Coach K and Roy: Guitar heroes??

I about fell out of my chair Sunday while watching NCAA basketball when I saw the new "Guitar Hero" ad featuring Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Rick Pitino and Bob Knight in a "Risky Business"-inspired ad for the video game "Guitar Hero."

If you haven't seen it, click here to watch.

Knight is the silliest-looking in the ad, in which Coach K and Roy are the guitar players, Knight the singer and Pitino the drummer in a makeshift band. They are dissed by Metallica in the ad, which begins hilariously (with Coach K sliding across a hardwood floor much like Tom Cruise once did in the movie) but goes downhill IMHO once Metallica shows up. From then on, it tries too hard to be funny, and not that successfully.

My first thought when I saw this ad was "I can't believe they did this." I mean, all those coaches in their skivvies? Advertising a video game? Isn't that a little demeaning?

But after thinking about it a little bit, I decided this was about like President Obama picking an NCAA bracket. If he wants to do it, I have no problem with it. Same with the coaches -- it's an entertaining 30 seconds, I'll give it that.

And Coach K and Roy will both be able to blunt criticism from 8 miles down the road since they did it together (can you imagine the snarkiness if one of them had done the ad, but not the other?)

Williams talked about the ad some Monday in a teleconference. He said all the coaches did their parts individually and by some digital magic it looks like they are together.

Williams also said he filmed his part about 3-4 weeks ago at a TV studio in Raleigh. Said Williams of the filming: "It probably would have been more fun if all four coaches had been there at the same time as opposed to each of us doing our part individually.
"But if you had all four of us there at the same time, it would have probably taken 30 days to do a 20-second commercial, because it would have been so hard to get all of us to do exactly the right thing at one time."