WaPo Column - Mike Wise - Hoyas & Twerps

[DanMcQ]

All That Promise Reduced to This

By Mike Wise
Tuesday, March 8, 2005

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15431-2005Mar7.html

[FLHoya]

"All That Promise Reduced to This"--I'm sorry, was that title referring to the final 1/3 of the DC area basketball teams' seasons, or the last 2/3 of this article?

Mike, it's okay if you want to write a column about Maryland's puzzling mid-to-late season collapse. It's an interesting case to look at. There are plenty of Terps fans who read your paper and would appreciate the contribution.

But if you're going to write an article about Maryland--just go for it. Don't just throw in stuff about Georgetown and George Washington as an afterthought, a little dash of salt or pepper to spice up the soup just a wee tad. It looks sloppy and it's borderline insulting to the fans of the schools actually in the District of Columbia.

After the intro, when the article gets to the meat of its analysis of the appropriate level of disappointment for each team's slide, Georgetown gets a paragraph, GW gets a (smaller) paragraph, and then Maryland gets about 12 paragraphs. Nothing in the GU or GW paragraphs really rises above the analysis one is likely to hear waiting for the Metro at Chinatown after a game. Not to mention some of it I consider to be quite dubious--GTown's talent among the least in ALL of Division I? GW being a "mostly young" team when they start three Juniors and a Senior (our starters look infantile by comparison!!)?

Before I became a student at Georgetown, my college basketball team of choice was the Miami Hurricanes. And nothing annoyed me more than when Miami started to rise to national prominence in the late 1990s, and commentators failed to do their research on the team, instead settling for canned sentence-long "analysis". It became comical to watch Dick Vitale exclaim "Wow baby, Leonard Hamilton really has something going down there in Coral Gables!" for the 40th consecutive time in the studio when a UM score came up, then struggle to name any of the players when he did commentary for a Hurricanes game on TV.

I'm not saying the Terps' story doesn't deserve coverage--it's been quite intriguing to watch them this season. But the same is true of the storylines that have come from Georgetown and Foggy Bottom this season. None of these deserves to be mere "filler".