During his relationship with Priya, there were many times in which we see Leonard still holding onto Penny. For example, Priya told him she wanted him to tell Penny that they needed to stop hanging out because he had a new girlfriend, but he ends up not doing it. Priya finds out while they are out on a date and Penny comes to their table and chit chats with Leonard as though nothing had happened. Obviously, this angered Priya and she once again pushed him to tell Penny they need to stop hanging out. He never really does it completely and Penny is still always around.

I think Leonard acts like he still loves, but what do you think? 

Was Leonard wrong for doing that?

In Episode 9 of Season 5, Leonard and Penny hang out alone for the first time since breaking up. Penny asks Leonard to join her to a movie, but initially he resists. However, he agrees after Penny tells him "it's not a date Leonard. It's just a man and a woman hanging out and not having sex at the end of the night." 

For the first time ever, Leonard actually takes control of an evening with Penny. He makes her go to the movie he wants to see and he makes her pay her own way. He used to go to movies she wanted to see so she would have sex with him at the end of the night, but since sex is "off-the-table" he doesn't see any reason to not choose the film he wants to see.

After the movie, they hang out in a cafe/bar setting. While there, Leonard makes a point of letting Penny know they aren't on a date. Therefore, Penny starts talking to a random guy and discusses the science based movie she just watched with Leonard with her new friend. Leonard becomes jealous, and declares he will do the same and find someone to hit on. 

Shortly thereafter, he begins talking to a girl named Laura about the things he likes to do, which includes a list of activities he used to do with Penny. Penny ends her conversation with the random fellow she was talking to and disrupts Leonard. She begins telling Laura embarrassing secrets about Leonard such as how he has two Star Trek costumes that he wears on days other than Halloween, how half of his porn is animated, and how he has a "lucky" inhaler. Leonard argues with Penny and starts calling her out for her shortcomings as well. They go back and forth and end up forgetting about Laura. Penny eventually tells Leonard to take her home, and when he turns to address Laura she is gone.

When they get back to the apartment, Penny says how she really enjoyed the "take charge Leonard with a little backbone. Picking the movie, knowing what he wants, and a little cocky." Also, the random guy Penny was talking to at the cafe is eerily similar to Leonard. As Penny puts it, the guy was cute in his "dorky t-shirt and hipster glasses," which just so happens to be exactly what Leonard was wearing and almost always is wearing. Though the sexual tension could be cut with a butter knife in the hallway of their apartments, they both go home alone. 

Throughout the episode, the bird torments him from the window. He calls animal control to come remove the bird that he describes as a "bluejay," and they laugh at him. The bird, however, appears to be of a more exotic species of bird and not a "bluejay" as Sheldon claims. His next attempt of getting rid of the bird included drawing the head of a cat with whiskers and all on a notebook, holding it up to his face, and then making cat noises. Obviously, this was not successful. 

His next idea is to create a machine that Howard and Raj call a "Death Ray," which Sheldon vehemently rejects as a name for his devise. Sheldon's intent for the machine is for it to generate sound waves that scare off the bird. When he uses it, however, all it ends up doing is shattering the window's glass and the bird doesn't budge.

His fourth attempt of getting rid of the bird is to put on a mask and use a broom to "shoo" the bird away. When he opens the window to scare the bird, it ends up flying into the apartment. This prompts Sheldon to call Amy Fowler and Bernadette to come deal with the bird since they are biologists. While Bernadette is carrying the bird, that she realizes is someone's pet, Sheldon actually asks her to carefully take it to the bathroom and "flush it down the toilet." Eventually Bernadette and Amy convince Sheldon to pet the bird, and he ends up loving it and wants to make it his pet.

The question here, however, is how rational is it for a grown man as intelligent as Sheldon to actually be afraid of a bird? 

Even Sheldon acknowledges "this is ridiculous. I'm a grown man from Texas. This isn't a terrifying bird like a swan or a goose."

Michigan sophomore guard Tim Hardaway Jr. is part of the 12-man USA Basketball U19 team that will play in Europe later this month.

USA Basketball released the roster Thursday, and the team leaves for Europe today. George Mason's Paul Hewitt is coaching the U19 team, which will face Lithuania's U20 national team in an exhibition game Sunday and face the Lithuania U19 team on Tuesday.

The FIBA U19 World Championship for Men will be played June 30-July 10.

Also on the 12-man roster: Keith Appling of Michigan State; James Bell of Villanova, Anthony Brown of Stanford, Jahii Carson, who is headed to Arizona State, Joe Jackson of Memphis, Jeremy Lamb of UConn, Meyers Leonard of Illinois, Khyle Marshall of Butler, Doug McDermott of Creighton, Tony Mitchell of North Texas and Patric Young of Florida.

Michigan sophomore-to-be Tim Hardaway Jr. made the roster for the 2011 USA U19 World Championship team, USA Basketball announced today.

Twenty players -- both incoming college freshmen and rising sophomores -- were invited to Colorado for tryouts. The team leaves for Friday to compete in the FIBA U19 World Championships in Latvia, which starts June 30.

Hardaway spoke to AnnArbor.com about the opportunity earlier this month.

“At first, I really didn’t want to go but I thought about it with Evan (Smotrycz) and he was like, ‘You should take it. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing and nobody else is doing it,’” he said. “I just want to be recognized in that group of athletes that actually has a chance to represent the nation.”

Michigan State's Keith Appling and Illinois' Meyers Leonard are currently part of the 13-member roster. Iowa's Melsahn Basabe was among the cuts.

The team will cut one more player before leaving for Europe. CBSSports.com's Jeff Goodman is reporting that the last roster spot will go to Appling or Villanova's James Bell.

It's not all good news for Hardaway, however. His participation in the World Championships will delay his return to Ann Arbor and Smotrycz, Hardaway's roommate, plans capitalize.

Smotrycz response to the news on his Twitter feed: "...now i get to set up the room I want and take all the closet space and pick the best bed..sorry tim."

The sudden retirement of Maryland coach Gary Williams late last week added to the gravity of the discussions about basketball at this week's annual ACC meetings at Fernandina Beach, Fla.

Coaches, administrators and conference officials will meet today through Wednesday to continue plotting a course for the future for the sport whose history and tradition have built the ACC's reputation more than any other.

The idea of increasing the number of conference games from 16 to 18 will be among the issues debated, although it's not likely to come to a vote until the ACC's fall meeting.

"I do think this is a critical meeting for our league," Virginia Tech coach Seth Greenberg said. "We need to resolve some issues that are critical to the direction of our league."

Other sports and issues will be discussed, of course. The ACC's new television contract with ESPN and partner Raycom Sports takes effect in the 2011-12 season.

The mechanism for maximizing the effectiveness of the agreement for TV and the conference will be important. But with ACC basketball coming off a less than stellar season, improving that sport is a hot topic.

"We have a great product here," Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said in February. "ACC basketball has been great. You've got to keep working at it, keep working at it."

Changing faces

There is a lot of work to do, in part because the ACC has undergone significant changes in the last three years.

Williams' retirement guarantees that the ACC will open the 2011-12 season with just four coaches who have more than two seasons of experience at their current schools.

Krzyzewski, Greenberg, North Carolina's Roy Williams and Florida State's Leonard Hamilton are the only ACC coaches who were at their current schools in 2008-09.

Five of the 12 ACC schools have fired their basketball coaches in the last three years in an indication that performance hasn't matched expectations.

"We have a lot of new coaches coming into the league," ACC commissioner John Swofford said Thursday, "and there is a great deal of hope in terms of revitalizing some of the programs that have not been quite up to their own standards where they have contributed so much over the years."

Other measures also show that the ACC has slipped. The Ratings Percentage Index is a mathematical formula that measures a conference's strength based on its win-loss record and the quality of its schedule.

According to the website realtimerpi.com, the ACC ranked No. 1 among all conferences in the RPI four times in six seasons from 2003-04 to 2008-09. The ACC dropped to third in 2009-10 and fifth - behind even the lightly regarded Mountain West Conference - in 2010-11.

The ACC's level of success in the NCAA tournament also has dropped significantly since the conference added Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech to become a 12-member league beginning in 2005-06.

In six seasons as a 12-team conference, the ACC has posted a .600 NCAA tournament winning percentage that ranks third among the BCS conferences behind the SEC (.609) and Big 12 (.603).

In its final six tournaments as a nine-team conference, from 1999 to 2004, the ACC's winning percentage was .692. That's far ahead of the .654 number posted by the next-best conference, the Big East.

Despite the statistical dropoffs, coaches who work in the conference say the competition remains ferocious in the ACC. They talk about changing the way outsiders view the league as the Big East has surged past the ACC in terms of reputation.

"Anything we can do to re-establish the perception of our league needs to be discussed," Greenberg said.

More conference games?

Greenberg declined to discuss any specific ideas for the future of the league.

But Swofford confirmed that the ACC is closely studying the issue of expanding the schedule of conference games from 16 to 18.

The 16-game conference schedule once allowed each team in the nine-team ACC to play each opponent twice. Since expansion, coaches have been reluctant to increase the number of conference games for fear of strengthening their schedules to the point where they would be reluctant to play high-profile nonconference opponents.

"We're a one-time-zone league," Krzyzewski said in February. "You've got to give us a chance to play in different time zones, different places, get out and play different teams from throughout the country. That's what made this conference. This conference didn't become what it is because we stayed isolated within this region."

In 2010-11, the Big East, Big Ten and Pac-10 played 18-game conference schedules. Teams in the ACC, Big 12 and SEC played 16 conference games.

Swofford said the ACC is working to determine whether an 18-game schedule helps a conference put more teams into the NCAA tournament. Swofford said it would be "premature" for him to state his own opinion on an 18-game conference schedule.

"There are obviously pluses and minuses depending on your point of view," Swofford said. "From a fan standpoint, in some ways from a business standpoint, in direct fashion, from a television standpoint there are some definite pluses there."

Improving perception

Swofford said the ACC will continue to move forward with new plans for ticket distribution and ancillary fan events at the ACC tournament. Those plans, which involved getting tickets to schools with greater fan support, resulted in improved attendance in 2011 over 2010.

Perhaps in an effort to improve the "perception" of the ACC alluded to by Greenberg, Swofford said there are lots of plans to leverage the league's media coverage under the new agreement with ESPN.

For the second straight year, the Operation Basketball media tipoff event will be held in Charlotte, where players and coaches can go directly to ESPN's studios.

The conference is developing and rebranding its digital network in an effort to reach as many fans as possible. Swofford said that many years ago the ACC enjoyed an advantage in exposure over other conferences because so many of its games were televised.

"In today's world, we have as many games on ... as you can possibly have on, but a lot of other conferences do too because of the numerous, multiple platforms that are out there to distribute games. Anything we can do collectively or institutionally to continue to promote the game itself, our teams, our players, our coaches, we will do."

The conference will have to do it without one of its most enthusiastic advocates. Williams played point guard at Maryland and took pride in the ACC's history and tradition.

During his farewell news conference Friday, he defended the ACC.

"The ACC has taken some knocks the last couple of years," Williams said, "but check who's won the most national championships the last 10 years. Check who's won the most NCAA tournament games the last 20 years."

At a time when many of the key faces in the conference are changing, ACC officials will meet this week to try to regain some of the momentum the conference seems to have lost.