This is the first of our four quick-and-dirty region breakdowns. This will serve to help the quick triggers who like to fill out their brackets first thing on Monday morning. For the rest of you, we’ll be providing more detailed game-by-game analysis throughout the rest of the week.

Reliant Stadium Hosts the South Regional

Region: South

Favorite: Duke, #1 seed, 29-5. Yeah, I know it isn’t shocking that they are the favorites especially in what many are calling the weakest of the four regions, but the Blue Devils have a solid combination of perimeter talent (albeit limited in numbers) and interior players (quantity more than quality, but still something). With the way Jon Scheyer has been playing this season and the sudden re-emergence of Kyle Singler in the ACC Tournament, Coach K and the Blue Devils should have their sights set on Indianapolis.

Should They Falter: Villanova, #2 seed, 24-7. A Final Four team last year, the Wildcats had the appearance of a Final Four team a month ago (many will still pick them now), but after losing five of their last seven games to close the season some of that luster has worn off. Still we would be remiss not to list them here as all but one of those losses came on the road (neutral site in one case to a #6 seed) against a team that is in the NCAA, another team with a top-3 seed and another to a UConn team back when Jim Calhoun’s players still cared.

Grossly Overseeded: California, #8 seed, 23-10. I know they won the Pac-10 regular season, but as you may have heard the Pac-10 was awful this year. When we asked Mike Montgomery about the possibility that the Bears might miss the NCAA Tournament this year he was perturbed. While he might have made it into the NCAA Tournament it does not erase the fact that they did not beat a single team in the top 50 of the RPI ratings. The Bears might deserve a spot in the NCAA Tournament, but I think most people would agree that they have not earned a seed this high.

Grossly Underseeded: Siena, #13 seed, 27-6. This might be where they deserve to be seeded based on their resume this year, but this is the team with the most “growth potential.” The Saints struggled in their conference final, but they have won first round games as an underdog in each of the past two years. Last year they knocked off Ohio State as a #9 seed and the year before knocked off Vanderbilt as a #13 seed. With an experienced squad they would be a tough out as a #13 seed in any bracket.

Sweet Sixteen Sleeper (#12 seed or lower): Siena. Like we said they won their first round games each of the past two years and there might not be a team more set-up to be upset in the first round than the Robbie Hummel-less Purdue Boilermakers. If they get past Matt Painter’s crew, they will play the winner of the Texas A&M and Utah State. It won’t be an easy second round game, but since it is in Spokane, Washington, we can’t imagine that either team will have a huge following there (although Utah State could conceivably travel up there).

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1. See that number two up there?  Yeah, the second month of the year… folks, it’s February.  Although a short month in terms of days, it’s not short on importance.  In fact, it’s without a doubt the most important month of the regular season, as a majority of teams will make or break their case for the Big Dance over the next twenty-eight days (Selection Sunday is seven weeks from yesterday).  Right now there’s a pool of roughly 75 teams in contention for the 34 at-large NCAA berths, and as each week goes by, that number will continue to shrink.  Buckle in and enjoy, because it’s time to separate the pretenders from the contenders.
2. The New York Times takes a look at the domino effect that would likely occur if or when the Big Ten makes a decision to expand by one or more schools.  The best part of this piece is Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon throwing the Big 12 under the bus by comparing quality of academics at certain [not unnamed] institutions.
3. John Wall, on his game and coach, John Calipari after beating Vandy on Saturday:  “I didn’t think I played that bad. I don’t know what to expect. [Calipari]’s probably going to say I played bad today too so. I don’t know. I just try not to listen to him and go out and play basketball and try and help my team win.”  Is the presumptive #1 pick in this June’s NBA Draft hitting the proverbial wall?  His five least efficient games of the season came in January (Georgia, Vandy, South Carolina, Louisville, Auburn), and he’s only shooting 39.5% from the field and committing 4.2 turnovers/game in SEC play.  Are teams figuring out how to handle Wall, or is he losing some of his focus?
4. We’re still trying to track down a photo of this, but the WVU student section came up with a creative response to the AD’s criticism that they were not acting appropriately during last week’s game against Ohio State (a few F-bomb chants were thrown around).  They printed up white t-shirts that looked like tuxedos with the slogan “Keeping it Classy Since 1863” written across the back.  In the spirit of benevolence, they then proceeded to chant Rick Pitino paramour Karen Sypher’s name throughout the game.
5. You’ve probably already heard that President Obama was at Saturday’s Duke-Georgetown game in DC.  If you haven’t heard his segment as a commentator with Verne Lundquist and Clark Kellogg, you can check it out below.  But in one of the great all-time examples of why political writers should never write about sports (and vice versa), check out this pool report from the NY Post’s Charles Hurt.  Hurt couldn’t have misunderstood, well, just about everything, any worse than he did in his piece.  Taking shots at liberal elitism?  Talking about the “kick-off” and the “playoffs?”  Completely missing the tongue-in-cheek back-and-forth between Obama and the CBS team about “going left?”  Good grief.  Clearly Hurt has never witnessed a basketball game in his life.

Welcome back, everyone!  Boom Goes the Dynamite returns for the fourth weekend of the year with a blockbuster Saturday of games that are so good that we’re getting them up today as a reminder to join us tomorrow afternoon.  With noon-to-night coverage and the fact that most of the country is completely frozen over again, we expect that you’ll be right there with us on the couch, eating a bunch of bad food and breaking down zone offenses.  We hope to see you then!

Here are the games we plan on keeping an eye on…

12 PM: La Salle at #15 Temple on ESPN2 and ESPN360.com
12 PM: Marquette at #19 Connecticut on Big East Network HD and ESPN Full Court
12 PM: Louisville at #9 West Virginia on ESPN and ESPN360.com
1 PM: #7 Duke at #11 Georgetown on CBS – RTC Live
2 PM: #4 Syracuse at DePaul on Big East Network and ESPN Full Court
2 PM: Indiana at Illinois on ESPN2 and ESPN360.com
3 PM: FSU at Boston College on Raycom and ESPN Full Court
3 PM: #25 Northern Iowa at Missouri State
4 PM: Baylor at #6 Texas on Big 12 Network and ESPN Full Court
4 PM: #23 Vanderbilt at #1 Kentucky on ESPN and ESPN360.com A
4 PM: Arkansas at #20 Mississippi on SEC Network and ESPN Full Court
6 PM: Notre Dame at Rutgers on ESPN2 and ESPN360.com
6 PM: New Mexico at TCU on CBS College Sports
7 PM: #2 Kansas at #13 Kansas State on ESPN and ESPN360.com
7 PM: Georgia at South Carolina on Fox Sports (regional) and ESPN Full Court
7 PM: Northwestern at #5 Michigan State on Big Ten Network
8 PM: Providence at Cincinnati on ESPN U
9 PM: Utah at #10 BYU on Mountain Network
9:30 PM: #8 Gonzaga at San Francisco on Fox Sports (regional)- RTC Live

We will be dividing the day into three shifts with nvr1983 starting things off then rtmsf will handle the afternoon games before John Stevens takes you into the night with late night coverage of all the day’s big games.

10:50 AM: Apparently ESPN forgot to pay the electricity bill as the lights just went out on Jason Williams. (As a college basketball fan, I refuse to call him Jay. Jason Williams was a great player. Jay Williams crashed his motorcycle.)

11:00 AM: Dear College Students of America, This is how you show up for a College GameDay. I don’t want to call anybody out, but the Kansas State fans are crushing what I saw when I went to GameDay at UNC last year. To be fair, a game against in-state rival Kansas is much, much more important than a disappointing Miami team. This seems more like a College Football GameDay and that’s what we need for the basketball version too. Right now the pressure is on Illinois, Kentucky, Washington, Syracuse, and Duke to match this atmosphere when GameDay comes to town later this year.

11:10 AM: Does anybody have a link to where we can buy one of those Frank Martin t-shirts?

11:15 AM: According to the Kansas State website, the previous record for College Basketball GameDay attendance was 6,700 at Clemson last year before they played Duke. I haven’t heard an official number for today. Bramlage Coliseum holds 12,528 and I would think they are well over half full.

11:20 AM: Is Coach K advocating for abolishing the requirement for players to spend one year in college or wanting them to stay in school for more than one semester, which is all they really have to do to be eligible to play in their freshman year? It sounds more like the former. Jay Bilas is right that this issue is more a NBA/business issue.

11:22 AM: If you’re wondering who Hubert Davis and Digger Phelps are going to pick to win the Kansas-Kansas State game, their clothes might be a pretty good clue. Hubert is wearing a purple shirt and a purple tie. Digger is wearing a purple shirt and a purple tie and he he has a purple highlighter. . .

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It’s a travel day around here, which we’re sure is also true for many of you out there in Hoopsland.  Apologies if things get a little quiet after tonight, as there is only one game over the next three days (Saturday’s West Virginia at Seton Hall tilt).  Have a safe, happy and tremendous Christmas celebrating however your family chooses to do so (or not at all), and remember to give that little extra, whether time, attention, or cashmoney, to those in need this weekend.  Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone!

1. Georgetown’s Nikita Mescheriakov will transfer at the end of the semester, according to school officials, marking the fifth such transfer from the Hoya program in the last three seasons.  Mescheriakov wasn’t getting much playing time as JT3 continues to utilize a very short bench this year, but we wonder if his style of coaching isn’t grating on some of these players who are leaving?
2. Rick Pitino has suspended forward Terrence Jennings for Wednesday night’s game against Louisiana-Lafayette for an undisclosed violation of team rules.  Recall that in October Jennings and teammate Jerry Smith were involved in an altercation with police outside of a party in nearby Jeffersonville, Indiana.  Speaking of Coach P, Karen Sypher pleaded not guilty yesterday to (new) charges of retaliation against a witness.
3. Tubby Smith is acting the role of the eye-rolling parent by stating yesterday that the status of Royce White, who retired from college basketball and the University of Minnesota in a strange YouTube clip we wrote about last week, has not changed.  Probably for the best.
4. Hear about that UK2K thing from Monday night?  Check out this cool graphical interpretation of the winningest programs in college basketball history by decade.  Trust us, you’ll enjoy it.  Promise.
5. This is fairly interesting.  SI.com rated the top 25 “franchises” in both professional and college sports for the 2000s.  Their top CBB “franchises?”  #10 – North Carolina, #13 Kansas, #17 Michigan State, #20 Florida, #22 Duke.  Interesting how that matches up with our very own Team of the 2000s we set forth last summer — same top five, slightly different order.

1. The holidays are approaching and lucky for us, Karen Sypher truly is the gift that keeps on giving.  Ms. Sypher was charged today by a Louisville grand jury with the federal crime of retaliation against a witness for accusing Rick Pitino of raping her.  In plain english, this means that the grand jury found no reason to believe her claim that Pitino raped her (same as the police).  Yep, just tack that one onto all the others — extortion, perjury, etc. — if she keeps it up, she might just end up doing some serious time over all this nonsense.
2. The SI guys (Seth Davis, Grant Wahl and Luke Winn) give us their preseason selections for various categories in bite-sized form, but isn’t it a week late for this, fellas?  (ed. note – ok, got it — it was for the magazine)
3. This is a nice piece by Alexander Wolff on the precocious career of Josh Pastner at Memphis.  Gary Parrish also has something to say about this year’s scrappy Memphis team.  We’re a little late to Pastner’s bandwagon, but after what we saw last night in terms of strategy, energy and fight, this guy is going to be around for a very long time.
4. This was an interesting study done by professors at Indiana (where else?) that looks at the incidence of fouls called on college basketball teams over the course of a season.  The findings were compelling, but commonsensical: a) aggressive teams are rewarded by physical play by officials’ (unconscious?) tendencies to “keep it even” in terms of foul calls over the course of a game; b) home court advantage is a clear predictor of foul differential (+7%); and c) the greater the foul differential, the more likely it is that the next foul will be called on the team with fewer fouls.  We haven’t vetted the data or methodology but most everything sounds reasonable at first blush.  The smart coaches have known this for years, and even the not-so-bright ones know that teams that clutch, hold and grab on every possession can’t get called for everything.  The only possibly confounding factor not accounted for would be if the teams that are behind in the game get more aggressive through the course of play, which explains why there’s a greater likelihood of the team with fewer fouls getting whistled more often in this situations.  Interesting study.
5. Former FIU star and RTC Impact Player Freddy Asprilla has committed to Kansas State as a juco — another great get for Frank Martin, who is putting together a nice program there in the Little Apple.

Sometimes even the spinniest of spinmeisters can make us guffaw out loud (GOL?) with their ridiculousness. 

Louisville head coach Rick Pitino could literally have his arm up to his elbow in the cookie jar and find a way to deliver a condescending lecture on why we shouldn’t be looking in the direction of that jar in the first place.  The guy is like Pooh Bear searching for the honey pot, Lucy holding the football and Wimpy asking for a hamburger all wrapped into one person – his memory capacity runs in nanofractions and he expects us to all blindly follow along.  Baghdad Bob himself must have eschewed Noam Chomsky’s treatise on propaganda in favor of one of Pitino’s missives, so artfully does he dwell in alternate universes of reality. 

Pitino With Yet Another Reach (photo credit: EH Shepard)

From today’s lecture speech by Pitino at the Louisville Tip-Off Luncheon, Pitino was quoted as saying a number of things, including that he thinks his team will be very coachable this year, Edgar Sosa will become one of the best point guards in the nation, and that Louisville’s backcourt can stand up against anyone in America.  All of which are possible, perhaps even plausible on certain days.  But, oh, there was also this jewel:

Louisville coach Rick Pitino insists that he’s having one of the best years of his life.

Really.  After a mostly embarrassing summer where Pitino spent several press conferences apologizing to his wife/kids/players/fans/employer by invoking 9/11, playing the hapless victim, fibbing about health insurance, berating the media and telling everyone to focus on the important things like basketball, he has decided that 2009 represents one of the best years of his 57-year old life.   Well, let’s see about that, shall we?

Below is an enlightening chart that SI’s Luke Winn created to describe the fortunes of the Louisville program since the team was upset in the Elite Eight last March by Michigan State (coincidentally, not one of Pitino’s better coaching moments).  As you can surmise, anything below the black line is a negative thing.  Anything above it is positive.  (h/t CNNSI)  What do you guys think about Pitino’s latest claim? 

Oh, we get it.  Bad means good; best means worst; and so on.  Like the kids used to say…

Readers of this site will probably assume that we’ve turned to coverage exclusively about the University of Kentucky basketball program, what with all the news that’s come out of the Bluegrass State this summer/off-season — the firing of Billy Gillispie, the hiring of John Calipari, the recruitment and signing of John Wall and the accumulation of other big-time prepsters, the Rick Pitino/Karen Sypher fiasco, the eventual further misadventures of Gillispie, and so on.  And now, there’s this:

From the Sporting News…

In early July, [Assistant Director of Basketball Operations/Manager] Bilal Batley visited the UK practice gym to speak with a player regarding an academic matter…While there, [Batley] was seen gathering rebounds for one of the players.  The university determined it should be turned into the NCAA as a secondary violation.

Batley held the same post at Calipari’s Memphis program last year before accompanying him to Kentucky.  Before that he was a graduate manager at Indiana for a season.  The Kentucky job didn’t last long, though.  A few days ago, it was announced that Batley was no longer on the UK staff, evidently choosing to leave to go back to Houston because of an illness in his family.

Though no connection has so far been discovered or reported, a person cannot be faulted for asking the question regarding the possibility of a connection between Batley’s departure and what really does look like a minor violation.  It would be normal to ask that question if such an occurrence happened at ANY program.  When John Calipari is your head coach, though, it’s going to draw even more of a critical eye.  We know, nothing’s ever been actually pinned on him, but when you’re the only coach ever to have Final Fours vacated at the two schools you coached and when you associate with people named World Wide Wes, you can’t be surprised when you’re looked at a tad more closely. 

Did Calipari hear about the possibility of some kind of (even miniscule) violation perpetrated by this man, and order him out in the spirit of running a totally clean and pristine program at UK?  Or, if a bigger investigation is forthcoming, did the coaches convene and decide to oust Batley preemptively because some other things might be discovered?  Is there more news to follow from Lexington?  Nobody can say right now, and the possibilities mentioned above are total speculation and conjecture on the part of this blogger, as of right now.  There’s always the chance that — and you might want to hold onto something, here — the violation really is just a tiny thing that UK is playing it very safe (and understandably so) by reporting, and Batley really is going back to Houston for the aforementioned family illness.  If that is indeed the case, of course we hope everything turns out well for the Batley family.

I have one question, though.  Given what’s happened, the “minor-ness” of the violation becomes more compelling.  I mean, the guy grabbed a few rebounds for somebody while on his way to take care of something else; the NCAA is one bizarre organization when it comes to evaluating crimes and doling out punishment, but it would have to be utterly insane to attach any penalty to that.  People take leaves-of-absence from jobs all the time when family members get sick, and they’re often allowed to come back.  In fact, as most of you know, depending on who the family member is, your job is protected by law if you choose to take leave.  Jobs at programs like Kentucky don’t just grow on trees.  Maybe I’m misinformed on the whole thing, but a job like “Assistant Director of Basketball Operations/Manager” sounds like one that another person in the department could handle for a short time while Batley tends to the family issues, so that he could return when those matters are resolved (happily, we hope).  No matter whose decision it was, why is Batley now totally unassociated with the program?  Why would he seemingly remove himself or let himself be removed from such a plum position at a Leviathan program like Kentucky so quickly and so soon after taking the job in the first place, and over so minor an incident?

Who knows — right now, it looks like there’s no fire associated with this smoke.  But we’re going to stay tuned.

On the eve of college football’s start…  let’s get caught up on the news and notes from the last week in roundball.

• Preaching to the Choir.  Gary Parrish wrote an article that was ostensibly about the A10’s financially-motivated decision to move from its ancestral home of Philadelphia to its Sun Belt environs of Newport News, Virginia, but morphed into a scathing critique of the rapidly increasing revenue gap between the power conferences and the mid-majors.  We liken this a little bit to what has happened in major league baseball over the past twenty years or so.  It’s not an issue of there once being equality where now there is none; it’s more an issue of relative inequality being much larger than it ever has been (and only increasing).  The Yankees and other major market franchises in MLB always had more money to spend on players, marketing, etc., and were summarily rewarded with larger media deals and ticket prices.  This is similarly true for the power conferences in football and basketball.  But in the modern era of 100-million dollar contracts for baseball players and billion-dollar contracts for media rights, what we’re witnessing is an acceleration of the revenue gap between large and small to a future point that is completely unsustainable.  As an example of the disparity, the $2.2B television contract that the SEC has with ESPN is probably worth more than the contracts of every mid-major league in existence has ever had, combined.  Seriously.  As Parrish points out, this sort of exposure leads to recruits, and the cycle starts all over again.  We’re really uncertain as to how the NCAA plans to deal with this over the next decade, but if we know anything about the entity at all, we’re betting that they’ll be completely behind the curve when something happens.        
• Vegas Watch: Big 12 Preview.  We mentioned this in a previous FBs, but Vegas Watch is leading an exercise previewing each of the six BCS conferences using last year’s Pomeroy rankings, this year’s incoming recruits, and the sharp eye of his respected cronies (Money Line Journal and Sports Investments).  He invited RTC along for the ride this time around, and we tried to provide some value where we could.  Keep an eye out for the remaining installments over the next several weeks.  (note: not even a regression analysis is needed to determine KU is #1 in the Big 12)
• Get Creative, SEC Schools.  Look, it’s not every year that a player named Nimrod Tishman comes into your league as a freshman, assuming that the NCAA clears his amateur status in the next few weeks.  But Billy Donovan’s Florida Gators picked up the 6’6 Israeli to replace Nick Calathes and you should expect to see his curious name all over the place next season.   So here’s our request of the other 11 SEC schools – get creative.  Come up with some really clever signs and chants for when Florida visits your house this winter.  If we hear a school derisively chanting his first name with no further thought or effort put into it, we’re going to be extremely disappointed.  Come on, UK and UT fans, we know you’ve got something up your sleeves – an opportunity like this only comes around once a decade. 
• SI’s 25 Things We Miss in Basketball.  This wasn’t exclusively a list of college basketball memories, but the ones chosen by Grant Wahl, Seth Davis and others were exceptional.  It’s not every day we can honestly say we learned something completely new about the modern era of CBB, but the piece about Bo Ellis designing Marquette’s national title year “untucked” jerseys indeed was (image here).  It was so ugly that the NCAA banned it a few years later.  We also enjoyed the pieces on great team nicknames, Len Bias and the SEC in the 80s.  Give it a read.  You won’t regret it.
• Closing Out Pitino/Sypher.    An awful lot of bandwidth was used writing about the Pitino/Sypher Scandal, and presumably there’s more to this story coming down the road.  But the best piece we read last week was this one on CNNSI by Pablo Torre, who attempts to describe Pitino’s inner circle and how intertwined they all are.  The worst one was this abomination by Jason Whitlock.  Then there was this hard-hitting interview from WLKY in Louisville… 
• Comings and Goings.  J’Covan Brown was cleared to play at Texas this season.  Ditto with Mississippi St.’s John Riek, who will sit out the first nine games of the season over extra benefits.  Pitt’s Gilbert Brown, on the other hand, will be sitting out the fall semester due to academic troubles.  South Carolina picked up a heckuva transfer in walk-on Malik Cooke, who averaged 9/5 for Nevada last season.  Darryl “Truck” Bryant’s legal troubles don’t appear to be too burdensome – he’ll face no jail time after leaving the scene of an accident and striking a WVU student with his vehicle in separate incidents this summer.  What’s that get you under Huggins?  A one-game suspension?  Finally, in the let’s-keep-our-fingers-crossed dept., BYU’s Dave Rose got a clean bill of health after his pancreatic cancer surgery earlier this summer.  He’s hopeful that he’ll be back on the court this season (his next scan is in two weeks).
• Quick Hits.  John Wooden: On death, penises and politics.  Calipari: disappointed in Memphis penalties.  NCAA Selective Enforcement: we need as many people writing as many articles about these inconsistencies as possible.  Tom Crean: Marquette HOFer.  Kevin Stallings: forgoes $100k raise for team trip Down Under.  Greg Paulus:  starting QB at Cuse.  Goodman: impact transfers for 09-10.  Patrick Christopher: the new JJ Redick.  Eric Bledsoe: better than Wall?  Scout: summer all-americans and class of 2011 rankings.   Delaware: looks like NFL parlays or nothing at all, folks.  Arizona: can the Cats scratch their way to 26 in a row?  Billy Clyde: the least hirable coach in America?  FIU: caves, will play UNC after all.  Jarvis Varnado: heading home, but what caused his sudden illness?  Ed Davender: ticket scammer.  BBall Prospectus: careful slurping that class of 09 just yet…  Nebraska: inventing new ways to hold scholarship players.  Teddy Dupay: 30 days in jail.  NCAA Ethics: John Beilein is the head man, and here’s what coaches want to see.  Bank Robber Recruit: Anthony DiLoreto signs with Utah St. 

The Rick Pitino 3pm news conference has just ended.  If you didn’t get to see it, you didn’t miss much (video highlights posted below).  All we saw was a frustrated man. 

Pitino basically just wanted to get up in public and tell the media why he doesn’t like what they do (at least when they say negative things about him), and then thinks he has the authority to go tell them what they SHOULD be covering.  He made a couple of references to how he didn’t understand why the media was covering the release of the Karen Sypher tapes “on the day that Ted Kennedy has died.”  He seemed ticked off that the New York media had been reporting on the subject today, and was surprised that they would do so, because — Pitino’s own words — the New York media had always treated him with respect.  (Ed. note – Pitino made no comment on the Boston media.)  His frustration on this point was compounded since he describes himself as “a proud New Yorker,” which has never been disputed.  And he reiterated his faith that the truth will come out during the upcoming trial.

I agree with Pitino that there really isn’t much actual NEW information to be reported by these news outlets — Pitino specifically singled out Fox 41 in Louisville during the press conference.  They seemed to want to take Sypher’s rape allegation (which was all but squashed by the Louisville police, in terms of its credibility) and report it as a new story, when in fact people have known about that particular facet of all of this for a while, now.  What I don’t understand is why, when (as Pitino admitted during his rant) he has his legal team telling him not to talk, when he has the authorities telling him not to talk, when he most likely has his friends and family telling him not to talk, Pitino hears this advice and thinks, “Right!  I’ll call a press conference!”  If you have faith in the trial, then let the trial do the talking.

Now, I have no comprehension as to what’s going on in this man’s life — that is, in his home, within the confines of his marriage and regarding his relationship with his family.  That’s nobody’s business but his own, though Pitino openly admits that there have been problems and that his wife is certainly struggling with all of this, to say the least.  Who couldn’t understand that?  No question that whole clan is in hell right now.  And if you’re Rick Pitino, it’s beyond frustrating to turn on the news and watch them try to take what appears to be, at this point, OLD information and report it in a way that makes it look like something new has developed.  The unfortunate fact is that this is par for the course and it results from a bad decision that Pitino himself made back at that restaurant.  This treatment from the media is something he’s just going to have to endure.

But today’s press conference highlights something that Pitino has never learned, and that’s the fact that he is not “above” the people to whom he is speaking.  You can’t come out there and tell the media what they SHOULD be reporting, like the poor economy (it’s been covered a little already) or the death of Ted Kennedy (not the domain of local sports reporters).  People don’t like to be told how to do their jobs any more than he does.  You can’t get up there and talk about how you’re from New York and expect people to be impressed by it; it’s not going to gain you any extra credibility. 

Rick Pitino is a great basketball coach, and for the most part he’s pretty media-savvy, which makes today’s press conference all the more puzzling.  If you don’t think there’s any real news to report about a bad decision you made several years ago — don’t go out and create it. 

We’ll continue to review the newly-released tapes and be back with more on this issue as events warrant.

It has been a loooooong week around these parts, but now that we’ve crowned a Team of the 2000s, let’s move on to some other goings-on and nuggets of news floating around the college hoops world…

• Comings and Goings.  There have been a few announcements of players who are out for the upcoming semester as we’re heading into fall matriculation.  The most notable are Villanova wing Reggie Redding and Florida big men Eloy Vargas and Adam Allen.  Redding was suspended by the university arising out of an incident where marijuana was allegedly found in his car at an accident, but he is expected to return for the spring semester.  Allen recently had surgery for a stress fracture and Vargas is academically ineligible for the fall semester.  Although neither were major contributors for Florida in 08-09, they were expected to provide depth in the frontcourt this season.  On the flip side, former Dookie Elliot Williams received his waiver from the NCAA and will be eligible to suit up immediately for his hometown Memphis Tigers this season. 
• 2009 NIT Bracket.  The pairings were announced a week ago, but we’re just now getting around to analyzing it.  They’ve seeded the top four teams by region (#1 Duke, #2 UConn, #3 LSU, and #4 Arizona St) in a solid, if not spectacular, field.  But did anyone else notice that they mismatched the seedings?  Take a closer look at the thumbnail below.  If the top eight seeds win their first game, then we should be left with pairings of 1/8, 2/7, 3/6 and 4/5, right?  In this NIT bracket, #1 Duke would play #8 Charlotte, so that’s ok; but, #2 UConn would play #6 Hofstra, #3 LSU would play #5 WKU, and #4 Arizona St. would play #7 TCU.  What’s the point of this?  If you’re going to take the time to seed teams by expectation, you should probably do it properly rather than trying to slot teams based on regional travel convenience.  Sigh…   For what it’s worth, Duke seems to always win this thing, but depending on how quickly replacement players develop on the other top seeds, any of the others could surprise.

• Memphis/Calipari Post-Mortem.  Memphis plans to appeal the decision that was handed down on Thursday by the NCAA to vacate all 38 of their wins in 2007-08 as a result of using an ineligible player (Derrick Rose) and ‘accidentally’ providing said player’s brother flights on the team plane.  If upheld (and it will be), Memphis will be on the hook for $530k in NCAA revenue-share funds to CUSA, but even more interestingly to those who say that the former coach is completely untouched by this mess, Coach Cal will have to return $300k in bonus money to Memphis as a result of the NCAA’s penalties.  His $32M contract with Kentucky will help ease that particular pain, but these odd coincidences involving ineligible players really need to stop following this guy around if he expects to ever be taken seriously outside of the Bluegrass State again.  One other thing…  failure to respond to mail?  Really? 
• Pitino/Sypher Post-Mortem.  We have nothing further to say on this issue other than the following.  It’s doubtful that the Sypher saga will have any significant effect on this.  Pitino was never going to be fired over this issue because he has a F4 and two recent E8s under his belt.  The moral depravity BS only comes into play when you’re not getting it done on the court or you cross the blurry line into true depravity (speaking of depraved).   Please, please just lock this woman up before she starts accusing Pitino of supporting death panels for puppies.  Now, just give us 24 Hail Marys and a few kisses of the rosary so we can get back to business of winning the Big East, Coach (a nice donation wouldn’t hurt, either).
• Quick Hits.  NCAA v. Delaware: an expedited hearing at the CoA level before Sept. 1.  Hard-Hitting Journalism: in other news, water is wet.  Enes Kanter: the reverse Brandon Jennings.  Nolan Richardson: not sure what to think of this idea.  Denis Clemente: until he throws it over a girder, we’re not impressed.  Seth Davis: laments a long, scandal-plagued summer.  Calipari’s Old House:  one of the very few areas he’ll take a loss this year.  Goodman: 64 nonconf games to watch.  Leonard Hamilton: this is what one NCAA appearance in seven seasons gets you at a football school.  Jeremy Tyler: yeah, 140k is a lot of money for a 17-yr old, but Parrish misses the cost/benefit analysis here.  Bobby Cremins: extended at CofC through 2014.  Lapchick Awards: JT2 and Kay Yow.  Great Alaska Shootout: on its last legs?  SLAM: their preseason top 25.