Soft Pretzel Logic

Greetings to those of you coming over from ACC Now, the Raleigh News and Observer's fine college sports blog. UNC's fans came by last month, and with N.C. Stave having paid a visit to Philadelphia this past March, now we just need Wake Forest to play here to make the Tobacco Road quartet complete.

I've got a grand total of five audio clips for your listening pleasure. From Duke, here are Mike Krzyzewski and Gerald Henderson. From Temple, here are Fran Dunphy, Dionte Christmas and Mark Tyndale.

Henderson, of course, is a Merion native who starred along with Tar Heels guard Wayne Ellington for Episcopal Academy before heading down to the Triangle. The nationally-televised game those two played against Neumann-Goretti at the Palestra a few years ago was the subject of some good banter between Henderson and reporters before I turned the recorder on.

Of note, the Dunphy audio is one long clip with two parts spliced together. The first half is his press conference; the second is him talking to me and Mike Sielski of the Bucks County Courier Times outside the locker room after that.

Also of note, some final stats: Mark Tyndale scored 20 points and Dionte Christmas scored 23, the latter of which was notable for Christmas' 5-for-16 performance from the field, including 3-for-11 from three-point range. But he was 10-for-12 from the free throw line.

Duke averaged 1.051 points per possession for the game: a nicely balanced 1.049 in the first half and 1.053 in the second half. Temple averaged 0.870 points per possession in the game; 0.626 in the first half and 1.106 in the second half.

The key state for the game was probably assist-to-turnover ratio: 13 to 14 for Duke and 11 to 20 for Temple.

The crowd was announced at 18,030.

I can't honestly say that there was a great line from this game. So I'm going to steal two from the Rhode Island-Dayton game, a 92-83 win for the Flyers at a jam-packed UD Arena. A few of us caught glances of the streaming video on press row and were quite impressed by Rhody's comeback.

What impresses me most looking at the box score is that Rhode Island averaged 1.23 points per possession and Dayton averaged 1.29. Not much defense there, but I'm sure not complaining.

Here are the lines for the game's two big backcourt stars, Jimmy Baron of Rhode Island and Brian Roberts of Dayton. If there was ever a game when efficiency was meaningless, this was it:

Okay, with all that done, I'm going to call it a night and chill out to a 14-minute LP version of this song that I just stumbled across on iTunes:

(Gratuitous hat tips to Philadelphia Will Do, The Next Mayor and Heard in the Hall. Honestly, I just wanted to get it in here somewhere because it's just that cool.)