We have conference tournaments starting this week, and as of right now there is but a single team in Division I college basketball that has not won a game in its conference:

Yes, the Fordham Rams.  They are 0-14 in the Atlantic 10 this season.  They were 1-15 last year, with that sole win coming in a 67-65 squeaker at St. Bonaventure on January 28, 2009.  Since then — 24 straight conference losses.

To be fair, the Rams weren’t really predicted to improve on last year’s 3-25 (1-15) performance, especially after their best player, sophomore guard Jio Fontan, decided to skip town after five games and head for USC where he’ll be eligible in December 2010.  As a freshman in 2008-09, Fontan led the team in scoring (15.3 PPG) and assists (4.7 APG) and was putting up similar numbers this year.

One bright light for Fordham has been the play of freshman Chris Gaston.  Averaging 18.0 PPG and leading the team with a 44.9 FG%, he’s won or shared multiple Atlantic 10 Freshman of the Week awards so far this year.    That shooting percentage is remarkably good, by the way, since Fordham ranks 344th of 345 D1 teams in that category, shooting 37.7% on the year.  And there is further good news; last month the Fordham Board of Trustees voted to increase the men’s basketball budget, raising it from the very depths into the top third when compared to the hoops budgets of the other A-10 schools.

As for the remainder of this season, they have two games left.  The first is Wednesday night, their final home game of the season against Xavier.  Their last game of the year is a noon tipoff this Friday at Duquesne (the last two teams in the A-10 do not qualify for the post-season tournament).  I wouldn’t get excited — the oracle known as KenPom gives Fordham just a 2% and 4% chance, respectively, to win those games.  Fordham has never suffered a winless conference season as a member of the Atlantic 10, Patriot League, or MAAC, going back almost 30 years.

Eating a conference doughnut isn’t as rare an occurrence in college basketball as you might think.  Last year, DePaul (Big East, 0-18), Air Force (Mountain West, 0-16), and Southeast Missouri (Ohio Valley, 0-18) all pulled it off.  Three teams did it in the 2007-08 season: Rice (CUSA, 0-16), Colorado State (Mountain West, 0-16), and Oregon State (Pac-10, 0-18).  In fact, there have been only three seasons out of the last 20 in which every team won at least one conference game, and those were the consecutive seasons between 2004-2007.  There is some reason for optimism for the future of Fordham basketball, but that statistic will stand, and they’ll be the only winless team in conference play this season unless they can beat the odds and come through in one of their remaining two chances.

Herb Magee goes for his 903rd win as a college basketball coach tonight as he and his Philadelphia University Rams host Goldey-Beacom College.  A win this evening, if it happens, will put Magee at the top of the all-time NCAA wins list for a men’s basketball coach.  Magee tied Bobby Knight on that list this past Saturday by achieving his 902nd win in a buzzer-beater against Post University.

It’s easy to tilt our heads, offer a short patronizing applause, and then forget about men like Magee, or like Don Meyer, the all-time wins leader for a men’s college coach (many of his wins came at Lipscomb when they were a member of the NAIA) who announced that he’d be retiring at the end of this season, because they don’t coach at the so-called “elite” level.  But these men don’t need our patronization.  They don’t coach basketball because it’s cute, because it’s easy — yeah, you try it — or because they want attention.  Magee (and certainly Meyer) could have had all the attention he wanted, given the number of offers he’s had for higher profile jobs.  These are men who coach basketball and stay at the Division II level or lower because this is where they feel they can best be both coaches and educators.  It’s where they feel they can do the most good for their student/athletes when teaching them about existence both on and off the basketball floor, and/or because they know that the brighter spotlight inherent in the higher-profile jobs also comes with innumerable extra headaches that might compromise what they’re really out to achieve.

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Ryan Restivo is the RTC correspondent for the CAA and an occasional contributor. 

I don’t think this is a news flash but the BracketBusters format is broken. The teams that really could have benefitted from BracketBuster games such as Cornell and St. Mary’s chose not to participate.  Both of those schools could have used another chance to prove their strength against the at-large field in an effort to bolster their resume for March Madness.  Until the tournament expands to 96 or 100 or 347 teams, there were only two headline games in BracketBusters this year and both were a resounding dud. Northern Iowa blew out Old Dominion and Siena could not hang with ranked Butler in Hinkle Fieldhouse. However, if you are a fan of mid-major college basketball, you probably got to see teams that will be showcased in this year’s NIT or other postseason events.

Meanwhile, let’s take a look at the winners and losers of this past weekend’s BracketBusters.

Winner: Missouri Valley Conference. The Valley quietly went 7-3 in the event starting with a Northern Iowa crushing of Old Dominion at home on Friday night. There’s a good chance that Northern Iowa clinched an at-large berth should they fall in their conference tournament and the Valley could benefit from the lack of major conference at-large bids by bringing in two. It will likely not match the four it put in 2006 but the winner of this conference will be a dark horse for an upset come mid-March.

Loser: Siena. The Saints had the lead at halftime against Butler but could not find the basket in the second half, eventually falling by 17 at Hinkle Fieldhouse. Siena lost every game against top-50 RPI opponents this year, and unless Siena wins the MAAC Tournament, the Saints are off the bubble.

Winner: Utah State. The Aggies are going to be on the fence for an at-large bid only because of their weak non-conference schedule. But their tournament resume got a little stronger Saturday with a 10-point win over visiting Wichita State. Utah State’s claim to fame this year is a 10-point home win over BYU. One statistical reason the Aggies should be in? They are the nation’s best (43%) from behind the arc and are fifth in the nation in free throw percentage at 77%. The only problem they have, other than a weak schedule, is that five of the six Aggie losses have been on the road so it will be interesting to see how they handle a road-neutral environment.

Loser: Colonial Athletic Association. The CAA went 3-9 in BracketBusters and blew two games in almost the same way over this weekend. George Mason’s Ryan Pearson drove too hard to the hole and got called for charging late with a chance to tie the game against Charleston, and GMU lost by two. Northeastern’s Matt Janning got called on a similar charge with a chance to take the lead in their game against Louisiana Tech and also lost by two. This was a weekend where if the CAA could grab a few of their five TV games it would have given the conference a great chance at getting multiple bids for the first time since in several year. However, the CAA managed to win only one of their TV games and the non-TV games weren’t any better. Every CAA team that went on the road lost, and lost by an average of 11.5 points. Unfortunately, it looks like the CAA will be a one-bid conference again this year

Ryan Restivo of the MAAC-based SienaSaintsBlog is the RTC correspondent for the Colonial Athletic Association. SienaSaintsBlog now features exclusive video! When not covering the CAA for Rush The Court, Ryan writes about Fantasy Baseball on Rotosavants.com, on his own website RyanRestivo.com and at SienaSaintsBlog.com.  Ryan will take your questions here.

We know that Kentucky crossed the finish line first in the quest to reach the 2,000-win plateau back on December 21st, but the race for second has become pretty tight, as well.  Kansas started the season in third position in total wins with 1,970 victories and have added 25 so far this season.  North Carolina started the season with 1,984 wins, just four behind Kentucky, but have only added 14 this year.  We’re fairly sure you’ve already done the math on this, but we’ll go ahead and tell you that the score going into this weekend currently stands at UNC with 1,998 and Kansas with 1,995.

Each team’s remaining regular season games are as follows:

No, Coach W. You only need two.

North Carolina

• Tomorrow 2/20 @ Boston College
• Wednesday 2/24 vs Florida State
• Saturday 2/27 @ Wake Forest
• Tuesday 3/2 vs Miami (FL)
• Saturday 3/6 @ Duke

It's now down to five, Coach.

Kansas

• Tomorrow 2/20 vs Colorado
• Monday 2/22 vs Oklahoma
• Saturday 2/27 @ Oklahoma State
• Wednesday 3/3 vs Kansas State
• Saturday 3/6 @ Missouri

It’s true that the Duke/North Carolina rivalry produces amazing games no matter what the teams are ranked, but one would have to admit that UNC’s chances in Cameron Indoor in the regular season finale is not likely to work out for them, so that leaves four games to win two.  KenPom has a grim outlook for the Tar Heels, though.  His calculations predict that UNC will win only that game against Miami on 3/2 and finish the regular season with 1,999 wins, meaning that they’d have to pick up a game in the ACC Tournament to get to 2,000 victories this season.

Whether they’re second or third, Kansas has the chance for a truly memorable close to the regular season, as you can see.  If they win out — and that’s even tougher than it looks, with that schedule — they’d be celebrating win #2,000 in that final game against Missouri.  KenPom’s Kansas page predicts the Jayhawks will win all five of them, with their toughest challenge obviously coming in the last game (predicted 63% chance of winning) against Missouri.  What a wave of momentum to launch Kansas into the post-season, though, if they can pull it off:  the #1 ranking, a win on senior night against rival K-State, and then the program’s 2,000th win to finish it against another huge rival at Missouri.

Both programs have some bigger issues on their minds right now, but what do you think?  Kentucky’s already taken the Win, but as far as the the Place and Show positions in the Race For 2,000 — will Kansas win five games before North Carolina wins two?

For the third week in a row, Michael Rothstein at AnnArbor.com has taken a straw poll of nearly fifty journalists from around the nation who have a vote in one of the major national Player of the Year awards (presumably the AP, Wooden, and Naismith).  Like the annual Heisman Trophy analyses that pop up every November, the straw poll gives us a sense as to who the top NPOY candidates are heading into the final few weeks of the season as well as any trends for better or worse that are occuring.  This week’s list, released Wednesday prior to tonight’s games, is below.

Right now it appears to be a two-horse race between Ohio State’s Evan Turner and Kentucky’s John Wall, but for the first time in the three weeks of the straw poll, The Villain received more votes.  It’s unclear whether these votes were tallied before Wall’s near-triple double on Tuesday night, but Turner more than held his own tonight against Purdue with 29/7/5 assts himself (although OSU lost the game).  If DeMarcus Cousins keeps putting in the work for John Calipari’s Wildcats, he could begin shaving off even more of Wall’s supporters, as murmurs of an anti-Wall hype backlash are already surfacing in some circles.

Evan Turner is #1, For Now...

It’s somewhat interesting to us that Scottie Reynolds outpolled Syracuse’s Wesley Johnson in the Big East, even though Johnson has been the more celebrated player throughout the season — their relative placement on this list could literally come down to one game in Syracuse on February 27.  If Kansas keeps winning, expect to see Sherron Collins rise up this list fairly quickly, especially if he has another big game where he leads his team to a close victory.  We wouldn’t think Cole Aldrich will have a similar track, though, simply because his overall numbers are so pedestrian compared to the other names above him on the list (note: we recognize his substantial impact, but NPOY winners have better numbers than Aldrich will have this year).

With nearly four weeks until Selection Sunday, keep in mind that college basketball writers are a fickle bunch.  At this time of year, one particularly inspiring nationally-televised game can seal it for a player near the top of this list.  For example, who could ever forget the dominating Kenyon Martin performance against DePaul that sealed his NPOY award in 2000, or the 30/16 game that a baby-faced freshman Kevin Durant dropped in a double-overtime win against rival Texas A&M in 2007?  There may not seem like there’s a lot of basketball to be played, but writers fairly or unfairly place much more emphasis on the games near the end of the season when making their selections.  It’ll be worth keeping an eye on this straw poll the final few weeks to see how it ends up.

Ray Floriani of College Chalktalk is the RTC correspondent for the MAAC and NEC conferences as well as an occasional contributor.

NEWARK, NJ – North Carolina, UConn, Siena… It just occurred that some of the strange goings-on lately can be attributed to a jinx. Namely with yours truly and Rush the Court. Oh, don’t read this wrong. I love my association with RTC . I enjoy the work as a Northeast Conference and MAAC correspondent. Also enjoy the occasional side article the opportunity affords to produce. 

Every other week a recap is submitted on the Northeast Conference and MAAC; besides that is an occasional article of general interest. In November at Coaches vs. Cancer one of my features was on the North Carolina cheerleaders. Well, you can see what has transpired in Chapel Hill these past few weeks.  Over Thanksgiving another one of my articles was a profile on the UConn cheer/spirit program. Watching the Huskies effort against Cincinnati on Saturday all I could think was NIT. How about UNC-UConn at the Garden in an NIT semi?  It could happen.

The Jinxster Doing His Work

Twice last year I wrote about officiating Richard Codey’s basketball games. Codey is a basketball devotee, a coach and was the New Jersey Senate leader. Was is the key word. He no longer heads the Senate.

Friday morning I sent my MAAC wrap-up across several time zones (with no Rick Majerus-like complaints of the cyberspace road trip). At the beginning I noted how the MAAC tournament in March will be “Siena’s to lose.” The undefeated Saints have the experience, talent, coaching and location. That evening Siena went out and lost at Niagara. On seeing the score I thought I was to blame. On second thought I did not officiate their game nor did I drive the team bus to Niagara Falls, Ontario, and not NY by mistake. None of those things happened, so in other words the game had a great crew and I’m sure Fran McCaffery’s club arrived well-rested and prepared to play. What happened? A quick tempo free look…

The Purple Eagles scored their 87-74 victory because they were almost unconscious from the floor and cared for the ball with a great turnover rate. Niagara also moved the ball extremely well with 22 assists on 33 field goals and shot 26 of 40 (65%) from two-point range. Joe Mihalich’s club all appeared to follow the lead of sophomore forward Kalief Edwards , a 7 PPG scorer, who shot 9-14 from the floor for a 20-point night.

No Jinx Here (Yet)...

So forget the jinx. In Siena’s as well as Carolina’s and UConn’s case as well. Just one thing. At the Big East-SEC Challenge at the Garden in December I met and chatted with the Kentucky cheer squad. Even took a picture with them. Still, no one asked about getting an article done about them. Guess they knew better. Didn’t want to jeopardize a deep run in the NCAAs next month.

According to this report from Kentucky basketball blog BigBlueCats.com, DeMarcus Cousins’ cell phone number has been leaked onto the internet via various social networking media, and he is receiving phone calls from the fans and students from various SEC schools.  In the video below, which was shown on local Lexington television on Monday evening, Cousins says the messages being left range from morons spouting racial remarks to people asking him to…er…make out.

Ahead of Kentucky’s game against Mississippi State on Tuesday, the majority of the calls are evidently coming from Bulldogs fans.  The best part of the video, in our view, is when Cousins states that not only is he now having conversations with some of the antagonistic callers, but he’s going to wait to change his number until tomorrow — after the Mississippi State vs Kentucky game.

After watching this, there are obviously several items of note:

• DeMarcus’ nickname is “Boogie”…and now there are headbands.  We bet this is going to be the Kentucky (and maybe national) equivalent of those weird red berets made by Roots Canada that the world went nuts over during the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano.  We’re a little surprised that we don’t hear more “Boooooogie” cat-calls (see what I did, there?) during games by the Rupp Arena fans when he scores, or whatever.
• DeMarcus Cousins can already handle himself around a slew of media, impressive for this age.
• And the most important thing:  DeMarcus Cousins is a very, very funny man.

Apparently this story was announced at its creation, but that was before the start of this website and well, we’re not tied in closely enough to Oklahoma State University to have known about it otherwise.  News today, however, that OSU had filed a claim in Oklahoma court to recover $33M+ in premium payments from a Texas-based life insurance firm called Lincoln National piqued our interest.  Our first question was… what is a university doing paying life insurance premiums?  We haven’t checked the Supreme Court’s decisions today, but last we looked, universities (unlike corporations) were not persons, and as such, cannot live or die in the sense required by most insurance companies.  The answer was a little startling. 

In March 2007, Oklahoma State announced its new “Gift of a Lifetime” donorship program, a seemingly-progressive idea that would ‘lock in’ as much as $280M of funding over the next 20-25 years for the athletic department.  The premise is undoubtedly macabre: twenty-eight prominent, wealthy and (lest we forget) old OSU donors would allow the university to take out $10M life insurance policies on each of them, with the expectation that when they croak in the next couple of decades, the school would reap the benefits of the policies.  In order to start paying the premiums, uber-Cowboy alumnus T. Boone Pickens (who brought the idea to bear) even fronted a loan of $10M to the university. 

Sounds like a great idea, right?  Everybody has to die, and the odds are greater that those doing the dying are people who are already old.  It’s a can’t-miss.  The problem is that insurance companies such as Lincoln National aren’t in the business of giving away money, so they use all these neat little actuarial tables with lots of fancy numbers and formulas to figure out how to screw the consumer minimize their risk and maximize their profits.  And herein lies the rub.  The premiums that Oklahoma State must pay on an annual basis are ridiculously expensive!  According to reports out today, OSU paid the first two premiums of $16M+ without so much as seeing the terms of the policies.  Some simple math tells you that a yearly outlay of that kind of coin will put you in a hole very fast if those donors are having a particularly healthy year — in fact, a few more years at that rate and the OSU brass may have been pushing Washington a little harder for those ‘death panels’ we heard so much about last summer. 

OSU Will Strike Down Upon Thee...

It looks like today’s ridiculous schedule of college basketball games just got a little lighter as the SEC, Arkansas, and Mississippi decided to postpone this afternoon’s game until tomorrow due to inclement weather. The game, which was to be played at 4 PM EST today, has been pushed back to 7 PM EST tomorrow (the article listed CST times). Unfortunately due to the time change the game will not be televised.

Rush The Court Central Command  
RTC Towers  
28 January 2010  

Even Duke RTCs Occasionally

Hey.  How you doin’ out there?  Good, good to hear.  You know, it doesn’t seem that long ago (even though it was) that all of us here at RTC were college students.  God, those were some sweet times.  Lining up for tickets, going to every home game and as many road games as we could, turning a two-hour game into a whole-day event, making signs, coming up with catcalls for our opponents…ah, such wonderful years.  The game was ours back then, and we’ve since turned it over to you.  And we love what you’ve done with it.  Fantastic job, really.  It’s a great time to be a fan of the game, especially if you’re a student.  Strong work.  

One thing we’ve noticed in the past couple of weeks or so, though, is an increase in the number of court rushes, or “RTCs,” after wins.  Oh yeah, we know how fun it is.  We’ve got a few of those under our belts.  But it’s that increase that we wanted to talk to you about.  That’s why we’re writing.  We want to talk about how it’s being overdone, and not just by a little.  All the guys here at RTC, after four five a number of years as undergrads, we only had maybe one or two apiece.  It should be that rare.  Hey, calm down, we’re not trying to ruin your good time.  When it’s time to rush, we want you out there.  But it’s kind of like when you’re going out at night — we want you to have standards.  And, like so many times AFTER going out at night, we definitely don’t want you to wake up the next day, have the memory come flooding back to you, and have that “Oh, God…what have I done?!?” moment.  You know, like when you realize someone’s over there, so you roll over, turn off the camera, and…well, never mind.  That’s a story for another post.  Anyway, let’s get back to how this court-rushing exuberance has gotten out of hand.  

Good court coverage. Extra points for usage of blimp.

You know how hard it is for us in particular to say that.  But people are talking.  Gregg Doyel is talking about you.  Seth Davis is talking about you.  Other bloggers are talking about you.  Every commentator on TV is talking about you.  And if you were involved in one of the recent RTCs that was obviously uncalled for, then your families, friends, and neighbors are talking about you.  None of it’s flattering.  You don’t want that, do you?  People are definitely e-mailing and tweeting and commenting, asking us about it because of what we call ourselves around here.  Again, we don’t want to spoil the fun.  We know that RTCing will always exist.  There’s no more chance of it going away than there is of crowds actually taking Bob Knight’s advice and chanting “Great Job!” after victories over rival teams (though we despise the “overrated” chant).  It’s just not realistic to think it will ever stop.  But like we said — this is all about having standards. 

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