Pandemonium in Cincinnati |
It's been long known that the Cincinatti Bearcats basketball program is compiled of a bunch of thugs and clowns. Fortunately we had never seen this reputation come to fruition on the actual basketball court, until yesterday that is. The "Crosstown Shootout" as the they call the rivalry between Xavier and Cincinnati became an actual shootout but instead of using guns, the players used wild rights and excessive vulgarity. For 5 minutes last night, the Cintas Center transformed from a basketball arena into Bed-Sty. It was utter pandemonium.
Whether this all came out of twitter "beef," on court trash-talking or simply when Dezmine Wells decided to push Yancy Gates to the ground, this clown-fest was both absolutely ridiculous and also completely unsurprising. Nothing that happened last night should stun or shock anyone. This wasn't a quick fight. It didn't end after the simply Yancy Gates push. It didn't even end after both teams exited the court. This was a predetermined, pre-meditated fight. This was going to happen. The post game interview made it all-too-clear that this issue was seeded in both teams' minds way before yesterday's tip-off.
My first reaction to this was to laugh. "Oh, Cincinnati and Xavier got in a brawl? Well that's obvious." But then I heard the post game interview that Tu Holloway gave and I just was stunned. "We're a bunch of grown men over here. We've got a bunch of gangsters in our locker room, not a bunch of thugs. We went out there and zipped 'em up. That's our motto for the year, 'Zip em up.'" The ignorance was literally pouring out of this kid, and not by his fault in the least bit. That's up to Xavier's PR people and coaching staff to make this kid realize what he did was wrong. But even more important than reacting properly is preventing this. The coaching staff should have addressed the whole fight before they went into the press room, but instead they allowed Tu Holloway to beat his chest like he was Styles P or Jadakiss spitting a verse of one of their songs. This was a press conference, not a party later that night. Instead of reconciling the issue, Xavier simply let it's players walk around like they had a "S" on their chest. It simply became a complete embarrassment for the team, the coaching staff and the university of a whole.
Cincinnati, on the other hand, is a lost cause. They have plenty more issues to deal with. Yancy Gates was dancing around like Muhammad Ali throwing hooks and running his mouth, yet no one was even trying to stop him. Once he put Kenny Frease on the ground, he should have been stopped by a teammate or a coach. But they were all more interested in posturing their toughness or "thug" attitude.
It'll provoke a laugh out of all of us who are far from the situation, but it is a disgrace to the game of college basketball, not that these two teams traded fists, but more because the situation was not quelled quickly or effectively. Xavier and Cincinnati can go out and recruit thugs, that's fine. But it is on you to turn them into mature adults who play basketball at a high level not only on the court, but off it as well. Thugs, folks, may not be thugs on the basketball court.
This press conference is just mind blowingly ignorant.
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