SEXY-ISH-KIND-OF-BUT-NOT-REALLY IS NO LONGER BACK

Sorry boys. Syracuse is out of the N.I.T. That means if you want to see sweaty guys in tight muscle shirts and capri pants, you're going to have to make it Fire Island before Labor Day.

So now we see what Jim Boeheim learned. By that, I mean will he realize that it's no longer 1988, and in the new watered-down, WAC-wannabe Big East (now with Rutgers and South Florida!), he'll have to balance the feeble conference schedule with someone besides Canisius and the St. Francises, or will he continue to be a stubborn prick about it?

THE FUTURE OF BASKETBALL UNIFORMS

OR

WELCOME TO SYRACUSE BASKETBALL, I LOVE YOU

I had to let these new Syracuse uniforms marinate for a couple days. When I first saw them, I assumed I had been selected by the Pentagon to be the guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program. Forgotten, I awoke 500 years in the future. I discovered a society so incredibly dumbed-down that I'm easily the most intelligent person alive. I wrote a screenplay about it. But it turns out Mike Judge already made that movie. And ironically, these new Syracuse uniforms look like something out of Idiocracy:


I fear change. But usually I don't have a reason. These half body suit/half long skirt uniforms are a horrible prank being played on the once-proud Syracuse basketball program. SU's previous low point was signing this.

Then it moved a little lower by nicknaming the Carrier Dome the "Loud House." If you've ever been to the Carrier Dome, you'll realize it's neither a house, field or otherwise, nor is it loud. (You'd never think 30,000 people could make so little noise. My good friend Tad and I hit higher decibels when we sob uncontrollably on Gordon Lightfoot Wednesdays).

But this is not just a low point for a fading basketball program. This is a low point for the human
race if more than one person thought this looked good. Think I'm overreacting? This is what Syracuse's Nike-designed men's basketball uniforms will look like in 2027 (artist's depiction):

And those haircuts will be Phil Knight-mandatory.

There's no way around it. The end is near. Soon the mighty hand of Zeus will reach down from the sky and usher in a new age or something along those lines. It's in Revelations, people.

Luckily for me, my friend Tad and I have been working on a fallout shelter for just such a day. His wife Rhoda can come too, since we have to procreate. But I wish we had spent that extra $2.99 on that KMart shower curtain so they could have some privacy.

I guess my point is that every member of the Syracuse basketball team looks like an asshole in those uniforms.

YOU HAVE BEEN NAMED TO AN ALL-BIG EAST MEN'S BASKETBALL TEAM

Congratulations. If you have ever been affiliated with a Big East school (like, say, that time you had a connecting flight in Louisville), you were named to the men's basketball team.

See the full team here. Anyone under the heading "honorable mention" should be ashamed. Not only are you awful at basketball, but you probably smell terrible if everyone hated you so much that you weren't one of the seemingly thousands of players named to the first- and second-teams.

But if I could just contradict myself for a second, since I don't have any readers to do it, perhaps the Big East is just preparing for the day that the all-conference teams play each other for conference supremacy. Sure, the Big Ten might look nasty, but they're just five players. The Big East's starting team alone has 11. They could triple-team Greg Oden with Aaron Gray, Herbert Hill, and Roy Hibbert, and still have eight other defenders in the passing lane. And they can bring a fresh 10 off the bench whenever needed. That's more than enough to make up for the inevitable 5-for-16 shooting performance of Demetris Nichols.

(The woman pictured is Rhoda, wife of my good friend Tad Goodfellow. She sucks at basketball. Even I beat her nearly half the time. But her grocer went to DePaul, thus her All-Conference honors.)