When Percy Miller (aka Lil’ Romeo) announced that he was leaving the USC basketball team earlier this month it was more of an entertainment story than a college basketball story. The rapper/actor currently has already released six albums with a 7th album coming out later this year, but his college basketball career, which we never expected to amount to much, has been significantly less profilic. In two seasons with the Trojans, Miller (a Tim Floyd “recruit”) appeared in nine games for a grand total of 19 minutes scoring five points on four field goal attempts (1.25 PPS!!!). After Miller left USC, Trojans coach Kevin O’Neill issued the following statement: “Percy thought it was in his best interest that he pursue his (entertainment) career rather than play basketball. . . I was able to evaluate him. I think his future is more off the court than on the court, which I think he understands. . . He’s a great guy and was a pleasure to have around. I think he made a decision that was in the best interest of his future.”

While that seems like a fairly benign (and true) statement, Miller was a little less than graceful when he issued the following Tweet: “College Bball is all politics…I’ve never quit n never will.If my scholarship is wanted thats wat Yahoo should clarify.” [Ed. Note: We don’t even know where to begin with grammar on Tweets so we’ll let this [sic] cover the entire Tweet.]  Although that may be the final shot that Miller fires in his college basketball career (bringing him down to 1 PPS) we would be remiss if we did not provide you with what will be our lasting image of Miller playing “defense” against J.R. Smith at Vince Young’s Celebrity All-Star Game.

First of Several Meetings Between O & K?

In the annual ceremony for the NCAA Champion at the White House Rose Garden, Duke’s 2010 title-winning team visited with President Barack Obama today in a jocular proceeding where the CiC quipped that the Blue Devils won it all in an effort to stick it to him after he picked UNC to win the crown in 2009.  Other than starting off by calling Coach K’s team the “Bluke” (presumably) Due Devils, his best line came later in the speech when he ragged on his assistant (and former Dookie and teabagger extraordinaire — but not that kind) Reggie Love for shooting too much during pickup games.  If you remember Love’s game at Duke during the early 2000s, you’re aware that the bruising forward’s few minutes were meant for hustle, defense and rebounding — his career total of 75 points attests to that fact. 

The entire ceremony is below.   

KU head man Bill Self has had a tumultuous couple of months.  First, that Northern Iowa thing followed by the loss of key underclassmen Cole Aldrich and Xavier Henry to the NBA Draft.  What better way to get over your troubles than to dance the night away wearing a white leisure suit with a gigantic collar.  For merely $200, you too can join the coach for some electric slides (??) at his Basketball Boogie on June 11 at the Sprint Center in Kansas City, so don’t say we didn’t warn you. 

Just imagine the outcry if Duke had gotten a call like this. . .

If you’re like us today, you’re probably feeling a little bit like you do when you realize that the blue lights in your rear view mirror weren’t intended for you even though you were about +15 over the speed limit.  As the friendly patrolman roars by on your left, that adrenaline-fueled fear of getting a ticket (or worse) melts into a somewhat euphoric state of well-being as you realize that you’ve dodged a terribly unpleasant situation.  We all spent the last two months lying hogtied on the tracks watching the 96-team locomotive steaming toward us, and the surprising (shocking?) news that the NCAA will instead move to only a 68-team scenario feels like Clint Eastwood or Rambo or freakin’ Michael Cera stepped in at the last moment to save the day.  Perspective is everything.

NCAA HQ Can Cancel That Security Detail Now

Yet imagine for a moment if we’d never heard about the 96-team debacle from the inner circles of the NCAA.  Without that particularly bilious perspective to abhor, excoriate, lambaste and dread for months leading up to today, the news that the NCAA was expanding to 68 teams would probably have been met with complete and utter derision across the board.  Four play-in games, pfshaw!  Yet when considered against the alternative, today’s news was met with guarded optimism and in some cases downright celebration.  Was this a brilliant strategem of managing expectations pulled off on us, the unsuspecting public, by the cunning NCAA (probably not), or simply a realization that the organization was treading ever so closely to killing off the goose that laid the golden egg (more likely)?  Either way, the decision is a reasonable and defensible one that we can all live with, so let’s get to the business of reviewing it now and analyzing it to death in coming weeks.

Here’s what some of the best in the business have to say…

Luke Winn, CNNSI – More importantly, it represents a major victory for college basketball. The NCAA did the right thing. While I’d prefer a pure, 64-team format without play-in games, 68 teams is immensely more palatable than 96. The sanctity of the NCAA tournament has been preserved for the time being, and that’s something to celebrate, even if Jim Isch, the NCAA’s interim president, admitted that 68 wasn’t guaranteed to be the format for the entire length of the new TV deal. […]  Public reaction had to have played at least some role in them settling on 68 rather than 96. The public’s response to the 96 idea was overwhelmingly negative, and I wonder if Isch, Shaheen, CBS and Turner didn’t want to be regarded as the villains who ruined college sports’ crown jewel.  […]  Eventually, we’ll get back to worrying about how Isch left the expansion door open by saying two words: “for now.” But for now, at least, we can rejoice. The NCAA tournament has been saved.

Mike DeCourcy, Sporting News – Turns out, they were listening. Nobody came out and said the public’s revulsion at the prospect of a 96-team field was a factor in settling on 68, but if you’d loved the idea like chocolate-chip cookies, we’d be talking about a far different NCAA Tournament next March.  It wasn’t at the start of negotiations that someone with CBS/Turner suggested a 68-team tournament would be workable with the dollar amounts being discussed. That came after the general public declared 96 teams to be a product no more appealing than the XFL.  […]  How should a 68-team tournament work?  That’s fairly obvious. Although it might be most fair to have the teams at the bottom of the field play for the right to be No. 16 seeds, it’s hard to imagine anyone at CBS or Turner Sports, the networks that just agreed to pay roughly $740 million annually to televise the tournament, being thrilled about showing four games that this year might have involved such matchups as Robert Morris-Winthrop or Morgan State-East Tennessee State.  The solution would be to have the last eightat-large teams play for the right to be seeded into the middle of the field—as No. 12s or No. 11s. This season, that might have meant Virginia Tech-Minnesota and Illinois-Florida.  People would watch those games. CBS and Turner saved us from the dread of a 96-team tournament. They deserve something for their money.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you were anticipating some clarity coming out of the BCS meetings in Arizona this week involving league commissioners from the various heavy-hitters across the college sports landscape, you’ll have to wait a little longer.  It was widely speculated that Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany may have used the forum to announce some form of targeted expansion for his conference that could have blown a torpedo-sized hole in the existing structure of major college athletics.  Didn’t happen.  In fact, according to the commish of the richest conference in D1 sports, a whole bunch of nothing is going on.

There are no announcements here and there are no notifications here.”  Delany said the expansion process remains in an early phase. He said it’s too early to tell whether the 11-team conference would add one or as many as five teams. He said his thinking wasn’t being heavily influenced by a desire to hold a conference championship game in December. He also said he doesn’t know how quickly an expanded league could be put together.  He would not deny, however, that programs are being evaluated for their potential fit in the Big Ten.  “I didn’t say we weren’t at that phase, I said we are not at the phase of any need to provide notice to an institution, that we were in formal discussions with an institution.”

We counted at least five uses of the negative in his two quotes there.  Delaney uses two more in another interview with USA Today, where he said the Big Ten is: 

“not anywhere near” [approaching or adding new schools.]  “We have not accelerated anything” [with respect to the 12-18 month timetable.]

Delany’s manner of speaking reminds us of the old unknown unknown bit from Donald Rumsfeld in the mid-2000s.  It wouldn’t have surprised us to hear Delany segue into a similar lecture on what the knowns and unknowns are with respect to conference expansion, all the while dropping double-negatives and enough qualifiers and derivatives to make Goldman Sachs blush these days. 

The bottom line is this, though.  Missouri, Pitt, Rutgers, UConn and Notre Dame fans can all rest easy now.  Until they can’t anymore, which will happen at a time and place known only to Delany and his cronies  and will be pushed upon the American people without provocation or consideration.  All we ask is that when it comes time to actually add one, three, or five new teams to the Big Ten Conference, Delany doesn’t continue to play this game by telling us that, for example, “Missouri may not be under consideration in the current phase, but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t ever under consideration nor does it preclude them from future consideration.  It wouldn’t make good business sense to not consider them at some point.”  Um, thanks.

With the announcement today that the new downtown Louisville basketball arena will be named after local corporation KFC Yum!, the artery-clogging conglomerate that brings you such tasty fare as Pizza Hut’s Meat Lovers Cheesy Bites pizza (460 calories per slice) and Taco Bell’s Volcano Nachos (1000 calories) in addition to the new gastronomic delight of chicken, bacon and cheese known as KFC’s Double Down (1,430 mg of sodium), you’ll forgive us if our burgeoning chest pain means we can’t muster the energy to cheer this latest encroachment of corporate America into college athletics. 

So YUM!

Cardiologists throughout the area, however, put deposits down on additional properties in Mexico as Yum! will pay $13.5M over the next ten years for naming rights to the arena.  The deal also gives the company as many as eight concession spots throughout the building, ensuring a steady stream of in-game revenue from the good citizens of what Men’s Fitness ranked as the tenth fattest city in America in 2009.   

To their credit, the key principals in this deal are toeing the party line with their celebratory talking points.  Jim Host, chairman of the Louisville Arena Authority, said with respect to this deal, “We’re just tickled to death with the way it worked out.”  Louisville mayor Jerry Abramson added, “This is the icing on the cake, the cherry on top the icing.”  Color us cynical, but these statements are no more coincidental than Rick Pitino finding the keys to Porcini’s at the bottom of his trousers pocket.

Luckily, Louisville officials have shown considerable foresight in this regard and have already covered all of their bases.  We kid you not.

Now if that isn’t a classic example of rack ’em and stack ’em, then we don’t know our process improvement theory.  Louisville will host defending national runner-up Butler on November 16, 2010, to christen the building.  Over/under on fan visits to the Norton care center that night? 

Awesome or Awful?  Discuss.

Maybe this was overlooked amidst the relentless barrage of close games and buzzer-beaters yesterday, but West Virginia’s Da’Sean Butler had a little fun with the Twitter at the expense of conference rival Georgetown’s shocking loss to Ohio University, 97-83.

Spike Lee, of course, was at last week’s Big East Championship game wearing a Georgetown jersey.  He claims that he’s been a Hoya fan since the Ewing era, and maybe he has, but it’s still plenty interesting for a New York guy through and through to be seen rooting for a team from the District instead.  Much like you, we just watched that Reggie Miller vs. Spike Lee thing on ESPN’s Thirty at Thirty this week, so maybe Butler is auditioning for the new role of Spike’s nemesis?

As for Da’Smack, we’re not sure that making fun of a first round loser is the greatest idea one day before playing your own opening game (and especially the way the Big East has looked so far), but hey, we’re not the guy with seven hundred and forty-one game-winners this season either.  If he can back it up…

And so can Vermont’s Marqus Blakely.  Welcome to the Dance, kid.