All Digger, all the time.

Digger Phelps wasn't matching his tie with his highlighter last night, which was nice. He was, however, busy comparing Channing Frye and Salim Stoudamire to Emeka Okafor and Ben Gordon. How can someone who is paid to analyze basketball make such an innane blanket statement? He works for ESPN, that's how. It seems like Digger just looked for the best inside-outside combo of upperclassmen and tagged them this year's version of Okafor and Gordon, because the while the games of these two groups may resemble each other on the surface, there is no comparison when it comes to the overall ability and consistency.

I'll start with Gordon and Stoudamire: Yes they're both somewhat undersized shooting guards. Here's the difference, Gordon possessed the ability to run the point for long stretches at UConn while also being lethal at creating his own shot off the dribble. So much so that many had Gordon pegged as a combo guard in the Gilbert Arenas mold when he entered the draft last summer. Stoudamire, on the other hand, is a shooter first and foremost. He can do a little creating off the dribble but his game is primarily of the catch and shoot variety. Lute Olson would sooner run off and get married six months after his wife died of cancer than ever let Stoudamire run the point for Arizona. Wait, that's a bad analogy...well, you get the point. Simply put, Gordon and Stoudamire have very different games with one major similarity: they can both shoot very well. Yeah, them and 75 other 6'3" guards in the country.

Frye vs. Okafor: If I was Emeka Okafor, I would find Digger Phelps and impale him with antlers like Slippery Dan on Deadwood this past Sunday. Its insulting to everything that Okafor accomplished in college to put him on the same level of a chronic underachiever like Frye. Okafor was the consensus National Player of the Year while Frye couldn't even make First Team All-PAC 10 this year. The PAC-10, by the way, wasn't exactly making Pete Newell drool over thoughts of the potential its young big men possessed this past year. Okafor was the most dominant player in all of college basketball last year, hands down. Frye could never be described using the word dominant other than, maybe, a phrase such as, "Channing Frye was was the dominant disappointment in the underachieving recruiting class of 2000 at the University of Arizona." It is an insult to the intelligence of college basketball fans as well as to Emeka Okafor to ever compare Channing Frye and Okafor. Hell, its and insult to compare Frye to Loren Woods. Other than both being black and over 6'9", there are no viable comparisons between Emeka Okafor and Channing Frye.

I truly believe that the only reason more people don't hate Digger Phelps is that his sublime stupidity is outshone by the endless (and pointless) rantings of Dick Vitale which have overshadowed him for so many years, thereby safeguarding him from the public scrutiny that his awful analysis truly deserves. I can't believe people like him get paid to misinform thousands of unsuspecting people for 8 months a year. Actually he works for ESPN so I can believe that...I guess I should be surprised that he doesn't have his own channel yet.