Brian Goodman is an RTC editor and contributor.

With an onslaught of coverage devoted to the new season and players to come, it can be easy to lose sight of the game’s storied past that made fans and followers out of so many of us to begin with. Sunday night was a time for the game to honor its illustrious history with the induction of some of the sport’s most beloved players, coaches and contributors, into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in Kansas City. This year’s inductees included Chris Mullin, James Worthy, Ralph Sampson and Cazzie Russell as players, Bob Knight and Eddie Sutton as coaches, and contributors Eddie Einhorn and Joe Vancisin. In a ceremony emceed by Dick Enberg, one of the classic voices of college hoops and Sports Illustrated contributing writer Seth Davis, the Class of 2011 was enshrined. A recap of RTC’s coverage comes after the jump.

The National Collegiate Basketball Hall Of Fame Added Some Highly Impressive Names To Its Membership Sunday Night

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1. The big story of the weekend was the ongoing Bernie Fine saga. As we mentioned on Friday, the case at Syracuse is more nuanced than the one at Penn State although there are plenty of strange things going on at both locations.  After Jim Boeheim basically called out the two individuals who accused Fine of sexual molestation, one of them issued a response that indicates this case will end up being a he said, he said controversy. For their part, the team responded by leaving Fine’s seat on the bench vacant during their first game since he had been put on administrative leave. Interestingly, it appears that the accusers may not be able to bring the case in front of a court due to how long ago the alleged crime happened. We have a feeling that this case will drag on for quite a long time.
2. Connecticut received some good bad news when the NCAA announced that it would be suspending freshman Ryan Boatright for six games for improper benefits — a plane ticket he received while playing AAU basketball. Including yesterday’s game, Boatright has already missed four of the required six games so he will only need to sit out the first two games of the Battle4Atlantis Tournament this week. Boatright could potentially see his first action of the season in the final game of Battle4Atlantis if the Huskies are able to win their first two games. Boatright’s return could be a big boost for the defending champions, who have not posted a dominating win yet during the regular season while their primary competitors for this season’s championship have all done so at least once.
3. We are not exactly sure what is happening at Oregon with Jabari Brown and it appears that neither does the Oregon staff. The most recent reports indicate that Brown is on his way out of Oregon, but earlier reports suggested that Brown’s name had been removed from the school’s online roster and that school officials, as well as head coach Dana Altman, were unaware of the reasons behind it. Now it appears that Altman will essentially be left to beg for the school’s one stud five-star recruit to come back to them, as the loss of such a hyped recruit so early in the season will certainly affect the decision of uncommitted prospects who now might be more weary of playing for Altman after this incident.
4. Arkansas was dealt a significant setback at a practice last Thursday when Marshawn Powell suffered what is being called a “serious” knee injury that will sideline him indefinitely. The loss could be a huge one for the Razorbacks as Powell, a junior, led the team in scoring the first two games with 19.5 PPG on a team full of freshmen and sophomores and bereft of the services of Rotnei Clarke, last year’s leading scorer who decided to transfer. The Razorbacks are talented enough and their non-conference schedule is weak enough — with the exception of a game at Connecticut — that they should be able to survive until their SEC schedule starts. If Powell is not back by then, things could get ugly very quickly for the young Razorbacks.
5. Former UCLA legend Walt Hazzard died on Friday from complications related to cardiac surgery at UCLA Medical Center. Many of our younger fans may not be as familiar with Hazzard as they are with other members of the UCLA dynasty, but Hazzard was the one who gave John Wooden his first national championship in 1964 when Hazzard was named the MOP of the 1964 NCAA Tournament. Hazzard teamed with Gail Goodrich to form one of the most devastating backcourts in NCAA history and help build the UCLA dynasty. Along with his contributions as a player at UCLA, Hazzard also won a gold medal at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, played 10 seasons in the NBA, and coached the Bruins for four seasons. There has been no word on when and where funeral services will be held, but we imagine that it will be a who’s who of basketball royalty at the event.

RTC Live heads to the Great Northwest for an interesting Pac-12 vs. WCC matchup this evening. So far this season the WCC is 3-1 against its bigger brother, but the only conference loss was Portland being blown out by Washington. Join us to see what happens tonight, after the jump:

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RTC Live is back this evening with an interesting intersectional game between two teams with high hopes for this season. Join us in the city known as the Gateway to the West, after the jump.

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RTC Live moves out west for an interesting matchup between the best team in the Ivy League and a team who has already scalped local behemoth UCLA this season. Will the Lions prove they’re more than a one-trick pony this season; join us to find out tonight, after the jump.

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It’s Feast Week around the hoops nation and RTC Live is in New Jersey tonight for the semifinal round of the Legends Classic. Interestingly, the only team with a loss is the only ranked team here, but Vanderbilt vs. NC State followed by Texas vs. Oregon State should make for a great evening of college hoops. Join the conversation from the Izod Center, after the jump.

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What's Reasonable to Expect From These Bulldogs? (JCL/F. Franklin)

On Friday night, Mississippi State defeated No. 16 Arizona in Madison Square Garden to be crowned champions of the 2K Sports Classic benefiting Coaches vs. Cancer, one night after it knocked off^–No. 18 Texas A&M in the semifinals. MSU used a balanced offensive attack in which eight different players all converted at least two field goals to control this game from the outset. Its depth and talent were on display all night, as veteran leaders Dee Bost and Arnett Moultrie played well and were joined by impressive young reserves Wendell Lewis and Deville Smith. In limited minutes, Moultrie dominated inside to the tune of 19 points and ten rebounds on 8-10 shooting, while senior lead guard Dee Bost racked up eight points, six boards, and five assists.

Watching tonight’s game just makes you wonder how the Bulldogs lost at home to Akron last week. Perhaps we should just accept that this, again, is who Mississippi State is — talented enough to beat ranked teams on back-to-back nights, but undisciplined enough to lose at home to a team from the MAC. MSU’s ability to bounce back from the early upset and improve immediately to win two games over good teams with excellent coaches should leave a real impression on the rest of the SEC and, perhaps, the entire country. The Bulldogs could be ranked in the new Top 25 come Monday, and the buzz will be building again. This team goes eight deep with a combination of experience and youth, and a good mix of size inside and speed on the perimeter.

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It’s a late afternoon tipoff, but RTC Live is back in MSG for the consolation and finals of the 2kSports Coaches vs. Cancer Classic. Texas A&M will take on St. John’s first, followed by Arizona and a surprising Mississippi State team in the nightcap. Join the conversation from the Garden, after the jump.

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A report yesterday from Deadspin brought to our attention that the NCAA makes a lot of money. Not that we didn’t already know that, and not that it wasn’t already publicly available (apparently Will Leitch’s progeny whiffed on that one), but to see the NCAA’s financial statements for 2008 provides an additional layer of context to the invisible hand driving the shifting landscape of college athletics.

If we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a million times already — college football drives the bus in conference realignment and executive decision-making, with college basketball sitting in the back with the other ne’er-do-wells. But why is that so? Nearly every metric shows that our sport is not only popular, but thriving. March Madness could be America’s most beloved sporting event. Attendance figures are still on the uptick. The recent Carrier Classic set a ratings record for a November college basketball game (on a Friday night, no less). The NCAA just over a year ago signed a $10.8 billion (that’s a “B”) contract with CBS/Turner Sports to broadcast NCAA Tournament games until 2024 — that’s $771 million annually, in case you were wondering. These are not characteristics of a sport without fans.

The sport will never be as popular as the three major professional sports or even college football, but it’s not a second-class citizen on the landscape either. It produces real dollars that in a rational environment should extensively contribute to long-term decision-making. And yet we’re told again and again that it doesn’t matter. So the question we have is… why? And the answer here is the same answer found in most every other decision we make as a species: the rational pursuit of self-interest.

Take a look at these numbers. In 2008, the NCAA brought in $550 million in television revenue for the NCAA Tournament and another $70 million for its various championships. Keep in mind that the NCAA sees nothing from major college football with its archaic but separate bowl system. By removing all the non-revenue sports and for the sake of expediency, let’s call it a round $600 million that the NCAA made from college basketball that year. That money is then filtered through the belly of the NCAA where it is parsed to pay for everything else — administration of all its championships ($119 million), assorted NCAA programs ($109 million), management ($26 million), and so on. Before long that $600M is cut nearly in half to $360 million, which is then parsed out to 31 D-I conferences using a complicated ‘share’ system based on five years worth of NCAA Tournament performances.  Here’s how that system paid out in 2008:

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1. Just when the circus around Penn State was starting to calm down a little bit the college sports world appears to have an eerily similar situation at Syracuse. The basics of the story are that Bobby Davis, a former ball boy at Syracuse who is now 39 years old, has accused Syracuse assistant coach Bernie Fine of molesting him for more than a dozen years. It should be noted that even the strongest report of sexual abuse that we have heard out of Syracuse pale in comparison to the extent to the accusations and crimes that are now widely accepted as having happened at Penn State. Fine, who has become a fixture at Syracuse as an assistant to Jim Boeheim since Boeheim took over as head coach in 1976, has been placed on administrative leave by the school and has not commented on the accusations yet. However, Boeheim has strongly denied the accusations over the phone and in a press release issued by school. While we disagree with the tone of Boeheim’s statement (particularly the one over the phone) it should be pointed out that the local Syracuse newspaper is reporting that it looked into these claims in 2005 and could not verify any of the claims that Davis made including ones that other boys had experienced something similar as all of the people they contacted reportedly denied those claims. However, given the emotional nature that these cases can take we would caution anyone who might jump to conclusions quickly.
2. We don’t link to rankings very often because we realize that in general they are just educated guesses at best, but very few people do them like Luke Winn. Winn, who consistently puts out some of the best content you will find, came out with his latest power rankings yesterday. We won’t even bother getting into the rankings because they are irrelevant as we already mentioned, but there is a ton of interesting statistical information and even a few amusing photos that make it worth reading every week.
3. By now you have undoubtedly heard about the story of Arizona‘s Kevin Parrom and like rankings we normally would not link to a human interest story on Parrom because many of the details have already been published, but like Luke Winn with ranking posts few people do human interest stories like Dana O’Neil and her piece on Parrom is a great example of that. O’Neil actually does not talk to Kevin much for the article (at least for what is used in the article) and instead goes to those who are very close to him to get a good look at what he has had to endure over the past few months and what keeps him playing despite all that he has been through.
4. We cannot remember many top-tier teams that have had to deal with as many significant injuries as early in the season as Louisville has had to deal with this year. The latest to join the walking wounded is Peyton Siva, who sprained his ankle during a practice on Monday and is listed as “day-to-day”. In the long run, it looks like this should not be a significant setback for Louisville, but could be an issue on Saturday when they take on Butler at Hinkle Fieldhouse. Louisville should have enough to beat a Bulldog team that is not very good right now, but Siva’s injury may make them susceptible to Butler’s guards, who have been solid so far this year.
5. Tuesday night was a historic night in college basketball as Mike Krzyzewski became the all-time wins leader for men’s Division I basketball. After the press conference, Krzyzewski went into a small room close to the court where he addressed a large group of former Duke players who had come to the game to support him in addition to a group of players who played for him on the US Olympic team. One player who was not there, but played for Krzyzewski although not in a Duke uniform was Michael Jordan, who we had always assumed had been targeted by Krzyzewski early in his career at Duke. Recruiting information from the early 1980s is sparse, but a letter appeared online yesterday that appears to have been sent from Krzyzewski to Jordan (h/t Lost Letterman for the find) after Jordan told the new Duke coach that he was not interested in playing for Duke. The letter’s content is fairly generic, but it is amusing to read now and consider what might have been if Jordan had decided to play for the other team on Tobacco Road. While we were looking this up, we noticed that Jordan’s childhood home had been sold in 1998 for $37,500 (ignore the ridiculous Zillow estimate and we are assuming there was a shift in zip code boundaries because the 28405 and 28411 zip codes are next to each other) and found it humorous that you could own the house that Jordan grew up in and the backyard court that he waged his legendary battles with his brother Larry for less than half of what you would pay for for a 1986-87 Fleer Michael Jordan rookie card. For that price, we are surprised that some loaded foreign businessman has not bought the house and transported the entire house and yard to his or her home country as a very unique collectible.