No Home Away From Home

As I watched OSU's first round Big 12 tournament game against Nebraska (which they won and looked decent at least on defense)last night, I was repeatedly annoyed by how bad the commentators were.

Stacey King - who I hadn't previously seen do commentary - was a star at OU several years ago. Doug Bell was the other guy, no idea if he's ever played or even actually touched a basketball or not.

Here's the summary - they're both horrible. I've probably witnessed worse, but it was pretty bad. I'll just give one example of their really bad attempts at color commentary.

The Big 12 tournament is being played at the Ford Center in OKC this year for the first time. This is a great facility, I saw OSU play SIU in the 2nd round of the NCAA tournament a couple of years ago in there. It's very nice. Located in downtown OKC, the Ford Center is about 70 miles from Stillwater. So it's close to home and OSU fans will obviously roll out in force. However, it is not the same as a home game.

These two guys repeatedly tried to claim that playing in the Ford Center was the same for OSU as playing in Gallagher-Iba. They didn't make this idiotic claim once, it went on and on and on. They even were so audacious as to claim that Sean Sutton tried to sell this to his team as a home game (because they haven't won a road game all year).

Reality is that OSU beat then #7 Pittsburgh in the Ford Center earlier this season and were 5-1 on neutral courts. So OSU's problem this year hasn't been neutral courts - they've got several problems this year, but that's not one of them.

Stacey King played at OU. While that statement alone should be enough to prove my point I'll go ahead and explain. (As the following sentences will explain that's not a slam on OU, read on) Stacey King has played in Gallagher-Iba, he even played in there back in the day when it was a 6,000 seat arena and was literally dangerous to the ear-drums (not sure it's much different on a good night now). He should know better than to think that the Ford Center is anything like GI. At no point will fans ever generate as much noise for any game in the Ford Center as the ones in GI do regularly. That's not even because OSU fans at GI are superior, it's because the building was built differently. The Ford is a much bigger space, the seats don't go straight up to the ceiling like in GI and I think they even installed some sound deadening material in the Ford (won't find that in GI, which was an intentional move to keep it as loud as possible during the expansion).

The assertion that Sean Sutton would try to sell last night as a home game to the Cowboys is even more ridiculous. While I doubt that any of OSU's current squad are going to be Rhodes or Truman scholars, these guys aren't dumb enough to buy that playing in the Ford Center constitutes a home game. They got on the bus and made the bumpy drive down I-35. They unloaded into a locker room that wasn't theirs. They walked onto a court with the most awful teal color ever painted in such large quantities. They heard the dull murmur of a mostly OSU crowd (as opposed to the deafening roar at GI). This was no home game and Sean Sutton is way too smart to try to sell that to his guys.

Bottom line, ESPN Regional needs better commentators, or at least the ones they have need to clue in.