Intramural basketball notebook (Feb. 4-10)

Last year, The Daily Barometer ranked the top 10 intramural men’s basketball teams heading into the playoffs.

This year, we’re taking it a step further.

Over the course of the four-week regular season, we’ll scout each men’s “A” team least twice — unless you’re not any good, then we won’t waste our time.

Every Tuesday, we’ll run a notebook with observations from the previous week’s men’s “A” games. The day before the playoffs begin, we’ll release our men’s “A” top 10. We will also release a women’s “A” top 5, but we won’t include the women’s teams in our weekly notebooks since there are only 18 women’s teams in comparison to 78 men’s teams.

The notebooks will touch on a variety of topics — we have no set criteria for what we will, or won’t, write about.

If you don’t like something we wrote, or if you think we significantly undersold or oversold a certain team, feel free to shoot us an email (sports@dailybarometer.com) or hit us up on Twitter (@gradygarrett, @AndrewKilstrom). Feedback is welcome, and your email or tweet may make it into a future notebook.

Notes on games from Feb. 4-10 — last night’s games will be included in next week’s notebook.

• Apparently the 6:15 p.m. Thursday time slot is full of a bunch of super scrubs, because the Scrubz are 2-0 and winning by an average margin of 30. The rest of the league better figure their stuff out or they’re going to get embarrassed.

• Remarkably there are two teams dedicated to the Blazers’ Luke Babbitt in the 10 p.m. Monday time slot. While Babbitt Empire unsurprisingly plays much like Luke, losing by an average of 26 a game, the Babbitt Ballers have played nothing like the lead-footed southpaw, starting 2-0 and winning by 11.5 points a game.

• The Yeeders emerged as a legitimate contender, defeating Flint Tropics (primarily back-ups on the OSU football team) by 24. Unfortunately, the schedule doesn’t pit them against SipEp A, the other legitimate team in their time slot, but expect to see both teams in our pre-playoffs top 10.

• We’ve discussed how last year’s champion, Lambda Chi, returned only one player this year. It appears they’ve reloaded — to a certain degree. They aren’t quite as good as years past, but they’ve won their first two games by an average of 24 points and are as athletic as nearly any team we’ve seen. They should be able to give SigEp a good battle on the Greek/co-op side of the bracket — though we shouldn’t write off SAE A Team 1, either. Lambda will face a stiff test tonight, though, against undefeated Fantasy Factory in what may be the game of the week.

• Speaking of game of the week, another strong candidate is The MinoTaurs vs. Sabonis’ Massage Team tomorrow night at 10. Both teams have won close games over Polyester, the team made up of several OSU football players you’ve probably heard of.

• The game of the week last week occurred between the Cavemen and White Mamba. The Cavemen ended up winning, 44-43 in overtime, but not before a couple laughable moments got us to that point. At the end of regulation, a Cavemen player was fouled with 1.5 seconds left and went to the line for a 1-and-1 with the game tied. His free throw was so off — a line drive that hit the backboard and barely grazed the rim — we wondered if he was trying to miss on purpose because he thought his team was up by one. Then, with about 15 seconds remaining in overtime and the Cavemen up three, a White Mamba player was fouled while shooting a 3-pointer. Basically, the Cavemen were doing their best OSU basketball late-game impression. Despite the Cavemen’s gaffes, the White Mamba player made 2 of 3 free throws and his team ended up losing by one.

• We’d like to take a moment to acknowledge all the not-very-good fraternity teams that make team jerseys with their house’s name on it, their name on it, etc. It’s one thing if you’re actually good — Lambda had custom-made jerseys last season, which is acceptable — but it’s an entirely different issue if your team is made up of guys who clearly didn’t play organized basketball past the junior high level. We don’t even get why you make them ... it’s like a “hey, look at me!” move, but wouldn’t you want people to not look at you if you’re losing by 20? Get this: We won’t name names, but we overheard a fraternity member donning one of these custom-made jerseys telling a girl in the Dixon weight room that his team, which just lost by 19, didn’t belong in the “A” league. If you admit that, why the heck can’t you admit you don’t deserve jerseys?

• Wednesday at the 10:45 p.m. time slot, Lambda Chi Alpha B lost by 42 to Lambda Chi Alpha A2, then Lambda Chi Alpha A2 lost by 36 to Ice Vipers. Ice Vipers play Lambda Chi Alpha B the last week of the regular season. We hope they’ll have medics on standby for that one.

• Four teams total lost by 30-plus last week. We’ve mentioned three of them. The fourth is The Mambas, who fell by 32 to the Moharebeens. Next year sign up for “B.”