Jeremy Lin Pays Up On Marquette/Harvard Bet With Steve Novak

People tend to get competitive when it comes to March Madness. I think it would be a stretch to say they get competitive for the NIT.

Oftentimes, the teams barely want to compete. Heck, USC’s Chimezie Metu elected to sit out this year to protect his potential NBA future.

But people will often jump at the chance to make their friends look like fools, I think, and so every once in a while, one of those opportunities will come up that allows for that to happen.

One such opportunity came as a result of Marquette being matched up with Harvard University in the first round of the NIT. As we all know, Marquette won the game 67-60 in an uninspiring game recapped by myself and Ben Snider. You can find that here.

However, the most important implications that game held were from a bet made on Twitter by Marquette legend Steve Novak and current Brooklyn Nets guard Jeremy Lin, whom I imagine are friends from their time together on the New York Knicks in 2011-12. When the matchups were released, Novak hit up Lin on Twitter and asked if he wa— I don’t want to over-explain this, just read their tweets.

I have to say, it’s a little concerning that Steve Novak has never wanted Marquette to win a game more, considering he was part of a team that literally played on the biggest stage a college basketball team could play on, but Steve, we love you anyway.

By the time Marquette had won, I had actually forgotten about the bet, but today, scrolling through my feed, I came across this work of art:

I really appreciate a couple things here. Number one, Lin was very frank with how much he was not going to enjoy singing the fight song, and number two, he actually got pretty into it! He could’ve just half-heartedly sang the words while reading them off his phone with no music, but he was bobbing his head, pumping his fist and really feelin’ it.

I might watch this every day for the rest of my life.