Would you like to watch two minutes of ye olde time basketball? Sure you would! Here’s a couple minutes from the 1954 NCAA tournament game between Cornell and NC State, which the Wolfpack won. This is coming from the Cornell perspective, but still it’s entertaining.
A long lost find. Highlights of the 1953-54 EIBL champion Big Red in the NCAA Tournament against NC State at The Palestra on March 13, 1954. The 10th-ranked Wolfpack won 65-54. Ray Zelek had 12 points, while Lee Morton
— Cornell Basketball (@CUBigRedHoops) April 27, 2020
scored 11 in his final collegiate game. #YellCornell pic.twitter.com/UZMupm3vsj
Neither team cracked 30% shooting from the field (old school basketball was extremely bad, generally), but NC State got to the free throw line 42 times and fouled out two Cornell players to build a decisive edge on the scoreboard. The Pack’s Mel Thompson scored 26 points and grabbed 14 rebounds—he was the only player to hit more than a third of his shots from the field. Ronnie Shavlik had a tough day scoring the ball but hauled in 21 boards.
This contest was the third-place game in the East-1 Region, as each team had previously been bounced from the 24-team NCAA tournament in the regional semifinals. NC State opened its tournament with a two-point win over George Washington, then lost to eventual national champion LaSalle by seven.
In more contemporary news, Rivals recruiting analyst Eric Bossi had some kind words for NC State’s newest basketball commitment, Ernest Ross:
While Ross is far from a finished product, I absolutely love the athletic 6-foot-9 forward’s upside. He runs the floor extremely well, he’s a pogo stick around the rim and while he’s still lean he has the exact type of frame with good shoulders and long arms that you like to see in a high end prospect. He’s not yet a knockdown shooter, but he’s also got a lot of promise as somebody who can stretch the floor and his shot looks pretty sound.
In the above-linked piece, Bossi also has an interesting assessment of Wake Forest’s situation now that Danny Manning has been fired, pointing out that the late move can create some additional problems for the new coach. I still don’t understand why they waited six weeks from the season’s conclusion to do this.
As he points out, it’s not currently possible for a new coach to go out and evaluate potential recruits, which will make constructing this first roster pretty tough. Wake has had three recruits decommit (none highly ranked) since Manning was removed and also has to replace Chaundee Brown, who is transferring elsewhere.
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Is going to a sports venue to watch a sitcom on the jumbotron a crazy thing to do? Yes, I’d say that yes it is. But the Cheers finale was just that big of a deal, apparently.
Cheering on cheers: Some of the 40;000 Toronto-area fans of the popular TV show did just that last night; viewing the sitcom’s final episode on the Jumbo-Tron screen at SkyDome.
Cheers is perfect coronavirus quarantine material because there are like 270 episodes of that show—and it’s a pretty good show; I was pleasantly surprised when I binged it a while back. Fire up three episodes a night on Netflix and you got content for three months.