Even in the February dog days of conference play, college hoops has the potential to deliver serious doses of excitement. Wednesday’s games didn’t disappoint in that area. But beyond that, they worked as an advertisement for the good stuff ahead  rivalry-rich conference tournaments and unexpected NCAA tournament shootouts.  It’s a cliché, but it’s also true  every game between the University of North Carolina and Duke is a big game. Wednesday’s meeting between the two rivals loomed slightly larger than usual because the Tar Heels and Blue Devils are, once again, battling it out for the top spot in the Atlantic Coast Conference  and, to a lesser degree, because UNC chancellor Holden Thorpe picked a game-day fight with Duke on Twitter. What initially looked like a lopsided win for the visitors turned around dramatically in the second half, as Duke rallied to erase a 16-point deficit and pad its conference lead with a 79-71 79-73 win.  While a host of players had a hand in the outcome on both side, this game belonged to Duke’s senior guard Nolan Smith. In the biggest game of his still-blossoming career, Smith led the way for the Blue Devils by scoring 22 of his career-best 34 points in the second half. At Yahoo’s long-form sportswriting showcase The Post Game, Duke alum and Daily Fix extended family member Ben Cohen  he’s somewhere between a revered uncle and an eccentric cousin  has an excellent profile of the unheralded and increasingly impressive Smith and his impact on one of college basketball’s iconic programs.  “This school has churned out better scorers, better passers, better players, better heroes and better villains,” Cohen writes, “but not someone like Smith, who’s injected an unexpected and very timely charisma into Krzyzewskis program.”  If Smith’s breakout game and Duke’s most impressive win of the season presage brighter things ahead for the defending champs  and served as a reminder of how exciting the ACC tournament will be, even in a down year for the conference  another Wednesday game served as a reminder of just how crazy things can get once March Madness begins. What at first looked like another tough loss for a rebuilding Rutgers program turned into one of the wildest endings of the college hoops season so far when Rutgers senior forward Jonathan Mitchell converted a four-point play with 0.8 seconds remaining on the clock to secure a 77-76 upset win over ninth-ranked Villanova. The Scarlet Knights trailed by 13 points with a little over five minutes left, nine points with two minutes remaining, and were down five points with just eight ticks left on the clock.  “For the first time in a long time, fans walked out of the Rutgers Athletic Center believing,” the Newark Star-Ledger’s Brendan Prunty writes. “Call it karma. Call it luck. Call it whatever you want.” In lieu of anything more convincing, let’s call it a preview for what awaits college hoops fans in March.  The last year has been filled with news of European soccer’s debt issues  this Gabriele Marcotti column offers a brief refresher  and the imminent need for a more responsible approach. Eventually, fans may see something like that from the big dogs of the English Premier League, but that day is not yet here. Which means that Saturday’s Manchester Derby between Manchester United and Manchester City is both something of a throwback to the make-it-rain days of the EPL during the last decade and something fans have never seen before.  “This won’t be just another regularly-scheduled whistle stop on the British soccer calendar. It will be the richest match played in any sport, at any time, anywhere on the planet Earth,” the Journal’s Matthew Futterman writes. “According to analyst estimates, team statements and media reports, the players on the field and on the two benches in the Manchester Derby will have cost their teams roughly $850 million to acquire, or about as much as NASA spent to refurbish the Hubble Telescope.”  Johnny McEntee has taken only a handful of snaps at quarterback for the University of Connecticut during his three seasons there, and hasn’t thrown a single pass. But, in a testament to the power of viral video, the third-stringer has become a big name of sorts in recent days. The reason is a YouTube video demonstrating McEntee’s uncanny and unerring accuracy as a passer in non-game situations.  “If some marketing genius ever puts together the gridiron equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters, McEntee is going to make a serious run to be the No. 1 overall pick,” Yahoo’s Matt Hinton writes. Anyone who sees the video, which is already north of 1.4 million views on YouTube, would be hard-pressed to disagree.  Much has changed for William “The Refrigerator” Perry since he kicked his “Super Bowl Shuffle” lyrics  “I’m the rookie/I may be large, but I’m no dumb cookie”  during his smashingly successful NFL debut with the 1985 Chicago Bears. Some of it has been good, much of it has been less-than-good, but all of it is described in Tom Friend’s sweeping, sad profile of the present day Fridge  a portrait of the former run-stuffing artist as a housebound 400-pound eccentric  at ESPN. It’s not uplifting, exactly, but stories about retired NFL players seldom are.  Brian Phillips is a fairly regular figure here at the Fix, primarily because of his excellent pieces about international soccer for Slate. But at his own blog, Run of Play, Phillips gets a bit further afield. In a recent post that’s a must-read for sportswriting nerds, Phillips uses the insanely improbable and unlikely 4-4 draw between Newcastle and Arsenal  in which the Gunners closed a 4-0 deficit for what has to be one of the most exciting ties in sports history  as a jumping-off point for a bigger question. Namely, why does most sportswriting fall so far short in describing the emotional scope and sweep of games like this?  “While we all know Newcastle-Arsenal was an insane, historic, staggering game, the sort of game we might not see again for years, its actually been a little easier to talk about Chelsea-Liverpool,” Phillips writes. “Theres probably no room to imagine a different genre or tradition of sportswriting in Our Current Media Culture, bless its dear inescapable talons, but really as a game more than anything, I wonder what one would look like. What would it mean to open up a newspaper or a blog and find a bunch of pieces that threw out the familiar conventions and tried to give you a vivid sense of what it was actually like to watch a match? What would the conventions of that genre be?”  Found a good column from the world of sports? Don’t keep it to yourself — write to us at dailyfixlinks@gmail.com and we’ll consider your find for inclusion in the Daily Fix. You can email David at droth11@gmail.com.
High drama in college hoops in the ACC and Big East on a February weekday. Plus: The UConn QB with the soul of a Harlem Globetrotter; the sad fall of Refrigerator Perry; and more.