1. Unless you pay attention to college basketball exhibition games you probably are not familiar with the Carleton University basketball team. That’s a shame because as Jordan Conn notes they might be the closest thing to a dynasty that college basketball has seen since John Wooden’s UCLA teams. Winners of nine of the past 11 national championships in Canada the Ravens might be ignored by some because of the weak competition that they face in Canada, but as their performance against American college teams in exhbition games before this season started they would be a legitimitely good American college team. Most of you will probably never see the Ravens play, but it is still interesting to learn more about one of the most dominant programs in college basketball history.
2. Most college basketball fans are focused on the NCAA Tournament, but yesterday the field for the 2014 Coaches vs Cancer Classic was announced. Duke is the obvious headliner in the field particularly with the #1 incoming recruiting class, but there are some other interesting storylines. The most obvious one is a potential match-up against Stanford, which would create a Mike Krzyzewski-Johnny Dawkins match-up (assuming Dawkins is still Stanford’s coach next season). UNLV could also be a dangerous team with their incoming class (both high schoolers and transfers). The one thing that we cannot stand with these events is that the hosts (Temple is the other one and it hardly merits mentioning) advance to the semifinals even if they lose to other teams earlier. We understand the need to sell tickets with big name programs, but it cheapens the earlier games.
3. With the Sloan Sports Analytic Conference occurring this past week, sports analytics have gotten back into the mainstream media. One article that was featured in The Wall Street Journal last week that might be of interest to you at this point in the season is the “Hot Hand” theory espoused by Andrew Bocskocscky, John Ezekowitz, and Carolyn Stein. Their analysis (available here) essentially claims that players can increase their shooting percentage when they get on hot streaks. The actual analysis is a little more complete than that (Zach Lowe offers a more complete explanation), but the next time you hear somebody just mock the idea of the hot hand you might want to point out that it is a little more complex than they might think.
4. That squeal you heard on Twitter yesterday was from college basketball writers who found out that Bruce Springsteen would be headlining this year’s Final Four concerts. While Springsteen is the main act the warm-up acts–Jason Aldean, Tim McGraw, and The Killers–are not bad either. If you are in Dallas for the Final Four, the free concerts are worth checking out and over the years have featured a number of well-known performers. And if a program wants to announce some bad news the night that Springsteen is performing for free in front of what we would assume is most of the major college basketball writers would seem like a good time to do so.
5. Just about the only time that we ever talk about junior college basketball is when one of the big-name junior college recruits signs with a Division I school, but for the case of Glenn Germany we will make an exception. Germany plays for the Community College of Allegheny County team, which normally would not merit mentioning except that he is 44-years-old and spent more than 15 years in prison. Like the Carleton basketball team, you will probably never see Germany play (unless this article inspires a national news show to do a feature on him), but he does have an interesting story and it is worth reading to see how he turned his life around.

Welcome to March Madness. With the tip-off of the opening round games of the Patriot League Tournament on Monday night — hey, Colgate and Lafayette — Championship Fortnight is already here. To prep ourselves for all of the action among the nation’s Other 26 leagues, the RTC Podblast crew welcomed O26 microwriters Tommy Lemoine (@hoopthink) and Adam Stillman (@adamstillman87) to walk us through some of the top storylines to follow both this week and next. The guys had a good discussion about whether Wichita State will ultimately #cheerfortheears at Arch Madness, which tourneys might produce the most interesting match-ups, and named some players to keep an eye on as we ultimately head toward the NCAA Tournament. Among other things. If you’re at all interested in the non-power leagues, definitely give this preview a listen!

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.

• 0:00-4:03 – #cheerfortheears – Three Games Left
• 4:03-8:55 – Top Five O26 Teams
• 8:55-10:25 – Conference Tournaments To Be Excited About
• 10:25-12:03 – Another Year, Another WCC Championship for Gonzaga?
• 12:03-13:42 – Leagues Primed For Some Conference Tournaments Upsets
• 13:42-15:38 – Championship Match-Ups to Hope For
• 15:38-17:33 – Potential Bid Stealers
• 17:33-19:34 – Future Cinderellas
• 19:34-21:55 – Players the Nation Will Fall in Love With

March Madness is officially under way. With the Patriot League’s opening round tipping off last night at campus sites in Baltimore, Maryland, and Hamilton, New York, eliminations have begun. The first two teams to survive and advance in the PL were Lafayette and Colgate, meaning that Navy and Loyola (MD) are the Circle of March’s first on-court casualties of the year. A handful of other schools that were not invited to the conference tournaments got their one-day in the CoM sun and were also removed. The entire group of 11 eliminated teams is listed below the Circle. We’re down to 330 active schools. Note: In order to respect the integrity of the regular season, we will not be removing teams until their schedules are finished regardless of their current status (i.e., six Ivy League teams cannot win the conference’s automatic bid).

Thanks also to everyone who played yesterday’s Circle of March crossword puzzle game. Many of you got at least 10 of the words, and a very few of you got the entire set of 15 (several found other words or just made some up). Here were the hidden words: court, rush, march, champion, upset, bubble, madness, cinderella, dunk, lucky shot, stars, final four, bracket, pool, swish. We’ll be contacting those who were among the winning group very soon. Thanks for playing!

Teams Eliminated From National Title Contention (03.03.14)

• NJIT
• Northern Kentucky
• Kennesaw State
• LIU Brooklyn
• Sacred Heart
• Jacksonville State
• Tennessee State
• Austin Peay
• Tennessee-Martin
• Loyola (MD)
• Navy

Nick Fasulo is an RTC correspondent who writes the column College Basketball By the Tweets, a look at the world of college hoops through the prism of everyone’s favorite social media platform. You can find him on Twitter @nickfasuloSBN.

Congratulations, everyone, we’ve made it to the month of March, which some people are unofficially just straight up calling “Izzo.”

It's March. @MSU_Basketball pic.twitter.com/UaYM5BCsuO

— Kevin Pauga (@KevinPauga) March 1, 2014

I guess if you’ve reached the NCAA Tournament in each of the last 16 years, including six Final Four appearances as the head coach of one team, you can pretty much do whatever you want.

Marcus Paige

There’s perhaps no non-freshman player in the country who has improved as much as Marcus Paige since November. The slender point guard is the clear-cut leader of this year’s Tar Heels, and his play against Triangle rival NC State last week proved as much.

How do you give Paige his left hand?

— Michael DeCourcy (@tsnmike) February 27, 2014

Had to be the single most important item on scouting report. Paige is a stud.

— Michael DeCourcy (@tsnmike) February 27, 2014

Marcus Paige went to the rim in a down one situation! Look at that! Finally some smart basketball.

— Brian Otskey (@botskey) February 27, 2014

That game will go down in history as the least ability shown by two coaches to get the ball out of the ONLY scorers' hands for each team.

— Chris Littmann (@chrislittmann) February 27, 2014

Um …. .Did N.C. State realize that the dude who'd dropped 30 in the second half was probably going to take the last shot?

— Myron Medcalf (@MedcalfByESPN) February 27, 2014

And then a few nights later, Paige sealed a victory for UNC on the defensive end.

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What a crazy weekend of college basketball. After more than enough upsets and upheavals to shake your fist at, the RTC Podcast is here to attempt to make some sense of all the early March Madness. To help us navigate through some of the morass, we asked ESPN analyst Andy Katz to join us for this week’s Rush the Take, and he was gracious enough to spend some time with us discussing the likes of Oklahoma State, the notion of talent vs. seed level, Cincinnati’s Mick Cronin, and what he’s looking forward to in terms of the bubble over the next week. It’s excellent stuff, and will more than get you ready for the week before Championship Week. Hosted by Shane Connolly, the guys also spend time talking over the miraculous ascent of Virginia, the equally miraculous descent of Kentucky, and everything in-between. Join us for a listen!

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.

• 0:00-7:39 – Virginia Sits Alone Atop the ACC
• 7:39-9:38 – Upsets Abound This Weekend
• 9:38-14:11 – Kentucky’s Season Spirals Downwards
• 14:11-16:43 – Least Concerning Upsets
• 16:43-20:43 – Most Encouraging Win
• 20:43-28:16 – Rush The Take With ESPN’s Andy Katz
• 28:16-31:58 – Future of Rushing the Court
• 31:58-35:15 – Ranking New Mexico
• 35:15-45:13 – Week Preview

1. Coming off Saturday night’s loss at Oklahoma State the big concern out of Lawrence was not the Jayhawks’ loss, but instead was the health of Joel Embiid. Yesterday, Kansas announced that Embiid had reinjured his back and would miss the final two games of the regular season. Embiid could be back in time for the Big 12 Tournament, but with the Jayhawks’ final two games being against Texas Tech and West Virginia it would seem that the Jayhawks are locked into a #2 seed at worst. So while they could play Embiid in the Big 12 Tournament they have no need to do that so we would expect Embiid’s next game to be in the NCAA Tournament.
2. Normally we would make a big deal out of Roscoe Smith (11 points and 11 rebounds per game) missing Wednesday’s game against San Diego State after suffering a concussion on Saturday, but with UNLV unlikely to make the NCAA Tournament it probably doesn’t affect the big picture. On the other hand, the absence of Isaiah Zierden (3.2 points per game) usually would not merit mentioning here, but with the freshman being out indefinitely after injuring the medial collateral ligament in his right knee it could be a fairly significant blow to Creighton. Zierdan played sparingly at times this year, but has shown flashes of his potential with three double-digit games this season including a 13-point performance against Villanova on February 16.
3. Like many of you when we first read Mark Cuban‘s comments about how “hypocritical” the NCAA rules for one-and-done players were we were waiting for somebody to tear his argument apart. Mike DeCourcy was happy to oblige pointing out that it was the NBA that is in charge of the one-and-done situation. On some level we can understand Cuban’s logic that there is a better way to develop basketball ability than the current NCAA system he is going about it the wrong way. If he wants to make a change he needs to go to the other owners and the players association to make a change. On a selfish level, we would prefer that he opts to push for an age minimum of 21 years, but whatever option Cuban decides to pursue we hope he will do a little more homework in the future.
4. Last week on Twitter we mentioned how Doug Gottlieb had been widely criticized for ranking Kentucky #7 in his preseason poll, but looking back on it now it is clear that he ranked them too highly. We also referenced how wrong we were in our preseason rankings with only a handful of teams being +/- 3 spots of where they are now. Dan Hanner took a deeper look into which teams are exceeding or falling short of preseason expectations. Much of his analysis  focuses on his own predictions, but it does offer some interesting insight into polls overall as Hanner analyzes his own work.
5. We are still a couple of weeks away from what should be a Black Monday for college basketball coaches, but that did not stop Tennessee-Martin from firing Jason James after his fifth consecutive losing season. James, who was an assistant at Tennessee-Martin before taking over as the head coach, finished with a 37-117 record in his five seasons there. The school’s administration commended James for leading running the program with “the highest degree of integrity,” but in the end he simply did not win enough. Although this will make for a vacancy at the Division I level don’t count on a big-name assistant heading to the Ohio Valley Conference so we would guess this job will probably go to an internal candidate or someone who doesn’t have high-major aspirations.

Selection Sunday is almost here and the field is starting to take shape. Everything will obviously clear up a lot more when conference tournaments get underway this week and next as teams play themselves into and out of the 68-team field. This time of the year is like a whirlwind, though. It’s hard to keep up with all of it because there are still so many things we do not know. But if we focus on what we do know, things get a lot easier. Let’s do that with today’s RTC Bracketology.

• Unless  something unbelievable happens down the stretch, Wichita State is going to get a No. 1 seed. The Shockers are basically a lock for the top line and Florida and Arizona are very close to it as well. I think if the Gators and Wildcats win both of their games this week, they will be No. 1 seeds regardless of what happens in their conference tournaments. This is the clearest the top line of the bracket has ever been at this point. Of course, losses by the Shockers, Gators and Wildcats in the next  two weeks would muddy that picture, but let’s count those three teams as No. 1 seed locks at this point.
• The fight for the fourth No. 1 seed is insane. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the possibility of Wisconsin earning the final No. 1 seed, and as of today, I think the Badgers have the nation’s fourth-best profile. For now, I’m leaving Syracuse on the top line, because that’s what I think the Selection Committee would do, but in my opinion, both Kansas and Wisconsin have better resumes. We know that the fight for the last No. 1 seed is really unclear right now, because there are so many teams still alive for it: Syracuse, Wisconsin, Kansas, Villanova, Duke, Virginia, Michigan, Creighton, and and San Diego State. Obviously some of those teams are long shots.
• The bottom of the bracket is a complete mess. Arkansas moves in with a sweep over Kentucky, and Tennessee hangs on to the last spot in, which gives the SEC a surprising four teams. It’s still very possible that both the Hawgs and Vols could miss the field, leaving the conference with only two teams playing in the NCAAs. I will say this, though: Tennessee was the only team I got incorrect last year. I picked the Vols over Middle Tennessee last season, and although that won’t factor into the decision on my final field of 68, I won’t be too happy if Cuonzo Martin’s team costs me  a perfect field again. Luckily, there is still a lot of basketball to be played before a final field is seeded.
• I’ve got 32 locks at  this point. I realize some other websites are more patient on their locks, but there are only 13 days left until Selection Sunday. It’s time to lock teams up. Here are the teams I have locked in the field right now: Arizona, Florida, Wichita State, Syracuse, Wisconsin, Kansas, Duke, Villanova, Virginia, Creighton, Michigan, San Diego State, Iowa State, Michigan State, Louisville, North Carolina, Saint Louis, Cincinnati, UCLA, Texas, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Kansas State, VCU, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Iowa, Ohio State, George Washington, Memphis, Arizona State  and New Mexico.
• Teams moving down the seed list in a hurry this week include Michigan State, which lost at home Saturday to Illinois, and Kentucky, which lost at South Carolina. Ohio State is also on the decline after a loss to Indiana on Sunday.

Bids by Conference: Big 12 (7), Big Ten (6), Pac-12 (6), Atlantic 10 (6), ACC (5), AAC (5) SEC (4), Big East (4), Mountain West (2).
First Four Out: Providence, Missouri, BYU, Oregon

Complete bracket after the jump:

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In this, our third annual Circle of March, we’re going to spend the next five weeks until post-championship Tuesday counting down and eliminating the entirety of Division I basketball until we get to a single, solitary name. The Patriot League Tournament gets under way this evening, and a total of 12 other conference tourneys will tip off this week after that. According to the NCAA, 11 of this season’s 351 Division I schools are ineligible for the NCAA Tournament because of APR scores or because they’re still transitioning up. We have removed those names from the CoM and wish them the best of luck in future seasons — the other 340 schools are represented in the CoM’s inaugural 2014 edition. Because we want every eligible team to get at least one day of run on the Circle, though, we have chosen not to formally remove any of the other already-eliminated schools until Tuesday. Bubble teams also won’t be removed until they’re officially disregarded by the NCAA Selection Committee in two weeks. It just seems nicer this way.

Last year you might recall we added a bit of a game component to the debut CoM. This year’s version is no different, but instead of asking readers to find like groupings of school logos, we’ve added a crossword puzzle element to this one. See if you can locate at least 10 of the NCAA Tournament-related words hidden within the Circle (note: make sure to click on the image for a larger and clearer view). The first 15 people who tweet at us (@rushthecourt) or e-mail us (rushthecourt@yahoo.com) with 10 or more of the correct hidden words will receive a free RTC t-shirt. We’ll also give a t-shirt prize to every 10th person who gets that many right after that. For the first person who identifies all of the hidden words, we’ll have a grand prize. Please, everyone, feel free to SHARE AWAY!

Here is 2014 Circle of March. Welcome to March Madness.

Teams Eliminated From National Title Contention (03.03.14)

• Abilene Christian (D-I transition)
• Arkansas-Pine Bluff (APR)
• FIU (APR)
• Grambling State (APR)
• Grand Canyon (D-I transition)
• Incarnate Word (D-I transition)
• Mississippi Valley State (APR)
• Nebraska-Omaha (D-I transition)
• New Orleans (APR)
• Southern (APR)
• UMass-Lowell (D-I transition)

With just one full week left in the regular season, things started to get very interested this past weekend. A total of 10 previously-ranked teams suffered setbacks on either Saturday or Sunday. The most noteworthy results of the week involved previously 19th-ranked Kentucky. John Calipari’s enigmatic squad, which was ranked first in the preseason edition of the RTC25, is now unranked after falling at home to Arkansas on Thursday and getting stunned at 11-18 South Carolina on Saturday. The SEC, ACC and Big 12 conference races were all decided on Saturday. #1 Florida grabbed the outright SEC crown by remaining unbeaten in conference play with a comfortable 18-point win over LSU in Gainesville. #4 Virginia clinched the ACC regular season title outright, as it moved to 16-1 in conference play with a dominating 19-point victory over #7 Syracuse. #6 Kansas wrapped up the regular season Big 12 title by besting #21 Oklahoma in Lawrence on Monday and taking advantage of losses by the conference’s second-place teams, #15 Iowa State and Texas, on Saturday. The outright regular season Pac-12 champion was determined on Sunday by virtue of #2 Arizona handily defeating Stanford in Tucson. With several major-conference crowns yet to be determined, the final week of the regular season promises to bring the intrigue that college basketball has become to be known for every season. The quick n’ dirty analysis of this week’s poll is after the jump.

Quick n’ Dirty Analysis:

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The 2014 recruiting class marked the first time that John Calipari did not come away with the No. 1 recruiting class in the country during his tenure at Kentucky. While he still ended up with the No. 2 class, Kentucky has their sights squarely set on landing the No. 1 class in 2015. They got their first commitment this past week when five-star shooting guard Charles Matthews announced his intentions to play for the Wildcats. The 6’5 guard is currently the No. 15 player and No. 4 shooting guard in the junior class and is the next Chicago native to make the journey down to Lexington.

The 6’5” guard missed the first month of his junior season at St. Rita’s (IL) High due to an ankle injury, but is now back to full strength. Matthews proved his status as a five-star player over the summer on the Nike AAU circuit. Playing against older competition Matthews always had a large contingent of colleges watching him including Duke, Illinois, Kansas, and Michigan State. He averaged almost 13 points a game while playing for the Meanstreets AAU program and scored from all areas of the court but was especially effective from mid-range. With long arms and good height for his position, Matthews can also elevate with the best of them making his jump shot unblockable. While he proved his elite status on the summer circuit, he also developed a strong chemistry with his squad’s point guard. That point guard just happens to be four-star point guard Tyler Ulis (#29 overall, No. 6 PG) who committed to the Wildcats in the fall.

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