think it's absurd to suggest that his pro-Duke-ness makes him anti-UNC or any other ACC team. It's far more likely that the fans of non-Duke ACC teams have been in the aforementioned scenario of hearing Vitale worshiping Duke after their team just got punched in the gut with a 12-0 run. It makes sense, then, that non-Duke fans in the ACC have a perception of Vitale as being pro-Duke to the point where his objectivity is being questioned.
Furthermore, I think it's against Vitale's personality to be biased against any one team. He likes watching college basketball even more than I do. The only people he's biased against are people who commit what he perceives are sleights against the game, namely the NCAA when it distributes hefty punishments for small infractions or the NCAA selection committee when it leaves out a deserving team. As Jay Bilas once said after a Vitale anti-selection committee rant, "Dick...you'd have 75 teams get into your bracket! Who are you going to leave out?"
But just to prove my point, tonight I'm going to keep a tally of Vitale's comments. One column for pro-Duke, one for pro-UNC, one for anti-Duke, one for anti-UNC. I'll probably be heavily into the game, so it will be highly unscientific, unless I decide to record it and watch it again just to tally the comments. Also, I might just do the first half, in case the second half is too intense. Or maybe I'll get into the experiment and it'll be highly accurate. Heck, I'll even try to update the score at halftime, so check back here towards the end of the half when I've had time to get that post up. In any event, I predict that whoever wins the game (or the half if I only do one half) will win the "pro-" category.
Finally, I'm going to give my completely biased predictions for tonight's games:
Syracuse 74, Connecticut 71 Donte Greene is due for a big game.
Duke 87, North Carolina 85 (OT) Duke bench keys second half rally.
*I've decided to call Sports Sauna readers "Sweaters," as in people who visit a sauna and sweat a lot.
As longtime Sweaters* will know, I (heart) Dick Vitale. The voice of college basketball returns tonight to call the Duke-UNC game. He's been gone since having surgery on December 18 to remove lesions on his vocal chords.
What I love about Vitale is all his energy and enthusiasm is real. He actually does get that excited about the game, and goes bonkers over being able to blab about it on television. He's not much more insightful about game tactics than the average color man. But he certainly does live and breath the sport more than perhaps any other human. Plus, because of his personality, everybody knows him, so he's in tune with the pulse of the sport.
I can sympathize with people, like my dad, who find him obnoxious. If your team is getting thumped, the last thing you want to hear is some commentator shouting from the bottom of his throat about how scintillating your opponent is playing. Over time, we've all been on the wrong end of that scenario. But if I turn on a random college basketball game that I don't have much of a stake in, I'm only going to get as excited about the game as the announcers are. CBS's Gus Johnson always sounds excited because he really is excited. He admitted as much on the Sports Guy's podcast a few months ago. I think ESPN's Mike Patrick is good at that too. (He'll be calling tonight's game with Vitale.) If the game itself actually turns out to be exciting, these guys take it to another level. That's why I wish Vitale could call some NCAA tournament games, at least for the first weekend. He was born to call one of those crazy upsets, but CBS never brings him in.
Instead, we're stuck with Billy Packer all the way through the finals. He's the anti-Vitale. Imagine one of those games when your team is getting crushed, and you're about to throw your remote through the TV because Vitale is on the verge of tears worshiping the play of the opposition. How much more annoying is it when Packer is calling one of those games and he starts harping on some random critique that popped into his brain about your team? He keeps bringing it up every time you get scored on, right on through the post game show. That's the difference between the two. Vitale is a vomit-inducing bucket of positivity. Packer is a crotchety old Negative Nancy. I'll take the positivity every single time.
Now, I guess there's still probably some people out there who think of Vitale as "Dukie V." Here's my theory on that: Dick Vitale has been calling games on ESPN since the early eighties, and he's been their number one color commentator for almost as long. The ACC has been the best conference in college basketball since the early nineties, and ESPN has had rights to their games for just about as long. Thus, Vitale has been assigned to a particularly high percentage of ACC games. Acknowledging that North Carolina is right there with them, Duke has been the best team in the ACC since 1990. (They've won the regular season title 10 times since 1991, and the conference championship 8 times in that same span.) Thus, Vitale has been assigned to a particularly high percentage of ACC games. It follows that Mr. Vomit-Bucket-o-Positivity will have said more positive things about Duke than any other team. There WERE more positive things to say. Once you tack on the fact that Coach K is longest serving coach in the ACC right now, and that Vitale is a personal friend of Coach K... Yes, it's reasonable to suggest Vitale is partial to Duke. But I think it's absurd to suggest that his pro-Duke-ness makes him anti-UNC or any other ACC team. It's far more likely that the fans of non-Duke ACC teams have been in the aforementioned scenario of hearing Vitale worshiping Duke after their team just got punched in the gut with a 12-0 run. It makes sense, then, that non-Duke fans in the ACC have a perception of Vitale as being pro-Duke to the point where his objectivity is being questioned.
Furthermore, I think it's against Vitale's personality to be biased against any one team. He likes watching college basketball even more than I do. The only people he's biased against are people who commit what he perceives are sleights against the game, namely the NCAA when it distributes hefty punishments for small infractions or the NCAA selection committee when it leaves out a deserving team. As Jay Bilas once said after a Vitale anti-selection committee rant, "Dick...you'd have 75 teams get into your bracket! Who are you going to leave out?"
But just to prove my point, tonight I'm going to keep a tally of Vitale's comments. One column for pro-Duke, one for pro-UNC, one for anti-Duke, one for anti-UNC. I'll probably be heavily into the game, so it will be highly unscientific, unless I decide to record it and watch it again just to tally the comments. Also, I might just do the first half, in case the second half is too intense. Or maybe I'll get into the experiment and it'll be highly accurate. Heck, I'll even try to update the score at halftime, so check back here towards the end of the half when I've had time to get that post up. In any event, I predict that whoever wins the game (or the half if I only do one half) will win the "pro-" category.
Finally, I'm going to give my completely biased predictions for tonight's games:
Syracuse 74, Connecticut 71 Donte Greene is due for a big game.
Duke 87, North Carolina 85 (OT) Duke bench keys second half rally.
*I've decided to call Sports Sauna readers "Sweaters," as in people who visit a sauna and sweat a lot.
Labels: Dick Vitale
posted by Prof. A at 3:13 PM
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