Rush the Court would like to wish everybody around college basketball nation a safe and happy Thanksgiving holiday. Now, pass the mashed potatoes, Bilas…

It's a Festive Turkey Day Around the RTC Household (image inspired by TNT's Inside the NBA Goin' Fishin' series)

Act V of our six-part microsite release is now here. Today we’re pleased to announce the launch of our Big East Conference microsite to join the ACC, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC. It’s no secret that the 16-team monster of a league has been top to bottom the best basketball conference in America the last few years, and it appears that will likely hold true for at least one more year until powerhouses Syracuse and Pittsburgh alight for a different league.

Like the other four existing microsites, our two new staffers, Pat Prendergast and Mike Lemaire, will bring you daily news, analysis and commentary on the state of Big East basketball from Tampa to Milwaukee to Providence and everywhere in-between. The usual ways to find the microsite are in effect: the little button in the top right hand corner of the site, the direct link, or just add big-east to the end of rushthecourt.net/. You can reach both of them via their contact information over on the microsite.

Finally, we’re still taking applications for our Big Ten microsite, which we hope to roll out in the next several weeks. Send us a writing sample and some information about yourself to rushthecourt@yahoo.com as soon as you can.

Ready for Act IV in our unbridled attempt to never sleep again?  We are, as today we’re pleased to announce the launch of our Pac-12 Conference microsite to join its older brothers and sisters, the ACC, Big 12, and SEC.  And yes, it’s going to take a long while to get used to writing that “12” instead of “10” — in fact, we’re counting on making that mistake at least once a day for the next two months.  Nevertheless, even though the league often tips off after those in the east’s bedtime, the only major conference playing basketball west of Denver appears to be on an upswing.

Sean Miller is quickly revitalizing Arizona into national powerhouse status, and UCLA seems to be on the verge through Ben Howland’s recruiting of perhaps putting together another string of Final Four runs.  Washington remains a tough match-up with its line of talented athletes from in and around the Emerald City, and does anyone doubt that Phil Knight’s dollars will allow well-funded Oregon to stay down for very long?  The league has already signed a deal with ESPN and Fox Sports to allow more people around the country to watch its games, and with increased exposure comes additional recruiting opportunities.

Like the other three existing microsites, our two staffers, Drew Murawa and Connor Pelton, will bring you daily news, analysis and commentary on the state of Pac-12 basketball.  The usual ways to find the microsite are in effect: the little button in the top right hand corner of the site, the direct link, or just add pac-12 to the end of rushthecourt.net/.  You can reach both of them via their contact information over on the microsite.

Finally, we’re still taking applications for our Big East and Big Ten microsites.  Send us a writing sample and some information about yourself to rushthecourt@yahoo.com as soon as you can.  The season is only two weeks away!

After two weeks of rolling out our first two microsites for the ACC and the Big 12, we’re back today to proudly announce our third in the series, the SEC.  Even though most fans of the Southeastern Conference are focused exclusively on the initial BCS rankings that were released Sunday, they play a little roundball in this league too, as having three schools ranked in many preseason Top 10s will attest.

As we stated when we launched the ACC and Big 12 microsites, the premise behind these things is rather simple. By focusing separately but comprehensively on these six individual conferences, we hope to provide a more targeted user experience without marginalizing the quality of commentary and analysis that our readers have come to expect from the national site. As always, we expect that you’ll tell us if we’re not realizing that goal.

How to find it? Just like the others, you can locate the SEC microsite by simply adding sec to the end of rushthecourt.net/. Or you can click on the SEC microsite button above at the top right (in the bottom right corner). Our two SEC staffers, Gerald Smith and Brian Joyce, are chomping at the bit and ready to go. If you’d like to reach them with questions and ideas of your own, their contact information is available over there.

As mentioned last week, we’ll be rolling out all six of these gradually, but we’re still taking applications for writers for both the Big East and Big Ten conferences, so please contact us at rushthecourt@yahoo.com with a writing sample if you’re interested in either one.

Last Monday we rolled out our first RTC microsite featuring the Atlantic Coast Conference.  It went so well that we figured why not keep going with this peculiar little idea.  Our intent with these microsites is to provide a far greater depth of coverage of each of the six power conferences in college basketball.  Whether those six leagues remain those six, or if they merge and split and negotiate into five, or even four, isn’t for us to decide.  But given their existing configuration where ten is 12 and 12 is ten, we’re pleased to announce that today marks the launch of our new Big 12 microsite.

As we stated when we launched the ACC microsite, the premise behind these things is rather simple. By focusing separately but comprehensively on these six individual conferences, we hope to provide a more targeted user experience without marginalizing the quality of commentary and analysis that our readers have come to expect from the national site.  As always, we expect that you’ll tell us if we’re not realizing that goal.

How to find it?  You can locate the Big 12 microsite by simply adding big-12 to the end of rushthecourt.net/. Or you can click on the fancy little Big 12 microsite button above at the top right (just below the ACC one). Or you can simply click here.  Our two Big 12 staffers, Danny Spewak and Clark Williams, have also been with RTC in several capacities in the past, but we know that they’re committed, hungry and ready to work to make this microsite a resounding success. If you’d like to reach them with questions and ideas of your own, their contact information is available on the microsite.

As mentioned last week, we’ll be rolling out all six of the microsites gradually, but we’re still taking applications for writers for both the Big East and Big Ten conference versions, so please contact us at rushthecourt@yahoo.com with a writing sample if you’re interested in either one.

You’ve probably noticed that little countdown clock above tells us that we’re a little more than eleven days from the first official practices of the 2011-12 college basketball season.  In many parts of the country, the leaves have started to change, there’s a nip in the air, and Halloween candy has taken over the grocery store shelves. Today also marks the first day of the RTC 2011-12 Season Preview, where we’ll be previewing all 31 Division I conferences and bringing you comprehensive coverage of the upcoming season over the next five weeks until the first games tip off on November 7.  What better time to also introduce our newest and perhaps most ambitious idea, the RTC microsites. the first of which rolls out today with the Atlantic Coast Conference.

The premise behind the RTC microsites is rather simple.  The breadth, scope and influence of the six power conferences on the sport of college basketball only continues to grow.  As much as we all love the mid-major schools, the focus of most fans falls on one or more of these six leagues.  The RTC microsites will endeavor to spotlight each conference at a level of detail that goes well beyond what the national site can or should do.  Each microsite will be staffed with at least two writers whose sole responsibility will be to keep up with the stories within their particular conference.  Our intent is that the quality of commentary and analysis that our readers have come to expect on the national site will transfer over to the microsites, and we hope that you’ll let us know if we’re not keeping to that standard.

You can find the ACC microsite by simply adding the three letters acc to the end of rushthecourt.net/.  Or you can click on the fancy little ACC microsite button above at the top right.  Or you can simply click here.  However you decide to navigate there, we hope you visit and stay for a while.  Our two ACC staffers, Matt Patton and Kellen Carpenter, have been with RTC in several capacities in the past, but both fellas really know this league and will do a great job with it over there just as they’ve done over here.  If you’d like to reach them with questions and ideas of your own, their contact information is available on the microsite.

We’ll be rolling out all six of the microsites gradually over the next couple of months, and we’re still taking applications for writers for both the Big East and Big Ten conference microsites, so please contact us at rushthecourt@yahoo.com with a writing sample if you’re interested.

Here’s hoping everyone had a superb Labor Day weekend to celebrate the end of summer and coming of fall.  It may have been college football weekend elsewhere across the sporting universe, but here at RTC we’ve been whiling ourselves thinking about the upcoming roundball season.  With that in mind, we’re pleased to announce a completely redesigned site, streamlining many of our existing features and adding a couple of new ones.  Our hope is that a simpler and sleeker interface will enhance the user experience while still offering the comprehensive commentary and analysis on college basketball news that we’re known for.

RTC Continues to Evolve...

The major changes to note are as follows:

• The Independent Voice of College Basketball.  We’re not quite sure how it happened, but in the four-plus years since the debut of RTC we’ve evolved from a one-man showcase of college hoops opinion and nonsense to a 40-person team of extremely talented writers showcasing college hoops opinion and nonsense.  Although we have a very basic affiliation with Big Lead Sports to provide advertising, we are one of the few remaining college basketball sites free from corporate overlords directing our content and analysis.  We are proud of our independence in terms of creative control, and the day that we lose that here will also be the same day we shut the whole thing down.  You as the reader may not always agree with our opinions here at RTC, but you can rest assured that you’re getting a legitimate and honest take.
• Conference Check-In Carousel/Nightly Nonsense Tabs.  This feature located at the top left of the site under the navigation bar will make it easier to keep up with our 31 conference correspondent updates (called Conference Check-Ins) during the regular season.  The most recent Check-In on a given day will post on the far left side under the “Latest Check-Ins” tab, and the carousel will allow readers to scroll back through the last 15 posts to find their favorite conferences.  Conference Check-Ins will resume weekly in mid-November.  On the right hand side of the carousel, you’ll notice a blue “Nightly Nonsense” tab, which will provide a daily listing of the key televised games of each day during the season for your viewing pleasure.  This feature will resume again in early November on Opening Night.
• TumblRTC.  You’ll note on the right sidebar that there’s a new widget we’re calling “TumblRTC.”  Tumblr is a blogging platform that many folks have fallen in love with in the past year, and we’re planning to give it a shot too.  The best way to describe how we hope to utilize it is “RTC for Busy People.” It’s not meant in any way to replace our long-form content on the home page; rather, we intend for our TumblRTC posts to complement it.  TumblRTC will be heavy on photos, quotes, videos, links and any other media we find and think might be interesting to you guys, and it will also provide readers with an interactive way to provide some of their own content back at us.  You will be able to see the last few TumblRTC posts on the RTC home page (above right) or you can see our entire stream at rushthecourt.net/tumblr/.
• RTC Microsites.  These six buttons for each of the power conferences currently sit at the top right of the page where the old Announcements box resided.  Over the next couple of months, we hope to start rolling out conference-specific ‘microsites’ focusing on all things college basketball within each of those six leagues — the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC (for as long as they exist).  Each microsite will have its own subdomain and dedicated writer(s), and the idea will be to cover those conferences with a depth of scope and analysis that is simply impossible on our nationally-focused home page.  Stay tuned on these — we’re very excited about them.  We’re still looking for talented writers to staff these six microsites, so please send us your information (i.e., area of interest, background, writing sample) to rushthecourt@yahoo.com if you think you’d be interested.

As always, none of this means anything if our readers don’t like what we’re doing, so feel free to share your feedback with us in the comments, via email or social media.  We’re always listening.

The editors and correspondents here at RTC were quite a happy bunch today upon taking a gander at Sports Illustrated’s Twitter 100.  SI polled 50 of their reporters, editors, and writers and, after distilling the numerous possibilities, they refined it down to a list of the 100 Twitter accounts the queried 50 consider “essential to their daily routine for finding news, information and entertainment from the sports world.” It looks like SI finally took note of the 300 subscriptions to the magazine we maintain, and the weekly bribery money we send to Davis, Winn and Glockner finally paid off, because…we’re on the list.

Our Twitter feed is manned pretty much ’round the clock by at least one of our three executive editors, but the Twitter feed wouldn’t be worth anything if the site itself wasn’t something we thought was worth our readers’ time, and much of the site’s quality is due to our cadre of correspondents around the country covering every conference for us. It may be one guy out of only a possible three doing the tweeting at any given time, but we count this as an honor for the whole RTC crew.

The 2011-2012 season — our fifth — will be here before we know it, and we think we’ve got some fun stuff in store for our faithful. We’ll keep tweeting as long as you keep engaging us in conversation, since that’s the point of this whole endeavor. So, many thanks, SI. We greatly appreciate the mention, and we’re proud to be on a list with so many people whose work (and tweets) we’ve long admired.

RTC is lucky to have partnered with Buffalo Wild Wings and the Reese’s Company to offer some great prizes this weekend during the Third Round of the NCAA Tournament.  Get your picks in prior to the first tip on Saturday at 12:15 PM ET.  You can email your responses to rushthecourt@yahoo.com or tweet at us @rushthecourt — either works, but please don’t do both.  Description of the games and prizes are below.

RTC is Offering Some Great Prizes This Weekend

Contest #1) There will be sixteen teams remaining after this weekend is finished.  Add up the total aggregate value of the sixteen seeds that will remain. (ex: #1 + #4 +#3 +#10 seeds = 18, etc.).  The closest two replies to the actual number will win this contest.

Prize:  Buffalo Wild Wings is offering prize packs that they will mail directly to your home.

Contest #2) Pick the highest scoring player in the Third Round, and give his total points scored to act as a tiebreaker.  (ex: Nolan Smith, 31 points).

Prize:  Reese’s is offering a case of Reese’s Cups for the winner of this contest.  Yes, it’s a lot of candy.  Also note that you can go to Reese’s Perfect Play for a shot at a million bucks.