No doubt by now you’ve heard about Bobby Knight’s return trip to Indiana last night to speak at the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, and the lick he got in on Kentucky head honcho John Calipari.  Just so we’ll have it in front of us, here’s what the General said:

“We’ve gotten into this situation where integrity is really lacking and that’s why I’m glad I’m not coaching.  You see, we’ve got a coach at Kentucky who put two schools on probation and he’s still coaching.  I really don’t understand that.”

That’s from the ESPN.com report on Knight’s trip to Indianapolis for his speaking appearance.  The initial reaction for most people is going to be to question Bob Knight’s definition of integrity.  They’ll reel off a laundry list of Knight’s transgressions and try to discredit him in that fashion.  They’ll assault his character and call him all kinds of nasty names.  Much will be written about the irony of Bob Knight accusing another man of a lack of integrity.

Forget the slam...does he have his facts right?

Of greater importance to us, though, is the actual content of what the guy said.  Everything you read is going to focus on his slam of Calipari (though he didn’t actually say the name, for some reason), but we think any examination of the statement should start with a much more basic question:  is what he said factual?  Were things really “cleaner” back in the good ol’ days of Knight’s time of prowling the sideline?  And did John Calipari really put two schools on probation?

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1. More bad news for UCLA as James Keefe will miss three more weeks with a shoulder injury suffered on Tuesday night versus New Mexico State.  He’s not a huge loss in terms of offensive production (only 21 points all season), but he definitely impacts Ben Howland’s depth chart (17 MPG)
2. Derrick Caracter is back at UTEP and Gary Parrish for one believes he could be the difference-maker that the Miners need to make a run at the CUSA conference title.
3. Renardo Sidney’s eligibility is still way up in the air, and it’s becoming apparent that the NCAA just might be dragging its feet long enough to ensure that they don’t actually have to rule on this situation.  It’s an interesting strategy, but if we were in their shoes, it might be one that makes sense to avoid litigation.
4. Gregg Doyel is a strange character, but always a good read, and in this article he states that he wants Kentucky to run the table (i.e., go undefeated) so that it’ll piss off the mainstream media (of which he is a member).  Like we said, strange character, indeed.
5. Maybe our boy and new Terp fan Dave Zeitlin should reconsider, given just how poorly the Maryland assistant coaches are being treated by the university.  Granted, 60-90k isn’t chump change to most people, but it’s hard to believe that a program the quality of Maryland isn’t coming up a little bigger than that.

Game of the Night. Florida State 76, Auburn 72. You know we’re having a slow as molasses night when this is our top game.  No disrespect to FSU or Auburn but this isn’t a bowl game, and we know just how apathetic these programs generally are about basketball.  The ACC moved to 6-3 against its southeastern brethren tonight with this hard-fought victory over Jeff Lebo’s team behind Solomon Alabi’s (22/9/3 blks) second straight superb and fourth straight good game.  If this isn’t a fluke and the FSU big man is starting to really find his game — and the evidence supports that he is (20/8/3 in his last four games) — then the Seminoles are a completely different team than they were just a few short weeks ago.  Freshman stud guard Michael Snaer also had his his fourth straight good game, garnering 14 points in 24 minutes of action.  We know that Auburn is one of the bottom teams in the SEC, but thirteen threes (on 39 attempts!) is a peculiar strategy considering that the Tigers came into this game hitting only 30.4% from deep this year.

Alabi (right) Brought His Game Tonight (AP/Steve Cannon)

Some Close Calls.  Two BCS schools were forced to fight back from halftime deficits tonight to avoid disastrous losses at home, both teams winning by a mere three points on an otherwise very blase’ evening.

• NC State 79, Elon 76. Elon held a six-point lead at halftime of this one in Raleigh, and it took until the last five minutes of this one for the Wolfpack, behind Tracy Smith’s 21/8, got the lead and put this game away.  NCSU is hard to gauge this year, with an away win at Marquette and a home loss to Northwestern on its resume, but if the Wolfpack are going to endeavor to move out of the cellar of the ACC this season, they’ll need a much better showing than tonight on Sunday when they travel to Wake Forest for the first ACC game of the season.
• LSU 63, Nicholls State 60. Tasmin Mitchell hit a three with 36 seconds remaining to give LSU a three-point lead, which the Tigers used to get the win in the final seconds versus a Louisiana school for the 79th consecutive time.  Mitchell had 27/6/3 assts for the now 7-2 LSU team, who are completely reliant on he and Storm Warren (13/11) and Bo Spencer (12/4 assts) to lead this team.  Other than that, there is no depth for Trent Johnson’s team.

Other Games of National Interest.

• #23 UNLV 72, Weber State 63. UNLV pulled away from Weber State in the second half behind 16/3 from Matt Shaw and 15/5/4 blks from Chace Stanbeck tonight.  The Rebels look to head into Mountain West play on January 6th against BYU at 12-1 with two more easy wins in the next two weeks.
• Nevada 73, Eastern Washington 70. Luke Babbitt dropped 29/9 in another stellar performance for the big man from Reno tonight.  Babbitt is averaging 19/10 while shooting 50% from the field and 90% from the line.  Still, his team has struggled to a 5-4 record this year, although each of the four losses came in road games against top 100 opponents.  If Nevada wants to get back into the picture for an NCAA Tournament bid, though (as in 2004-07), they’ll need to figure out a way to shore up a leaky defense.  In tonight’s game Brandon Fields (17/8/3 assts) hit the game-winning three with 4.3 seconds remaining.

Here are Thursday’s Check-Ins.  A definite west coast flava today…

Big East – Rob Dauster of Ballin is a Habit (READ MORE)

So, as any reasonable blogger would do, I’ll compare.  Last year on December 16th, the Big East was 116-28 as a league. This year? 119-29. That’s a one game difference in the loss column.  Crazy, right?  Now take into account the disastrous weekend the league just had, and it is pretty obvious that as of last Friday, the Big East was well beyond where they were at this same point last season, and last season the conference was considered one of the best ever. (…)

Mountain West – Andrew Murawa  (READ MORE)

There will be an uptick in the number of games played over the next week, as finals wrap up and schools get a chance to stretch out a bit, and a couple more early-season tournaments will play out, as BYU takes part in the Vegas Classic and UNLV plays in the Diamond Head Classic.  But the subtext over the next couple of weeks will be preparation for conference play which looms on the not-too-distant horizon.  (…)

Pac-10 – Ryan ZumMallen of LBPostSports.com (READ MORE)

[The Pac-10 is] a conference of classes, with Washington and California clearly the best teams (despite recent trouble), then a clear three-team middle class and a dreadful five-team bottom class.  Most teams have scheduled cake opponents to build some confidence before heading into the Pac-10 schedule, but that may not be enough to fool voters into handing out at-large bids come March. […]

WCC – Michael Vernetti  (READ MORE)

Although the overall conference landscape didn’t change much within the week, a mystery team has emerged in the form of Loyola Marymount. After stumbling through some early-season highs and lows, including a 67-59 win over cross-town rival USC on Nov. 21 that followed a deflating 84-78 home loss to UC Irvine, the Lions pulled off a stunning 87-85 upset over Notre Dame on Dec. 12 behind a Jared DuBois 3-pointer with eight seconds remaining. To say the Fighting Irish don’t often lose at home to non-Big East teams is a bit of an understatement – the last time it happened was four years and 41 victories ago.  (…)

You guys remember Royce White, the uber-talented freshman power forward from Minnesota who has spent the better part of his first semester in college getting in various forms of trouble — allegedly shoplifting at the Mall of America followed by shoving a security officer onto the ground (twice), and somehow later getting mixed up in a laptop theft on campus where it’s still uncertain how involved (if at all) White may have been in that incident.  Needless to say, he’s been on semi-permanent suspension by Tubby Smith as the team and school awaited to learn how all of this would ultimately shake out.

Royce White (left) in Better Times

Gopher Nation probably didn’t think it would shake out like this.  Today White released a bizarre, somewhat rambling, six-minute mea culpa explanation buttressed by a couple of interestingly chosen musical montages at each end.  In the opening segment straight out of Eight Mile, he walks around the streets of Minneapolis while Beanie Sigel’s “Feel It In the Air” plays in the background.  After you get past the clear ripoff of the Geto Boys, a quick read of the lyrics of this song reveals a troubled mind given to fits of paranoia and instability.  White then enters the video at around the 3:20 mark as narrator in a Saw-like feed from his couch, where he riffs mostly about how the “wheels of justice” are putting a “stressful burden” on him, his family, Coach Smith and the Gophers.  This crescendoes to a point at the 7:20 mark when White announces that he is “leaving college basketball” but that he will not be transferring to another school, and as for his next steps, that’s “to be decided.”  The clip ends with another song chosen for maximum cinematic effect as photos of his friends, family and playing career cycle through: Timbaland’s “Apologize.”  (keep in mind that the chorus repeatedly states, ‘it’s too late to apologize…”)  But don’t take our word for it – check it out yourself.

There’s a lot here, not least of which involves his apparent resignation from college basketball.  White clearly strikes us as a troubled young man who might need some time away from the stresses of basketball and school to get himself together.  One commentator said this clip reminded him of Ron Artest in his role as emerging impresario, and he’s probably on to something, but we’re a little worried that he also has a bit of Avondre Jones in him as well, the former USC/Fresno State center and rapper who became notorious in 1998 for assaulting someone with a Samarai sword back when Samarai swords were cool (along with Raider hats and do-rags, but we digress).  White is only 18.5 years old, and he wouldn’t be the first kid to feel the weight of the world on his shoulders and think that exiting stage left is the answer to his problems.  But there was one segment of his diatribe that rang completely true, a morsel of wisdom of which we hope that White will heed.  Too many situations like this turn out to be utter train wrecks, so we hope he follows his own advice where he talked about his coach Tubby Smith, who is universally reknowned as a great teacher and man.  It’s very unlikely that Tubby would counsel White to fight the justice system by withdrawing from responsibility; even if White is telling the truth about the laptop incident, he still needs to own up to the shoplifting and assault.  People make mistakes, but character is earned by addressing them and learning from them.  Let’s hope that White’s story on the national level doesn’t end (today?) with people wondering what could have been.

The news that the Big Ten was looking to expand from 11 teams (yeah I know 11 > 10) to 12 teams (yeah I know there is already a Big 12) set the college sports world abuzz with speculation about who the 12th team would be. And that set off a chain reaction of questions about who would fill in the spot in the conference that the Big Ten’s 12th member would leave vacant and so on. We will leave the latter for another post if and when the Big Ten finally commits to expansion and selects a school. Right now the schools I have heard mentioned most often are Cincinnati, Connecticut, Iowa State, Louisville, Missouri, Notre Dame, Rutgers, Syracuse, Texas, and West Virginia. I’ll go ahead and make this simple for everybody. Despite what Mike DeCourcy says Texas is not going to the Big Ten. The prospect of Texas leaving the Big 12 is too disastrous for the Big 12 officials to let happen. He can argue about TV revenues and how Texas is a much bigger TV draw than any of its Big 12 competitors, but he is missing a key element here. Unfortunately for Mike, geography destroys his grand scheme of having the Longhorns leave the Big 12 for the Big Ten. As the graphic clearly illustrates, Austin, Texas, is very far away from the members of the Big Ten. In fact the closest school would be Illinois, which is just a short 1,004 mile trip away from Austin (or 3 Mike DeCourcy Sporting News glamour shots).

While I understand a college team expects to have its fans outnumbered in road games, I can’t imagine that they would want to have a scenario where none of their students could go to a road game and none of the opposing team’s fans could watch games in Austin. So in my mind that pretty clearly eliminates Texas from consideration in the Big Ten. You can use this same argument when Mike suggests that UCLA join the Big East after the Big Ten poaches one of their programs for this round of expansion.

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Upset of the Night. UAB 64, Cincinnati 47. Hangover, anyone? Three days after playing the game of the year in the Crosstown Shootout against Xavier, Cincinnati travels to Alabama, shoots miserably, and falls 12 points short of their previous season low. No disrespect to the Blazers, though; they were responsible for more than their share of the Bearcats’ lackluster showing. UAB was obviously the fresher team, coming off of a 12-day stretch with no games, a time they used to improve themselves on the defensive side of things. UAB coach Mike Davis said afterward, “We knew how important it was for us to come out and really play with a lot of intensity on defense. It was the best performance we’ve had all season on defense.” The combination of fatigue (both mental and physical) and UAB defense forced UC into a 31.7% shooting night, including an atrocious 3-22 (13.6%) from behind the three-point arc. The Blazers weren’t exactly lacking on offense, either. Elijah Millsap was formidable, stepping up with 22 points and 15 boards, and Howard Crawford added 14/5. Dion Dixon, the Bearcats’ only player in double-figures (13/3), minimized the possiblity of a post-Xavier hangover when asked about it after the game, saying, “That didn’t have anything to do with it. We’re a young team, we haven’t played many games on the road.” Really? It’s true, not all of them are major contributors, but eight of UC’s 14 players are juniors or seniors. And five of their nine games this year have been away from their home floor. The most damning evidence that the Bearcats’ minds and bodies weren’t totally into this one, though, is that Cincy came in as the 10th best rebounding team in the nation, averaging 40.2 a game. UAB ranks 179th (32.6 RPG). Tonight UAB owned the boards, 44 to 29. No doubt, Cincinnati will be back, but it was UAB, now 9-1, who served notice to the rest of the nation tonight.

UAB Drove Around Cincy All Night (AP/Butch Dill)

RTC Live.  Oklahoma State 71, Stanford 70. RTC Live visited Maples Pavilion for the first time this evening, and although the fans weren’t all that excitable throughout the game, we were treated with a near-miraculous finish as Stanford hung around just long enough to have a shot in the air to win this one.  It didn’t happen, as Andrew Zimmermann’s drive to the left and subsequent shot attempt went long and fell harmlessly off the glass into the hands of an OSU player, but for most of this game it appeared that the Cowboys were the far superior team, so the fact that Stanford was even in that position had to be a positive for Johnny Dawkins’ team.  The two stars for the respective teams both had big nights — OSU’s James Anderson dropped 28/6/3 assts, including several very difficult three-point plays the old-fashioned way and a few deep threes the modern way in the second half.  Stanford’s Landry Fields had 22/12/4 assts to keep the pace, and it was his playmaking down the stretch that led to open looks for Stanford to crawl back into the game.  Dawkins has to be kicking himself a little bit, though, as the Cardinal committed 11 fewer fouls than Oklahoma State, shot thirteen more FTs, yet only earned four more points from the stripe — that’s what 12-24 will do to you.  It was OSU’s second-half three-point shooting (6-12) that gave the Cowboys as much as a 15-pt lead, but Stanford’s Jeremy Green (19/7) stepped up with a few timely shots to keep his team within striking distance.  We came away not very impressed with either team tonight, but clearly Oklahoma State should feel good about itself in getting a road win, even one against a Pac-10 team with half the fans not in the building tonight.

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1. St. John’s will hold out star forward Anthony Mason, Jr., for at least three more weeks as he continues to heal from a preseason hamstring injury.  The Johnnies have gotten off to an 8-1 start that includes solid wins against Siena and Temple.  SJU should be ok for another two weeks without him, but away games loom against Georgetown and Louisville right around the new year.  In other news, reserve Quincy Roberts will also take a medical redshirt due to recurring migraine headaches.
2. Remember Josh Nochimson, the former UConn equipment manager who was tangled up in the investigation involving illegal contact with Nate Miles, the one-time next-big-thing for the Huskies?  His attorney says that Nochimson has never even been contacted by NCAA investigators.  They must be too busy with that Memphis strict liability standard, right?
3. Duquesne’s Sam Ashaolu — feel-good story of the year.  You go ahead, young man!
4. Seth Davis gives us his best and worst of the decade of the 2000s, and there’s an awful lot of good stuff here.
5. Coach K gave his opinion on the whole Expansion 96 idea, which we’ve summarily ripped apart on this site.  His essential take is that folding the NIT into the NCAA Tournament will allow more teams from mid-majors to get in because of the regular season auto-bid the NIT uses (he cites the Patriot League).  True, but as Mike DeCourcy (per usual) points out, it renders the regular season in the BCS conferences meaningless.  Our previous example of 70% of BCS teams getting a bid is not something anybody except coaches and those leagues want here.

Here are Wednesday’s Check-ins excerpted in case you missed them listed above.

Atlantic 10 – Joe Dzuback (MORE HERE)

Common Opponent Analysis: Providence.  Both Rhode Island and George Washington hosted the Providence Friars within a 4 day period. How did the Rams and Colonials match up against a common opponent under similar circumstances? Rhode Island won a 3-point decision (86-83), while George Washington lost by a whopping 27 points (110-83). As the table shows, both teams played about 78 possessions (lower than they usually play — Pomeroy shows about 80 possessions per game), and have work to do on their respective defenses. And both teams are close on offense, garnering over 1.0 points per possession while converting their own field goal attempts in the low-mid 40s (eFG% — 44.0% for the Rams and 43.2% for the Colonials). Providence, a perimeter-oriented team under Coach Keno Davis, allowed both A10 opponents to rebound a high percentage of their own misses (47.1% and 51.1% to URI and GWU respectively), but The Rams’ frontcourt experience showed in their defensive rebounding numbers, holding the Friars to less than 30% of their misses (29.7%), even as GWU yielded 34% of the defensive rebounds, more typical of D1 basketball teams. The Friars took over twice as many 3s against George Washington as they did against Rhode Island, suggesting the Rams did a better job of defending the perimeter than the Colonials. Providence converted their 3s at a 55.2% clip, largely the reason for the Colonials’ disappointing 64.6% eFG% on defense. The Rams forced turnovers, somewhat unexpected against a perimeter-oriented team like PC, while the Colonials put the Friars on the line about once for every two field goal attempts, again unusual for a perimeter-oriented team. Conclusion: Rhode Island looks like they may be close to ready for conference play, while George Washington may need more work.  (…)

Big 12 – Patrick Sellars (MORE HERE)

Backdoor Cuts is a college basketball discussion between RTC correspondents Dave Zeitlin, Steve Moore and Mike Walsh. This week the disgruntled fans each pick a new team to root for — and start a friendly competition in the process.

DAVE ZEITLIN: So I know what I want for Chanukah (or, as you guys like to call it, Weird Christmas). I’ve decided I want a new college basketball team to root for.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Penn will always be my No. 1 team and I know better days lie ahead.  But let’s be honest: the only thing my Quakers are competing for this year is whether or not they can become the worst team in Division I (if they aren’t already).  Combine this with the fact that my favorite baseball team is the Mets (don’t say anything, Steve), my favorite football team (the Giants) just gave up approximately 3,500 points in one game (seriously, Steve, be quiet) and neither of my fantasy football teams made the playoffs…and I forget where that sentence was going because I just started crying.  Please, Fake Santa of Chanukah, give me a winning team to root for this holiday season.  Just one.

Here’s my own criteria for picking a new team:  I want the school to be relatively close — as in, driving distance from my home in Philadelphia (sorry, most of the country).  Obviously, the team can’t be any kind of rival of Penn’s (as much as I like Fran Dunphy at Temple).  It can’t be a perennial favorite to win a national championship (that’s no fun) but it also can’t be a team that has no shot of winning it all (rooting for one-mid major is enough).  And even though I’ve followed this conference most of my life, it can’t be any team from the Big East.  (Before going to Penn, I was a big Syracuse fan; I’d feel like an abusive boyfriend going back to them now, but I’d feel like even more of a jerk rooting for one of their rivals.)

So where that does that leave me?  Based on my complex formula, I think I have to go with a middle-of-the-pack ACC school.  And after careful consideration, I realize there’s only one that makes sense.  And the winner is…drumroll please…I don’t hear a drumroll…seriously, give me a drumroll…fine, I guess when you’re writing by yourself and there are no drummers nearby, you’re just not going to get one…Maryland!

Fear the Zeitlin!

I’ll explain more about why I chose the Terps later. But, first, I want to hear who you guys would pick, considering you both root for teams that aren’t making the Big Dance. We can even make this a competition throughout the season. A Chanukah/Christmas competition. Or something.

STEVE MOORE: You may have gotten one of your Weird Christmas wishes when your boy Glen Miller got fired today. Maybe Penn can adopt the Princeton offense (too soon?).

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