Tim Hortons Brier

EDMONTON _ Some of the loudest noise being made at this week's Tim Hortons Brier is the complaints over the curling rocks being used.

"There's a couple of pigs out there," said Northern Ontario skip Brad Jacobs.

That's actually one of the nicer terms being tossed around.

Curlers say the rocks are as unpredictable as Charlie Sheen on a Saturday night. The "pigs" are slow. That means they require more weight to throw than the rest of the rocks. Some have more curl than Little Orphan Annie's hair while others run straighter than a Saskatchewan highway.

"I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It's tough," said Ontario's Glenn Howard, the defending champion who is appearing in a record 15th Brier. "They are not matched very well. There's a lot of different ones out there.

"Some are 15-plus feet slower than the next one. I've never experienced that."

Brad Gushue, the 2006 Olympic gold medallist skip from Newfoundland & Labrador, said teams are struggling to figure out which rock will do what.

For high school hoops drama, it's tough to top the 55-foot game-winning buzzer-beater that New Rochelle's Khalil Edney made to beat Mount Vernon in a New York sectional title game on Sunday.

It was awesome and up here in Canada, TSN had it as the highlight of the night on Sportscentre. It turns out that over the weekend there was an unreal buzzer-beater during a big high school basketball game and it was 100 per cent composed of Canadian content. On Friday, when the Kitsilano Blue Demons played the Burnaby South Rebels in B.C.'s Lower Mainland AAA boys basketball championship, Kitsilano's Noah DeRappard-Yuswack made a halftime buzzer shot with his foot on the three-point line.

What was so unusual about that? It was from the opposite three-point line.

Tyson Hinz (left) and Carleton are looking to win the school's record 9th national title (The Canadian Press)

A controversial new rule might have sweetened the subplots for the CIS Final 8 in Ottawa.

The possibility of the Carleton Ravens and Ottawa Gee-Gees meeting for the fourth time this season in the final next Sunday is possible, with the Ravens drawing the No. 1 seed while Ottawa is No. 3. But the draw for this country's university's men's basketball championship was shaped from the fallout from the 2012 bracket in Halifax. There was a big stink down east when the Acadia Axemen's reward for winning the AUS Final 6 was getting the eighth seed and being pitted against Carleton in the first round.

That prompted a rule that a conference champion cannot be seeded lower than sixth. So Carleton, with their backcourt brother act of Thomas and Phil Scrubb, will begin pursuit of a record ninth national title against none other than co-record holder for most championships, the Victoria Vikes, whom their father Lloyd won three national titles with in his youth. The other half of the bracket has a

Brad Gushue is an Olympic champion, but is mising a Brier. (The Canadian Press)EDMONTON _ Brad Gushue may be one of the best curlers never to win a Brier. And until the Newfoundland/Labrador skip wins a Canadian men's curling championship he may be pushed to the fringe of the conversation when the great Canadian curlers are discussed.

The gold medal Gushue won at the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy, puts him in unique company. Besides Alberta's Kevin Martin, he's the only Canadian male skip to claim an Olympic title.

During his career Gushue has won a world junior championship and claimed a Grand Slam title. He's playing in his 10th Brier this week in Edmonton but has never hoisted the trophy. He lost the final of the 2007 Brier in Hamilton to Glenn Howard and was third in 2011 in London, Ont.

The absence of a Brier title is as noticeable on Gushue's resume as two front teeth missing from a child's smile.

"I think he needs to win one of those . . . to be with one of the big boys, the (Jeff) Stoughtons, the Howards and the (Kevin) Martins," said Russ Howard, the TSN analyst who joined Mark Nichols, Jamie Korab and Mike Adam on Gushue's gold medal team.

"It's too bad it's that way. You come second in a Brier (and) you should be one of the greats, but you're not. It's all about what you did for me today. You have to win."

Chris Schille, the second on Brock Virtue's Saskatchewan rink, believes it's only a matter of time before Gushue wins a Brier.

Lien Phillip (left) led OUA in rebounding this season (RM Photo)TORONTO — The role of the big man has changed, but the expectations haven't, so Lien Phillip put the Windsor Lancers' missed opportunities on his shoulders.

Every March in Canadian university basketball, a team which has been in the Top 10 all season gets left out in the cold. The dust gets blown off the same arguments for expanding to from an eight- to a 16-team championship. The counterpoint is that conference playoffs already provide that first culling ahead of the CIS Final 8. The percentage of teams (eight out of 44) who reach the CIS Final 8 is right in line with the NCAA tournament (68 out of 347 Division I men's teams).

So there was urgency Saturday afternoon when Lakehead and Windsor tipped off in the OUA bronze-medal game, only Phillip seemed to project it the most of any Lancer during their 78-64 loss. Having their lead guard Josh Collins limited to 11 minutes over two games after injuring his right ankle in practice last Wednesday was too much for Windsor to overcome. A know-it-all might even say Windsor played like it knew this, but that's presumptuous. Lakehead just made shots and the Lancers were a touch off. No matter how much his team was fading, Phillip was a treat to watch while he tried to not to lose the patient, knifing in for offensive rebounds, getting above the rim for a tip-in putback. The Grenada-born power forward who didn't take up hoops until moving to Toronto in his teens had his usual double-double, 15 points and 13 rebounds. But he shot only 4-of-14 while Lakehead's broad-shouldered bigs, Yoosrie Salhia and Matthew Schmidt, took license with the rules and used their fouls wisely.

If Phillip had gone to a NCAA school instead of Windsor in 2009, this could have been end of this stage of his hoops life. Instead he only went home with a narrative for his fifth season. The wild-card berth is likely to go to No. 5 Acadia. If so, that makes three years in a row that coach Chris Oliver's Lancers have missed the Final 8. Windsor lost a first-round game to eventual national champion Saskatchewan in Phillip's frosh year in 2010.

Carleton guard Clinton Springer-Williams drives on Ottawa's Johnny Berhanemeskel at the OUA Wilson Cup on Saturday (RM Photo)TORONTO — First the Carleton Ravens and Ottawa Gee-Gees played a five-point game, then four, now three in the OUA Wilson Cup on Saturday.

Now the cross-town rivals wait and see if they could be the final two standing in Canadian university basketball next weekend when the national championship is decided in their backyard. That scenario never came to pass when the CIS Final 8 was held at Scotiabank Place from 2008 to '10. Ottawa lost in the first round during its only tournament appearance over that stretch.

University hoops diehards across Canada might chafe at the notion of an all-Ottawa national final. However, Ottawa, which never shies away rolling its boulder up Mount Smart across town at Carleton, rates the chance. Other teams tighten up like an overworked calf muscle against the Ravens. Even with their Final 8 ticket in hand in front of a crowd of just fewer than 1,000 at Mattamy Athletic Centre, Ottawa went down fighting on Saturday before Carleton got out with a 72-69 win. It took some close defence by game MVP Thomas Scrubb (17 points, nine rebounds) on Gee-Gees star Warren Ward (27 and 10 despite being limited to 30 minutes by early foul trouble) to prevent a tying three-pointer at the buzzer. If Ward's last shot had dropped, they might still be playing.

"They’re a really tough matchup every time we play them," said Carleton coach Dave Smart, whose No. 1-ranked Ravens are looking for its record ninth CIS title next weekend. "They pose a lot of problems for us. If we get the opportunity to play them again, it’s going to be tough to beat ’em four times.

"I think it [both Ottawa teams being high seeds] is really going to help the attendance at the tournament, the excitement around the tournament. I think Ottawa’s got to be a team that people consider a top-three team."

Eyes and ears will be on Brock Virtue's Sasketchewan rink at the Brier. (The Canadian Press)EDMONTON – Fans at this year's Tim Hortons Brier won't just be watching Brock Virtue's Saskatchewan rink, they will be listening to what the team says as well.

Virtue's team comes to their first Brier under a dark club. Second Chris Schille was ejected from a game during the provincial playoffs for using profane language. He also posted some tweets critical of his treatment.

The Brier is a much bigger stage and Schille plans to be a better actor.

"It was an unfortunate incident for everybody involved," he said. "The whole provincial championships was affected by it.

"We're happy it's behind us and hopefully we'll just move forward from it."

Virtue just wanted to put the whole thing behind his team.

"It's over and done with," he said. "That's provincials.

"We are at the Brier now. Onward and upward."

Lakehead University's Joseph Jones led his team to a CIS Final 8 berth on Saturday (RM Photo)

TORONTO — In the last month, Joseph Jones has pulled a woman out of a car crash and kept the Lakehead Thunderwolves' finest senior class wrecking their final season.

The deeds don't compare, since real life is on a higher plane than sports. But finding out what the Thunderwolves fifth-year guard did a few weeks ago before seeing him sink a game-high 23 points Saturday when Lakehead, with leading scorer Ryan Thomson on crutches watching, beat the Windsor Lancers 78-64 in the Ontario University Athletics bronze-medal game? That kind of works on a couple levels.

On Feb. 9, Jones was driving in Thunder Bay with his mind on the Thunderwolves' game a few hour laters. It was a big one: rival Windsor in tone, playoff implications and Senior Night for he and five other fifth-year 'Wolves. His dad, Gilbert Lowery, and his junior college coach, Benny Edison, had both made the trip north. Then the Landover, Md., native saw a woman driving behind him go into a skid.

"I guess she overcorrected her steering," Jones recalled after Lakehead beat Windsor to reach the Canadian Interunivesity Sport Final 8 men's basketball championship for the fourth season in a row. "The next thing I know I saw her car take off into a ditch and do a couple flips and landed upside down. I pulled over and sprinted over there. It was instinct. No person would not want to be helped. So I rushed over there. I did what I could. I kept her calm until the police arrived. She was upside-down. We said, 'do you want to try to get out?' So the cop and I helped her out of the car."