BYU Radio

Here in Denver without satellite, the only way I could manage to catch last night's game was by listening to the BYU feed over the web. This was less annoying than I expected, because the BYU announcers were consistently building up UCLA as a great team, so they could claim a moral victory from a hard-fought loss. (And rightly so -- BYU's improvement from 9 wins two years ago is positively Howland-esque.)

In their pre-game interviews, the BYU coaches and players kept emphasizing the importance of containing AA and Shipp, so I was not much surprised to see LRMAM and DC have big games.

During the game, the announcers whined about a couple calls in UCLA's favor (including the intentional foul that Shipp drew), but overall were pretty fair. At one point the color man noted that UCLA had shot many more free throws than BYU but refused to blame the officials, correctly attributing the disparity to the fact that UCLA was more aggressive and athletic in the paint.

Three amusing notes about the BYU radio broadcasters:

1. Throughout the pre-game show they were speculating that BYU would be able to out-muscle UCLA in the paint. About two minutes into the game they dropped this theory completely.
2. Early in the game, the color commentator was calling Collison "pretty quick." By the middle of the game, he had become "lightning fast." At the end of the game, the guy was describing Collison as "the fastest basketball player I have ever seen."
3. The BYU announcers were understandably wowed at the atmosphere of Pauley Pavilion and especially at getting to meet John Wooden briefly off-mike. The color commentator made a nice contrast between Bob Knight, who has won a whole lot of games while acting like an asshole, with the Wizard, who had more success than anyone yet managed to do it while treating everyone around him with decency and respect.