Brendon Mulvihill is an RTC contributor. You can find him @themulv on Twitter. See bottom of the post for the Official RTC Star System.

Tonight we’ll see two match-ups that may be previews to conference championship games in the ACC and the WCC. All four teams are in the RTC Top 25 and both games should be fantastic. Let’s take a look at how things break down.

Senior forward Mike Scott takes his efficient offensive skills into Cameron Indoor for UVA's toughest test of the season (The Sabre)

#19 Virginia at #8 Duke – 9:00 PM EST on ESPN HD (****)

• Virginia has only lost one time this season and is looking for its 13th consecutive win. Playing at Duke will be UVA’s toughest test of the season. The Cavaliers play at a sloth’s pace. While their offense is nothing more than average, their defense has been stellar. They are holding teams to 27% from beyond the arc and are in the top 10 in the country in defensive rebounding. Although offense is not the Cavaliers’ strong suit, 6’8″ forward Mike Scott is one of the most effective scorers and rebounders in the country. Considering how slowly Virginia plays, Scott should be considered one of the top big men in the country. Keep a close eye on how he matches up with Duke’s Mason Plumlee. It should be a great battle between two future NBA forwards.
• Duke still possesses one of the top offenses in the country. The Blue Devils shoot an outstanding 41.7% from downtown. Much like Virginia, Duke knows how to get to the line. The free throw battle in this game will be extremely important. In both of Duke’s losses, two key statistics emerged. They did not get to the line and their opponent shot the lights out. On the season, the Dukies have a free throw rate of 51.5%, which is good for third in the nation. In losses to Ohio State and Temple, Duke had a free throw rate of 25% and 27%, respectively. Virginia does not put teams on the line, so it will be interesting to see how the free throw situation plays out.
• While it appears that this game will come down to Duke’s offense versus Virginia’s defense, the UVA offense actually may hold the key to the win. In Duke’s two losses, OSU and Temple both had an eFG of over 60%. Look to see if Virginia’s Sammy Zeglinski can hit his threes. Zeglinski is the Cavaliers’ top three-point shooter, hitting 31-of-74 attempts (41.9%). Also, keep an eye on Duke’s offensive rebounding. The Cavaliers’ defense will contest Duke’s three-point shots and the Blue Devils are a poor offensive rebounding team. If Mike Krzyzewski’s squad goes one-and-done too many times, the Cavaliers could pull the upset at Cameron Indoor. However, it may be too much to expect for the Virginia offense to win in such a tough environment.

#16 Gonzaga at #25 St. Mary’s – 11:00 PM EST on ESPNU HD (****)

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Welcome to Through the Lens, an RTC photo tour through the game of college basketball.

This week’s topic: IN THE MOMENT.

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1. Vegas is a lot of things to a lot of people, but it also happens to currently be a recruiting hotspot for the Class of 2012. According to a published report from Five Star Basketball, the nation’s #1 and #8 recruiting targets (Shabazz Muhammad and Anthony Bennett) are both strongly considering Kentucky and UNLV, causing the hearts of many Wildcat and Rebel fans to flutter with the possibility of a package deal involving two of the very best talents the prep ranks have to offer. This is nothing more than wild speculation at this point, as the two players suit up for different high schools (Bishop Gorman and Findlay Prep, respectively) and have kept their cards close to the vest, but those two schools are the only overlaps on each player’s list of his final five candidates. The two will face off on January 21 in a nationally televised game — something tells us that ESPN’s ratings will spike in and around central Kentucky and southern Nevada on that particular evening.
2. In the wake of the BCS National Championship snoozer on Monday night, several college basketball writers have put together their “half-year” awards, with the emphasis on half. Mike DeCourcy at TSN starts us off with several lists that may or may not surprise you with his current choice for NPOY (think Valley), Most Improved Player (think gunner), and Toughest Team to Judge (think #1). Jason King at ESPN.com takes it a few thousand words further with his analyses, but he details the teams that he feels you should hold on to and fold on to. Perhaps the most interesting piece of King’s article is where he lists a number of coaches who he feels deserves a raise at this point in the season. Rick Pitino? Really? We really hope that he wrote that prior to Louisville’s last two games.
3. Regardless of losing a hard-fought game last night against Temple, St. Louis has been one of the feel-good stories of the season, as Rick Majerus’ Billikens have seemingly gotten past the rebuilding stage and moved into the era where they will regularly start competing for Atlantic 10 championships and NCAA Tournament bids. It didn’t start out so smoothly, though, as the Cleveland Cavaliers swooped in and, as Majerus puts it, “LeBron’d” him by grabbing one of his top assistants, Alex Jensen, a mere four days before practice was set to begin in October. According to the coach, the Cavs organization never so much as contacted him about their outreach to Jensen, but the Billikens have managed to put that behind them en route to a 13-4 start this season.
4. It’s a rather light news week so we’ll throw this up for some mid-season levity. We don’t at all understand the context behind this website built about North Carolina (basketball? football?), but it was passed along to us, so here it is. A quick whois search shows that the owner of the site is someone named Matt Hisamoto, a programmer at McKinney in Durham, NC, and a 2008 graduate of NC State. Hatred runs deep in those parts, that’s for sure.
5. This trailer debuted last week but we’d missed it to this point. For a period in the early-to-mid 1990s, Arkansas basketball — or more colloquially, Forty Minutes of Hell — was just as big a name as some of the other blue-bloods in the sport such as Duke, Kentucky, North Carolina and UCLA. Nolan Richardson, the second black head coach to win a Division I men’s basketball championship in 1994, was a lightning rod with his outspoken demeanor and freewheeling style of play. But he was a winner at Arkansas, and he won big. This documentary about Richardson and the rise of his program, entitled Forty Minutes of Hell, will debut on February 11 on ESPNU as part of its “Storied” series. The film purports to delve into the makeup of the man that led him to such great heights, along with his inevitable downfall at the university after his teams stopped winning. For college basketball fans of all ages, it’s sure to be a must-watch.

Tonight’s Lede. It wasn’t as crazy as Tuesday’s action, but Wednesday night around the college basketball landscape held plenty of interest in the form of a number of ranked teams going on the road, a near-complete meltdown among the major teams in the Keystone State, and a career night from a Marquette sophomore and its coach’s sport coat. Let’s jump into it…

Michigan's Celebration Means Yet Another Northwestern Disappointment (DFP)

Your Watercooler Moment. Northwestern Can’t Win For Losing. Poor Northwestern. It’s probably only a weird mind trick that the Wildcats seem to have lost about a dozen games like this over the last several seasons — games that if a few bounces had gone their way, they may have finally found their way into the NCAA Tournament — but just a week after a heartbreaking one-point loss at home against Illinois, Bill Carmody’s team once again found itself on the short end of a game that they’ll file under what-could-have-been at the end of the season. Facing the prospect of a 1-3 Big Ten start with games in the next week against Wisconsin and Michigan State, the Wildcats had Michigan down in Ann Arbor by 10 points in the second half and managed to find ways to lose (or not win, more accurately) the game both in regulation and overtime. Northwestern had what looked to be the final shot at the end of regulation, but a drive by Drew Crawford ended in a weird traveling turnover call that resulted in the extra period. Then, when presented with an opportunity to make three FTs with 0.3 seconds left to tie the game in overtime, Alex Marcotullio managed to miss the first attempt, rendering the next two rather useless. As noted above, a couple of different bounces and the Wildcats are sitting pretty at 3-1 going into a brutal part of its schedule. Instead, they’re now facing a difficult 1-5 start to conference play and a near-impossible situation to get to 9-9 and have a reasonable shot to make the NCAA Tournament (even in a deep conference such as the Big Ten).

Tonight’s Quick Hits…

• Road Wins From Syracuse, Kentucky, Missouri and Kansas. As we have learned from an eternity of conference play, no team is ever completely safe on the road in conference play. Tonight, though, four of the Top 10 teams went on the road and took care of business. It’s true that their four opponents — Villanova, Auburn, Iowa State, and Texas Tech, respectively — are not among the elite of each conference, but a road win is a road win is a road win. As described below, Kansas’ destruction of Texas Tech in Lubbock was the most impressive victory, but Missouri’s bounceback win in Iowa State against a dangerous Cyclones squad, Kentucky’s late push to finish off Auburn, and Syracuse’s surgically methodical taking apart of Villanova are all worth noting. Read the rest of this entry »

Evan Jacoby is an RTC columnist and contributor. You can find him @evanjacoby on Twitter. Night Line will run on weeknights during the season, highlighting a major storyline development from that day’s slate of games.

If Missouri is going to be a serious contender by the end of this season, they’re going to need to win several games in the fashion that they did on Wednesday night. Playing with just five available players in the final minutes and with their leading scorer having an off night, the No. 9 Tigers still found a way to pull out a road win over streaking Iowa State in Ames. Mizzou was coming off a 16-point loss in Kansas State’s raucous arena in their last game, so defeating ISU under adverse conditions was huge for this team’s confidence. “We had a tough loss at Kansas State, and when we came back the next day in practice, the whole week we focused on being mentally tough,” said senior Matt Pressey, and that toughness is exactly what carried the Tigers to the 76-69 victory. While tougher challenges lie ahead, Missouri found out on Wednesday that they can win on the road even when things don’t go their way, a great sign going forward.

Matt Pressey Showed Big Time Toughness in Mizzou's Win Over Iowa State (AP Photo)

Everything went right for Missouri during non-conference play, to the point where many pundits thought they were playing better than anyone in the country. The Tigers were dominant in victories over Cal, Notre Dame, and Villanova, and also defeated Illinois in the Braggin’ Rights game on way to a 13-0 start. But reality has quickly struck for Mizzou, who, in addition to getting spanked by K-State in its first conference road game, found out that freshman Kadeem Green requested to transfer out of the program. Though not a major contributor, Green was part of Frank Haith’s eight-man rotation as the third big man alongside star forward Ricardo Ratliffe and reserve Steve Moore that could bang inside and grab some boards (he averaged 3.4 rebounds in 10 games). Now, Haith plays just seven guys per night, only two of whom stand taller than 6’8”, so there will be plenty of times when the undersized Tigers have little margin for error against their opponents.

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More Big East than you can possibly handle. RTC Live will be in the great city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this evening for a matchup between two teams searching for elusive wins in this big-time basketball conference.

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Past Imperfect is a series focusing on the history of the game. Every two weeks, RTC contributor Joshua Lars Weill (@AgonicaBoss|Email) highlights some piece of historical arcana that may (or may not) be relevant to today’s college basketball landscape. This week: the marvelous dominance of  Glenn Robinson.

The Big Dog was shy. You wouldn’t believe someone with a nickname like that would be quiet, reserved and sensitive. But then again you wouldn’t believe a lot of things about Glenn Robinson, Jr.

To believe just how dominant — how beautiful to watch — the man known as Big Dog was in his two seasons in West Lafayette, Indiana, you first have to understand it takes more than talent to make a great basketball player. Every year, millions of kids start high school hoops with dreams of being the next big thing. Many have more innate talent than all but a small fraction of their peers. But whether it’s lack of focus or work ethic, lousy coaching or just lacking the will, the vast majority of those talented kids will never be better than average at basketball.

But those select few whose ability to do whatever they want on a basketball court – the capability to dominate every game — these are your superstars. And to be one of those, a player has to possess more than just athleticism, talent and more than just focus.  These players must have something deep in their psyche that compels them, that propels them, beyond the abilities of normal athletes. And this brings us back to the Big Dog.

Glenn Robinson sat out a Prop 48 year, then dominated the college ranks for two seasons.

In the early 1990s, college basketball was changing. Gone were the behemoths that had dominated the college ranks for a decade. With the exodus to the NBA of Shaquille O’Neal and Alonzo Mourning in 1992, and the new prevalence of coaches running full-court, trapping defenses, a new need for versatility and ball-handling skills at nearly all five positions emerged. Suddenly, the demand for plodding centers was replaced by a demand for frontcourt players with backcourt skills.

This new breed of inside-outside forwards was led by a cadre of beefy but agile college big men, guys like Kentucky’s Jamal Mashburn, Wake Forest’s Rodney Rogers and Vin Baker of Hartford. Each of these players was an All-American, a top draft pick and an electrifying blend of power and finesse. But the best of that era’s “swing-bigs” was without question Purdue’s Glenn Robinson.

But what made Robinson so good was actually not even basketball-related. Raised on the rough streets of Gary, Indiana, the reserved Robinson was instilled early with an inner and outer toughness that took his already otherworldly hoops talents to a different level. Combining his immense physical gifts with a hunger for success and perseverance that can be borne only of struggle, Robinson reached that rare transcendence in sports that cannot be created solely by training and talent alone. Isiah Thomas had it. So did Larry Bird. And Glenn Robinson certainly did. His came from a natural place – his mother.

Robinson’s father was in and out of jail throughout his life. The elder Robinson left Christine Bridgeman when both were teenagers, and like too many inner city girls in similar situations, Bridgeman was left to fend for herself with a newborn. But Robinson Jr.’s mother had that steely resolve – the same resolve that would later show up so many nights in her son on the court – that wouldn’t allow failure. Like the time Glenn was struggling with his high school grades, and Christine marched into the coach’s office with her boy and informed the coach his star wouldn’t be on the team unless his grades improved. And guess what? They did.

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Evan Jacoby is an RTC columnist and contributor. You can find him @evanjacoby on Twitter. See bottom of the post for the Official RTC Star System.

Will the number one team in the land survive a rivalry road test? Can Missouri bounce back from its recent beatdown to win an away game? Here’s what to expect from two Top 10 teams in tough spots tonight:

#1 Syracuse at Villanova – 7:00 PM ET on ESPN2 (***)

Can Villanova Save Its Season Tonight by Beating #1 Syracuse? (AP Photo)

• Undefeated Syracuse comes into this game playing as well as any team in the country, but their toughest away games of the season have been at NC State and Providence, so they’re not exactly road tested. The Orange will certainly have the advantage in this one, as their 2-3 zone defense has been incredibly effective this season at forcing turnovers and limiting paint opportunities. Nova’s a team that struggles in these two areas to begin with, and also a team that fires up a lot of threes (over 20 per game) at a low conversion rate (30%, ranked in the bottom 50 nationally). If Syracuse simply executes defensively and forces the Wildcats into a three-point barrage, they’ll have a huge advantage. Jim Boeheim’s team will come at Villanova with their deep array of weapons, where Kris Joseph (14.1 PPG) and Dion Waiters (12.5 PPG) should have opportunities to score in transition and on the wings against Villanova’s poor perimeter defense.
• Villanova is in the midst of a year to forget, but they can change the outlook of the entire season with a win tonight. The Wildcats are dying for a victory of this caliber, and fans must be fired up in Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center for this rivalry home game against the number one team in the land. If the Wildcats are going to have a chance to win, they need to stop chucking up threes, especially in this game against a zone defense that will encourage them to shoot from the outside. Maalik Wayns and Dominic Cheek each attempt over four three-pointers per game and both are shooting under 30% from deep! Instead, these talented guards need to play off of each other. Wayns (17.4 PPG, 4.75 APG) is one of the quickest guards in America and can penetrate the teeth of a zone defense, and from there he must make good decisions and find teammates moving amongst the trees for good shot opportunities. Jay Wright’s team also must stay out of foul trouble and defend the perimeter if they want to have a chance.
• This seems like an uneven matchup on paper, but it could be a serious trap game for Syracuse. They haven’t yet played a good conference team on the road, and Villanova is a rival who will be fired up for this one. If Nova can find early success against the Syracuse zone, then they could have a chance in this one.

1. Most of the nation seems to believe that this year’s championship will probably come down to Syracuse, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Ohio State, but one team you would be wise to keep an eye on is Michigan State. As we noted around New Year’s their only two losses were their opening two games in extraordinary circumstances (playing UNC on a naval carrier and Duke on #903K). If you don’t believe us, perhaps you would listen to Tom Izzo who says he is so excited about this team that he is having trouble sleeping at night. If you are looking for potential NBA lottery picks you should probably look elsewhere, but after a down year this is looking a lot like your typical Spartan team that is always dangerous in March.
2. Tennessee got its first look at new recruit Jarnell Stokes in action on campus yesterday. Stokes, a top 20 recruit in the class of 2012, elected to enter college early and was cleared by the NCAA to play for the Volunteers. So far Tennessee has not given any indication of when or even if they will use Stokes this season. Given the current status of this Volunteer team we could not come up with a single reason for Stokes to play this year. He is not the type of player that we would expect to be one-and-done especially with about half of the season remaining. He could certainly make Tennessee a better team this year, but to what end? A NIT trip? It doesn’t seem to be worth it for a year of Stokes’ eligibility.
3. We are always surprised when coaches accept a job without signing or reviewing a contract, but it continues to happen. The latest example is Auburn coach Tony Barbee who worked for two years without having a formal contract before he signed an extension last month. Barbee’s extension, which runs through 2017, will pay him $1.5 million per year and includes various bonuses and buyout clauses. The most interesting part of Barbee’s new contract is the clause on NCAA compliance that he shares with football coach Gene Chizik that essentially allows the school to stop paying a coach if they were involved in any NCAA violations.
4. In November in the wake of their recruiting scandal that got buried underneath the circus in Happy Valley, UCF cleaned house and fired their athletic director Keith Tribble. Yesterday, they announced his replacement would be Todd Stansbury, who had previously worked as an executive associate athletic director at Oregon State. We have heard plenty of talk about coaches or administrators inheriting difficult situations, but the one that Stansbury could make nearly any of those situations seem simple. While the situation lacks the watchful eye of a nation that Penn State will have, we expect that UCF will have significant NCAA sanctions headed its way based on the 16-page notice of allegations it received in November from the NCAA.
5. If you are going through withdrawal from college football and are missing the ridiculousness of the BCS, we have something for you: the latest RTC BCS Top 25. In addition to the theoretical BCS bowl match-ups, politics, and snubs it also provides an interesting look at how the different computer polls rank the teams. In the end what it is really about is being thankful that we use a court instead of some convoluted formula to decide who gets to play for our championship.

Tonight’s Lede. It wasn’t just any other Tuesday night, as a number of ranked teams were in action and there was more than enough intrigue around the country to keep everyone interested. Whether it was a team few people seem to believe in slowly swaying hearts and minds, or a much-maligned former prep star bringing forth the game of his life, or an acerbic coach showing his true colors in a postgame interview, there was a lot to cover tonight. Let’s jump right in…

Will Some Pundits Begin to Take Baylor Seriously Now? (AP/C. Riedel)

Your Watercooler Moment, Part I. Baylor Stakes a Claim of Legitimacy. One of the knocks against Scott Drew’s Baylor Bears to date has been its lack of exceptional road wins this season. Apparently the non-believers did not take seriously wins at BYU and Northwestern, although neither the Marriott Center nor the Welsh-Ryan Arena these days are the easiest places to escape victorious. Still, Kansas State’s Bramlage Arena is universally regarded as a tough-as-nails venue, borne out most recently by K-State’s dominant weekend victory over an unbeaten Missouri squad. Baylor’s mid-second half run to come back from seven points down behind several eye-popping defensive transition dunks, along with its ability to hold K-State to a single bucket in the last four minutes of the game, showed America how things have changed. Last year, Drew’s Bears hardly played defense, generally preferring to use that end of the court to rest before another wild LaceDarius Dunn field goal attempt. This year, long green-and-yellow-clad arms and legs seem to cover all four corners of the court, and in fact, the two game-saving plays on this night resulted from a strip from behind of Angel Rodriguez with three seconds remaining, and a deflected pass on the ensuing inbounds play. The Bears are not going to win every game this season, but they’ve already won 16 and have survived one of their four toughest road tests on the schedule. With Pierre Jackson (10/11 assts) running the show, Brady Heslip (13/4 stls) providing scoring punch, and an elite corps of forwards in Quincy Acy, Perry Jones, III, and Quincy Miller wreaking havoc defensively, it’s time to stop questioning Scott Drew’s team and take the Bears seriously as a national title contender.

Your Watercooler Moment, Part II. Brandon Paul Hits Everything, Leads Illini Over Ohio State. In two-and-a-half seasons at Illinois, Brandon Paul has been better defined by what he is not rather than what he is. The former Chicago-area prep star who came to Champaign with sky-high expectations has largely disappointed, gradually improving his scoring output over three years but never shooting the ball efficiently (career 37.2% shooter) nor becoming an effective distributor (2.0 APG). Paul must have eaten a full bowl of his Wheaties this morning. The 6’4″ junior literally took over tonight’s game against OSU, scoring his team’s last 15 points en route to a career-high 43 points on 8-10 shooting from behind the arc. Unless you saw the game, you cannot comprehend just how ridiculous a couple of the late threes that Paul hit were, perhaps none more so than his final trey which gave Illinois a four-point lead with 43 seconds remaining.

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