Tuesday Items

-- Tim Peeler spoke with Bobby Purcell about the Wolfpack Club:

We are a very goal-oriented organization and every year we have a theme. In 2007, it was the "Quest for 20,000" and in 2008 it is going to be "Red, White and You." It gives us a focus for the coming year. As we started growing the Wolfpack Club in numbers, we realized there were very few schools in the country that have ever reached the 20,000-member milestone. So we set that as a long-term goal in 2000, when our membership was 14,898. That’s when we began talking about it. We were very confident that we could get it done, and ’07 seemed like the year that if we did everything we could to the best of our ability, that we could reach the goal.

The "Red, White and You" campaign's accompanying leaflet is entitled The Shame Spiral And You.

-- There's a free preview of ESPN Full Court going on currently.

-- Some interesting college football number-crunching.

-- Andy Glockner looked at the last four Final Fours and found that 2FG% offense/defense appears to be the biggest key (among the major factors--shooting, rebounding, turnovers) to success. A good read, even if I don't feel entirely comfortable with the conclusions. Although I'm down with anything that counters "college basketball is a guard-dominated game!"

-- It's been a week and I'm still having trouble coming to terms with what TSN's Gerry Fraley said about Tim Raines.

Raines’ case was hurt by his reluctance to run in all situations, as Rickey Henderson did. Raines seemed at times too concerned about preserving his stolen-base percentage.

That's one of the most preposterous criticisms I've ever read.