Butler 83 - Stanford 50

I had never seen a Butler game at home at the Hinkle Fieldhouse, one of the great old college arenas still in use. A friend gave me his tickets for this afternoon's game against Stanford, an alma mater of mine. So, I put on my old, grungy Stanford sweatshirt and headed to the game. I didn't really know what to expect. I had seen a little of Butler this season, enough to know that they have had a bit of a rough start to the season after last year's run to the NCAA final. Stanford I knew even less about, other than the team's 6-2 record, which, given what I saw this afternoon, must have been compiled against a group of high schools. By the middle of the first half, Butler was on top and running away from a Stanford side that was porous on defense and uncoordinated on offense. They seemed poorly coached (with all due respect to Johnny Dawkins). I can't say much about the second half because I left after only 4 minutes of it had passed, when Stanford had not yet scored a point, and Butler extended it's lead to 30 (9 points more than Stanford had scored in the game to that point).

As someone who usually supports Butler as a home-town team, I want to thank the Butler fans for not throwing things at me despite being the only one in the building wearing a Stanford sweatshirt. One of my colleagues who attended the game, who is also a Stanford grad, wore a Stanford hat at the start of the game but replaced it before the end of the first half with a Butler hat. He likes a front-runner.