ea sports complex
Seriously: These aren't the "Oh, look, an athlete is having fun like a normal person," things that occasionally makes me queasy. It looks like Griffin is not only totally sober but having fun, quite possibly in a friend's film project for an Ingrid Bergman class, or something. In fact, that last one is bound to be as famous as The Seventh Seal's chess match with death.
(HT: 
The paid attendance was announced at 25,267, well below the 79,000 seat capacity of the stadium. And it looked like there were even fewer fans than that. As a comparison, the Tar Heels average about 21,000 to games at the Dean Dome in Chapel Hill.
While 25,000 is still a fine number for a basketball game, it's a staggeringly low mark for just the second game MSU has ever played at the Lions' stadium. Back in 2003, Michigan State faced Kentucky at Ford Field and drew 78,129 fans, a mark which set a 
Cram Session is The Dagger's semi-daily roundup of all the basketball knowledge in the world. OK, not the world. But in the parts of my brain not ravaged by abuse and neglect.
Have you heard? North Carolina has ninja skills. Last night
wasn't North Carolina's first non-cupcake test of the season. The Tar
Heels played Notre Dame in Maui, and Notre Dame has a potential
All-American in its front court (Luke Harongody) and a really, really
good shooting guard on the perimeter (Kyle McAlarney). It wasn't like
North Carolina had to prove themselves on the road or something; pretty
much everyone agrees that they're incredibly dominant, and will stay
that way the entire season. North Carolina is good. We get it, OK?
And still ... UNC comes out against a talented Michigan State team, and just blows them off the floor. Just annihilates them.
It was never close. It was never even in the same zip code as close. It
was just a dominating performance from top to bottom, yet again, and
there's really a limit to the ways this space can say that North
Carolina is incredibly, impressively good. As for Michigan State, it's
tough to say whether that 34-point difference is due to the Spartans'
deficiencies, or whether UNC is that much better than the rest of the
Top 25. Though, come to think of it, it could be both.
Indiana has no ninja skills. No skills to speak of at all, really. Bless
their little Hoosier hearts, but the Indiana Hoosiers are just not a
good basketball team. They will not be a good basketball team any time
soon. They fight hard, and scrap, and do all of the things that
announcers will semi-condescendingly praise them for in the next few
months, but the reality is that they are about as bad as North Carolina
is good. It's going to be a long season. Wake Forest, on the other
hand, is slightly easier to examine: The Deacons were sloppy. Very
sloppy. Even for a team that will apparently thrive on the fast break
this year -- sloppy. (Except for a particular second-half dunk. Oh, my god.) That Indiana was able to take a second lead at
13-12 in the first half is testament to the marginal difficulties Wake
had last night. The Deacons will have to get better, and play harder;
not everyone will be so easily dispensed with as the Hoosiers.
Gary Williams merciful are the basketball gods. It hasn't been the best of years for Gary Williams. His intra-ACC loss of Gus Gilchrist, and desperate search and eventual institutionally forced miss on troubled uber-talent Tyree Evans,
were both shots to his team's already sparse talent. More importantly,
they were shots to Williams' psyche, which, if Getty Images is any
clue, is not exactly sound. That m