- Today’s completely unsubstantiated rumor is that Kansas will be busing students the 85 miles over to Manhattan, Kansas, for ESPN Gameday on Saturday morning (as K-State tries to set a new record for Gameday attendance). If there’s any truth whatsoever to this, we fear a little for the lives of those young Jayhawks.
- Did Kentucky’s DeMarcus Cousins “cold-cock” a South Carolina student as they were RTCing after the Gamecocks’ big win over Kentucky the other night? Video evidence is inconclusive, but at least one radio broadcaster and a student say they witnessed it. For whatever that’s worth.
- Gary Parrish reminds us that in the volatile world of college basketball polling, we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the polls around this time of year because they offer a window into the teams that will be left standing in early April. This is an accurate point to a certain extent, but it’s more fun to take the reverse view and think about which teams in the Top Ten will flame out early in March (best guesses: WVU, Duke, Michigan State).
- You may have heard a little about this upcoming Harvard-Cornell game on Saturday night, but did you think an Ivy League battle would ever escalate to a Twitter cage match between the New York Times’ Pete Thamel and SI.com’s Pablo Torres? Apparently Thamel tweeted Torres out for his soft handling of Harvard’s program in his recent piece on Wooden Award candidate Jeremy Lin, and Torres responded by accusing Thamel of similar kid-glove treatment on one of his pieces about Syracuse’s Wes Johnson. Must be the full moon….
- Finally, UNC-Wilmington fired their head coach last night. Benny Moss, with a record of 41-74 in four years at the school, was coming off a 39-point pasting at the hands of Hofstra on Wednesday night, and his teams were making a habit of regularly getting run out of the gym. Moss is the fifth head coach to lose his job during the season this year, further validating a troubling trend (even at the mid-major level) of ADs impatiently cutting their losses in the middle of the season.