You may have heard that a little thing called Midnight Madness went down Friday night in packed gyms across the college basketball landscape.  From Duke to Kentucky to Marquette to Kansas to Gonzaga to even little ol’ Cal Tech (ok, they celebrated Thursday, but give ’em a break, they’ve lost 300 conference games in a row), fans filed into arenas to celebrate the return of roundball.   Despite the fact that we remain on the record that MM has lost its uniqueness over the years and could stand to get back to its roots, we’ll admit that even the over-produced pyrotechnic-style monstrosities we saw on the tube enabled a few pangs of excitement in our tummy.  How can it not?  After all, bad college basketball is still college basketball, and from the perspective that the Madness is a celebration of the sport, we’re completely on board with that.

Make sure that you check out our Boom Goes the Dynamite from Friday night where we commented on all the goings-on where we could find them in real time.  Today’s postmortem will share some of the biggest highlights we noted from the evening.  If you think we missed something major, send us a tip at rushthecourt@yahoo.com or tweet at us @rushthecourt.

Duke

Duke’s Countdown to Craziness was, as expected, a celebration of the 2010 national champions, replete with the unfurling of Coach K’s fourth national championship banner and a collection of hardware at center court (starting at the 1:15 mark).

Those championship rings are HUGE!  We much prefer seeing Nolan Smith this way instead of the creepy-as-hell video he did at last year’s CTC.

Kansas State

As we referred to last night, Jacob Pullen has only trimmed the beloved beard, not shaved it, so major meltdown averted there.  As if he wasn’t already one of our favorite players in the country, Pullen further endeared himself to us by running around in the scrimmage with his jogging pants still on.  He looked like a cross between Barack Obama and somebody’s uncle out there; that is, until he started draining 28-footers with ease.  The other big news of the night was the announcement that the school will be building a new $20M practice facility, showing that the Wildcats have no designs on losing their hoops momentum of recent years.

This clip is from the introduction at Madness in Manhattan, and it features the cast of ABC comedy Modern Family all wearing Kansas State gear around the set and studio lot — Eric Stonestreet (“Cameron”) is a K-State alum.  Apologies for the smallness of the video, but if you try, you can just make out Ty Burrell’s (“Phil”) cap which says “Screw KU” on it.  Not to mention that there’s a Sofia Vergara (“Gloria”) in a t-shirt sighting at the 2:07 mark, which means we’re going to have to put John Stevens back on his calming pills.

Michigan State

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, Fox Sports’ Jeff Goodman broke the news that Purdue’s Robbie Hummel will be out for the 2010-11 season with a torn right ACL. Goodman’s article says that Purdue’s assistant SID Cory Walton confirmed to him that Hummel suffered the injury on Saturday morning during practice. In fact, a Tweet from Goodman earlier in the day stated that it happened on just the second drill of the practice.

This Is Hummel's Second Right ACL Tear Within Eight Months.

Hummel averaged 15.7 PPG and 6.9 RPG last season for a Purdue team that seemed to be peaking at the right time and destined for a deep tournament run before he went down with a tear of the same ACL in the team’s 27th game, a February 24th contest at Minnesota. Even though the Boilermakers still have senior guard E’Twaun Moore (last year’s team scoring leader with 16.4 PPG)  and big man JaJuan Johnson (15.5 PPG, 7.1 RPG) still available and ready to roll, Hummel was considered the emotional leader and his loss is devastating to the squad.

This is even more tragic considering that, just last night, during ESPN-U’s Midnight Madness coverage, Hummel was interviewed by the network’s college hoops guru Andy Katz about how Hummel’s knee was faring. Hummel cited the usual caution associated with the recovery from such an injury, but seemed optimistic, and happy that he’d been cleared to play. Then, mere hours later at the Saturday morning practice, Hummel re-injured the knee.

Shamelessly cribbing from the clever NBA catch phrase, we here at RTC will present you with the 2010-11 edition of Thirty Reasons We Love College Basketball as we ramp up to the start of the season a little over a month from now.  We’ll be bringing you players to watch for this season and moments to remember from last season, courtesy of the series of dump trucks, wires and effluvia known as YouTube.  If you want to have some fun while killing time, we encourage you to re-visit the entire archive of this feature from the 2008-09 and 2009-10 seasons.  Enjoy.

#19- Where The Next D-Rose/Tyreke/Wall Happens

And here it is.

Look at that beautiful clock in the top right corner. We’ve been watching that thing tick and tick for almost 200 days, and now…such beautiful stillness. All zeroes.

The only thing that can match this feeling is the beginning of the NCAA Tournament, and even though that’s five months away, the days between this moment and that one will pass like a dream. So let’s enjoy this one tonight. Gyms and arenas are packed across the nation tonight to celebrate the First Official Day of Practice. We’re already checking out some local broadcasts, live streams, Twitter feeds, and live blogs, and the ESPN-U broadcast with their (we like this term) “whip-around” coverage is mere minutes away. Every one of the RTC Compounds (Western, Southern, and Eastern) are locked in and rocking. We have our satellite feeds. We have our Blue Ribbon Yearbooks beside us. We’re ready.

Join us here at 8:45 pm ET (about 15 minutes from now) and start hitting that refresh button for updated comments, and, as always, we encourage you to give us your thoughts via the comments section and Twitter. WELCOME!

8:45 PM — So many programs kicked off their festivities at 7 pm or 8 pm ET, so the first order of business is to try and get you some links up to some of the various happenings:

Dan Wolken, columnist for the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, is live blogging Memphis Madness on his live blog (we actually love the “Wolken In Memphis” title).

Kentucky’s official site is streaming live here at UKAthletics.com.

More on the way…

8:51 — Kentucky’s Enes Kanter, a big wrestling fan, entered to the music formerly used to introduce The Undertaker. He cannot practice tonight, unfortunately for all of us, since just about everyone wants to get a look at this guy. But that was one heck of an entrance.

9:01 — ESPN-U’s broadcast is underway. That aurora borealis background is kind of cool, eh? By the way, if you have such access, Maryland Madness is also live on TV on Comcast MidAtlantic.

9:08 — Wow. From Duke, Jay Williams and Lou Canellis are covered in sweat. Not surprising, considering it’s Cameron Indoor, but it can’t be fun sitting there under hot lights in a sweltering building while wearing a suit. Actually, it’s the Madness, so it’s fun no matter what. But hopefully they have designated toweler-offers (read: interns) standing just out of the shot.

9:12 — Evidently Duke’s Seth Curry took a nasty elbow to the eye and was pretty much spurting blood. This is awful, but hopefully it’s not as bad as the initial shock, and we’ll provide more details as available.

Read the rest of this entry »

Greg Waddell of The Murray State News is the RTC correspondent for the OVC.

Predicted Order of Finish

1. Murray State (17-1)
2. Morehead State (15-3)
3. Austin Peay (11-7)
4. Eastern Illinois (11-7)
5. Eastern Kentucky (10-8)
6. Jacksonville State (8-10)
7. Tennessee Tech (8-10)
8. Tennessee State (6-12)
9. Tennessee-Martin (3-15)
10. Southeast Missouri State (1-17)
11. SIU-Edwardsville – ineligible for conference tournament

All-Conference Team (key stats from last season in parentheses)

• G:  Isaiah Canaan, Murray State (10.4 PPG, 50% FG, 48% 3-pt)
• G:  B.J. Jenkins, Murray State (10.6 PPG, 1.8 SPG)
• F:  Anthony Campbell, Austin Peay (15.5 PPG, 5.3 RPG)
• F: Justin Stommes, Eastern Kentucky (14.2 PPG, 52% FG, 42% 3-pt)
• C: Kenneth Faried, Morehead State (16.9 PPG, 13 RPG, 56% FG)

Isaiah Canaan appears on ESPN First Take after a half court shot from his knees against SEMO:

6th Man

• Isacc Miles, Murray State (9.7 PPG, 47% FG)

Impact Newcomer

• Zac Swansey, Tennessee Tech

What You Need to Know

This could be the first year in quite some time the OVC puts two teams in the NCAA Tournament. Though unlikely, it could happen if Murray State has the season everyone is expecting, and Morehead State can find a way to knock off the Racers in OVC Tournament play. Based on preseason hype including a #31 ranking by Lindy’s, Murray State could make a resume impressive enough for an at-large bid if it can knock some big-name teams and win the 76 Classic in Anaheim. The other MSU can make some noise also, as the Eagles possess a special player in Kenneth Faried. In basketball, that kind of player can make all the difference and Donnie Tyndall’s squad will get the chance to make waves early as they play three quality teams from last season’s NCAA Tournament in Ohio State, Florida and Northern Iowa. Morehead State will travel to Gainesville on November 11 to get a crack at Billy Donovan and the Gators before heading north to Columbus two days later. Northern Iowa is the final stop as the Eagles head west to Cedar Falls on the December 11. Also, SIU-Edwardsville continues to wait in the wings as it transition to full-fledged membership.

Kenneth Faried is ready to dethrone Murray State, but the Racers have other plans. (zimbio.com)

Predicted Champion

Murray State (NCAA Seed: #9): After a campaign in 2009-10 that will go down as one of the best in program history, the scary thing for OVC foes is that this year’s edition may be even better. Despite losing senior leaders Tony Easley and Danero Thomas to graduation, the Racers look to reload behind the strong play of a three-headed guard attack. Led by returning starters B.J. Jenkins and Isacc Miles, the deadly backcourt gets a little more frightening when last year’s sixth man, Isaiah Canaan, gets thrown in the mix. Canaan, who actually averaged the second-most points on the team last season at 10.4 PPG, should pick up right where he left off, shooting a ridiculous 50% from the field and 48% from behind the arc. After last season’s last-second buzzer-beater vanquished Vanderbilt, things are looking good for Billy Kennedy’s squad, as the Racers look to cash in plenty of wins at the newly renamed CFSB Center.

Read the rest of this entry »

Shamelessly cribbing from the clever NBA catch phrase, we here at RTC will present you with the 2010-11 edition of Thirty Reasons We Love College Basketball as we ramp up to the start of the season a little over a month from now.  We’ll be bringing you players to watch for this season and moments to remember from last season, courtesy of the series of dump trucks, wires and effluvia known as YouTube.  If you want to have some fun while killing time, we encourage you to re-visit the entire archive of this feature from the 2008-09 and 2009-10 seasons.  Enjoy.

#20- Where Get On My Back, Fellas Happens

There aren’t many beautiful brisk fall Friday nights where you’d catch us happily curled up on the couch with the remote, but this is one of them. It’s the First Official Day of Practice, and many schools across this great nation are having events to celebrate its arrival. OK, it’s not the Midnight Madness of old, but it’s Madness just the same, even if it happens a few hours early. The ESPN-U broadcast featuring several programs starts at 9:00 PM, and we’re going to have our first Boom Goes The Dynamite live blog of the season tonight, too. We’ll start at 8:45, and in addition to watching Lowell and Andy and the boys, we’ll be scouring our satellite listings for extra coverage. We’ll also be putting up photos from attendees from the various events, tweets from coaches/players/fans/whoever, any video we can scrounge, and whatever else we can find. We hope you’ll join us, and we look forward to your comments and tweets. Let’s have some fun, for our long non-college hoops national nightmare is now over.

1. It’s been approximately 190 days since we last saw collegians take the floor in their uniforms, but as you surely noted above on our countdown clock, we’re almost down to all zeros.  Tonight is Midnight Madness or whatever people are calling it these days, but the primary concern to everyone reading this site is that COLLEGE HOOPS IS BACK, baby.  For a guide to many of the major events that will be scattered throughout the country tonight and in future weeks, here’s our post outlining the when and where.  ESPNU will be showing the proceedings tonight starting at 9pm ET at several of the schools on the list including Duke, Kentucky, Gonzaga, Memphis and Kansas State, so lock yourselves in this evening and get ready for another great season ahead.
2. Good work if you can get it…  Former legendary Purdue head coach Gene Keady will join Steve Lavin’s new staff at St. John’s in the role of grandfatherly advisor/executive assistant.  Lavin was an assistant under Keady at Purdue from 1988-91, during which time the Boilermakers went to the NCAA Tournament twice (Keady went back fourteen more times at Purdue).  For some reason we love seeing these kinds of situations when the student brings back his mentor.
3. Wake Forest’s Tony Woods, the 6’10 junior center who was relieved of his duties as a player for the Demon Deacons, isn’t suffering for suitors as to his next stop.  Jeff Goodman reports that Louisville, Kentucky, WVU, Georgetown, Auburn, Xavier, Cincinnati and others have expressed interest in bringing on the talented but heretofore underachieving player.  We’re all for second chances around here, but there’s clearly no honor among thieves — lots of young people make “mistakes,” but how many of them kick and fracture the spine of the mother of his infant?  Good things seem to find those who have pro size and can occasionally rebound and score a few points, eh?
4. In what we cannot even possibly begin to describe as anything other than awkwardly hilarious, Ole Miss students, faculty and alumni on Thursday voted that their new mascot should be the Rebel Black Bear, earning 62% of the vote to beat out the Hotty Toddy and the Land Shark.  Colonel Reb has been officially retired, but does anyone else find the use of skin/fur color to describe a cartoonish bear inspired by William Faulkner as something better left to schools without such a violent and ugly racial history?  Just sayin…
5. Yesterday was  John Wooden’s 100th birthday, and although the Wizard of Westwood wasn’t with us to celebrate it, the UCLA family and his own relatives held their own parties to honor his legacy.  We’ve said this before, but we think it would be a fantastic commemoration of the man and his contributions to the game of basketball if the entire 2010-11 season was dedicated to Coach Wooden — the NCAA and its media partners could easily make this happen, so they should.

Wooden's New Portrait Was Unveiled at UCLA on Thursday (LA Daily News/H. Gutknecht)

Baylor star LaceDarius Dunn has been allowed to return to practice for the Bears. His reinstatement comes one day before the official start of team practices for college basketball squads across the country, even though Baylor has no “Midnight Madness” type of event.

Mike DeCourcy of the Sporting News writes that while Dunn is allowed to rejoin practice, he remains on indefinite suspension as far as participating in actual games, including exhibitions. He returned to class today.

LaceDarius Got a Favorable Ruling From Baylor, And Will Be At Practice Tomorrow.

Dunn turned himself in to authorities on October 5th after a warrant was issued for his arrest regarding an altercation with his girlfriend that took place in late September in which Dunn allegedly struck her and fractured her jaw, supposedly necessitating surgery and hardware to repair it. The girlfriend, however, has stated that she does not feel the incident is consistent with a felony assault but rather a misdemeanor, that her jaw was not broken, and that she will not prosecute.

Yesterday, Dunn, who is on target to graduate in May, was found not guilty of “assaulting a female which resulted in her jaw being broken” by Baylor’s Judicial Affairs Disciplinary Committee. The suspension from games remains in place because he still faces a felony aggravated assault charge, but the not guilty verdict from his school and the chance to get back to life as usual had to elicit some sighs of relief from Dunn and head coach Scott Drew as they prepare to follow up on last year’s school-record 28 victories and Elite Eight appearance.

Rush The Court is back with another edition of One on One: An Interview Series, which we will bring you periodically throughout the year. If you have any specific interview requests or want us to interview you, shoot us an email at rushthecourt@yahoo.com.

Few college coaches have had careers with as much success at as many different venues as Charles “Lefty” Driesell. After playing at Duke under Harold Bradley, he coached a few years of high school basketball in Virginia finishing with a 57-game winning streak at Newport News High School before accepting a head coaching position at Davidson where he coached for nine seasons compiling a 176-75 record leading the Wildcats from the bottom of the Southern Conference to the Elite Eight in back-to-back seasons (yes there was basketball at Davidson before Stephen Curry). Following the 1969 season, Driesell moved to Maryland, which is where most basketball fans associate him with. After a rough start his first two years in College Park where his teams went a combined 27-25 (10-18 in the ACC), Driesell quickly turned things around making it to the NCAA Elite Eight twice more and winning the NIT in a span of four seasons at a time when only the ACC Tournament champion was awarded a bid to the NCAA Tournament.  This hit the Terrapins especially hard in 1974 when they were a top five team who lost what many consider to be one of the greatest college games of all-time, a 103-100 loss in overtime to David Thompson and eventual national champion North Carolina State. It was just prior to the start of that run in 1971 that Driesell instituted what would come to be viewed as the predecessor of Midnight Madness when he gathered his team a few minutes after midnight on the first day of practice for a training run around the track. In the subsequent 39 years, the tradition has transformed from a humble event into a media spectacle. Following that four-year run, Driesell’s most notable success came in the mid-1980s when the Terrapins re-emerged in the national consciousness with the play of Len Bias and his subsequent passing just after he was drafted by the Boston Celtics. After leaving Maryland in the wake of the Bias scandal, Driesell was away from the sidelines for two years before returning to coach at James Madison and later Georgia State, making the NCAA Tournament three more times including a 2001 win at GSU over Wisconsin in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. For his contributions to the game, Driesell was inducted into the University of Maryland Athletic Hall of Fame in 2002 and the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008. Earlier this week we caught up with him to discuss the origins of Midnight Madness and other issues relating to the current state of college basketball.

Driesell Helped Build Progams at Four Schools

RTC: You started “Midnight Madness” in 1971 based on a 1.5 mile run, which it seems like you continued all the way through your Georgia State days. Could you talk a little bit about your motivation for coming up with the idea and what your thoughts are on what it has become today?

LD: My thought at the time was to make sure that the guys, when practice started on October the 15th [were ready]. We didn’t have all this conditioning and weightlifting like they have now. Until October the 15th you couldn’t have anything to do with the players. Right now they start conditioning with four hours per week for team practice or something. You know what I’m saying. Back then you couldn’t do anything until October the 15th. You couldn’t hold meetings. You couldn’t lift weights with them. You couldn’t run or condition them. It was a way for me to encourage them to get in shape for October the 15th when practice started. I always ran them a mile on October the 15th. That kind of messed up my practice on that day. So George Raveling and I were talking and we said why don’t we just run the mile at 12:01 and then we can practice at 3 o’clock that afternoon. So that’s what we did for the first year. You know we had cars on the track with lights on so nobody would cut the course, but I heard that [Len] Elmore did. So I don’t know if we did that one year or two years, but Mo Howard said, “Hey Coach. Why don’t we just have a scrimmage at midnight next year?” because they wanted to get out of the running. So I said, “Yeah. Alright we can do that.” So we did the next year. We had a scrimmage and had seven or eight thousand kids. . . In fact we had a lot of kids watching us run that night [in 1971]. It was like my second year at Maryland. We were going to have a good team. We had [Tom] McMillen and Elmore coming up as sophomores. We had our undefeated freshman team the year before so everybody was excited. We had a lot of people just watching us run that first year so Mo said “Let’s have a scrimmage at midnight next year” so we did and we had about ten thousand people show up and from then on we filled it up. So that was kind of the way we got it started. It let us get a jump on everybody. I told them we’re going to practice before anybody else in the country and we’re going to be playing on the last day in the NCAA Finals. You know just a little motivational thing.

From the Oct 16, 1971 edition of The Virgin Islands Daily News

RTC: Could you talk a little bit about its evolution and what it has become now? It’s on ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, all of the ESPNs, and a lot of other channels. What are your thoughts on that?

LD: I think it’s great. It has helped promote basketball. It gets the students and the fans thinking basketball in the middle of football and baseball and everything. I think it’s great. The only thing that I don’t like is that they let them have it at 5 o’clock in the afternoon instead of midnight. I think midnight created more interest because kids like to stay up late. I think one of the best teams I ever had was at James Madison and we played a game at midnight. I see that a couple teams play games at midnight this year. I think that’s great because college kids like to stay up late when they should be in bed. At least they are better off at a basketball game than somewhere else. I wish it was still at midnight. A lot of people call it “Basketball Madness,” but it really is “Midnight Madness.”

Read the rest of this entry »