RTC Live is back in MSG tonight as the next week-plus of pre-conference tournaments start tipping off everywhere around the country. Texas A&M will take on Mississippi State in the first game, with Arizona visiting a young but talented St. John’s squad in the nightcap. Join the conversation from the Garden, after the jump.

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Who’s Got Next? is a weekly column by Josh Paunil, the RTC recruiting guru. We encourage you to check out his website dedicated solely to college basketball recruiting, National Recruiting Spotlight, for more detailed recruiting information. Once a week he will bring you an overview of what’s going on in the complex world of recruiting, from who is signing where among the seniors to who the hot prospects are at the lower levels of the sport. If you have any suggestions as to areas we’re missing or different things you’d like to see, please let us know at rushthecourt@yahoo.com.

Lead Story: Poythress Picks Kentucky, UK Still Able To Nab Number One Recruiting Class

Poythress Gave UK Fans Hope To Have the Best Recruiting Class In the Country... Again (Daryl Paunil/NRS)

Big Blue Nation Has Reason To Rejoice. Don’t lie Kentucky fans, you were worried about not getting the number one recruiting class for the fourth straight year. You tweeted about it, you posted on message boards about it, you wrote on Facebook about it. But when Class of 2012 small forward Alex Poythress decided to join Big Blue Nation last Thursday, head coach John Calipari kept his 2012 class in the running to be rated as the top collection of talent in the country. The 6’7″, 220-pound wing joins shooting guard Archie Goodwin and center Willie Cauley as Coach Cal’s commitments so far with top senior targets small forward Shabazz Muhammad and power forwards Anthony Bennett and Jarnell Stokes still out there. Poythress had a terrific summer and showed the ability to consistently get to the bucket, finish in traffic and an improved perimeter shot. At times, he’s simply unstoppable when he attacks the rim and he’s able to impact the game in a number of ways whether it’s defense, rebounding or running the floor. He fits in well with Calipari’s system and will thrive with Goodwin and Cauley running the floor with him. At this point, the Wildcats have the second-best recruiting class in the country only behind Arizona’s ridiculous haul of talent but with another commitment or two they could reign supreme for the fourth straight year.

What They’re Saying:

• Senior standout Robert Upshaw‘s mother, Ceylon Sherman, on her son choosing Kansas State: “It was a close run, he had a lot of great schools, but when it came down to it, him and all of us family just all had Kansas State. For Robert, it was about how much he liked the guys out there. He had chemistry with them.”

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

Now that you have fully recovered from ESPN’s 24 Hours of Hoops Marathon, it’s time to jump into the first of the exotic preseason tournaments.  The Puerto Rico Tip-Off gets going today, along with the big boys’ rounds of the 2K Sports Classic benefiting Coaches vs. Cancer.  Let’s take a look at the action.

Maryland vs. #16 Alabama – 5:00 PM EST on ESPN2 HD (**)

JaMychal Green and Anthony Grant Lead Alabama into the Puerto Rico Tip-Off

• Rarely do you see a team hit zero three-point shots and still win a game.  However, that is exactly what Maryland did in its first game of the season against UNC-Wilmington.  The Terps finished 0-9 from downtown, but managed to drain 58% of its twos.  Mark Turgeon’s squad is going to have a tough time hitting such a high percentage of shots inside the arc against Alabama’s vaunted defense.  While Terp forwards James Padgett and Ashton Pankey both scored in double figures in the opener, neither consistently demands enough attention to take scoring pressure off the guards.  Sophomore guard Terrell Stoglin needs to have another big game in order for the Terrapins to have a chance.  If the Alabama defense can lock him up, there is not enough fire power elsewhere on Turgeon’s team to beat the Crimson Tide.
• Alabama is all about defense.  They picked up right where they left off last year giving up only 0.8 points per possession through their first two games of the season.  However, senior forward JaMychal Green should not be overlooked as a big time offensive threat.  Green is averaging 18 points per game in only 25 minutes of action per night.  Coach Anthony Grant’s team needs to improve its shooting, though.  Alabama shot under 50% eFG in 20 of it’s 37 games last season and that trend is continuing again this season.  While they finished a remarkable 10-10 in those games because of a stellar defense, it’s very difficult for a team to have major success shooting under 50% eFG.  If the Tide is hitting more than half of its shots against Maryland, the game will not be close.
• This game hinges on Maryland’s ability to create baskets in transition.  Maryland plays at a much faster pace than Alabama.  If they get locked down in a halfcourt match-up with the Crimson Tide defense, the Terps’ offense will bog down because they do not have enough weapons in the low post.  The team that dictates the pace and style of this game will ultimately win.

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Kellen Carpenter is an ACC microsite staffer and an RTC columnist. Behind the Numbers will publish weekly throughout the season.

Preseason rankings are a funny thing and once real basketball begins, these guesses about the season grow increasingly meaningless. People forget who was ranked where in the preseason by January, if they haven’t already forgotten by December. This, for what it’s worth, is probably a good thing.  Preseason polls can turn out to be pretty embarrassing, highlighting how little journalists and coaches actually know about how the basketball season is going to turn out. Remember Kansas State and Michigan State last season? They weren’t exactly huge factors in the postseason despite being almost unanimously ranked in the top five at the beginning.

Ron Morris Was Certainly On To Something

Gary Parrish’s “Poll Attacks” column is devoted to critiquing what he feels aren’t well-considered ballots. It’s an interesting idea and is usually very fascinating, but since Parrish can’t see the future, the columns have a tendency to not age all that well. What seems like understandable ridicule in November can seem less well-founded when the championship game is being played in April.  Here is a particularly infamous  passage from last year’s pre-season column:

Same dude voted Connecticut 18th.

This would’ve made sense three years ago, but it makes no sense now given that the Huskies have a coach who can’t seem to stay healthy, and a roster that looks nothing like your typical UConn roster. That’s why Big East coaches picked UConn 10th in the league, and why somebody needs to shoot me Ron Morris’ email address. With little effort, I can get him added to the official Big East email list, at which point he’ll start receiving announcements, and then this sort of stuff can probably be avoided. I don’t mean to be pushy.

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1. After Tuesday night’s embarrassing loss to Middle Tennessee State, UCLA fans were questioning what Ben Howland could do to resurrect the floundering program. Howland appears to have answered them by reinstating Reeves Nelson after suspending the junior for what has been described as “behavior issues”. While the decision certainly makes the Bruins a more talented team that does not appear to be UCLA’s primary problem right now. They certainly were not any less talented than Loyola Marymount or Middle Tennessee State even without Nelson, but still lost to both of those teams. Now, Howland will be using a point guard who was involved in a computer theft earlier this year, an incredibly overweight big man, and a player whom he appears to have brought back in a desperate attempt to save this season. As Jeff Goodman notes that this act screams of Howland putting winning above everything else. It will be interesting to see how this affect UCLA’s recruiting going forward. They already have signed Kyle Anderson, who appears to be sticking with UCLA although we would argue that he doesn’t have much choice after signing with them, but we imagine this turmoil might affect Shabazz Muhammad, who apparently was watching both UCLA and Kentucky on Tuesday night.
2. The NCAA has a history of making interesting decisions and yesterday’s announcement that Joe Castiglione, the athletic director at Oklahoma, had been appointed to the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee appears to be another one of them. Castiglione replaces former Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe, a man whose career fell so precipitously in the past few months that he got his own fake Twitter account that has over 15,000 followers. Castiglione appears to have a solid resume, but the timing is a bit odd since his school was put on probation just a week ago and although it appears that Castiglione probably could not have stopped it the selection is an interesting one especially in light of the fact that Connecticut‘s Jeff Hathaway is also on the same committee and serves as chairman despite his school having to take a scholarship hit and potentially being ineligible to play in next year’s NCAA Tournament due to a low APR score.
3. The Kentucky fans who showed up en masse at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night for the team’s resounding win over Kansas will get another chance to return New York next year, but will have to head over to Brooklyn instead of Manhattan as the Wildcats are scheduled to play Maryland in next year’s Barclay Center Classic. We don’t know who will be playing at Kentucky next season, but we expect that they will be very talented and there will be plenty of Wildcat fans at the game. The night’s undercard is Morehead State against Long Island, which might actually bring some fans to the game given the proximity of the school.
4. With many of the top recruits in the country having already committed or in the process of committing to a school Basketball Prospectus took a look at “basketball recruiting royalty,” which they use to refer to Duke, North Carolina, and Kentucky. While the article does take quite a few liberties in assuming why or even if those schools target certain recruits based on where they are ranked and consequently what type of player they will be, it is an interesting read. It also provides some interesting statistics on how often players ranked in each recruiting ranking range stay at a school they committed to before leaving either due to graduation, transfer, or to the NBA. We would love to see someone try a more formal approach to analyze this and see if there is a “sweet spot” for schools to recruit in although it would probably change whenever the NBA makes its decision on how long a player has to stay in college before turning pro.
5. The ratings for last Friday’s Carrier Classic are in and they were excellent as we all expected. The telecast received a 2.7 rating (3.859 million viewers), which is the highest rating that ESPN has ever had for a November college basketball game (technically tied with a 1992 Preseason NIT game). The press release claims that this is ESPN’s most-watched college basketball game since March 2005 when 3.78 million watched Duke play North Carolina. We are assuming they are referring to the Nielsen rating because 3.859 million is certainly more than 3.78 million. Of course, before we start getting too excited about this rating we should point out that more people watched ESPN’s College Football Scoreboard on Saturday night (2.8 rating for 4.232 million viewers) than watched an actual college basketball game.

After another exhausting but fun Hoops Marathon, RTC Live is back tonight with a couple of Big East teams taking on motivated mid-majors at home. Pitt comes in with a 2-0 record and is looking to avoid the upset bug among highly ranked teams that has already struck a few others. Join the conversation from the Steel City, after the jump.

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After another exhausting but fun Hoops Marathon, RTC Live is back tonight with a couple of Big East teams taking on motivated mid-majors at home. Notre Dame has struggled a bit without its star forward, Tim Abromaitis, in the lineup, but the Irish have managed to sneak by with a 2-0 record thus far. Join the conversation from South Bend, after the jump.

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

After a twenty-four hour marathon of hoops yesterday, we settle things down a bit and get into the groove of regular season college basketball.  Let’s check out a few games for you to watch tonight.

Indiana @ Evansville – 8 PM EST on ESPN3 (***)

Cody Zeller Leads Indiana Against Evansville

• Picking up right where it left off last year, Evansville continues to win games at the free throw line.  Junior guard Colt Ryan scored 14 of his game high 23 points from the line in the Purple Aces’ overtime win against Butler last Saturday.  Ryan was not the only scorer for Marty Simmons’ team, as four other players scored in double figures.  With 40% of the team’s points coming from the line, Evansville relies on free throws to fuel their offense like few other teams.  Since Evansville does not look like it will be a one-man show, Indiana will have to be cognizant of fouls across the board so as to not find itself in the double bonus early in each half.
• At 6’11”, Indiana freshman Cody Zeller gives the Hoosiers an athletic big man to go along with guards Vardell Jones, III, and Victor Oladipo.  IU has a significant advantage down low since no Evansville player is taller than 6’8”.  Indiana’s two-point shooting has been on target for the first two games, hitting 64.3% of its shots from inside the arc. Look for Zeller and the Hoosier guards to score from the paint regularly against a soft Evansville interior defense.
• This game, like most Evanville games, hinges on the Purple Aces’ ability to attack the basket and get to the free throw line.  If they are not getting to the line they will assuredly lose.  They do not have the size to guard Zeller or create second-chance points for themselves on missed shots.  Simmons’ team faced similar circumstances against Butler, though, but pulled off the win thanks to a hefty 32 points from the line.  If Indiana can continue to defend the two well without fouling, they should have no problem leaving Evansville’s new building with a 3-0 record.

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Act V of our six-part microsite release is now here. Today we’re pleased to announce the launch of our Big East Conference microsite to join the ACC, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC. It’s no secret that the 16-team monster of a league has been top to bottom the best basketball conference in America the last few years, and it appears that will likely hold true for at least one more year until powerhouses Syracuse and Pittsburgh alight for a different league.

Like the other four existing microsites, our two new staffers, Pat Prendergast and Mike Lemaire, will bring you daily news, analysis and commentary on the state of Big East basketball from Tampa to Milwaukee to Providence and everywhere in-between. The usual ways to find the microsite are in effect: the little button in the top right hand corner of the site, the direct link, or just add big-east to the end of rushthecourt.net/. You can reach both of them via their contact information over on the microsite.

Finally, we’re still taking applications for our Big Ten microsite, which we hope to roll out in the next several weeks. Send us a writing sample and some information about yourself to rushthecourt@yahoo.com as soon as you can.

We aren’t going to go into some deep analysis of Mike Krzyzewski picking up win #903 of his career because we already did it and there are some pretty cool graphics about it online. Instead, we are going to focus on the actual game, which many people decided to gloss over last night.

Krzyzewski Had a Great Night, But His Team Still Needs Some Work

For Duke:

1. They aren’t very good right now. This game was not as close as the final score indicates, but the lead that Duke had at one point — 20 points with 9:22 left — also does not indicate how well they played. For most of the game the Blue Devils looked lost against a Michigan State team that only returned two players (Keith Appling and Draymond Green) who played more than 20 minutes per game last season. The Blue Devils were bailed out by some phenomenal shooting from Andre Dawkins and Ryan Kelly, who combined for 40 points on just 18 field goal attempts, and some sloppy play by the Spartans, who had 21 turnovers.
2. Austin Rivers is not ready for prime time. Every year we hear about some talented perimeter player who is a sure thing and will dominate college basketball from day one. To be fair to Rivers, he never had the expectations that Harrison Barnes had last year, but many people figured that the son of a former NBA star and “current” NBA head coach would be able to adjust to the college game and the pressures that come with it. We saw the first signs of weakness in his game during Duke’s trip to Dubai and China, but figured that he just needed to get used to his new teammates. We will not say he is a bust because as Barnes proved last season some players just take a little while to get going, but the line for Rivers last night — five points on 1-7 shooting, one rebound, one assist, one steal, two turnovers, four fouls, and a seat on the bench late in the game — are not comforting. Rivers will come around eventually, but for right now we don’t see him playing a major role in the rotation late in games.
3. Duke has some big bodies on the inside. For all of their faults (and there are many) the Plumlees are big. They may drive some of their fans crazy, but they battle on the inside and as tonight showed they can even get chippy as they got physical with one of the more rough teams they will see all season. Ryan Kelly can also be a factor down low, but his real utility is battling a big man under the basket on the defensive end then taking him out to the perimeter on the offensive end. The reality is that the Plumlees need to play better if Duke is going to do Duke things like challenge for a Final Four appearance. At this point every Duke fan has to admit Miles is essentially a big body who will play physical, get rebounds and frequently get confused for his two younger brothers. Mason, on the other hand, has to do much more offensively. We are not expecting him to put up 25 points and 12 rebounds like he did against Marquette last season, but he should be a focal point of the Duke offense and should be able to create good looks for the perimeter players when he kicks the ball out.