What: Boom Goes the Dynamite – Midnight Madness Edition
When: Friday, October 16 @ 8:45 pm ET
Where: Your couch and ours
Why: Because you’re just as nutty as we are to spend an entire Friday night watching glorified practice sessions
If you’re a frequent visitor here at RTC you’ve probably seen what we do on weekends during the season, meaning our live-blogging during TV game broadcasts that we call Boom Goes The Dynamite (and if you’re the one person who still doesn’t understand that reference, get yourself over to here). We do this because not only do we love watching college basketball until our faces are numb, but we dig the comments of people who are sitting there on their couches watching right along with us and the in-game discussion it generates. In my view, it’s one of the best things we do here. As you probably know, even though it starts at 6pm in some places and most places don’t have the midnight start time any more, Midnight Madness is this Friday night; our beloved countdown clock up in the right hand corner of the screen will hit all-zeroes, and many schools will be having some sort of event to celebrate the first official practice of the new college basketball season. ESPN and ESPN-U are sending analysts to nine different schools (specifically Connecticut, Georgetown, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, Duke, Washington, Michigan State and North Dakota State) and will be showing some of the festivities at those venues from 9pm to 1am ET on ESPN-U. ESPN will be simulcasting right along with them from 11:30pm to midnight. By the way, Bill Raftery’s going to be one of the guys at Georgetown, which means we get an early dose of “Onions!!” and “A little lingerie!!” And I say thank God for it.
Our first Boom Goes The Dynamite of the year will take place this Friday night during the Midnight Madness coverage. I’m John Stevens, one of the editors here at RTC, and with some behind-the-scenes help from one or two of my RTC compatriots, I’ll be live-blogging during the ESPN-U broadcast, starting around 8:45pm ET and going all the way through 1am. We’ll be putting up our own thoughts on what we’re seeing and of course your comments as well, but we’ll also be putting up video footage as available, tweets from people who are at the Madnesses watching live, takes from discussion forums, and so on. So if you’re at home watching the broadcast, tune us in as well and get ready to hit the refresh button like a meth-addicted rat in a science experiment. We’ll be waiting.