Post-Gazette Bursts Its Own Credibility

[Fisk Tisk Tis the season, I suppose.]

Gene Collier wants you to know your team is garbage, even if he's never seen them play.

The notion that even a bogus election could get Penn State into the NCAA tournament is a perpetually suspect proposition...

Are the big words really necessary for a sentence that doesn't make any sense? What "election"? The selection is done by committee. And as far as the "proposition", Penn State has "perpetually" been legitimately in and out of projected brackets all over the internet.

Your big words do not fool me, I award you no points, and [you know the rest].

Ohio State, not two years removed from a spot in the national championship game against Florida, was clinging to some middling conference station and wasn't far removed from authentic bubble-team status even as most professors of bracketology were working with NCAA models that included Thad Matta's team in spite of itself. In other words, this event represented a bubble bigger than your head. Lose this one, and you pick gum out of your eyebrows for the next three weeks, which is no way to make it to distant March.

I'm really trying to stay on Gene's wild logic train here, but with this cross between loose tacky metaphors, forced figures of speech, and a words-per-sentence ratio that would give me a run for my money, I'm struggling.

But just to try and catch up, I think what he meant to say is that the loser of this game would find itself out of the NCAA tournament.

[T]he Lions might have let too many flattering angles get dulled by extended bursts of incompetence last night.

This would look better as a piece of art than some type of logical sentence, I say get the guy a paintbrush!

"We just didn't execute real well at times," said DeChellis, the Monaca native who still has a broken bubble's chance of getting Penn State into the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2001. "We dribbled the ball way too much. We didn't make the extra pass. We had some open shots we didn't make, and we took some really tough shots too."

Probably not as tough as some of the shots the bracketologists will be taking in the wake of the game.

Everyone take cover!  Big Ten Geeks:

The good news is that shutting the big three down is easier said than done, and so long as the Nittany Lions can take care of Indiana at home, they'll finish with at least 9 conference wins and 20 wins overall. Anything can happen on Selection Sunday, but I think most bracketologists would have Penn State playing on a neutral floor in April.

Oh, false alarm I guess.

But wait, what if Big Ten Geeks, who have spent the entire season previewing, reviewing and summarizing Big Ten basketball on one of those weblog thingies, doesn't know what they are talking about? I mean, what are their credentials? How many times have they been on Around The Horn or been allowed to argue with Stephen A. Smith? Exactly. What we need is an expert. A guy with by-lines who works for a newspaper!

Oh, how about Gene Collier, Pittsburgh resident and P-G writer, is he an expert? Well let's take a quick look at his back log.

His last ten stories are about: The Penguins, the herein linked, Tiger Woods, A-Rod, the Penguins again, Duquesne, Selig and the baseball union, the Penguins again, A-Rod again, Big Ben.

That's five sports in a little over two weeks. Based on the headlines, it doesn't look like Gene has written one single Penn State basketball story this entire season, maybe ever.

So, yeah, thanks for the insight.