Malcolm Cutchins: Big year for AU men’s hoops team

The Auburn men’s basketball team had an outstanding year. Individual players have been well recognized on the sports pages.

Those players coming back form a good nucleus for what will be the last season the Tigers play in Beard-Eaves-Memorial Coliseum. The new arena opens for the fall of 2010.

This team, Coach Jeff Lebo and his assistants did much more than what has been publicized. Auburn’s 24 wins this year tied for the second most wins in a single season in Auburn history (tied with the 1999-2000 Tigers). Auburn ended the season on a tear as it won 11 of its last 14 games.

Auburn’s eight SEC double digit wins this season are the most since the Tigers won 13 league games by double figures in the 1999 SEC Championship season. Only five teams in the country had more double-digit conference wins than AU and three of them played two more league games. In the SEC, only champion LSU had more league wins overall.

Auburn went 18-3 in Beard-Eaves-Memorial Coliseum this year to break the season record for home wins set in the 1998-99 and 2006-07 seasons.

Major wins included the first two-year sweep of Alabama by a senior class since 1971; and the largest margins of victory at Arkansas in their 16-year history in Bud Walton Arena, at Georgia since 1977 and at Mississippi State (tied all-time). Wins over Florida, Tennessee, LSU (the SEC West champion), and two NIT wins capped off an exceptional season.

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Here we go again, on two fronts. One, President Obama has nominated another very questionable cabinet member that will further divide our country. Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius should not be appointed to lead Health and Human Services. She has strong financial ties to Dr. George Tiller, the notorious late-term abortionist who even other abortionists avoid being linked with. She failed to disclose these financial ties when interviewed by the Senate Finance Committee.

The second front involves the regulations in place to reinforce federal laws that protect medical professionals from being forced to participate in abortion and other anti-life practices. It’s called freedom of conscience, and the president wants to overturn that freedom even though a majority of Americans want to keep that protection. If the president is successful, this in effect will eventually force many medical professionals out of medical practice.

A recent program featured the CEO of the Christian Medical & Dental Associations, a professor with the Dept. of Medicine at the University of Chicago and others discussing these issues. They oppose the direction of the Obama administration on these matters. Readers can listen to the Monday discussion at http://www.citizenlink.org/dailybroadcast/A000009820.cfm.

I urge readers to contact their congressmen and express their outrage on these two very divisive issues.

Dr. Malcolm Cutchins is an emeritus professor of engineering of Auburn University and writes a weekly column for The Opelika-Auburn News.