Gotta love squeakball (you can bet on it)

A conference landed me in Las Vegas coinciding with the first day of the NCAA basketball tournament. Hockey is still the king of winter sports for a Cornellian, but the electricity of watching multiple basketball games at a hotel sports book is pretty amazing, too. The sport being worshipped here is not necessarily NCAA basketball, but the betting line.

You don't have to hate basketball in order to love hockey.

billhoward
A conference landed me in Las Vegas coinciding with the first day of the NCAA basketball tournament. Hockey is still the king of winter sports for a Cornellian, but the electricity of watching multiple basketball games at a hotel sports book is pretty amazing, too. The sport being worshipped here is not necessarily NCAA basketball, but the betting line.

You don't have to hate basketball in order to love hockey.

Sure. There's a quaintness to that undercard of the NCAA hockey tournament. It's good to pass the time waiting for the hockey conference tournaments to gear up. Making it 65 teams was just adorable.

I happened to be in Vegas one year on the day the basketball field was announced. That has to be the closest thing to a holiday in Vegas sports books. Probably the most a digital board is stared at other than New Year's Eve.

Did anyone catch "The Colbert Report" Tuesday night? Cornell alumnus Keith Olbermann '79 was getting grilled by Stephen, and they closed the interview with a discussion of the basketball tournament and Oral Roberts University's chances. Olbermann admitted that it was hard to bet against their basketball team when you have a 900-foot Jesus on your team, and got "Yeah...but their *hockey* team isn't so good," in right before the interview ended.