While most of the college basketball world will be focused on the game between North Carolina and Michigan State on the USS Carl Vinson on Veterans Day there are plenty of other schools that are doing their part to honor military personnel. The UNC-Michigan State game will be attended almost entirely by military personnel, who have already been pre-selected, but if you are a veteran and were not selected to be on the ship to watch the game there are other opportunities.

Veterans Can Attend A Handful Of Games For Free On Veterans Day (Credit: AP Photo/U.S. Navy - Seaman Amanda Huntoon)

We have compiled a list of those opportunities based on what the host schools for Fridays games had on their websites as of late on Wednesday night (yes, we sifted through about 120 school web sites with some easier to navigate than others). If you know of any others, let us know so we can add them to the list. Our current list (all start times are local):

• Air Force: Discounted admission ($5) for all military personnel with ID (active or retired) for the game against Army, which starts at 7:30 PM, as well as the rest of the All-Military Classic this weekend (featuring Citadel and VMI). It isn’t stated on the website, but we confirmed with Air Force media relations.
• Arkansas: Free admission for all military personnel with ID (active or retired) for the game against USC-Upstate, which starts at 7 PM.
  
• Florida State: Free admission for all military personnel with ID (active or retired) for the game against Jacksonville, which start at 7 PM.
• La Salle: Free admission to all military personnel with ID (active or retired) for the game against Lafayette, which starts at 7 PM.
• Liberty: Discounted admission ($1) for all active military, fire, EMS and police personnel with ID and their families for the game against Randolph, which starts at 7 PM.
• Longwood: Free admission for all military personnel with ID (active or retired) for the game against Navy, which starts at 7 PM.
• Nebraska: Free admission for all military personnel with ID (active or retired) for the game against South Dakota, which starts at 7 PM.
• New Hampshire: Discounted admission ($3) for all military personnel with ID (active or retired) for the game against Suffolk, which starts at 7 PM.
• Saint Louis: Free admission for all military personnel with ID (active or retired) for the game against Tennessee State, which starts at 8 PM.
• Wake Forest: Free admission to military personnel with ID and their immediate families for the game against Loyola (MD), which starts at 7 PM.
• Xavier: Free admission with two tickets for all military personnel with ID (active or retired) for the game against Morgan State, which starts at 7 PM.

Michael Vernetti is the RTC correspondent for the West Coast Conference.

When you’re smaller and lesser-known than the competition you’ve got to do things differently from them – and preferably smarter.

That’s been the operating philosophy of Jamie Zaninovich in his four years as commissioner of the West Coast Conference, a basketball-first league of faith-based institutions with no pretense of BCS connections. It showed in the contract Zaninovich negotiated with ESPN in one of his first acts as commissioner to bring WCC games to a wider audience than the mighty Pac-12.  It worked last August when Zaninovich snuck in under the radar and convinced Brigham Young University to leave the Mountain West Conference and play all sports outside of football in the WCC. (Granted, BYU’s inclusion in the WCC might be short-lived as the Cougars’ infatuation with membership in the Big 12 continues even though the Big 12 apparently doesn’t return the affection. For now, though, Zaninovich has seen his conference rise to seventh place among Division I basketball leagues according to CBSSports.com analyst Jeff Goodman.)

Jamie Zaninovich's Progressive Ideas Are Pushing the WCC to New Heights

Zaninovich’s flair for innovation manifested itself again last week when the WCC held a groundbreaking Media Day. Rather than the dreary non-event most conferences schedule once a year to allow coaches to make their pre-season predictions, the WCC’s event was all about new media and new ways to reach the public. For starters, the conference took advantage of its high-tech neighborhood and staged the event at the headquarters of growing media giant YouTube, which counts some 450 million monthly viewers. Chew over that figure a second and then compare it with the few millions that the biggest traditional media outlets brag about.

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It’s Halloween night across college basketball nation and all the ghouls, goblins and ghosts are out trolling for sugary goodness. Whether Gary Williams shows up on your doorstep requesting a chicken wing or it’s an exasperated Jay Bilas wearing VCU garb from head to toe, Halloween is the only night of the year where everyone can act how they really want to act if there were no social mores, norms or YouTube. With the start of the season only one week away, RTC has put together a list of five tricks and treats for some of college basketball’s most notable people, places and things. Here’s our list of Halloween night goodies for all of college basketball’s kiddies, but don’t blame us if the bullies from over at Chapel Hill Street or Lexington Avenue jump out from behind a bush and steal all of your candy.

• Treats to Purdue’s Robbie Hummel & Arizona’s Kevin Parrom— in the form of  confident minds and an even more explosive sets of wheels. The good-guy Hummel returns for his senior season after rehabilitating his knee from a second ACL injury last October. He’s taking it slowly, wearing a massive knee brace and practicing only on second days, but the obvious fear is that he’s one of those hard-luck cases who simply can’t get healthy (he has also experienced back issues in the past).  Parrom, on the other hand, found himself a victim of a shooting in September as he was home visiting his mother with terminal cancer (who has since passed). The versatile wing is projected to be back in the Arizona lineup in about a month, but despite his positive attitude and diligent rehabilitation of a leg pierced by a bullet, both he and Hummel will have to overcome the mental hurdles necessary to compete at the highest level of college basketball.  Let’s hope both players find all kinds of treats as two of the biggest success stories of the season.
• Tricks to Connecticut Basketball – for using a wink-and-a-nod to find a scholarship at the last minute for superstar freshman Andre Drummond, while former orphan Michael Bradley volunteered to give his up for the good of the team.  No matter what the courageous Bradley says publicly, we still find the whole thing rather smelly. The NCAA may have stepped in and already provided a nasty little trick for the Huskies, though, in the form of an APR ban from participation in the 2013 NCAA Tournament — which, incidentally, is likely to impact Bradley rather than the one-and-done Drummond. Oy.

Treats to These Two For Finding Their Confidence in 11-12

• Treats to Kansas’ Thomas Robinson — this kid more than any other deserves a breakout 2011-12 campaign. After a nightmarish year in Robinson’s personal life where he lost both of his maternal grandparents and his 37-year old mother in a span of a mere month, the talented big man is on the credit side of karma in a huge way and hopefully ready to cash it in. We’d like nothing more than to see Robinson become an All-American this year by leading Bill Self’s team to its eighth consecutive Big 12 regular season title, before heading off to the NBA Lottery as a superstar in the making. 
  
• Tricks to the NCAA’s $2,000 Optional Stipend –– although we agree that football and basketball student-athletes are vastly underpaid relative to their value to the schools, making the stipend optional at the leisure of the conference only opens the door for even more of an inequitable distribution of talent than already exists. The power conferences can easily weather the extra couple million bucks such a measure will require, but as for the mid-majors… they’d best keep scouring those patches for the Great Pumpkin of Mid-Major hope to find their future stars.

Back in the late 1980s when Bruce Hornsby was probably at the peak of his pop/rock star persona with his band The Range, he wrote a song called The Old Playground. The smooth Virginian probably could have guessed given his musical acumen that there were great things ahead of him in his professional career, but he was rolling the dice of serendipity when he wrote the following lyrics to the song:

Take me to the old playground
Where the old ones rule, and the young ones do their time
Take me to the old playground
Where the talk is cheap
And the restless stalk the baseline

The old sage frowns, he says just pass it on around
But all-world junior’s pulling up from downtown
For some it’s a way out, for some it’s a way in
Most of us don’t even care
We’re just looking for another gym to get in

All-world junior may not be pulling up from downtown, but he is capable of going with a windmill reverse jam off the bounce.  Check out Keith Hornsby, a freshman guard at UNC Asheville, who also happens to be the basketball-playing child of the three-time Grammy winner.

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Midnight Madness is a somewhat strange tradition to begin with. Last year we spoke with Lefty Driesell about its humble origins around the track at Maryland. Over the past 40 years the tenor of the event has changed drastically (we have already documented our misgivings about the current state of it previously). Today, the event has become less about practice and more about an event to hype up the students and draw in recruits. Schools have tried to turn the event into a hybrid between a basketball exhibition and a concert as schools have drawn in artists such as Drake, but schools are continually trying to find ways to entertain the fans and entice talented recruits to play for them. To that end George Washington attempted something on Friday night that we have never seen before at a Midnight Madness or at least not that was recorded and allowed to see the light of day.

It is at once both mesmerizing and stupefying. While this may not have the news appeal of Roy Williams dancing at UNC, to us this is so much more interesting and leads to so many more questions. Who thought this was a good idea? What did the recruits think? Didn’t the school have something/anything that they thought would appeal more to the 16-22 year-old demographic?

Perhaps the most peculiar geographic realignment that we had seen in the last year of schools moving around was Texas Christian University‘s decision to join the Big East.  Located nearly a thousand miles from the two closest other schools (Louisville and South Florida), it made about as much sense as the Dallas Cowboys playing in the NFC East.  And yet, thanks to the meteoric rise in the last decade of Gary Patterson’s Horned Frog football program and its location in the nation’s fifth largest television market, TCU’s cachet had outgrown its affiliation with the Mountain West to the point where it could entertain options.  Well, at least one option, and that option was to join a BCS football conference centered in the Northeast regardless of its culture, religion and location.

Cheer Up Buddy, You're Staying Near Home

But if we’ve learned one thing about the rapaciousness of conference realignment in college sports, your best option today is tomorrow’s $1 pastry in the day-old bin. With the Big 12 seemingly getting picked apart by vultures on all sides, and all indications leaning toward Missouri as only the latest defector, the conference had to make a splash soon.  That happened today, with the pending announcement that TCU will reunite with some of its old Southwest Conference brethren Texas, Texas Tech and Baylor in the new-and-improved Big 12.  An invitation has been extended, and TCU is expected to accept the offer immediately.

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Kentucky basketball fans, get ready. He…is…coming.

Just under two weeks ago, several Kentucky outlets reported that another one of these NBA lockout-induced games was in the works, this time one that would pit a squad of former Kentucky players against a team comprised of guys considered “villains” of the UK program. We’re talking about players like Kemba Walker, who, along with the rest of Connecticut mates, bumped Kentucky from the Final Four last season. Tyler Hansbrough would certainly be a candidate for such a team; UK thought they had Hansbrough wrapped up during his recruitment in 2005, and his eventual signing with North Carolina seriously irked Kentucky fans. Then he came into Rupp Arena for an ESPN GameDay game in 2007 and put 14/11 on the Wildcats en route to an 86-77 win.

If It Happens, Surely It Was Predicted in the Book of Revelations.

So, as far as the Team of Villains, you get the idea. We have to admit — it’s a darn good one. We were even inspired (cue shameless self-promotion) to have some fun and come up with other villain teams for other schools. But to actually stage a game like this in Kentucky, where passion for college hoops — and the ability to hold a basketball grudge — resides in the very bone marrow of its citizens, is a strong play.

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The ongoing NBA lockout is resulting in some unintended but interesting effects related to college basketball.  This offseason has already produced a handful of ‘alumni games,’ featuring former players of recent vintage, including some at two of the most storied programs in the sport, Kansas and Kentucky, in addition to last week’s Jimmer All-Stars at BYU.  Saturday night’s Legends of the Phog in Lawrence was a jam-packed extravaganza of KU hoops that ended in a 111-111 tie as Mario Chalmers nailed a trey at the buzzer (who else?).

You’ll recall that a team called the Kentucky Pros scrimmaged John Calipari‘s Dominican Republic team twice back in mid-August, losing twice in games at Rupp Arena and Yum! Center in exhibitions that sometimes resembled pick-up than organized basketball.  Still, both games were well attended (23k at Rupp, 15k at Yum) and with current professionals like Rajon Rondo, Jodie Meeks, Patrick Patterson and others sitting around these days rather than preparing for NBA training camps, WKYT-TV has reported that there are plans to send these and other former UK players on a barnstorming tour around the state against various “villains” from their collegiate days.

Who Represents the Legion of Doom For Your School?

We actually love this idea, if for no other reason than the potential crowd reactions to some of the villains, reported as “Kemba Walker, Rudy Gay, Tyler Hansbrough, Nolan Smith, Eric Gordon, Terrence Williams, Joakim Noah, Kenneth Faried and Shelvin Mack.”  For Kentucky fans from Pikeville to Murray, there’s some serious villain juice here.  Hansbrough was a Tubby Smith recruiting flash point; Gordon and Williams played for hated Indiana and Louisville teams; Noah was the most despised SEC player of the last decade.

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Moments ago, ESPN’s Andy Katz and The New York Times’ Pete Thamel tweeted that the Pac-12 will not expand beyond 12 teams. This news follows a conference call of the presidents of the conference’s member schools that took place earlier tonight.

So, now where are we? If the Pac-12 stays put, does that open things up for the Big 12 and Big East to expand and attempt to push the Pac-12 into a position of lesser relevance? Are Oklahoma and Texas now blowing up the phones at the SEC offices, pleading for one of what appears to be two remaining spots, or will Oklahoma now have to reconsider sticking with the Big 12 after issuing the conference its bizarre ultimatum on Tuesday? Will Missouri tell the SEC thanks-but-no-thanks? More on this as things develop. What a soap opera this has been, and continues to be.

Daniel Connors is a full-time student at Syracuse University and an RTC contributor.

Monday morning was like any other morning here at Syracuse. The sun rose, the birds chirped, and the professors lectured. But something was different. The Syracuse student body woke up to an e-mail that the university will be joining the ACC.  Only 72 hours earlier the idea of Syracuse and Pittsburgh leaving the Big East had not even been leaked. Conference expansion had been a newsworthy topic of discussion, but this news seemingly came out of nowhere with the New York Times’ Pete Thamel breaking the story Friday night. The Big Ten had rumored interest in the Orange, but Texas A&M and West Virginia were the headliners in potential switcharoos, not us. We were happy in the Big East, for now at least. I guess we thought wrong.

Can This Game Really Disappear From the Schedule?

Rivalries are at the heart of college sports. As much fun as it is for us to cheer on the Orange, it is just as fun to hate the Hoyas and Huskies. So naturally, Syracuse fans and students are questioning what will happen to these longstanding rivalries that have become an integral part of the student experience at Syracuse.  “It’s a big move that’s been coming and I’m excited for the future,” Matt Shadle, a Syracuse sophomore said. “Hopefully we can retain the rivalries through out-of-conferences games. If not, new rivalries will have to be formed.”

Although Syracuse will no longer have conference games against familiar foes like UConn, Georgetown, and Villanova, Orange fans are excited about hosting Duke and North Carolina in the Carrier Dome.  Ben Glidden, a junior at Syracuse, said, “I think it’s a smart move for Syracuse … it adds a lot of excitement to basketball playing with the likes of Duke and UNC.”  Students that I spoke to all mirrored that opinion and look forward to clashing with the two storied programs from Tobacco Road.  Phillip Thomas, the starting safety on the Syracuse football team also seemed optimistic  about the move, citing an increase in competition by stating, “It’s great for our program to be able to face UNC, Virginia Tech, Miami, FSU, and others.” Thomas added that he “couldn’t be happier.”

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