Surprise Ultimate

So this really cool thing happened on the DC trip. Late at night while doing the flipping thing I discovered that the Donovan House gets "CBS College Sports Channel." This is a channel that's not part of the cable package we have at home. Anyway, while doing the flippy-flippy I happened upon this channel and what should be on - the college ultimate nationals.

I haven't played or seen decent ultimate in maybe three years; the last game I played (and saw) was the summer league finals I played in a few years back. So this was really cool to happen upon. Needless to say I stayed up to watch. All in all it was a decent game, but I kept having those "when I was a kid we had to..." thoughts.

The game was Wisconsin against Florida, all by itself that was sort of shocking to me. In three years of nationals I don't think I ever even saw either of those teams. I can remember an Indiana team, but nothing else really from the midwest. The team furthest into the southeast must have been ECU, pretty east but not too far south. My life was full of Cornells and Santa Barbaras and Princetons. Florida and Wisconsin, what's up with that?

Mostly the game was a bit of a blowout. All through the first half Wisconsin built and grew a lead. At one point later in the game they flashed a stat saying it was the largest blowout since Chabot played in the finals in 1987 - as if that was sometime before the dawn of history. As it turns out I was at that game, at Penn State, in the crowd. I'm old. Also of note is that Yuk played Chabot closer in pool play that year than any other team at the tournament, I have it on video tape. Not that a pool play loss in 1987 has anything to do with the finals in 2008, but its a nice little, tiny, connection for me.

So I'm watching and the crotchety old man is saying, this sort of sucks. I mean, the play is ok, when they're playing. But the whole thing got all ticky-tack early with call after call and didn't loosen up for the whole game. It was interesting to watch a game with pretty active observers. When I played observers could only speak up on line calls, in or out of the goal or the field of play. Now the observers are in on everything. At least it cut down on the argument time, although I guess on TV they could just edit the arguments out.

Seemed to me like I kept seeing a zone like the 4-2-1 Pittsburgh Zone, except it also looked like they were pinching one of the hammer stops and playing the back like a 2-3-2. The odd thing is that from the throwers perspective it looked like just a cup and then deeps. Add to that they were switching marks so the count never really seemed to get that high. I was just looking at it dumbfounded thinking bender to the flat or that cup will open up if you'd just throw a believable fake already. I know it's probably better than it looked on TV, and it was probably windier than it looked on TV, but it did seem like a fair number of summer league teams would have made pretty quick work of it (and then walk uphill both ways through the snow - why when I was a kid we didn't even have a box...)

Geek, geek, geek.

So, maybe next spring I'll look to add that channel to our cable package so I can ridicule another zone.