Tubby, Tubby, Tubby

We're nearing the end of March, and you know what that means: Every person in the world is currently losing in their NCAA tournament pools.
This is the time of year when anybody with the remotest interest in sports — and even many without any interest at all — fills out a tournament bracket. It's also the time of year when newspaper columnists and late night talk show hosts write or talk about how poorly they're doing with those brackets. And since nobody ever talks about winning their tournament pools, I can only assume nobody ever wins.
It's simple statistics, folks. You can't argue with it.
For the record, I actually still have a chance to win one of my pools. If I've done the math right, never a certainty, Ohio State beating UCLA in the championship means I win. That could mean some decent money. You know, if I was in favor of betting on things like this.
Kids, don't gamble.
I don't want to talk about any of that, though. I don't want to talk about this basketball season. This basketball season is dead to me. It went on life support the day the Gopher men's team lost to Marist, and it started coughing up vital organs around the time the team started stumbling its way through the Big 10 season. You know how you can tell things are bad? When you start to wonder if the players know they're only supposed to throw the ball to players whose uniforms match theirs.
I've been going to Gopher games since before I was old enough to really understand what was going on. There were times this season when I still wasn't sure, but I blame the team for some of that. In all those years, this is the first time I actually felt relieved when the season ended. I haven't been to the dentist in years, but getting teeth drilled couldn't be as bad as this year's team. At least at the dentist you get Novocain.
How bad was this year's Gopher team? If I'd had any college eligibility left, I might have had a chance to walk on. I'm not saying we'd do better if I was on the floor (we almost certainly wouldn't) but we couldn't have done much worse. And I'd have had the chance to wear a tank top, which likely would have either made people laugh or made them a little queasy. Either way, though, it might distract them from the game.
But like I said, this season is over. The Dan Monson Era is over in Gopher Basketball and the Tubby Smith era has begun. It's fitting this happened in spring, because there couldn't be anything more refreshing.
I don't know a lot about Tubby Smith. I know his real first name is Orlando, and that his parents had something like 632 children. I know he was an assistant coach at Kentucky before moving on to Tulsa and Georgia, where he ran successful programs. I know he won 22 games this season, just three fewer than the Gophers won in the last two years combined, and still had people calling for the school to fire him. And I know people in Kentucky really, really need something besides college basketball and bourbon to keep them occupied.
There are certainly concerns with the hire. Some of those people calling for Tubby to be fired questioned his ability to recruit. And if Tubby can't recruit at Kentucky, one of the great programs in the history of college basketball, how can we expect him to recruit to a school with players who at times this season seemed unclear on the underlying concepts of the game? Maybe we could offer to have someone write the players' term papers for them.
Mostly, though, I'm excited. Because beyond the questions, beyond the doubts, beyond the idea that, hey, $1.8 million is an awful lot to pay a guy to coach a basketball team, there is one important fact. That fact is this: In the next few years we're going to have a lot more opportunities to use the word "Tubby." And that can only be a good thing.