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When I woke up today I thought it felt like a Thursday, but I knew it was a Wednesday.  A little while later I realized that it actually was a Thursday.

I had all kinds of positive and creative energy this morning, but it waned pretty quickly with Milly being a bit fussy earlier than usual, bottles to wash (after reorganizing the dishwasher to get more stuff in it) and a bunch of little jobs at work that kept me from focusing on the bigger jobs as early as I wanted to.

Despite all that I was able to search out the energetic feeling I started out with and held onto it for a while and it allowed me to plow through the work.  Later in the day I set up a last minute meeting that ended up going really well.

My buddy Nick Warkentien called me and invited me to go to a Haiti benefit concert with him.  Rio Bravo was playing and a number of people that we know were going.  I’d seen people talking about it on Twitter, and if it were just about any other night I would have gone, but tonight was Thursday night.

Thursday night TV is usually really good.  On NBC you’ve got Community, a vastly improved Parks & Recreation, The Office and 30 Rock.  That’s enough to keep you busy from 8-10, but then you add Fringe on Fox from 9-10 and not only do you have one great night of television, but you’ve also got the DVR recording as much as it can at one time in that last hour.  That’s not usually a big deal, but then you have to add in basketball.  You’ve got Duke playing their second game with a good Georgia Tech squad and Carolina visiting Virginia Tech and trying to turn their abysmal season around.  Since you can’t record but two things at a time and you know the Duke game will go past 9:00, you’ve got to do something.

Well, Amanda and I watched the Duke-Georgia Tech game downstairs until 9:00 then watched the last few minutes of the game upstairs on the little TV.  I’m so used to watching basketball on a big HD screen that I told Amanda I couldn’t even tell which players were black and which were white.  Then we went back downstairs and watched The Office and 30 Rock.  Seeing online that the Carolina-Virginia Tech game was a close one, I had to watch the rest of that.

So, how did the games go?  I couldn’t have asked for much better results.

#10 Duke beat #19 Georgia Tech, who had won the game played in Atlanta earlier in the season, with a score of 86-67.  The refs called a lot of fouls, and some people complained that two of the Yellow Jackets’ main players got in foul trouble too early, but honestly they were obvious fouls, not tick-tacky ones.  Aside from that the game went great.  Kyle Singler hurt his hand, which must have fixed something in it because he went 8 of 10 on three pointers and scored 30 points.  Everyone else played pretty well too.  I was pleased with how Ryan Kelly did in the time he got to play.  Andre Dawkins wasn’t in the game at all, and there was some small debate as to whether it had to do with his effort in practices or if he had a slight injury.  Anyway, it was fun to watch.

Virginia Tech, unranked, beat Carolina 74-70.  The Heels hit a last second three to make it look a little closer.  Really though, aside from the Hokies being up 20-10 early on it was played pretty close the rest of the time.  From what I read, and what I saw later in the game, it wasn’t a pretty one.  Either way though, Carolina has now lost six of their last eight games and sits at 2-5 in the conference (Miami and NC State are tied for last at 2-6, Carolina just hasn’t played as many games yet) while Duke is at the top at 6-2.  It doesn’t get any easier for the Heels, as their rest of their schedule is as follows:

  • at Maryland
  • Duke
  • NC State
  • at Georgia Tech
  • at Boston College
  • Florida State
  • at Wake Forest
  • Miami
  • at Duke

The blue ones are the ones I think they’ve got a good shot at losing and the red ones are the ones I think they’ll win.  Boston College I don’t really know enough about, though I’d be tempted to put it in the blue because it’s an away game.  Man, how sweet would it be for them to go 4-12 in the ACC?  (The answer is “extremely”.)

All that said, it would infuriate me to no end, yet not completely surprise me, if Roy Williams were to decide to switch things up at long last for the Duke game at Chapel Hill and they won.  Then again, he’s been unwilling to make adjustments to far and the message board fans are really up in arms.  It’s delicious.

Zach Dotsey
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