What’s Trending is a column examining the week that was in college basketball social media. Nick Fasulo (@nickfasuloSBN) is your weekly host.

Deonte Burton Dunk

Nevada’s Deonte Burton undoubtedly delivered the dunk of the year in college hoops. You’d probably seen it at least 15 times in the past 36 hours, but another binge watch is good for the soul.

The reaction from Twitter was swift…

Russdiculous

The latest chapter in the fantastic college career of Mr. Russell Smith was written Wednesday night, as the Cardinals’ senior guard scored 22 second half points (including six three-pointers) in a win over SMU.  Here’s to hoping the graphic below is used at the KFC Yum! Center on Saturday.

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With four days of Championship Fortnight now behind us, we have breached the magical 300-team mark. As of this morning, some 298 teams are unofficially still alive for the 2014 national championship, represented below on the Circle of March. Nine tournaments are in varying stages of progress at this point, with the CAA and SoCon tipping off today. Yesterday we removed only 11 teams from the CoM, but with nearly every league finishing up its regular season this weekend and a number of tourneys picking up fast and furiously, we’ll get below 200 in no time. Note: In order to respect the integrity of the regular season, we will not remove teams until their schedules are finished regardless of their current status (i.e., as of today, six Ivy League teams cannot win the conference’s automatic bid).

 Teams Eliminated From National Title Contention (03.06.14)

• Monmouth
• East Tennessee State
• Tennessee Tech
• Drake
• Fairfield
• USC Upstate
• Portland
• Bradley
• Southeast Missouri State
• Marist
• Santa Clara

It’s all about coming full circle on the 2013-14 regular season in this week’s RTC Podblast, and to help us through some of the key questions as we enter the final weekend of play and start looking ahead to March Madness, the guys welcome Sporting News‘ columnist Mike DeCourcy. For those of you who have been listening to us all season, you might recall that DeCourcy was our first Rush the Take guest way back in the preseason. He may have aged five months since then but his takes are as relevant as ever. Full circle.

As usual, the rundown is below if you’d like to skip around to the most interesting parts. Also keep an eye out early next week as we’ll be releasing a bunch of podblasts previewing the upcoming conference tourneys as we head into the heart of Championship Fortnight.

Make sure to add the RTC Podcast to your iTunes lineup so that you’ll automatically upload it on your listening device after we record.

• 0:00-3:05 – Down Goes Duke
• 3:05-5:18 – Struggling Syracuse
• 5:18-8:27 – Saint Louis Blue
• 8:27-25:20 – Rush the Take: Mike DeCourcy
• 25:20-35:35 – Final Weekend Preview

In the last weekend of regular season hoops, Durham, North Carolina, will be the center of attention on Saturday night. Between a visit from archrival UNC, Senior Night festivities, and ESPN Gameday in attendance, there will be quite the buzz going on in Cameron Indoor Stadium. In order to take advantage of the big night, Duke has invited a plethora of big name recruits and top targets to campus. The biggest name on the list is five-star center Myles Turner. The 7’0” center is the top unsigned target in the 2014 class and the No. 2 prospect overall, and the Blue Devils are trying to add him to their already No. 1 ranked recruiting class. From the junior class, five-star power forward Chase Jeter (#18 – 2015) will make his official visit, as will five-star guard Luke Kennard (#14 – 2015). In addition, Coach K will have several players on campus for unofficial visits, including top sophomore Harry Giles, five-star wing Josh Langford (#15 – 2016), and four-star point guard Junior Smith (#26 – 2016). Several of the players noted above, including Jeter, Kennard, Giles, and Smith, are also considering North Carolina. With a win, the Blue Devils will look to continue their recruiting momentum with more five-star signatures. A loss, however, could certainly be devastating. Last year, UNC was in the exact same spot and brought Andrew Wiggins and five-star shooting guard Rashad Vaughn (#13 – 2014) to Chapel Hill. Duke jumped out to a 15-0 lead and the recruits quickly lost interest in the game they were brought in to see.

Myles Turner is visiting Duke on Saturday. Will the Blue Devils impress him enough to join No. 1 Jahlil Okafor?

2. Florida Celebrates SEC Championship

Florida has the SEC Championship locked up, but they will be looking to end the season with an 18-0 conference record. Going against rival Kentucky on Saturday afternoon, Billy Donovan is bringing in his 2014 commitments along with plenty of other recruits for 2015 and 2016. While not on the level of Duke’s haul, Florida will play host to 11 players in total. Four-star Devin Robinson (#24 – 2014), Chris Chiozza (#44 – 2014), and Brandone Francis (#37 – 2014) will all be suiting up for the Gators next year, and they will be joined by a pair of four-stars who are receiving strong interest from the Gators. Guard Antonio Blakeney is one of the Gator biggest targets in the class, ranked No. 39 in the country. He will be joined by 6’3” four-star guard Austin Grandstaff (#47 – 2015), who recently de-committed from Oklahoma State, and 6’8” Noah Dickerson (#49 – 2015). Alonzo Mourning’s son, Trey, will also be in attendance, as will four-star wing KeVaughn Allen (#84 – 2015) while on an official visit. The Gators will be celebrating their regular season accomplishments and will try to impress a few more players who will help them continue the tradition.

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1. Much of the next month will be spent with Doug McDermott collecting awards and by now you have heard almost everything about McDermott including his recruitment, how he got passed over despite every major program actively recruiting at his school. Still the piece by Elizabeth Merrill on McDermott is full of interesting anecdotes that might help you get to know him better. To us one of the more interesting things about McDermott is that despite the fact that he seems to have all of features you would expect from a player that the media would shove down everybody’s throat leading to a backlash we don’t get the sense that people are tired of McDermott.
2. After coming into the season with plenty of buzz, Harvard has flown under the radar, but with the NCAA Tournament just around the corner the Crimson are on the verge of wrapping up the first automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament tomorrow if they beat Yale. SB Nation has an excellent story on Tommy Amaker, the head coach and architect of Harvard’s basketball renaissance. As David Tannenwald points out Amaker’s time in Cambridge (they technically play their games in Allston) has not been without controversy, but what he has done to turn the program from an also-ran into a frequently-mentioned NCAA Tournament dark horse.
3. Apparently some people actually thought that Andrew Wiggins might stick around Lawrence for more than one season because we heard some surprised voices when Wiggins essentially said goodbye to Kansas fans in what is widely expected to be his last home game as a Jayhawk. Wiggins might not have lived up to the ridiculous expectations heaped on him before the season (anything short of LeBron would have been a disappointment), but he still is a legitimate choice as Big 12 Player of the Year so we have a hard time calling his season a disappointment. Wiggins might never become the player that some projected him to be, but it is already clear that he should be a solid NBA player for a long time.
4. In one of the weirder stories that we have mentioned in this space, Scott A. Weitzell, the director of basketball operations at  New Hampshire, was fired amid allegations that he videotaped his team’s players in the locker room during one of the team’s games in January. The school has already tried to scrub its site of Weitzell, but his old profile is still available thanks to the magic of Google cache. Unless this turns out to be something more widespread this is probably the last we will hear of this story on a national level, but it will probably be a big story for a while in New Hampshire.
5. We have not seen much of it up close, but based on how popular college basketball is the fact that getting autographs from star players has become a big business should not be a surprise. As Jason King points out, this is a bigger deal at some campuses than others. It goes without saying that the autographs of future NBA All-Stars will be worth something, but even the autographs of players who are “only” regulars on top teams can be worth quite a bit of money. We always knew that basketball players and other elite athletes would frequently get stopped on campus. We just did not realize that it would be by adults looking for autographs.

Each week throughout the season, RTC columnist Brian Otskey (@botskey) will run down his observations from the previous week of college basketball.

As the college basketball regular season wraps up, I thought this would be a good time to run down my Coaches of the Year and Players of the Year in each of the major conferences. Here goes…

ACC

• POY: T.J. Warren, NC State (24.2 PPG, 6.9 RPG, 1.8 SPG). Warren has been a tremendous bright spot on an otherwise mediocre Wolfpack squad. Since a rough four-point game against Virginia on January 11, Warren has scored at least 20 points in every game he has played (he missed one game due to injury). At 6’8” and an athletic 215 pounds, Warren is a match-up problem for nearly every opponent. He has had eight 30+ point games (only one fewer than Doug McDermott), including Monday’s 41-point explosion in a road win at Pittsburgh. Some may disagree because NC State is not at the top of the ACC, but a season like this where Warren brought it night after night deserves special recognition.

Tony Bennett has done a tremendous job at Virginia. (virginiasports.com)

• COY: Tony Bennett, Virginia (25-5, 16-1 ACC). Bennett’s teams have always been terrific defensively and this one is no exception. Ranked third nationally in adjusted defensive efficiency, Virginia has allowed only four ACC opponents to score 60 or more points this season. Even in a league with a tempo as slow as this year’s ACC, that is a remarkable statistic. Virginia was a trendy surprise pick but I am not sure anyone thought it would turn out to be this good. The Cavaliers were picked fourth in the preseason ACC poll but currently hold a three-game lead over Syracuse and North Carolina with just one game to play.

American

• POY: Russ Smith, Louisville (18.0 PPG, 4.5 APG, 2.0 SPG). This was a really close call between Smith and Cincinnati’s Sean Kilpatrick but I am giving Smith the slightest of edges. Both mean so much to their respective teams but Smith’s decision to return to Louisville for his senior year has proven to be a wise one. Smith is enjoying the best shooting season of his career (46.8 percent) and has matured greatly. He is playing smarter and has led this Louisville team to a 25-5 overall record. The Cardinals again have the look of a Final Four contender and Smith is the primary reason why.

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Alright, now we’re talking. With 14 more eliminations last night scattered among the Patriot, Big South, OVC and NEC, the Circle of March is starting to show some obvious gaps. Of our original 340 eligible teams, we’re now down to 309 remaining. The NEC was particularly exciting yesterday with two one-point games, including a buzzer-beating three-pointer at Mount St. Mary’s that resulted in the rare postseason RTC. Today the Atlantic Sun and OVC are back in action, with the Missouri Valley, the WCC and the MAAC each getting under way. Note: In order to respect the integrity of the regular season, we will not remove teams until their schedules are finished regardless of their current status (i.e., as of today, six Ivy League teams cannot win the conference’s automatic bid).

Teams Eliminated From National Title Contention (03.05.14)

• Liberty
• Presbyterian
• Campbell
• Bucknell
• Lehigh
• Fairleigh Dickinson
• Central Connecticut State
• Bryant
• St. Francis (NY)
• SIU-Edwardsville
• Lafayette
• Colgate
• Longwood
• Eastern Illinois

With a mere 10 days to go before Selection Sunday, it’s time to start checking all the mock brackets daily. Or hourly, if the mood strikes. With that in mind, the RTC Podcast crew decided to do a special mid-week Bracketology edition, inviting bracketologists Jerry Palm (CBSSports.com – @jppalmCBS), Patrick Stevens (Syracuse.com – @d1scourse) and Daniel Evans (RTC – @bracketexpert) on to discuss the ins and outs of selecting the field of 68. It’s an engaging and informative listen if you have the time to learn how these guys put together their brackets and some of their notable observations on the teams trying to earn invitations — join us! The entire rundown is below.

We’re going to be dropping podcasts/podblasts like crazy over the next five weeks of action, so make sure to subscribe to the show on iTunes so that you’ll get all of the episodes immediately downloaded to your listening device.

• 0:00-5:09 – Bubble Talk or Seeding Talk?
• 5:08-25:22 – Brackets with Jerry Palm
• 25:22-43:49 – Brackets with Patrick Stevens
• 43:49-1:00:39 – Brackets with Daniel Evans
• 1:00:39-1:04:11 – Recap

1. When we saw a story on ESPN.com about Dean Smith we were tempted to overlook it particularly after the John Feinstein story that we linked to on Monday. We are glad that we did because Tommy Tomlinson’s article on Smith, his failing memory, and the people who stand by him is probably the best thing you will read all day. As we mentioned on Monday, we cannot remember anybody saying something negative about Smith on a personal level. If you were not aware of why that is, this article and the anecdotes within it should explain it.
2. With Wichita State finishing the regular season undefeated, Matt Norlander decided it was time to compare this Wichita State team to the 2004 St. Joseph’s team, which was the last to go undefeated in the regular season. That 2004 team, which was led by Jameer Nelson and Delonte West, ended up losing a game in their conference tournament so Wichita State could make it a step further than them by the start of the NCAA Tournament. While it might be interesting to compare the two teams numerically they are very different teams. The Shockers certainly have their share of well-known players, but are overall a much more balanced team that that St. Joe’s team. In the end, the way that most people will remember this Wichita State team will be scripted in the next month.
3. We already read Mike DeCourcy’s response to Mark Cuban and now Larry Brown, a man who has plenty of experience at both the college and professional level, has decided to respond to Cuban’s comments that the NBDL would be better for player development than the NCAA is. Brown, who is actually based in Dallas now as the head coach at SMU, strongly disagreed with Cuban and said that the coaching players get at the NCAA level is vastly superior to what they would get in the NBDL. We can certainly agree with that assessment at SMU under someone like Larry Brown although we would not be quite as sure about that at some other colleges.
4. We are getting to the point in the season where people are starting to seriously look at end of season individual honors. Some awards like National Player of the Year are all, but locked up (the flight attendants on planes going to Omaha might want to start making space in the overhead bins). Most of the others are up in the air. With that in mind, Seth Davis took a look at the races for player/coach/freshman of the year in each of the major conferences. We tend to agree with Davis’ picks here, but we wouldn’t be surprised if there were some differences in the final decisions on some of these awards.
5. Some of you may remember Russ Pennell from his brief stint as head coach at Arizona when he took them to the Sweet 16 in 2009. Since that time Pennell served as head coach at Grand Canyon State University (yes, the one that caused the uproar recently) and the Phoenix Mercury of the WNBA. Now, Pennell is returning to Central Arkansas, where he played in college, to become the team’s new head coach. If you seem surprised that the name of a Southland Conference team seems familiar is because you may have heard of them when Corliss Williamson was briefly the coach there. Or perhaps you may have heard of one of their former players–Scottie Pippen.

Day two of Championship Fortnight resulted in seven eliminations spread between the Atlantic Sun and Horizon League tournaments. It was a particularly rough night for Florida schools, with three of the state’s 14 D-I programs — Stetson, Jacksonville, and North Florida — finishing off their seasons in the A-Sun. Luckily for the Sunshine State, league favorite and America’s darling, Florida Gulf Coast, easily defeated Stetson to keep its hopes alive for another turn in the spotlight. We’re now down to 323 active schools on the Circle of March. Note: In order to respect the integrity of the regular season, we will not remove teams until their schedules are finished regardless of their current status (i.e., six Ivy League teams cannot win the conference’s automatic bid).

There’s much more to come tonight, with the Patriot League picking back up and the Big South, OVC and NEC all tipping things off.

Teams Eliminated From National Title Contention (03.04.14)

• Detroit
• Illinois-Chicago
• Youngstown State
• Stetson
• North Florida
• Lipscomb
• Jacksonville