The Long and the Long of It   

Call it a long evening for basketball fans.

"Long" is one of the major current hoops buzzwords, used to describe players who not only are tall but also have long arms. Having a lot of long players is a beautiful thing.

Certainly Billy Packer, CBS Sports' lead college basketball analyst, thinks so. During the game between Florida and George Mason in the NCAA semifinals, Packer used "long" or some variation 24 — that's right, 24 — times to describe the Gators and explain why they were too much for Mason. Seventeen of those longs came in the first half.

"You know how long [Joakim] Noah is," Packer said. Not to mention "[Corey] Brewer has a very long wingspan." "There's a lot of length on this Florida team." "Long hands." "They're too long for George Mason." "There's that length again." And the one that went way over the top: "that long length."

It was enough to make you long for hoops analyst nonpareil Bill Raftery.