There’s a case to be made that Xavier-Cincinnati basketball is the best rivalry we don’t talk nearly enough about. The games are generally rugged, fraught affairs. The game in 2011 famously ended in a benches-clearing brawl, and most people marveled that it had taken so many years (it’s been played every season since 1946) for it to end that way.
Xavier won this year’s Crosstown Classic 73-66 last night, preventing Cincinnati from getting two in row — which it hasn’t done since 1996. Second-year Xavier coach Travis Steele found an amazing way to celebrate his first win in the rivalry, and it involved his son Winston hauling $1,000 in cash into a bar to pay for patrons’ drinks.
(Warning: Some foul language included in the video.)
Yeah, that will win over a few fans.
The weird thing about all of this, of course, is that if Steele wanted to take that $1,000 dollars and, you know, reward his team — the players who actually won the game — with a nice dinner or something he … couldn’t. Because it’d be an NCAA violation.
