Ray Floriani is the RTC correspondent for the MAAC and NEC conferences.

Reader’s Take

Looking Back

• That is why, the cliché tells us, “they put erasers on pencils.” At any rate, Wagner has suddenly emerged as the team to beat in the NEC. There will be competition from LIU, Robert Morris and Central Connecticut. Regardless, Danny Hurley’s team has our undivided attention — and the attention of folks outside of our time zone as well (going into Pittsburgh to defeat Pitt, then winning the Cable Car Classic out West will do that).
• At any rate, out-of-conference skirmishes are done and in the books. NEC play is now full speed ahead…

Standings

Team, MAAC record, overall record:

NEC Co-Players of the Week

• Latif Rivers, 6’1″, So., G, Wagner – Averaged a team-best 18.7 points per game for the last three contests. Scored all 18 points the second half of the big win at Pitt. Rivers iced that one with six free throws in the closing seconds. Averaged 19 points to capture Cable Car Classic MVP honors.
• Julian Boyd, 6’7″, Jr., F, LIU – Recorded a pair of double-doubles as the Blackbirds stretched their winning streak to three games. Scored 18 of his game-high 22 points in the second half of the win over NJIT.

NEC Rookie of the Week

• Ousmane Drame, 6’9″, Fr., F, Quinnipiac – Averaged 9.7 points, 10.3 rebounds in a three-game stretch. Drame also had a six-block game to complement his 10-point, 10-rebound performance in the win over Boston university.

Latif Rivers And Wagner Have Become Serious Contenders For the NEC Crown (AP)

Power Rankings

1. Wagner: Scored a big win at Pitt just before Christmas. The Seahawks followed that up defeating Air Force and host Santa Clara to win the Cable Car Championship. It was Wagner’s first in-season tournament title since they took the 1997 Marist Pepsi Classic. Latif Rivers was named Cable Car MVP while sophomore Kenneth Ortiz was named Most Inspirational Player. Ortiz’s game winning shot against Santa Clara has had over a million visitors view it on the internet (more on that incredible shot below). Read the rest of this entry »

1. Seth Davis dug a little deeper into the newest report over the weekend that Saint Joseph’s could not talk about Todd O’Brien until he waived his student-privacy rights and found that despite the school’s initial report it appears that they would not discuss the case even if O’Brien did waive his privacy rights, which is interesting because they seemed to indicate they would when we talked to them over the weekend. Several media members have talked with O’Brien asking if he would be willing to call the school’s bluff and waive his rights. Although O’Brien says he wants to waive his privacy rights he also is hiding behind the legal system in a way as he states that he will not waive his right due to his lawyer advising him not to do so. Like Seth we are willing to acknowledge that while it is probably sound legal advice in general, it is an awful public relations strategy. Todd can hide behind legal advice, but with his decision not to mention the computer theft issue in his original column there will continue to be at least a small portion of the public that will hesitate to support O’Brien in his quest for a graduate student transfer waiver without the full story being out there.
2. Mississippi lost its leading scorer yesterday when it dismissed Dundrecous Nelson following his arrest at 1:24 AM on Wedneday after he was caught smoking marijuana. Nelson, who was averaging 11.6 points per game despite coming off the bench for the past 10 games, was expected to play an even bigger role on a team that lost much of its scoring from last season. Little-used reserve guard Jamal Jones was also arrested and kicked off the team. According to team sources, both players also reportedly failed multiple drug tests. The Rebels will need to find another offensive weapon quickly as they start SEC play on Saturday.
3. Arizona State suffered a big blow before their game at USC last night when they announced that three players (starters Keala King and Kyle Cain and backup guard Chris Colvin) had been suspended for “unacceptable conduct”. We have not heard any more information on what these players did (or if their “unacceptable conduct” was related) or how long the suspensions will be. What we do know at this point is that the suspensions left the 4-9 Sun Devils with just six scholarship players for their trip to Los Angeles this weekend with last night’s game at USC followed by a game at UCLA tomorrow. We suspect that these three will be back soon (maybe even on Sunday), but despite their win over a USC team that is an even bigger mess with the Sun Devils falling apart around him you have to wonder how much longer Herb Sendek will continue to be the coach there.
4. John Calipari spoke out yesterday against a legislative proposal that would require Kentucky to play Louisville every year in men’s basketball and football. Prior to speaking at a lunch, Calipari said, “”I would hope they (lawmakers) don’t think I need help scheduling. I hope they have more important things to do.” When questioned about it later the bill’s sponsor claimed that the proposal was just to generate interest for in the bill’s primary purpose of improving education in the state. Apparently, he felt that he needed to use college sports to get the state to care about education. While we find it amusing (and somewhat disheartening) that he had to resort to the Kentucky-Louisville rivalry to get attention some of the figures listed in the article about graduation rates within the state’s university system are shocking.
5. In the latest installment of their weekly power rankings Luke Winn takes a look at foul rates for some top interior players as well as a variety of stats including the always controversial Kentucky defensive stats while Mark Titus offers his various musings about college basketball. Winn provides his usual insightful statistical analysis with great visuals to help those whose eyes tend to glaze when presented with a bunch of numbers. On the other hand, Titus appears to be trying his hand at being a serious journalist as you will notice there are not quite as many anecdotes and he repeatedly mentions watching a game multiple times, but we are just having a hard time adjusting to the new Club Trillion as a serious basketball journalist especially when he makes comments like Perry Jones being the best player in the Big 12 while completely ignoring Thomas Robinson.

When it comes to the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (key word: Entertainment) and its various offshoots, very little surprises us anymore. The network’s original programming jumped the Fonzie many moons ago, and the self-promotional brand of reporting that it favors does little to hide its mouse-eared shamelessness. Still, a recent article published on ESPNHS, the online arm’s boy’s high school basketball blog, shows that the company will not stop until it reaches the salacious bottom of the content barrel, no doubt populated with the remains of Nancy Grace’s bob haircut and Geraldo Rivera’s bathtub gin. In a piece written by someone they call “Recruit X,” ostensibly an elite recruit coveted by numerous top programs around the country, the player seeks “to keep it 100 percent real” in sharing with us the “truth about what goes on in the life of a heavily-recruited high school basketball player.” If you ever imagined that on-campus visits were like what Jesus Shuttlesworth (played by Ray Allen) experienced in a notorious scene of Spike Lee’s film, He Got Game, well, you aren’t the only one.

Next week on ESPNHS: Young, misunderstood kid is picked up on the side of the road by blonde southern woman who takes him into her home and develops him into an elite ballplayer in a nefarious scheme to get him to play at Ole Miss

When we got back to the dorms, the players had girls set up for us. If you’ve ever seen the movie “He Got Game” then you’ll understand better, but there were three of us and there were three girls there for us. We’d never met these girls before, but they were there for us. I won’t go into all the details, but let’s just say we had a great time with them and they were saying the whole time that we should come to the school and it could be like this all the time. I was loving it, personally. I’m not gonna front. What guy my age and in my position wouldn’t love that?

Real or fake? Who knows, and who cares? The sole reason for this particular endeavor is to get fans of rival schools in the comments to troll back and forth about which school offered Recruit X his companions, and as a result, drive up page views. As of this writing, Baylor, Kentucky, Ohio State, UCLA… even Duke was mentioned. Not that it matters a whit, because ESPN isn’t going to out the player (assuming he even exists at all), and there’s no actual there there anyway. ESPN.com has arguably more resources available to its writers than any other online entity in sports, and instead of taking the Yahoo! Sports tack of actual investigations into the corruption of high school and collegiate sports at all levels, they’d rather come up with gimmicky tell-all diaries from “recruits” who don’t actually tell us anything substantial at all.

Players are introduced to young women? Taken to clubs? Given a beer or two? WHO KNEW?!?! How about asking Recruit X, since he’s completely anonymous, to drop dime on the school that offered these things to him? How about getting another Recruit X, the football version, to give up the name and details of the coach that offered him a car “as a little joke?” Why does he care — he’s anonymous, AND he says he’s wasn’t going to matriculate there anyway? It’s all such garbage, and ESPNHS should be ashamed of itself for rolling this unintelligent tripe out there. In the media environment we live in, it’s much easier to be a hater than to laud someone for their efforts, but hey WWL, we’re just keeping it real.

(h/t @KansasSports for alerting us to this article)

Michael Vernetti is the West Coast Conference correspondent for RTC.

Reader’s Take 

Looking Back

• Along with greater strength at the top through the addition of Brigham Young, the WCC was supposed to exhibit league-wide improvement in 2011-12. At least in the early stages of conference play, that hasn’t happened. In fact, the gap between the haves and the have-nots appears to be widening.
• Opening games in WCC play found Gonzaga throttling Portland at home by a score of 90-51, Saint Mary’s skunking Pepperdine in Malibu by 74-45 and BYU beating San Diego at home by 88-52. That’s an average beat-down of 35 points, not indicative of a conference trending toward parity. In games not involving the league’s Big Three of Gonzaga, Saint Mary’s and BYU, Pepperdine beat San Francisco at home by a score of 77-61 and Loyola Marymount also topped San Francisco in overtime by 77-76. Completing a week of total futility, San Francisco’s loss to Loyola came on its home court.
• Santa Clara spent last week splitting games in its own Cable Car Classic, topping Eastern Michigan by 77-55 and losing to Wagner 64-62 in a game so surreal it deserves a paragraph of its own (see below). Santa Clara is one of the WCC teams thought to be gaining in stature, but will have to wait until tonight to taste its first league action against Portland in Portland. The Broncos have given fans equal reason to have hopes for resurgence or despair  in non-conference play, balancing wins over New Mexico and Villanova with losses to Washington State (93-55 – it was the margin of defeat not the opponent that made this one sting) and Houston Baptist (72-71). The Broncos do not have a road win this year, giving Portland hopes for a chance to stop its own bleeding in tonight’s game.

Talented Senior Rob Jones Has Sparked An Excellent Start For St. Mary's (SF Chronicle)

Power Rankings

1. Saint Mary’s (13-2 overall, 2-0 in WCC play): Continued its post-Baylor rise with an eye-opening throbbing of BYU in Moraga by the unlikely score of 98-82, then followed up with a thorough dispatch of Pepperdine, which may have harbored hopes of an upset after beating San Francisco by 16 in its league opener. Close observers of the Gaels concede strong games every outing from senior forward Rob Jones (14.1 PPG, 10.5 RPG) and junior point guard Matthew Dellavedova (14.3 PPG, 6.5 APG), but say lesser-known players Clint Steindl, Stephen Holt and Jorden Page must step up if the Gaels are to be an NCAA team. They’re stepping, as Holt has had games of 16, 21 and 14 points since a relatively quiet performance against Baylor, and Page has had three double-digit outings of his own (10, 13 and 14 points) over the same span. Steindl hasn’t been stepping anywhere since turning an ankle against Missouri State. Read the rest of this entry »

The Bob Cousy Award list was whittled down from its original 60+ names in the preseason to a more manageable 20 on Wednesday afternoon. In case you’ve lost track of what the Cousy is specifically for, it is the award given to the nation’s top point guard/floor general in college basketball. Often that player will also be in the running for National Player of the Year honors, as in the recent cases of Jameer Nelson (2004), Ty Lawson (2009), and Kemba Walker (2011). Last year, you might recall that Wisconsin’s Jordan Taylor was somewhat infamously left off the February list of 10 finalists, causing the Naismith Hall of Fame brass to reconsider and eventually reinstating the All-America Badger onto the list where he advanced to become one of the five finalists before Walker was selected for the award. To be clear, this version represents the preliminary finalists before the super-finalists before the super-duper-finalists list. The committee will make two more cuts over the next eight weeks before awarding the prize to the winner during Final Four weekend in New Orleans.

The Cousy Award Is Prestigious Because It Is Given By the Naismith HOF

Let’s take a look at the current list, and signify using (10) or (5) the players who we expect to advance further. A few notes follow after the jump:

• Pierre Jackson, Baylor
• Shabazz Napier, UConn (10)
• Ray McCallum, Detroit
• Seth Curry, Duke (10)
• Erving Walker, Florida (10)
• Scott Machado, Iona (5)
• Casper Ware, Long Beach State
• Peyton Siva, Louisville
• Trey Burke, Michigan (10)
• Dee Bost, Mississippi State (10)
• Phil Pressey, Missouri
• Kendall Marshall, North Carolina (5)
• Aaron Craft, Ohio State
• D.J. Cooper, Ohio
• Zack Rosen, Pennsylvania 
• Ashton Gibbs, Pittsburgh
• Scoop Jardine, Syracuse
• Damian Lillard, Weber State (5)
• Jordan Taylor, Wisconsin (5)
• Tu Holloway, Xavier (5)

A few notes:

Read the rest of this entry »

RTC Live will be in Philadelphia this evening for a fascinating ACC-Atlantic 10 matchup, with the quiet Duke Blue Devils travelling to take on Temple in the City of Brotherly Love.

Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Dzuback is the RTC correspondent for the Atlantic 10 Conference. You can also find his musings online at Villanova by the Numbers or on Twitter @(vbtnBlog)

Reader’s Take 

The Week That Was

• No A-10 Teams in the Top 25, Again: The latest round of the AP and Coaches polls (January 2) show no Atlantic 10 team that gathered enough support nationally to be ranked … for the second consecutive week. Saint Louis missed a good opportunity to impress when the Billikens dropped a four-point decision to New Mexico on Saturday, picking up their second loss in the process. With the next six teams showing three or four losses, the conference is out of the Top 25 conversation for the next few weeks. The other name brands, Xavier and Temple, did not help their causes this past week. Xavier dropped their third game in the last four, this time to Gonzaga in what might have been a good “comparison” game for the Selection Committee. Temple won their third straight, but the last two have not been especially impressive. The Owls may get the conference’s last good chance for some noise when they host #3 Duke tonight.
• Conference Comparisons: Nearly 90% of the out-of-conference games are on the books and the Atlantic 10 has posted a 62.6% winning percentage:

• Against the six power conferences, the conference has logged a respectable 22-26 (0.458) record. Highlights include .500 or better records against the ACC (7-6, 0.538 – note Temple hosts Duke tonighit, see below), the Big Ten (4-4, 0.500) and the SEC (4-1, 0.800). Conference members logged their strongest numbers against the teams within the conference footprint – those traditional opponents during the out-of-conference portion of the schedule, posting a 63.8% (30-17) winning record against teams located throughout New England, the Middle Atlantic and upper Midwest regions. Against those conferences most likely to compete for the at-large bids not allocated to the power conference teams, the A-10 posted a strong – but deceptive – 23-12 (0.657) record, largely at the expense of the CAA (15-5, 0.750) and C-USA (4-3, 0.571); both show improvement over the 2010-11 season when, through the end of December, the A-10 went 7-10 versus the CAA and 2-5 with C-USA.
• Conference Play Commences: The conference maintains their traditional “opening night” tipoff with five conference games and a sixth game to be played on Thursday night. Saturday will feature six conference games with the seventh game to be played on Sunday. By next Monday, every member will have logged at least one conference game.

Despite A Tough Start, Tu Holloway And Xavier Will Be A Major Challenger For The A-10 Crown (AP)

Power Rankings

With only a few games scheduled, and those yielding mixed results for the teams at the top of last week’s power ranking, the conference appears to be sliding sideways. Massachusetts disposes of their last out of conference opponents fairly easily to move up a spot, while Temple finishes the month 6-1 and Fordham upsets a ranked team.

1. Saint Louis (12-2) – The Billikens ended the week 1-1 — the loss coming at the hands of New Mexico (WAC) at the notorious Pit, UNM’s homecourt. Rick Majerus’ crew smothered Texas Southern with defense in a 71-39 win on 12/27, limiting the Tigers to a paltry 0.57 points per possession (or PPP, with 68 possessions per team calculated), about half a point per possession, just over half of the Division I average. Saint Louis’ own 1.04 point per possession hints at the ongoing point production problem with Saint Louis, but when a defense holds an opponent under 0.6 PPP, the team does not need a very efficient offense to win. Brian Conklin earned an Honorable Mention for his 35-point performance over the two games which yielded an average of 17.5 points per game with an eFG% of 68.4%. Very impressive numbers indeed. The Lobos were a different matter, as the Billikens were down two at the half, and gave up another two points in the second half. Saint Louis opens conference play at Dayton Wednesday, then returns home to host George Washington on Saturday. Read the rest of this entry »

RTC Live returns to North Jersey this evening for some more Big East action, with the Seton Hall Pirates hosting the defending national champion, Connecticut.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bill Hupp is an RTC correspondent. You can follow him on Twitter (@Bill_Hupp). He filed this report after Syracuse’s win over DePaul on Sunday afternoon.

Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim smirked at the reporter’s question and, with a slight shake of his head, replied, ““I’ve been here for 36 years and I’ve only had one of those guys.” That one guy was Carmelo Anthony, and though the Orange don’t have anyone with Anthony’s level of individual star power on this year’s team, they seem to have the right mix of savvy veterans and talented youngsters to make this season a memorable one for Syracuse basketball. Playing on the road near Chicago in front of a crowd half full of Syracuse orange on New Year’s Day, SU blocked 11 shots and swiped 10 steals as they overwhelmed DePaul, 87-68.

Joseph and the Rest of His Orange Continue to Roll (AP)

Defensively, the ‘Cuse are possibly as good as they’ve ever been. Their length and athleticism comes at you in waves.  The quickness and active hands of Brandon Triche and Scoop Jardine at the top of the vaunted 2-3 matchup zone means you can’t just rotate the ball from side to side at will. You want to try to split the zone and get into the lane? Fine, 7’0’’ Fab Melo, 6’10’’ Baye Keita or 6’9’’ Rakeem Christmas will be waiting to swat (or at least) alter your shot. There’s a reason Syracuse leads the country in steals per game (11.5) and is third in blocks (7.8).

Read the rest of this entry »