How fun is this weekend going to be? More snow, pivotal games, and a February push begins. We’ll get to all that funnery later today. Right now, we need to clear off our desk.

***

As we told you, Brian Mull is all over The Dub coaching search. Here’s his first list. It’s missing one name you’d think would be there, and contains one that some folks would give teeth (and money) to have.

Mull writes, in reference to others but most notably me:

Many people are interested in this vacancy but are not qualified.

But seriously, Mull also writes something I wholeheartedly agree with:

I do know, however, that this is an extremely pivotal hire for the UNCW administration, in particular Mehrtens, and the athletic department as a whole. Attendance in Trask has hit an all-time low. Seahawk Club membership and donations are floundering. Mehrtens made a mistake by extending Benny Moss’ contract following the 2007-08 season.

***

It’s been awhile since we linked over to Brendan O’Hallarn, the erstwhile ODU blogger. We’ve liked his work this year, but his latest is outstanding and highly recommended. Brendan spent pregame and postgame in the ODU locker room, and retells it very well. (We may have work for him at the CAA tourney…) Here’s one snippet:

I was struck by one thought: It’s VERY quiet in here. Normally, a dozen of 18- to 21-year-old boys and no supervision is a recipe for high-volume hijinks. But even chatterbox forward Ben Finney was almost silent, repeating “let’s go!” to himself, over and over. Forward Frank Hassell had his eyes closed and was rocking his head ever-so-slightly, side to side, visualizing the battle to come. Senior guard Marsharee Neely looked around the room. When he made eye contact with a teammate, he gave a tiny nod. Center Gerald Lee stared straight ahead, unblinking and unsmiling, looking like he was sitting in a jury box.

***

So I traded emails with one of the best Pug Fans I know; probably the best Pug fan I know. Out of respect, for the rest of this post, I’ll even call them The Wrens.

His question: are the Wrens being exposed, are they regressing to a 10th place talent level, or does the entire team just need to shoot 1,000 jump shots every day? My response to him was typically useless.

I took him back to a conversation we had in early January, when the Wrens were flying high. I asked him if, right now in early January, would he take 12-6? Keep in mind Wrenball was Wrecking Ball.

My point today was that it’s probably a giant cocktail of all of that. W&M isn’t playing as well, shooting far worse, familiar opponents are catching up to them, and the Wrens were never as good as they were playing in January but are still far better than anyone thought.

The caution to all WrenFans: don’t wear yourself out digging at the small things. Celebrate what is good, take your 12-6 to Richmond and revel in a great season that surpassed expectations, and surpassed them by far for two months.

Understand the good-natured, beautiful comedy that’s inherent in WrenFans having the “we blew our at large bid chances” conversation. Think about that.

It’s like my golf game being channeled through Dennis Green: you are what you are. I can shoot 36 on the front nine, or I can shoot 48 on the front nine. But I will always end up in the 78-83 range.

WrenFans–revel that you are about to shoot 76.

***

Jerry Beach provides the one reason I’ve seen written as to why the 96-team field is going to be better:

I’ll go so far as to say a 96-team tournament will be better than what we know now, because it seems inconceivable that ESPN wouldn’t grab at least the first week of the tournament and bash us over our frackin’ heads with coverage.

That’s frackin’ brilliant. My view has been it is a waste of your time to get angry about it. It’s going to happen so outrage is a wasted emotion. Find the beauty in it–this is our passion so concentrate on the good parts. To me, it was allowing the NCAA to structure money and brackets however they wish. I’m just going to keep on enjoying phonies getting exposed.

But Beach wrote this part that’s so obvious I’m stunned I missed it: we love the NCAA tournament, so who better than ESPN to test how deep that love goes?

It’s the ice cream theory we’re testing. I stole it from Reggie Jackson when Mr. October–a noted fastball hitter–was asked about Nolan Ryan fastballs.

“I like ice cream too,” said Jackson, “just not when you feed it to me by the gallon.”