Ed. Note – this is a sticky.  The new posts are immediately below this one.

Wanted: great writers or bloggers who are intimately knowledgeable with the hoops ins and outs of a conference of their choice.

                            Even Dick is On Board With RTC

Yes, we at RTC are looking to expand our breadth and reach.  With the season fast approaching (only 58 days until Midnight Madness), we are looking to broaden our exposure for the 2008-09 season by facilitating a mutually beneficial relationship with a conference correspondent from each of the 31 D1 leagues (we’d even consider an Independent correspondent if one exists…). 

If you already have a conference blog, great!  We’ll cross-post content that you may have already been doing anyway (in some capacity).  If you’re simply an interested writer looking to create a name for yourself as an expert in a conference, also great!  We’re interested in everyone. 

Depending on the conference the correspondent is covering, we envision a maximum of 2 posts/week that will summarize for our readers what they may have missed while they were keeping an eye on the team(s) or conference(s) they like best.  For the little guys, this is an opportunity to sell the readership of a national blog of the merits of your league and the teams/players to watch throughout the season.  For the money leagues, this is a chance to focus on details that only conference fans are knowledgeable about (i.e., rumors about playing time, local rivalry trash-talk, etc.). 

If you know of someone who would make a great conference correspondent, send us his name/blog/contact info. at rushthecourtATyahooDOTcom or leave the information in the comment section below.  If you are someone with those characteristics, do likewise.

We look forward to hearing from you.   

Update (9/11/08) :  the revised list of needed conferences is here.

Well, I was going to wait for the blog’s daddy to introduce me but it looks like he is MIA and I lack a certain patience to start posting so here goes. . .

I’ll be Rush The Court’s stepfather for the tournament (and possibly longer if the money is right) while the blog’s biological father goes off to Vegas, which I guess is sort of like how the typical real father/stepfather thing unfolds. A quick plug since “rtmsf” won’t allow me to change the site to a Christian Laettner shrine complete with video of a foot stomp on Aminu Timberlake (Sidenote: Aminu appears to be on LinkedIn.com), I normally and somewhat infrequently pen a blog Health Care Watch about the health care industry that gets roughly 1/100th the traffic RTC does or 1/1000th what RTC does when it posts pictures of Erin Andrews. Apparently, Bruce Pearl doesn’t keep up-to-date on health care.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I’ll be posting pretty frequently throughout the week with links to relevant articles/video and the occasional analysis/prediction. I’m planning on trying to live blog (not the fake day-after blog that rtmsf’s boy Simmons does where he miraculously “predicts” what will happen a minute later) for those unfortunate souls who can’t watch the games or like me don’t have passionate college basketball fans around them. I am also thinking about creating an AOL chat room so you can have a real-time chat with each other and give me feedback along with the regular comments section on the site. This is all pending the approval of the blog’s biological father upon his return and that he won’t go apeshit about what I am doing to his baby. Let me know what you think and we will try to convince him.

I’ll leave you with some links for today while I try to figure out what I’m going to write for the next week or three.

– NCAA tourney is the best, but it could be even better: ESPN.com’s Gene Wojciechowski (no relation to the 1998 National Defensive Player of the Year and huge snub from ESPN’s 25 Greatest College Basketball Players of All-Time) does what any writer would do when he has no idea to write about; he writes a list on how to make something better. In this case, he picked our beloved NCAA tournament. I’ll probably end up making a post like this during that interminable wait until the first game on Thursday (if you think I’m missing a game in there that’s a hint about one suggestion I will be making).

– The Bracket, Cracked: From the same geniuses who overvalued subprime mortgages and created the collateral debt obligations that sent the stock market into its recent freefall comes a pseudo-scientific way to fill out your bracket. Actually that’s a little exaggeration since the people who write for the Wall Street Journal are actually the ones who couldn’t get jobs on Wall Street so they didn’t actually cause the credit meltdown. Anyways, it’s a decent read with a couple extra features linked on there.

…and we’re back.

Suffice it to say that this year’s holidays haven’t been a personal best for us, but we’re back at it and ready to carry on with our lives (and consequently, the blog). Hope everyone out there had a great one.

Just briefly wanted to take a moment to update the site.

It’s a good thing it’s Finals Week at most schools because there hasn’t been much worth talking about anyway. But the sad and regrettable truth is that we’re dealing with a serious family matter this week and simply haven’t had the energy and wherewithal to attend to the site in the meantime.

Hopefully we’ll be back at it soon enough, but things are tough around here right now and we appreciate the patience.

Best Regards.

Welcome to Detroit

Apologies to the three of you who were anxiously awaiting our thoughts on the last two nights of the annual Big Ten emasculation at the hands of the ACC, but suffice it to say, we weren’t just being lazy. No, rather, our post-holiday travel enjoyment was mitigated by a 24-hr organizational clusterfark situated on the premises of the Detroit Intl. Airport and perpetrated by Lucifer’s personal air carrier, Northwest Airlines, and his innkeeper, Best Western.

Our Hotel in the Motor City

We can now safely say that we’ve seen the seventh circle of Hell and it without question resides in the Motor City. Although populated by the Devil’s henchmen intent on making your life miserable while you wait on something anything good to happen, the airport is overall a clean and otherwise redeeming place. But as for the city itself… well, the word dump when used to describe Detroit quite frankly insults the word. Actually, it doesn’t insult the word as much as bend over it and drop a 15-inch steaming log right onto its new shoes.

Of course, everything steams in D-town because it’s always about twenty degrees and snowing out.

Now that we’ve sufficiently deloused and fumigated ourselves and our luggage, we’re ready to get back to the games. As for Detroit, consider yourselves forewarned…

Update:  Detroit just unveiled its logo for the 2009 F4, which it is hosting.  There’s probably no press pass coming our way for that one! 

Has it really been six months since we opened the doors around here?

It has. On April 12, we shot out of the womb like a bloody mess…

…and now are just getting to where we can crawl around a little bit.

But 132 posts later, we’re still moving forward and more excited than ever to keep it going.

Bring on the Season!!

We’re back from vacation.

Wendy, I’m home!

Yes, we know you were waiting with baited breath for the next installment of our pithy commentary and analysis, but unlike certain charlatans working for large four-lettered sports news organizations, we don’t have enough friends (nor funds) to hire a guest blogger. Nor do we simply “forget” to finish posts, but that’s another issue for another time.

There’s a ton of things to get to, so for now, it’ll have to suffice with a simple agenda for the week. Here’s what’s coming:

• Thursday night is the long-awaited 2007 NBA Draft, also known in common parlance as the Oden/Durant Sweepstakes. Everyone has an opinion on whom should be taken where, but we really don’t do projected drafts. What we will do, however, is take a look at the history of the NBA Draft through the prism of the many colleges that the players attended. Out of the more than two thousand players drafted in the first two rounds of the NBA Draft from 1949 to present, which schools are best represented? Who are the surprises and who are the disappointments? Which schools have trended up and down throughout the six decades of the draft? The first part of this snapshot analysis should roll out early this week and continue up through draft day.
• We’re also nearly ready to introduce Part III of our NCAA Tournament Analysis, which will take a closer look at the raw numbers relating to the success of each conference during the 65 (64) team era. Building from this, Part IV will examine the conference overachievers and underachievers (assuming there are any), using a similar methodology to the one used for the schools themselves. Depending on how the NBA Draft material plays, these two posts should be coming out over the next week.
• Finally, we’ll also try to find time to make some noise about some of the news that we’ve missed over the past week or so, including more of the coaching carousel, Indiana getting a new barn, and an NC State fan who told us over the weekend that “Sidney Lowe is going to be a beast.”

Welcome to Rush the Court, soon to be the best college basketball blog on the interwebs. 

Only six months and three days until: