1. There’s already enough drama in this showdown between Kansas and Kansas State tonight. Two top-15 teams. Playing for first place in the Big 12. Bitter in-state rivals. But look carefully, and there’s another aspect to all this: the Illinois rivalry. The last two coaches at Illinois before John Groce were Bruce Weber and Bill Self. Weber took over for Self and went to the national title game in his second season. He now coaches Kansas State after the Illini fired him seven years later. Bill Self left originally so he could take this job at Kansas. Got it? Good. You knew all that. But do you remember when Weber hosted a mock funeral during his first year at Illinois because he was sick of everybody talking about Bill Self all the time? They’re not best friends, but that makes for terrific entertainment tonight.
2. Weber wasn’t necessarily the most popular choice when Kansas State hired him. Everybody knew he could coach at some level. He did, after all, have unbelievable success at Southern Illinois and propelled a Self-recruited team to the brink of a national title at Illinois, but things did not end well in Champaign. His final 2011-12 season was especially a disaster, so it’s not as though he was considered a home run hire by the Wildcats. Still, it appears to be working just fine at this point, and maybe it’s a sign that second chances and a change of scenery can really do wonders for a head coach.
3. We’re not sure who stole West Virginia’s uniforms this season and started playing with them, but they certainly can’t be coached by Bob Huggins, can they? Not even Huggins believes it. In the midst of one of the worst seasons of his storied career, Huggins is profusely apologizing to anybody who will listen for his team’s uninspired effort in a 27-point loss at Purdue. “I want to apologize to our fans, apologize to the people in the state of West Virginia. This is totally unacceptable. This is not what we’re supposed to represent and hopefully they have enough faith in me that I will fix it.” If there’s anybody who can fix it, it’s probably Huggins, but whether it will happen this year is an open question for considerable debate.
4. For as emotional as Huggins got with the media, it seems as though he took a different approach with his team. Strangely, the fiery head coach appeared to have said very little to his team in the locker room after Purdue embarrassed his team on national television. If the yelling and screaming is not working, why not try something else?
5. Travis Ford said after his team’s victory against Texas Tech on Saturday that the Red Raiders were one of the most improved teams in the Big 12. Even if that’s true, their record isn’t quite showing it. Texas Tech has lost four of its first five league games by exactly 100 combined points, with the only win coming against dreadful TCU. At least the Red Raiders are playing well in spurts. After a last-place, 1-17 finish a year ago, even that’s significant improvement in many ways. Tech’s Jaye Crockett, who emerged as a scoring threat down the stretch in 2011-12 and appears to have a bright future with the Red Raiders, says he’s “tired of all these moral victories.” Texas Tech competed punch-for-punch with Kansas for one half and was within striking distance of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State at halftime, but it hasn’t resulted in any upsets. Yet. Maybe as the season goes on, Ford’s statement about Texas Tech’s supposed improvement will show up on paper, in the form of a marquee win.

ESPN’s Brent Musburger and Fran Fraschilla gushed about a bunch of Baylor players during its victory over Oklahoma State Monday evening. They talked about how the 34 NBA scouts in the building surely must have noticed that forwards Cory Jefferson and Isaiah Austin combined for 11 blocks and two double-doubles. They talked about standout point guard Pierre Jackson, the preseason Big 12 Player of the Year and the Bears’ leading scorer. And they talked about Brady Heslip, the dead-eyed three-point shooter who has been suffering through a shooting slump after a terrific 2011-12 campaign.

A.J. Walton is a Starter, But Nobody Knows It (photo credit to Big12Sports.com)

There was one more guy they gushed about. That’s A.J. Walton, the senior guard and winningest player in Baylor basketball history. It’s about time you gush about him, too. He didn’t lead the team in scoring like Jackson, and he didn’t finish with a double-double or block any shots, but he made what Fraschilla called the “play of the game” when he saved a ball near the baseline and fired it to Jefferson for a dunk, helping extend his team’s lead to eight points after the Cowboys had staged a modest comeback. It was one of four assists on the day for Walton, who also tallied two steals, five rebounds and made a number of other hustle plays, none of which went unnoticed by the commentators. By the end of the game, it would be fair to say Musburger had more of a crush on A.J. Walton than he did on that other A.J.’s girlfriend, if you catch our drift.

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1. Over the past several years, Kansas and Texas have created a modest, budding little rivalry. Save for this year, of course, the Longhorns have been the most consistent threat to the Jayhawks’ streak of Big 12 championships, and that’s made for classic battles recently. Although the fourth-ranked Jayhawks certainly didn’t expect Saturday’s game against winless (in the conference) and Kabongo-less Texas to be a classic, it turns out this rivalry is turning into a “throw-the-records-out” kind of series. Kansas slipped by, and here’s a good look at why the Jayhawks were able to avoid catastrophe. Note Kansas’ lackluster defense against one of the worst offensive teams in college basketball. Did Texas improve, or does Bill Self have work to do? It’s probably a bit of both, and frankly, you can never fault a team for playing sluggishly on the road in league play. It happens, even to elite teams like Kansas.
2. If you’re not a Kansas fan perhaps you’re a Kansas State fan or maybe you’re a lost Wichita State fan. Either way, the state of Kansas is sitting pretty on the basketball scene right now. You never have to worry about Kansas holding up its end of the bargain, and lately, you haven’t had to worry about Kansas State or Wichita State floundering, either. After the Shockers’ home win over Creighton this weekend, it’s all but assured there will be three ranked teams in the state of Kansas this week. Now, if only the Big 12 schools would play Wichita State. We would pay to see that, but we’re guessing Bill Self and Bruce Weber probably wouldn’t.
3. Bob Huggins is partly responsible for the rise of Kansas State basketball, but his new team isn’t faring so well in the Big 12 right now. West Virginia got pounded on national television by Purdue over the weekend, leaving Huggins at a loss of words. There’s not much to this link, but the quote tells it all: “This is not what I’ve built a career on. We just do the most unexplainable things I’ve ever seen.” Enough said. This isn’t a Bob Huggins team, and West Virginia hasn’t looked like a Bob Huggins team for a couple of years now.
4. Oklahoma has played well enough to garner NCAA Tournament consideration at this point, but Lon Kruger’s team couldn’t capitalize on a chance to pick up a road victory against his former team on Saturday. A big reason for that? The three-point shot. It killed the Sooners, especially in the first half. Kansas State made seven before halftime, much to Kruger’s surprise. “We were concerned about a lot of things with them but not in their ability to make threes. They’ve been a little streaky on the year, but still very capable.”
5. Playing Texas Tech solves a lot of problems and for Oklahoma State that’s exactly what it needed. Travis Ford’s team, which lost a Bedlam game in Norman to Oklahoma a week ago, went through some gruesome punishment practices early in the morning in preparation for the Red Raiders. It appeared to have gotten the team’s attention, as OSU wasted no time dispatching its inferior opponent. Now, it’s time to see if the Cowboys can ride that momentum into Big Monday when it faces Baylor tonight.

When police arrested Iowa State point guard Bubu Palo in September and charged him with sexual abuse, it stunned us in more ways than one. Palo, the gritty former walk-on with terrific grades and no prior criminal history, seemed like the most unlikely candidate for a charge so severe. At the time, we wrote on this very website that Palo would “likely never play for the Cyclones again unless he’s fully exonerated.”

Bubu Palo Has Been Vindicated (photo by the Ames Tribune)

Funny you should mention that. Earlier this week, prosecutors dropped charges against Palo after forensic evidence showed the science wasn’t quite matching up to the victim’s story. The victim had said her blouse was torn during a sexual encounter and that she washed it 10 days afterwards, but the evidence proved the contrary. The blouse was actually torn after it was washed. As Palo’s attorney puts it: “A dismissal is as close as vindication as you can get in a situation such as this.” So, after essentially finding his version of “full exoneration,” Palo will return to the court sometime this month, possibly as soon as next week against Texas Tech. This is why it’s so important to not rush to judgment when athletes get in trouble. There are times when they do wrong. So, so many times, in fact. In this case, however, Palo has, in his attorney’s words, been “vindicated,” and he can now move on with us life barring an update in the case or new charges.

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Joe Lunardi released his latest Bracketology rankings this morning, and there’s a surprise team from the Big 12 in the field as a nine-seed: Oklahoma. After complete irrelevance since Blake Griffin jumped to the pros four years ago, Lon Kruger’s team picked up an important Bedlam victory at home over Oklahoma State this weekend and now firmly has itself in the NCAA Tournament conversation. And why not? The Sooners defend pretty well, they’re obviously well-coached, and they have a good mix of young guards to team with veterans Sam Grooms and Steven Pledger. Leading scorer Romero Osby has been a steady senior, Wyoming transfer Amath M’Baye has helped, and Kruger has much more depth and athleticism than a year ago. There’s a lot to like, but despite this weekend’s victory, there’s still a lot to question, too. Oklahoma was embarrassed by Gonzaga in Orlando during the Old Spice Classic. It also lost at Arkansas, dropped a home game to Stephen F. Austin, and did not have a quality victory over a projected NCAA Tournament team until knocking off the Cowboys. You can count Texas A&M as a decent victory after Elston Turner and the Aggies dismantled Kentucky at Rupp Arena, but the Wildcats have their obvious problems and Lunardi does not have A&M in the field at this point.

Oklahoma’s Scheduling Has it In Good Position

Bottom line is, Oklahoma’s resume isn’t staggering. Strangely, though, not only are the Sooners included in the NCAA Tournament field, but they’re actually quite safe as a projected nine seed. There’s a simple explanation for all of this: the RPI! Oklahoma is a top-15 team in the RPI right now and top-10 in strength of schedule, which is downright stunning considering the competition level hasn’t seemed all that demanding to this point. This team doesn’t have many quality wins, it has really only played one elite team in Gonzaga, and it scheduled four teams from the Southland Conference during non-conference play. Makes you wonder whether somebody did the math wrong.

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It seems almost unfair to rag on Texas Tech and TCU. The Red Raiders had to boot Billy Gillispie out of Lubbock this fall and didn’t have time to find a permanent coach, so they’re playing the entire season under interim coach Chris Walker. The record will show that Gillispie “resigned,” but there was nothing peaceful about his exit. It was a disaster, and it’s no wonder a young team with a boatload of newcomers has already lost to McNeese State at home, not to mention conference foe Baylor by 34 points. Meanwhile, the Horned Frogs have a more stable first-year coach in Trent Johnson, but even he knew his program’s transition to the Big 12 would take a significant amount of time and energy. In Year One of his rebuilding project, he’s dealt with a number of injuries, and his team is now 0-3 in the league. The worst part? TCU managed to lose to Texas Tech in the Big 12’s version of the Toilet Bowl.

Texas Tech and TCU Battled Over the Weekend in Big 12 Action

So we’ve buttered you up by giving Texas Tech and TCU excuses for losing, and they’re certainly valid. Now, though, it’s time to take a look at just how bad the two programs are historically in terms of the RPI. The RPI figures are hardly scientific. The flaws are well-known, actually. But to repeat the rhetoric of the NCAA Tournament selection committee, the RPI is a decent way to categorize teams. Using RealTimeRPI, which provides RPI data dating back to 2003-04, the numbers shows that Texas Tech and TCU form the worst Big 12 tandem in close to a decade. Texas Tech’s RPI sits at a robust #246 right now, whereas TCU sits at #222. Here are all of the sub-200 RPI teams since 2003-04 in the Big 12.

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Lon Kruger doesn’t need our basketball advice. The man was a two-time Big Eight Player of the Year at Kansas State in the early ’70s, and as a head coach, he’s won more than 500 games and reached a Final Four in 1994 with Florida. Oh, the dude coached the Atlanta Hawks once, too. Point is, Kruger knows what the heck he’s doing, and we’re guessing he doesn’t develop his scouting reports and pre-game preparations based on advice from idiots like myself.

So no, I don’t think he read my article published this Monday, in which I pleaded with the Oklahoma head coach to give senior point guard Sam Grooms more minutes. I wrote that article earlier this week because I could not offer any plausible reason for why Kruger had played Buddy Hield, Je’lon Hornbeak and Isaiah Cousins — three freshmen guards — ahead of the Big 12’s leading returning assists man. Here’s a guy with an absurd assist-to-turnover ratio, no defensive liabilities and no reason to be in the doghouse, and yet Kruger opted to cut Grooms’ minutes in half from a year ago and replace him in the starting lineup through the first 13 games of the season. The Sooners weren’t playing poorly, but I didn’t see any significant improvement overall from a year ago. Scratch head and repeat. What in the world was Sam Grooms doing on the bench?

Lon Kruger Gave Sam Grooms The Most Playing Time He’d Seen All Year (Las Vegas Review)

For the 14th time this season, Grooms sat on the bench to start the game Saturday in another edition of the Bedlam series. Oklahoma threw the first punch against rival Oklahoma State at home by knocking down perimeter jumpers and keeping the Cowboys’ high-flying wings out of the paint. With Grooms playing reserve duty, the Sooners opened up a 32-18 lead. Who needs Grooms now? Hield was playing terrific basketball in his first Bedlam game, and OU’s offense seemed to be clicking even without Grooms. Suddenly, though, the shots weren’t falling anymore. The Cowboys began to attack the rim and get to the free throw line, and that 14-point lead had turned into a 50-45 lead with 11:50 remaining in regulation.

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Danny Spewak is an RTC correspondent. You can follow him on Twitter @dspewak.

That white towel. That’s the universal basketball signal for “My Night is Over.” When he plopped himself on the Creighton bench with three minutes remaining in regulation on Friday night, Doug McDermott draped this white towel over his shoulders and stared blankly at his teammates on the floor of JQH Arena. His night was indeed over, and judging by the sweat stains on both sides of his jersey, it looked like he’d played pretty hard.

For all of the sweat, McDermott didn’t even set any records in his team’s 74-52 victory over Missouri State. He didn’t score a career high in points, nor did he set record marks for field goals or three-pointers made. Such a bum, that All-American. He only managed 39 points, 28 of which came in the second half. He only scored the Bluejays’ first 18 points of the second half, only made 14 consecutive field goals at one point and only outscored the entire Missouri State team by three points in the second half. Rough night, huh? “He’s making fade-away threes off one foot,” Missouri State guard Anthony Downing said. “You can’t do anything about that. God-given talent.” Sometimes, McDermott would abuse his defender off the dribble for an easy layup. Other times, he’d roll off a screen and fire a three-pointer, and other times he’d convert easy layups. “That was pretty incredible tonight,” said Greg McDermott, brimming with pride as both his head coach and father. Even when it finally looked like McDermott had missed a shot from beyond the arc, one of the Bears’ defenders collided with him and sent him to the free throw line. Missouri State coach Paul Lusk constantly switched defenders on him, and he threw everything from junk zone defenses to double teams at McDermott. Nothing worked. “We could have ran the whole arena out at him,” Lusk said. “It doesn’t matter.” Had his father not pulled him out of the game after the final television timeout, McDermott surely could have broken the career high of 44 points he set against Bradley last season. Instead, he’ll have to settle for the second-most points in career history. “I blame it on him,” he said, pointing to his dad. “That’s one of the better games I’ve ever played in my life.”

Doug McDermott’s Own Dad Ruined His Chance for a Career High (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

It’s hard to argue with that. McDermott finished 15-19 from the floor and even grabbed 10 boards to complete a double-double. Just another modest night for the guy who entered the game averaging 22.6 points per game, the fourth-best mark in college basketball. Sarcasm aside, McDermott has done this so many times it’s become almost commonplace. He hung 30 on Wisconsin and 29 on Arizona State out in Las Vegas this November, and his 33 points in the Missouri Valley title game against Illinois State last March set a tournament record. Similar to the likes of, say, Adam Morrison, McDermott moved from obscurity to fame a long time ago. It’s still appropriate to gawk at this sort of performance, but it’s not appropriate to dwell on it.

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As hoops junkies, it’s unfathomable to non-sports fans how many college basketball games we watch on a yearly basis. Thanks to the four-letter network, we’re plugged into our televisions and computers during every waking minute from November through March. As the days and years pass you by, though, you start to forget all the meaningless regular season games you watched on ESPN3. It’s impossible to remember everything, so to vividly remember a specific game, something wild must have happened. Austin Rivers would have needed to make a game-winning three-pointer at the buzzer. DeJuan Blair would have had to have flipped Hasheem Thabeet on national television. Kansas would have had to rally against a red-hot Kevin Durant. Point is, with so many games and so many seasons, we really only remember the special games.

Le’Bryan Nash Has Something to Prove This Weekend

For some reason, I have a vivid memory of January 26, 2009. Fifth-ranked Oklahoma was on the road in Stillwater, and the place was wild. If I remember correctly, a massive ice storm had crippled a portion of Oklahoma, which made the circumstances of the game even more epic. As has often been the case with Oklahoma State under Travis Ford, the Cowboys had absolutely no size and played a four-guard lineup. They were fast, athletic and, to put it bluntly, were playing their hearts out in a rivalry game against a much better opponent. Blake Griffin was on that OU team, for god’s sake. The Sooners escaped with an eight-point win at Gallagher-Iba Arena, but it wasn’t easy. I remember that was also the first game I noticed a little freshman named Keiton Page. That kid looked so out of place on the court, but according to the announcers, he used to average 50 points a game in high school. I would hear that story a million more time before he graduated, and it never got old. I remember watching the way Oklahoma State overcame its complete lack of size against an All-American, and I remember thinking, ‘this is college basketball, man.’ Bedlam! How can you not love it? In the regular season finale a few months later, Oklahoma won by four points at home behind 33 points from Blake Griffin. And less than a week later, the Cowboys shocked Oklahoma in the quarterfinals of the Big 12 Tournament, thanks to a couple of free throws by the venerable Byron Eaton in the final seconds. The Bedlam Series was in full swing. It meant something. Both teams made the NCAA Tournament that year, and the Sooners advanced to the Elite Eight.

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Myck Kabongo is not walking through that door. Not until February 13, at least. His Texas team must play eight more games before he returns from his NCAA-mandated  suspension, and by that time there’s a very real possibility the Longhorns could have an overall losing record. Without their star point guard, they’ve managed to reach the midway point of the season with an 8-7 record, fresh off two straight conference losses to open the Big 12 schedule. The hard-fought, overtime loss at Baylor this weekend was excusable.

Last night was not. Texas blew a 10-point lead over West Virginia with less than four minutes to play in regulation, needed a miracle shot by Jonathan Holmes to simply force overtime and then scored three points in the extra period. The Longhorns shot 44 percent from the free throw line, 35 percent from the floor, and had almost twice as many turnovers (14) as assists (8). It’s a good road win for Bob Huggins, whose team needed a boost after its own nightmarish non-conference performance, but let’s not pretend as though Texas’ collapse had nothing to do with this. Without Kabongo, Rick Barnes’ team cannot score. Period. We knew J’Covan Brown wouldn’t be here this year. But Kabongo? He figured to be the heart and soul of this team, the one guy who could create for others and change the dynamic of the offense. Barnes was counting on him to open opportunities for leading returning scorer Sheldon McClellan, blue-chip freshman center Cameron Ridley and the rest of this young squad.

Rick Barnes Is In Danger of Missing the NCAAs for the First Time at Texas

Had Kabongo played last night, there’s no chance Texas would have lost this game on its home floor. There’s no chance it would have blown such a significant lead in the final minutes, and there’s no chance it would have scored three points in an overtime period. When he returns against Iowa State on February 13, this Texas team will transform itself. Kabongo certainly wasn’t perfect a year ago, but this guy changes the game when he steps on the court. His blend of pure athleticism, pure speed and play-making ability is rare for a point guard. Kabongo will have eight games to prove that when his suspension ends in about a month.

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