Three more Feast Week events begin play on Wednesday or Thursday. As we did with Feast Week events already underway — like Puerto Rico and Charleston, as well as Maui, Legends, CBE and Cancun — let’s take a look at each tournament’s favorite, dark horse, team(s) with the most on the line, and a key storyline and player to watch.

Battle 4 Atlantis

Kyle Wiltjer Leads Gonzaga To The Bahamas (USA Today)

• Favorite: Gonzaga. This is not a vintage Atlantis field like those of 2012 or last year. The Zags are barely inside the top 10 and completely untested through two games, but the only other team in the field who made the NCAA tournament last year was Texas, who is starting over with Shaka Smart and already lost a game in Shanghai to the Zags’ quarterfinal opponent, Washington. Gonzaga has easily proven the most of any of the eight teams in Atlantis and deserve to be considered the favorite.
• Darkhorse: UConn. The Huskies are a dark horse in a tournament? That arrangement has worked out well once or twice. Last year, UConn only scored 70 or more points seven times the entire season. This year, the Huskies feature a more balanced roster with transfers Sterling Gibbs (Seton Hall) and Shonn Miller (Cornell) joining highly regarded freshman Jalen Adams and former Ryan Boatright sidekicks Daniel Hamilton and Rodney Purvis. So far, this new cast of players has scored more effectively than last year’s team, producing 80 points or more in each of their three wins, including a 100 spot against Maine in the season opener.
• Most on the line: Syracuse, Texas, Texas A&M. The Orange have struggled to score at times this season but draw a young, depleted Charlotte squad in the quarterfinals; a win in that game likely earns them two chances at resume-building wins. The Lone Star State showdown is a quarterfinal matchup featuring teams who were near but on opposite sides of the cut-line for the field of 68 last year. Smart won’t endear himself to locals and those ever-important Texas boosters if the Longhorns drop an early decision to hated rival A&M.
• Storyline: Who is this year’s 2011 Harvard/2013 Villanova? That upstart Crimson team shocked everyone in winning the initial Battle 4 Atlantis, launching a 26-5 season and the first of five straight Tournament appearances. The Wildcats stunned second ranked Kansas in the 2013 semifinals before knocking off another ranked team in Iowa in the final, propelling the Cats to a 29-5 campaign. Could the Orange or Huskies use the next few days to make a similar journey onto the national radar? Can Shaka conjure up his old tournament tricks to kickstart his Texas tenure?

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Who’s Got Next? is a weekly column by Sean Moran, the RTC recruiting guru. 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 discussing the recruitment of the top uncommitted players in the country. We also encourage you to check out his contributions at The Intentional Foul dedicated to recruiting coverage and analysis. You can also follow Sean at his Twitter account @Seanmohoops for up-to-date news from the high school and college hoops scene. If you have any suggestions as to areas we are missing or different things you would like to see, please let us know at rushthecourt@yahoo.com.

Note: Scout.com used for all player rankings.

Kentucky took down Duke 74-63 in last Tuesday’s Champions Classic and now it has surged ahead of the Blue Devils in the race for the top recruiting class in 2016 as well. Adding two five-star recruits in the span of a week (and three in the span of a month) will usually do that. It started on November 12, when 6’3” point guard De’Aron Fox committed to John Calipari’s program. It continued last week, when 6’8” Edrice “Bam” Adebayo and 6’3” shooting guard Malik Monk followed Fox’s lead with commitments of their own.

Surprise, surprise – John Calipari is cleaning up on the recruiting trail. (Getty)

So what is Kentucky getting in these three commitments? Fox will look to follow in the footsteps of John Wall and Brandon Knight, two of the many five-star point guards that Calipari has brought to Lexington during his tenure. He is a three-year veteran of the Nike EYBL, having first played on the Houston Hoops AAU squad as a rising sophomore with Justise Winslow, Kelly Oubre and Justin Jackson. Despite playing with older competition, Fox was usually somewhat of an afterthought in a loaded class of point guards. Even Kentucky originally prioritized Derryck Thornton (before he reclassified) and Kobi Simmons over Fox. However, this was before Fox put together a sensational summer and established himself at the front of the pack in a class that includes Dennis Smith, Frank Jackson (Duke commitment), Lonzo Ball and Simmons. The left-handed Fox is a menacing defensive presence who can lock down guards with his quick feet and fast hands. His primary weakness revolves around outside shooting, but he is a capable shooter off the dribble and is plenty explosive around the rim. While Fox was not always a priority for Kentucky, the Wildcats might have ended up with the best point guard in the class. Read the rest of this entry »

Brian Goodman is the lead Big 12 correspondent for Rush The Court. He’s in Kansas City this week for the CBE Hall of Fame Classic. You can follow Brian on Twitter @BSGoodman or the RTC Big 12 Twitter account @Big12Hoops.

The CBE Hall Of Fame Classic tipped off in Kansas City on Monday night, with Kansas State walloping Missouri in the opener and North Carolina taking care of Northwestern in the nightcap. Here are the most important takeaways from each team’s performance last evening.

Bruce Weber’s crew had a good night in Kansas City. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

• Dean Wade steps up inside for Kansas State. Post production on both ends of the court was a massive struggle for Kansas State a year ago, but it’s been a different story this year thanks to Bruce Weber‘s most important newcomer. Wade overwhelmed Missouri’s undersized lineup all night long, finishing with 14 points and 13 rebounds to register his first career double-double. The 6’10 freshman doesn’t yet have a ton of polish around the rim, but he showed impressive range all the way out to the three-point line and made all six of his free throws. Weber was very pleased with his big man’s play on Monday, telling media after the game that his rookie “responded against probably bigger, more athletic guys than we had played in the previous games.” Wade faces his biggest test of his young career today (7:00 PM PT, ESPN2) when he’ll go up against North Carolina’s formidable back line of Kennedy Meeks and Brice Johnson.
• Missouri has an all-around rough night. After last weekend’s gritty loss to Xavier, Missouri was only able to keep up with Kansas State for the first 10 minutes of the game. From that point, the Wildcats clamped down defensively and the wheels just fell off for the Tigers. Kim Anderson’s team was aggressive and played hard, particularly on one occasion where freshman Terrence Phillips leaped out of bounds to save a loose ball, but its execution otherwise couldn’t have been much worse. Missouri’s lack of size made things easy for Kansas State on the interior, and an ice-cold 4-of-18 night from three-point range did little to reduce the gap. This is an important year for the second-year head coach, who is not only working for an athletic director who didn’t hire him, but is also surrounded by SEC coaches who are far more accomplished. Monday night’s game was an opportunity to build on a solid effort against Xavier but the Tigers fell hard instead.

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The first week of the college basketball season was unquestionably highlighted by four of the RTC Preseason Top 10 suffering defeats. It all started last Monday when #9 Virginia went into a hostile road environment at George Washington and left with a 73-68 setback. Tuesday’s Champions Classic then saw #7 Duke fall to #1 Kentucky, 74-63, and #4 Kansas unable to hold off Denzel Valentine’s heroic performance en route to a 79-73 loss. Finally, #11 North Carolina — sans senior point guard Marcus Paige — stumbled on the road at Northern Iowa, 71-67. While it is way too early for any of these squads to panic, expect these highly-ranked preseason teams to ensure one loss does not spiral into multiple defeats. On the other hand, it will also be surprising if Feast Week fails to provide a few more surprising results. This week’s Quick N’ Dirty is after the jump.

Quick N’ Dirty Thoughts.

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1. Normally people go to Maui to relax (or take four months of paternity leave), but for Kansas the trip has been a lot more interesting and mostly for stuff that has been happening off the court. The big news is the lack of news from the NCAA about Cheick Diallo, which has led Kansas to take the somewhat surprising approach of publicly criticizing the NCAA. This wouldn’t be the first time that a school has criticized the NCAA, but they usually do it by feeding media sources who do the school’s dirty work for them. The other news was the decision to suspend Brannen Greene for six games after complaining about playing time. Fans and some media might make a big deal out of this, but we doubt it will have a significant impact in the long-term as long as Greene comes back with his head on straight although it does raise some questions about their leadership when an upperclassman does something like that.
2. Wichita State will likely be without senior point guard Fred VanVleet for this week’s Advocare Invitational in Orlando as he tries to recover from a hamstring injury. VanVleet, who has been limited this season by a series of injuries, is expected to be back for the team’s game against Saint Louis on December 5. With the Shockers senior leadership in VanVleet and Ron Baker we don’t think this will be an issue of making the NCAA Tournament, but losses at this point in the season could have a pretty big impact on what type of seed they receive on Selection Sunday.
3. On Friday, the 10th class was inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame. While Charlie Scott was assigned the role of “headliner” of the class by many media sources the others in the class aren’t too shabby either with the list of inductees including John Havlicek, Quinn Buckner, Rolando Blackman, and Lou Henson. The event, which is held annually as part of the CBE Classic in Kansas City, typically goes under the radar, which is unfortunate because it would be a great way to teach fans about the history of the game. The other problem (and probably the bigger one) is the fact that the Naismith Hall of Fame gets the majority of the attention making the college basketball one a second-tier version.
4. In the grand scheme of things it was a meaningless game (even for this college basketball season), but last night’s marquee game was the national premier of Ben Simmons. While Simmons and LSU lost to Marquette the big takeaway from the night was that Simmons is probably already the best player in the country and it might not matter because of the rest of his team and the interesting strategy they sometimes employ. Simmons had 21 points, 20 rebounds, and seven assists, but the thing that will end up being the most talked about part of the game was his decision to pass twice in the waning seconds including the last pass of the game that forced Jalyn Patterson to take an extremely difficult three when a two would have won the game. We aren’t sure how many more marquee games we will see Simmons play in college, but we are sure there will be plenty of hyperbole and the accompanying over-the-top analysis this season.
5. We have read a lot about the injury risks athletes are exposed to, but we have not read much in traditional media about the health risks that coaches face. As Brendan Prunty points out many college basketball coaches suffer from vocal cord trauma–the result of constant yelling. Many of you have noticed some of the short-term changes with the raspy voices of coaches that seem to appear fairly early in the season (something that has become a bit of a joke at this point), but as Prunty notes the consequences can be more severe.

There are talented tournament fields everywhere this Feast Week. The Gulf Coast Showcase has a relatively strong mid-major field headlined by Murray State, Duquesne (which absolutely BLASTED Penn State on Friday) and Texas Southern. Four capable teams — Clemson, UMass (already a winner over Harvard), Creighton and Rutgers — will tussle in another four-team field in Vegas. Looking further ahead, Atlantis tips off on Wednesday before a handful of other events kick off on Thanksgiving Day and beyond. As we did with Puerto Rico and Charleston last week, here’s a look at the event favorite, a dark horse, and the teams who have the most on the line this week. We’ll also highlight a player and a storyline to watch.

Maui Invitational

Despite some early struggles, Bill Self and Kansas are still the clear favorite in Maui. (Getty)

• Favorite: Kansas. Even with no Cheick Diallo or Brannen Greene for the week and the second half collapse to Michigan State in Chicago notwithstanding, the Jayhawks are still the clear favorite in Maui as the only top 10 team in this tournament. Perry Ellis and Jamari Traylor are seniors. Frank Mason and Wayne Selden are juniors. This is an experienced team that might be going on its last ride together. As usual, there’s chatter about this being the year the Big 12 title streak is broken. Winning the Maui title would probably pump the brakes on that notion, at least for the time being.
• Darkhorse: UCLA. In terms of talent and potential, the Bruins are a clear sleeper. Aaron Holiday, Bryce Alford, Tony Parker — you could easily see a team with talented pieces like these upsetting a still-not-quite-right Kansas in the semifinal and then taking out Indiana or Vanderbilt the next night. Of course, they’re flaky enough that they could brick the last Maui quarter to UNLV, especially after that whole Monmouth thing.

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Kenny Ocker (@kennyocker) is a national columnist.

Former Southeastern Louisiana assistant coach Larry Cordaro was given a unique opportunity: Build your own college basketball program, from scratch, in your home state. In his first season anywhere as a head coach in 2014-15, he took the debutant LSU-Alexandria Generals to a 23-4 NAIA record, including Red River Athletic Conference regular season and tournament titles. This year, Cordaro’s team has won five of its first six games, including road wins at NCAA Division I schools Southeastern Louisiana, 82-68, and at Northwestern State, 99-97.

We took the time to talk with Cordaro this week about what it was like to beat his former school, the process of building a basketball program from scratch, and how life is different in the NAIA. This Q&A has been edited for clarity and brevity. Unlike the 5’5″ Cordaro, it is not particularly short.

Started from scratch, Larry Cordaro has quite a nice program down south. (Red River Conference)

Your page on the school website talks about how you want to build recognition for your fledgling program – what better way to do that than two wins over in-state Division I opponents?

Two Southland teams, we were able to go on the road and compete against and were fortunate to come out on top. It was our night both of those nights and hopefully the college basketball fans and people that keep up are recognizing what we’ve done, because our players put in a lot of time and they deserve the recognition.

When you go into these games against Division I opponents, what are you telling your players?

Just to play hard, to play together. We don’t get these opportunities too often. A lot of NAIA schools don’t get Division I schools to schedule them, but because of some relationships here in the state of Louisiana, we’ve been blessed to have the opportunity to fundraise for our program and just to really battle test our team. We feel like if we can play with Southland teams, Division I, then for sure we can hopefully compete and win a conference championship in the Red River. Last year, we were 0-5 versus the five Division I schools, and came close in three of them. Those games prepared us for the season moving forward. It’s just like the lower Division I schools going and playing against the high-majors – it prepares them that way for when they get in their leagues. You want to play better competition whenever you can. Read the rest of this entry »

Part of what makes college basketball both exciting and maddening is that each year we have to throw out the previous year’s assumptions and start from scratch. If that wasn’t apparent before this season started, it became painfully obvious when mighty Wisconsin, last year’s national runner-up, lost to Western Illinois, the worst team in last year’s Summit Conference. But perhaps it is the case that we don’t erase the previous year from our memory at the beginning of each season as much as we should. The Badgers, despite retaining just three of the eight players who earned meaningful minutes and bringing in zero top 100 recruits, were still ranked 17th in the preseason polls. In fact, 13 of last year’s Sweet Sixteen teams started the season in the USA Today Preseason Top 25. Can the success of all of these programs be so stable? Or are we perhaps suffering from recency bias, where we tend to overvalue teams that have recently succeeded, even if the personnel structures of those teams have drastically changed?

Wisconsin is a Possible Example of Recency Bias in Polls. 

In order to answer this question, I checked the preseason and postseason USA Today Coaches’ Polls (with postseason being taken after the conclusion of the NCAA Tournament), and checked how many Sweet Sixteen teams from the previous season were in each poll. If we are overvaluing Sweet Sixteen teams, then there would consistently be more teams from the previous year’s Sweet Sixteen in the preseason poll than in the postseason poll, which would indicate that Sweet Sixteen teams have dropped out due to poor performance.

This is exactly what has happened. Going back seven years, the number of previous year’s Sweet Sixteen teams has always been greater in the preseason poll than in the postseason poll. Of 112 possible Sweet Sixteen teams to choose from in those seven years, 77 have appeared in the preseason poll and just 61 have appeared in the postseason poll. A difference of proportions test reveals that these two numbers are significantly different from each other at the 95 percent confidence level, which, in layman’s terms, means that this trend is too strong to write off as pure coincidence.

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1. Much of the debate around college athletics on the macro level recently has focused in on how to allow student-athletes to share in the profits that they help generate. As we have mentioned in this space on several occasions the discussions are rather myopic as they ignore the potential implications of what a true free market would do to most of the athletes on scholarships in both revenue and non-revenue sports. Many others have also noted that most athletic programs do not generate a profit, but we didn’t realize how big that probably was until we read a report by The Chronicle that estimated that nearly $10.3 billion have been provided to athletic departments over the past five years via student fees and other subsidies. It is a long article, but it is an extremely interesting read if you want to consider the other side of the equation. There are obviously externalities involve that limit the ability to take away too much from this analysis, but hopefully it will make some of you reconsider the role that college athletics play within the college experience.
2. It has been quite a week so far for John Calipari. Not only did Kentucky beat Duke rather easily on Tuesday night, but he also picked up a commitment from Malik Monk, the #5 ranked recruit in the country. Monk, an Arkansas native, ended up picking Kentucky over Arkansas leading to the inevitable backlash by Razorback fans as well as former Razorback star Bobby Portis. Monk’s commitment moves Kentucky’s class to the top of the recruiting rankings for the time being, but as we said when Edrie Adebayo committed there are still a lot of uncommitted players remaining on the board.
3. Miami might not be the dominant force it once was in football, but their basketball team is increasingly becoming a more significant player in the ACC and national landscape. Outside of being much more competitive in the ACC than many expected them to be, the Hurricanes are also starting to make waves on the recruiting trail with Wednesday probably being the biggest day in the program’s history in terms of recruiting as they added two top-30 commitments in Dewan Huell and Bruce Brown. Huell, a 6’9″ power forward who goes to school near Coral Gables, picked Miami over South Carolina while Brown, a shooting guard from Massachusetts, picked Miami over Indiana. While the decision of a player to stay at home over going to South Carolina is not that big of a surprise, an out-of-state player choosing to go to Miami over Indiana certainly is.
4. With college football season winding down and college basketball season picking up steam the dynamics within athletic departments can be interesting as the two sides compete for attention in resources. Few schools have the success in both sports that Michigan State enjoys, which makes the relationship between Mark Dantonio and Tom Izzo even more interesting. We aren’t privy to the relationship between most basketball and football coaches at major colleges, but most of the stories we have heard are about jealousy and how the coaches fight for resources so it seems like this relationship is somewhat unique although that may be affected by the fact that both of them are successful to a level that few in their respective sports are.
5. New Mexico forward Devon Williams has decided to stop playing basketball after a medical exam demonstrated that he had cervical spinal stenosis. Williams who underwent the exam on Wednesday after a fall on Sunday led him to lose feeling in his extremities for ten minutes. The on-court loss of Williams, who started 30 games last season, is a significant blow to the Lobos, but he will stay involved with the team acting as another coach.

One of the true beauties of non-conference play in November is all of the various tournaments and the match-ups that they enable. With multiple events tipping off this weekend, let’s start this series of previews by analyzing two of the bigger annual events — the Puerto Rico Tip-Off (bracket) and the Charleston Classic (bracket).

Puerto Rico Tip-Off

Potential top-10 pick Jakob Poeltl and Utah headline a strong Puerto Rico Tip-Off. (AP)

• Favorite: Utah. Just about everyone other than Delon Wright and Dallin Bachynski is back, and Brandon Taylor can fill enough of Wright’s shoes without making the team so reliant on any one player. Arizona is the Pac-12 favorite by default this season but it’s looking incredibly wide open after that and it ultimately may come down to the Utes defending their second-place crown against upstart Cal.
• Darkhorse: Butler. It’s Butler in a tournament setting — you’re not quite sure you see the Bulldogs coming but you’re not surprised when they do. Roosevelt Jones (yes, he’s still there) and Kellen Dunham (yep, him too) lead a team that dropped a Big East record 144 points on The Citadel transitioning from Chuck Driesell (344th in adjusted pace last year) to Duggar Baucom (the former VMI coach who was perpetually first)
• Most on the line: Miami, Minnesota, Temple. The Hurricanes might be the most interesting team in this tournament. That’s not a surprise considering they were also one of the most interesting teams for most of last season. Will they be the “winning at Cameron by 16” Miami or the “losing at home to Eastern Kentucky” Miami? Probably somewhere in-between. The Gophers are entering Year Three of the Richard Pitino Experiment, but closed Year Two by losing six of their final eight games. They’ll be eager to get off to a good start. The Owls couldn’t keep it close with a Marcus Paige-less UNC team in Annapolis and they have as much on the line as any team this weekend by virtue of their status as annual NCAA bubble candidates.

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