- After a week’s break while we “recuperated” in Rio de Janeiro (don’t worry we kept up with college basketball happenings) the Morning Five is back. Fortunately, the news in the world of college basketball has been relatively light in the past few days as when news happens during breaks it is usually negative news. We hope that all of you are enjoying the holidays with your family and if you are working (like some of us) we hope you get out of work early.
- Although most teams played a relatively light schedule last week with many students finishing their final exams there were some very interesting results. If you were busy with other obligations and missed out on some of the action, Seth Davis’ weekly “Fast Breaks” column is a great refresher. In this week’s column he goes over the usual themes including best teams/players/games, but also takes time to talk to Winthrop head coach Pat Kelsey, who made national headlines for his impassioned speech against the violence in Newtown, Connecticut. As usual, the column is well worth your time and also points out a rather big game tonight that you might miss if you are focused on things like putting together toys or trying to figure out how to return those ugly clothes that someone gave you.
- If you are looking for a more numbers-based approach to last week, Ken Pomeroy might be more like what you are looking for. Pomeroy employs a slightly different method than Davis does (or at least from what Davis says he does), but their results are fairly similar as you can see from Pomeroy’s top games and upsets. Assuming that Davis isn’t relying solely on Pomeroy’s work/post (and we doubt it) this is what look for in good advanced metrics–the data is in agreement with what we see with our eyes.
- We are getting near the end of the year and of course that means everybody will be churning out end of the year columns, but Seth Davis is certainly among the first to do so with his look at the biggest moments of the year. We are not going to argue for the exclusion of any these moments (ok, we could have done without any memories of the ridiculous First Four), but we are a little surprised that he could not find a space in there for Kentucky since that team and specifically Anthony Davis will be the defining memory of 2012 for us. Not to be outdone, Mike DeCourcy takes a look at the naughty and nice of college basketball [Ed. Note: We think this is the first time we have linked to a video in the Morning Five.], which could probably double as a year-end feature given the fact that he goes back into last season to dig out some of his choices. As he notes, we could really just give the naughty “award” to the NCAA all the time for this.
- Speaking of naughty (or at least Grinch-like), Gary Parrish was not willing to share in the holiday spirit and let Christmas week pass without his weekly Poll Attacks column. This week, Gary has a couple of targets: a writer who has been frequently called out and is taking issue with it now and another whom he thinks values North Carolina too highly. As always it is an entertaining column and we can only hope that more writers respond to Gary either directly or indirectly if for nothing more than our amusement.