An Open Letter to Ole Miss

"It's just YOU and ME! Ha Ha!"

Dear Rebels, Collectively,

Listen, I don't know if you guys know this, but we didn't just forget about you, OK? We're not stupid. We don't have alzheimers. Nothing has been forgiven.

So you can stop climbing up on the crows nest and flipping us off already. We're trying to cut you some slack, but you keep taunting us.

So listen, pricks, do you know how a prison guard operates? He doesn't want to seriously injure anyone, but he's forced to demonstrate his authority on occasion. So he billy clubs a little guy in the ribs in the lunch room. Or he domes a stray gang banger with his flashlight. Nothing serious. No emergency room. Just a little love tap. Did you guys like Oz? We did. Aaaaaaaaaaanyhoo...

I just wanted to say hey to you guys, give you a little taste, and to let you know that if we wanted to, we could seriously fuck you up.

All best,

Ralpheus

Eminent Treasurer

The Sports Gods, LLC

Does Anyone Remember? Does Anybody Care?

When the sun shines down on what's left of me /

About a hundred years from now /

I'm gonna cut my water with Rebel Yell /

And claw my way back to town

100 years, 100 years /

They'll break me, but I'll break them too

--Dr. Dog, 100 Years

The Rebels will take on Georgia in the Tad Pad on Saturday, and the University will do its best to celebrate 100 years of not-so-storied Ole Miss basketball tradition at halftime. The school has selected an All-Century team to commemorate the occasion of this season. A genuine +1 to Langston Rodgers and Co. for that.

But this is the same Sports Information Department that gave us manually dropped crepe-paper from the score board and "the redblue in you" campaign. Anything they promote should be taken with a grain of salt. The occasion, though - that of a century's worth of basketball at the University of Mississippi - brings up a very important and existential question that we've all asked ourselves before: How am I supposed to feel about Ole Miss basketball?

Let's not confuse the situation. No one at Forward Rebels wants you to rationalize not going to the game tomorrow. And it is decidedly not valid to answer basketball taunts from State fans with "Well, we're a football school." Because we all know first hand that when the Rebels are good, we care. The Forward Rebs editorial staff, to be sure, cared a great deal back in 2001 when a special Rebel was making it cool to be a small fry right when all 125 pounds of this blog's staff was hitting campus.

But what are we to make of this basketball program that once promoted its head basketball coach to Ass't Coach of the Freshmen in football (not even joking)? What to make of a team who's greatest basketball coach (Country Graham) is only regarded as highly as he is because he notoriously spied on opponents of the school's greatest football coach (Vaught)?

The answer, of course, is to treat it exactly the way it gets treated. Sure, in an ideal world every game of every season would be sold out and raucous, and we could raise the funds for better practice facilities, and we could eventually say bye-bye to the Tad Pad. But it took the University of Mississippi about 50 years to regard its basketball program as anything other than a primer for football season, so its taking the fans a while to warm up to the sport.

Consequently, its fitting that the Centennial would fall in the same season that brings us three year ending knee injuries and Bin Ladengate. Outside of a few notable exceptions, Ole Miss basketball has been hounded by mediocrity.

That said, it doesn't take an improbable SEC Tourney Championship run to endear a program to a fanbase. All it takes is competition against blood rivals, and players who prove that they will run through walls for the same program that we struggle to make it to Wednesday night games to see if it happens to be raining outside. Its those players, no matter how many times they missed out on post-season play, that deserve the recognition they'll get tomorrow night. If you've been around for a century and have never been considered a UK or a KU, you learn to appreciate grit, and pluck and scrap and mostly spite. You truly do have to appreciate the idea of going into games and seasons thinking "They'll break me, but I'll break them too..."

Players like Elston Turner and Gerald Glass and Ansu Sesay and John Stroud and yes, Lil' Harrison (who was somehow left off the All-Century Team) understood this when they came to Ole Miss. And they allowed us to have those fleeting moments that validate 100 years of basketball. If anything ever does come from this program, it will be because of the players on the court at halftime on Saturday.

If you're in Oxford this weekend, please attend for their sake, at the very least.

Warren Tears ACL? Abandon All Hope, Ye Basketball Fans.

"What's good is bad, what's bad is good, you'll find out when you reach the top, you were on the bottom..."
Bob Dylan, Idiot Wind

Word is that in a post-game interview - one that I can't find transcribed anywhere - Kennedy told David Kellum that Chris Warren has torn his ACL. Let that roll around in your cranium for a little bit before reading on....

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Ready? OK. I guess it should come as no surprise that Kennedy called today the worst 24 hours of his life. More on that later. Before I go any further I'd like to say that if this news about Warren is true, then this season has got to be considered among the worst for an Ole Miss program in the history of the University. A season that started out with hopes of a West title, an Atlanta championship, maybe an 8 seed in the Big Dance. All that seems like it was a million years ago on December 18. We haven't gotten into SEC play, and this season has gone beyond worst case scenario - literally. This season has gone beyond the pale. Beyond the freaking pale. I want to go ahead and call it the 'Season of Vengeance' a reference to the sports gods having their way with us following 31-13 and 45-0. Maybe I'll wait for the RedSoloCup guys to come up with something more witty. But for right now, as I polish off the last of my wine bottle after witnessing the worst day of Andy Kennedy's life from start to finish, I'm going to go ahead and officially christen the 2008 Ole Miss basketball season as The Season of Vengeance.

A quick recap of the Season of Vengeance:

• Gaskins out for the year.
• Polyniece out for the year.
• Kennedy accused of a hate crime.
• Warren out for the year.
• Zero 'quality' wins.

Its really enough to make me feel sorry for Kennedy. I honestly do, a little. Its obviously not his fault that his two best players and his sixth man have all freakishly gotten injured early on in the year. And he has been good for our program. He's made people care about basketball. He's generated the funding for the Basketball Practice Facility. The players love him. He's consistently on the sidelines supporting the football team. I mean, in these respects, he is exactly what I want in an Ole Miss baskeball coach. He seems to care about the players and the school, and those are excellent qualities to have in a coach.

But I cannot comprehend this free-pass he is getting from the majority of Ole Miss fans. I'll be succinct: What has Andy Kennedy done to deserve the benefit of the doubt, much less forgiveness, in the Taxigate Scandal?

Does anyone sincerely believe that he was just out at 1:00 a.m. "dining with old friends from his Cincinatti coaching days" as his brother suggested? How do you give that statement any credibility, when everyone knows that Kennedy is a lush. That statement was laughable.

Honestly, its not uncommon to see a coach - say Bianco or Nutt - out on the square. These guys are generally heading into City Grocery or 208 with their families. They speak to fans, they joke with the waitstaff, pay their tickets, go home, tuck their kids in bed and go to sleep. What other coach in the history of the program has been allowed to go make a fool of himself on a consistent basis while everybody just looks the other way? And don't think for a second that Boone and Khayat aren't just as aware of this as you and I. At the end of the day, Oxford is still very much a small town where word gets around quicker than anyone would like to admit.

I think I'm letting my thoughts get away without making my broader point, which is this: Why are people so adamant about protecting Kennedy here? A winning program? Newsflash: Its year 3 under Kennedy, and we are way worse than we were in year 1. No way around that. All the talk about Kennedy not having his players to run his system is absolute horseshit. Who have the best players been for the past two years? Far and away, they have been guys Barnes recruited. Doyne, Abernethy, Curtis - all Barnes' kids. I realize Kennedy couldn't have been expected to have his own starters in year 1, but its year 3, and the one quality kid he's brought in is probably lost for the season now (obviously, through no fault of his own). For the record, Huertas signed under Barnes, and had to sit out his transfer year during 2006, AK's first year.

None of this "quality of players signed" stuff would be all that huge of a deal to me if Kennedy didn't make such a point of throwing all of Barnes' guys under the bus that first year. I was on the baseline taking photos one night when someone from the stands hollered to AK to take Doyne out of the game after he missed several shots. Kennedy responded by pointing at the entire bench and hollering 15 rows up to this guy "Who the hell I am supposed to put in?" -- as in, "everbody else sucks even worse." This was done in front of a packed crowd, and drew sufficient laughter from the front 10 rows or so. Believe me when I tell you nobody on the bench was smiling.

He also took swipes at the '06 seniors while bellied up at the Sporst Bar on several occasions. A friend of mine, who Kennedy doesn't know from Adam, told me that one night AK bought him shots and proceeded to talk basketball with him for a little bit. "I love these kids because they work hard," Kennedy said of the seniors, Sanders, Doyne and Abernethy, "but I wouldn't have given a scholarship to a single one of those bastards. They wouldn't be on the team if I had anybody else." These statements came about a week after Clay Sanders gave Ole Miss fans one of their greatest moments in the LSU rivalry with his Valentine's Day buzzer beater. At a time when we didn't have much of anything over LSU.

Well fuck you too, Andy Kennedy. You have recruited exactly one player who has proven to be anywhere near as talented as those three were. I know their contributions - especially Bam's - can largely be attributed to AK's system and coaching, but why throw them under the bus like that? And those comments had the underlying theme that the players he would be bringing in would be head and shoulders better than those guys. Again, its year 3, and that simply is NOT the case.

I guess what I'm saying is this: If two trips to the NIT with someone else's players are sufficient enough to make excuses for a lush who spends the night in jail before the biggest game of the season, then what in the hell is considered inexcusable to this fanbase? Is the NIT worth sacrificing our dignity? Would we react this way if Rod Barnes got arrested the night before a game on national television? Take your "I love Ole Miss and everything associated with it" blinders off and ask yourself those three questions.

In all sincerity, we all love Ole Miss. The key is to avoid loving Ole Miss like a child loves his mommy - "Mommy can do no wrong so I'll defend everything she does." The key is to love Ole Miss like a spouse - to care enough to call her out when she is acting inappropriately.

Oh yeah, we lost the game.