Connecticut continues to top women's poll

NCAA Basketball Betting Lines

02/08/2010 - New York, NY (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - Connecticut remained a unanimous choice as the top-ranked team in women's college basketball, as the Associated Press released its latest poll Monday.

The Huskies (23-0) enter the week with a 62-game winning streak, just eight shy of the record set by a UConn team from 2001-03. Connecticut received all 40 first-place votes and a total of 1,000 points from a nationwide media panel to extend its record reign atop the poll to 38 consecutive weeks.

Stanford (21-1), with its only loss coming against UConn, again held at No. 2, while unbeaten Nebraska (21-0) moved up one spot to third. Notre Dame fell one spot to fourth, with Tennessee, Xavier, Ohio State, Duke, West Virginia and Florida State completing this week's top 10.

West Virginia and Florida State moved into the top 10. The Mountaineers slid up two spots from 11th, while the Seminoles vaulted five spots from 15th.

The second 10 starts with five Big 12 teams -- Baylor, Oklahoma, Texas A&M, Texas and Oklahoma State -- and concludes with Georgetown, Kentucky, North Carolina, Georgia and still one more Big 12 team in Iowa State. North Carolina tumbled nine spots from ninth after losses to Florida State and Miami-Florida last week.

Georgia Tech, Gonzaga, LSU, TCU and St. John's are the last five teams ranked this week. TCU is the lone newcomer, replacing Wisconsin-Green Bay. The Horned Frogs were ranked the previous week before falling out of the poll.

Wgo2net NCAA Basketball Betting News

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FOOTBALL TRASH TALK

NFL Football Trash Talk

Trash talk has a place in every competitive endeavor (except baseball; those stirrup-wearers are too busy chewing on their sunflower seeds and their supplements to worry about what their opponents are doing).

Fantasy sports is no exception. Any intelligent discussion of the subject would probably start with a thesis statement or a definition of terms. Thankfully, this wont be an intelligent discussion.

Let me just say that I am happy to take a place in this space alongside my talented colleagues, even our commissioner. (You should see how she bleats like a demented paper boy about league fees on our fantasy site).

Trash talking, I would argue, is primarily about amusing your friends, their sheeplike demeanors and sloping foreheads notwithstanding. The best place I have found for football trash talking is at www.SportsAlarm.com.

Beyond the entertainment factor, though, I would recognize that the sophomoric ritual has one advantage, when properly applied. It magnifies your fantasy triumphs and mitigates your fantasy failures by transforming the eventual point total into an afterthought. Winning makes it seem like your opponent really is a truss-owning, lapel-pin-wearing nitwit. And in defeat, trash talk can be the air bag to break the fall from your hyperbolic heights. The plug-necked yahoos on your team, you can say, will be sacking groceries by the end of the season.

The best trash talk, in my view, is layered and nuanced. And it doesnt focus only on your opponents team. It picks apart your opponent. The idea is to create a shock-and-awe-scale blizzard of nonsense, and the goal is to make your opponent drop his hands from his keyboard in exasperation.

What team does your opponent root for? Accuse a Giants fan of having a Joe Namath pillowcase. Wheres your opponent from? Give a look of concern no matter his reply, then say, I'll try to type slower for you next time. Is your opponent into politics? Label everyone a tax-and-spend corporate shill.

Cap all that with a liberal application of irrelevance. For instance, dont just conclude by saying your opponent is a twerp who drafts like my grandmother. Say that your opponent is a sweater-wearing, eyebrow-plucking twerp who drafts his team about as well as Zsa Zsa Gabor gave acceptance speeches at the Oscars. By the time your foe makes sense of that, his starting running back will have had puppies.

But what about you? Hmm? Recall a memorable slam? Have a tried-and-true technique? Know someone who seems impervious to insult? Take a moment and tells us about it. Put together some (fit-for-publication) thoughts. You wont be too busy returning phone messages from your friends, Im sure, to reply.

In addition to the trash talking, the Sports Alarm has a huge gallery of high resolution pictures of beautiful women and models in bikinis. The most popular models are: Lindsay Lohan, Carrie Underwood, Alessandra Ambrosio, and Paris Hilton.