Warning: This post is about college basketball, so you may wish to stop reading. The Outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day: The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play. And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same, A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game. The opening stanza of Ernest Thayer's poem Casey at the Bat. It is a poem about the emotional investment a small town made in a baseball player and his team. It sums up the situation here in Hooterville tonight. Hooterville is in a hand-wringing frenzy these days over the hiring of a new basketball coach at the University of Arizona. Hooterville is a college basketball town in a big way because frankly, there isn't much else going on here. Longtime coach and local hero Lute Olson has been in charge of the team for about 25 years. In that time he put Hooterville on the map, basketball-wise. Lute was a guy who could do no wrong in the eyes of most of the adoring Hootervillians. Without going into the gory details, Mr. Olson had a medical issued that resulted in the basketball team having no coach and no incoming players for next year. For the past two seasons the team had a interim coaches while Mr. Olson's situation played itself out. But now Olson has retired for good. Hootervillians have deluded themselves into the belief that anybody who is anybody in college basketball is just dying to get this coaching job. Rumors have been rampant over the latest coaching God rumored to be interested. All rumors have proven bogus thus far. Hootervillians are reluctant to admit that we are a collection of hicks stuck in a insignificant and dusty corner of the country. Not the midlle of nowhere, but definitely on the outskirts. The coach of the University of Southern California flew into town yesterday and the assumption was that he would take the job. Hootervillians were aghast. This guy was not big enough in stature to be our coach. No siree, we demand better. Apparently Mr. USC was as unimpressed with Hooterville as we were with him, so he said no and went home. As always, today was golf day. It was also Some Guy Named Bob's 73rd birthday. Weather was great, golf was fun and I wasn't at the hardware store. What's not to like about that? Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky