12:35 AM: SMC 59, SDSU 47

San Diego State shows some signs of life, which is nice because I don't know if I have any more Glory Days stories to tell.

Lucky for me, Albert is still up, looking for gambling angles. We both love Clemson -10.5 at Liberty. A ranked team, from a power conference, playing a team picked to finish 8th in the Big South, whose best player (Steph Curry's little brother) transferred to Duke. Plus, Liberty is one of those crazy religious schools, so it's always fun to bet against them.

And now that we've mentioned both St. Mary's and gambling, it's as good a time as any to tell Branny's least-favorite gambling story.

When I moved to California, my friends took this as an invitation to call me at all hours of the night. I mean, it's two hours behind Minnesota, right? So they just expected I would be up. And, on some levels it worked. If they wanted to talk sports at midnight, and all their Midwestern friends were asleep, no worries, it's only 10 PM in California, so they could call me. On the other hand, if they were stumbling home from the bar at 3 AM ... well, yeah, it's only 1 AM for me, but that doesn't mean I wasn't sleeping.

In addition to this, my relocation apparently meant I knew everything there was to know about West Coast sports. Branny would call me with questions like, "How is Kirk Sarloos on the road? I've got the A's in a seven-team parlay." And he would lose those parlays. Every time.

I like it when my friends bet sports online. Basically, I like it when people are passionately involved in things no one cared about. So I nurtured Branny's online gambling habit as best I could, just like I do with Albert now.

So one night, Branny calls me all excited. "Gonzaga is a 1.5 point underdog at St. Mary's! Gonzaga! Gonzaga never loses a conference game! And St. Mary's?!? I don't even know where that is!" And I liked that he was excited. And yeah, Gonzaga was absolutely unbeatable at this point. So I agreed with him that Gonzaga was a shoe-in, and that this line was ridiculous, and that this bet was probably the stone-cold lock of the century. I did not bother to research St. Mary's, which it turned out was actually not that far away from me in the East Bay. I did not know that they were also a solid team, and that they would also make the NCAA tournament that season. And so, over the course of the conversation, Branny decided to make the largest sports bet he had ever made. For my part ... I did nothing. I went on with my life, and really didn't think much of it.

Later that night, I was at House of Pizza in San Jose with my roommates when Branny called. He was worked up. He was barely coherent. He did not mention the game at all. This is what he had to say: "They had this guy! With an undershirt! Little white guy walking around with this stupid undershirt ... like, an EXTRA-LARGE undershirt ... and I don't know if this guy could have even filled out a MEDIUM ... WHO WEARS AN UNDERSHIRT?!?"

Anyway, it turned out that this undershirt guy had been raining threes on Gonzaga all night, and St. Mary's had won easily.

And so we learned an important lesson: Vegas knows a lot more than you do. Since that day, if I see a line that just looks ridiculously wrong, I'm always tempted to go the other way. Just give in to the idea that there are things I don't understand.

So I like Clemson -10.5 ... but I hope Branny doesn't bet it.