Blow it out

Boy, that 100 to 0 girls high school hoops game down in Texas sure has everyone's baggy basketball pants in a twist. If you're not up on the details, here's the latest.

Now let's be upfront about this: Though some people have made them out to be, the girls on the losing team are not heroes. They kept playing even though they were getting drilled, which is commendable, but that's all they could do. They couldn't score, or really even get the ball up the court, and they couldn't stop the ball from going the other way over and over, so they just kept playing. Badly, put playing. That's commendable, but it's not heroic, and we're a little uncomfortable with the sometimes over-the-top praise being heaped on them from a lot of corners.

But just leafing through the comments after the story on the ESPN site (and, yes, we know that's generally not a good idea), we found that this story has caused some people to become completely unhinged.

There you will find no shortage of very serious people -- you can tell because they use all capital letters a lot -- who are sure that any criticism of the winning team's coach is representative of THE END OF AMERICAN GREATNESS or THE PANSI-FICATION OF AMERICA or some such.

There's some good reading in there, and a lot of typos for people so committed to excellence (or EXCELLENXCE, as one spelled it), but, hey, who are we to point fingers.

There's an interesting debate to be had here on mercy rules in high school athletics, but for those of you are looking constantly for the silver bullet of proof regarding THE DECLINE OF AMERICA, you're not going to find it at a girls' basketball game. Bonus hint: You won't find it at a girls' cross country meet either. Just a lot of very skinny girls.

Our take: We would have backed off the press a little earlier. You can't really sharpen your press against an opponent that bad. You really can't sharpen much of anything. Just win and get out.

More important, if it was our boss that came out in the media on the other side of the issue, we wouldn't have come out disputing him until we had all our stuff packed up in boxes. Unless you have a lot more juice than we do (and we hope, for your sake, that you do), when you take your boss on in the press, it's pretty much over. And that, my friends, IS WHAT AMERICA IS ALL ABOUT.