Shamelessly cribbing from last spring’s very clever NBA catch phrase, we here at RTC will present to you the Thirty Reasons We Love College Basketball as we gear up toward the start of the season a little over a month from now.  We’ll be bringing you players to watch for this season and moments to remember from last season, courtesy of the series of dump trucks, wires and effluvia known as YouTube. 

#29 – Where Freshman Phenom Happens

Demar DeRozan (USC)

Jrue Holiday (UCLA)

Samardo Samuels (Louisville)

Tyreke Evans (Memphis)

Al Farouq Aminu (Wake Forest)

Folks, we’re only five weeks from the first games… just sayin…

• Sixteen months after agreeing to return to Florida after about-facing on the Orlando Magic job, Billy Donovan finally signed his contract. 
• Fooling with the Thurs/Fri/Sat/Sun setup of the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament because of gas prices is pure folly – surely the NCAA isn’t that stupid, is it?
• This is a pretty interesting NY Times article on how YouTube is changing the world of prospect identification and recruiting. 
• More foolishness involving the Gazelle Group – they’re apparently trying to move UMass to a different subregional in the CvC at the last minute.
• The difficulty of playing in the Big East, where 9 teams could be top-25 worthy this year.  Although Jameson at B/R makes a compelling argument that Georgetown is wildly overrated this year.
• Ok, so it turns out that the George Mason F4 rings on Ebay were stolen and will be returned to the rightful owner, Dr. Scherrens.  Nice investigative work by Chris Brooks over at B/R. 
• Gary Parrish continues with his ‘seedy underbelly’ offseason theme.
• So what you’re saying is that the SEC will get seven teams in the NCAA Tournament next year (and deserve four)?
• So who wants to bet on which coach will have the better 08-09 campaign – Marquette’s Buzz Williams or Indiana’s Tom Crean?

Shamelessly cribbing from last spring’s very clever NBA catch phrase, we here at RTC will present to you the Thirty Reasons We Love College Basketball as we gear up toward the start of the season a little over a month from now.  We’ll be bringing you players to watch for this season and moments to remember from last season, courtesy of the series of dump trucks, wires and effluvia known as YouTube. 

#30 – Where the Mario Miracle Happens

Yes, it’s that time again.  We at Rush the Court are 100% focused and ready to provide comprehensive coverage of every scrap of interesting news that occurs in college basketball this year.   The quips, the clips, the stats, and of course the commentary and analysis that so many of you come to this site for. 

We’re once again kicking off the five-month sprint from the November 10th opening tipoff  to the April 6th finish line in D-town with our Season Preview materials.  Will anyone be able to challenge the ridiculously loaded North Carolina Tar Heels for the crown?  Find out over the next several weeks as we roll out the following features beginning this weekend. 

1. Conference Primers – we have 31 correspondents lined up who are experts in each of the D1 conferences in NCAA basketball; they’ll be providing comprehensive primers on the names and games to watch for this season from the America East to the West Coast Conference.  Transitioning into the regular season, these correspondents will keep us up to date with their respective conferences as we roll on to March Madness 2009.

2. Feature Columnists – we also have several feature columnists lined up to write for us this year; one columnist will focus exclusively on Vegas odds in college basketball; another will provide quality pieces on timely issues facing the game at-large; and still another will provide an alternative voice to the one you’re already reading here every day.

3. Preseason Magazine Reviews – we did this last year, and will be doing this again this season with a few changes, including some additional analysis into the predictive acumen of these magazines.

4. Blogpoll – once again, we’ll be contributing to the preseason blogpoll and its various iterations as we progress through the season.

5.  Projected Bracket – we’re not satisfied with simply letting the correspondents have all the fun with preseason predictions; we too will be updating a projected bracket as we get closer to opening tipoff.

5. 30 Reasons – just for fun, we’re going to provide a new YouTube feature to get everyone riled up and excited for the new season: Where 2008-09 Happens – 30 Reasons We Love College Basketball.

7. Anything Else – we’ll continue with our usual fare of linkage and thought-provoking (gulp…) commentary where appropriate. If anyone has an idea of something else they’d like to see, hit us up at rushthecourt@yahoo.com.

Quick hit here, but Arizona coach and resident college basketball drama queen Lute Olson announced today, some four months after the bitter dissolution of his marriage to Christine Toretti, that he is newly engaged!  The new Mrs. Arizona Basketball will be the much-younger Kelly Pugnea (below, left), 47, herself a divorcee with two sons.  Apparently the couple met seven months ago while Lute was still battling his ex-wife over undisclosed issues.  Gosh, we wonder what those could have been?

(photo credit:  Arizona Daily Star)

From the Star:

News out of Storrs today has the rest of the Big East cheering, as freshman wing Nate Miles (he of the five high schools) was expelled from UConn today, merely days after he had been arrested for violating a restraining order sixteen minutes after it was issued for assaulting a female student he may or may not have been involved with.  From the Hartford Courant:

The woman accused Miles, 20, of Toledo, Ohio, of becoming physical and trying to pressure her into having sex. A restraining order was issued Sept. 22 and Miles was arrested for placing a call to the woman, a 19-year-old from Manchester, 16 minutes later.  […]  According to a court affidavit obtained Wednesday, Miles’ accuser said the relationship began with consensual sex but that later Miles became physical and “extremely possessive.” The affidavit said the woman went to Miles’ dorm room on Sept. 14, at which time he began pressuring her to have sex. When she refused, he allegedly “would tap my face or dig his nails into me.” When she hit him back, he “slapped me and pushed me off the bed.” Miles has not been allowed to live on campus since the incident. His criminal case was continued until Nov. 25. No charges related to the alleged abuse have been filed.

When I was also facing criminal charges, I contacted New Jersey Criminal Law Attorney, and things started to make sense. They understood not just the law but how overwhelming the experience could be for someone who’s never been in trouble before. With their help, I had the confidence to fight the charges and felt like I had a real advocate on my side. The personal service they provided truly stood out.

(photo credit:  Hartford Courant)

Miles was quoted as being surprised that he was expelled from school.  Yeah, really surprising that an assault, restraining order and subsequent arrest would end so badly for someone.  More importantly, Miles was the kind of long impact player on the wing that the Huskies haven’t had since Caron Butler was slashing to the hoop – he could have made a perfect complement to the AJ Price/Hasheem Thabeet inside-outside show.  Miles plans to appeal, but is also reportedly thinking of moving to Texas to live with his youth league coach and legal guardian, Sean Patterson – do you think Big 12 coaches have this guy’s number on speed dial yet?

One thing is certain – Louisville , Notre Dame and Pitt fans should be rejoicing tonight.

Today we were doing some background work on some of the preseason tournaments – you know, the Maui, the PNIT, the Coaches v. Cancer, the CBE (formerly Guardians) Classic, etc. – and we came across some information that absolutely floored us.  Seriously – like a-George-Mason-administrator-who-also-happens-to-be-a-college-football-referee-selling-his-F4-rings-on-Ebay (h/t GMB) floored us.

Photo Credit: LA Times

When we started researching the CBE Classic and the Legends Classic, both tournaments put on by The Gazelle Group organization, we discovered very quickly that we couldn’t find a complete bracket for these tournaments.  Instead, all we located was a weird one-page listing of matchups on the CBE site, and a similar listing in addition to a four-team “Championship Bracket” on the Legends site.  As we floundered wondering what the hell was going on with these tournaments, we noticed an interesting little phrase tucked into the middle of the page of the CBE site (emphasis added). 

This year, the O’Reilly Auto Parts CBE Classic will be played under a new format…

– Regional hosts automatically advance to the Championship Rounds in Kansas City regardless of the regional results.

– All other participants will advance to play a round-robin series at one of two other sites. Thus, every participating team will be guaranteed four games.

Ummmmm…. whaaaaaaattt??? 

Is this some kind of a joke?  Does The Gazelle Group think that we, the college hoops public, are complete effing morons?  How can they get away with this???  One of the ironclad bastions of basketball at every level from peewee league up to the pros is the idea of tournament play – you win, you advance.  You lose, you go home.  And here we have the first instance we’ve ever seen where that rule of basketball law is being fixed supplanted so that the money teams get to keep playing irrespective of their on-court performance.

Oh, but RTC, Kansas, Florida, Washington and Syracuse are going to win those CBE Classic games against a couple of nobodies anyway.  Same for Wazzu, Mississippi St, Pitt and Texas Tech in the Legends Classic.  No harm, no foul, right? 

Where’s My Shotgun?

Well, here’s a reminder for those of you with that clouded mentality – Gardner-Webb.   Does that name ring a bell from last year’s CvC Classic?  In the subregional round, the little school from outside of Charlotte shocked the basketball world by defeating mighty Kentucky in its worst home loss in almost two decades.  In the middle of football season, that loss earned far more attention in the national media (PTI, Sportscenter, etc.) than whoever won that tournament actually got.  But the problem, apparently, was that the Kentucky loss resulted in G-W and its dozens of fans going to NYC to play in Madison Square Garden rather than the Big Blue and its legions of fans (and dollars).  So this year the Gazelle Group has managed to rig the system in two of its sponsored tournaments so that the marquee names have a 100% chance (as opposed to the 99% chance they previously had) of getting to the semifinal round. 

Sorry Fairleigh Dickinson, Eastern Kentucky, North Alabama and Akron (among others), The Gazelle Group doesn’t have room for you on its dance card this year.  But hey!  At least you’re guaranteed four games, right?  That’s just as good as playing in a big-time arena on ESPN, right?

Memo to TGG for next season – why don’t we just take a vote of 12 random teams and declare it the champion of the tournament?  That way we can simply do away with the tedium of getting teams to the various locations, televising the games, and actually worrying about who will advance to the next round!  You can run ads on ESPN for a month given all the money you’ll save!  As for your judges, we hear that there’s a former French Olympic judge available to serve on your panel, and Katherine Harris is always around for this sort of thing…

What a stinking, heaping, vomit-inducing pile of abomination. 

Please tell The Gazelle Group how much they suck at: gazelle@gazellegroup.com.

Man, we really hope that GMB‘s take on this is true, and this ring belongs to some administrative office schlep that wasn’t really a part of the greatest Cinderella story in a generation.  

So how much would you bid for a claim to history? 

Maybe some enterprising UConn fans could pool their trust funds to buy up all of these and erase all evidence of their epic E8 loss to George Mason from public consciousness. 

Ebay auctions are here and here. 

Seems Sir Charles was right after all.  Somehow this wonderfully crafted piece by Dan Wetzel at YahooSports got past us for nearly a week before we found it.  Wetzel essentially fires a Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US shot across the bow of the Good Ship NCAA, led by Capt. Myles Brand, for its notably lax invisible investigation and enforcement of NCAA rules among its two revenue cash cow sports, football and basketball.

Doing some solid investigative work himself, Wetzel concludes that it’s been nearly two years since a major college basketball program was hit with a significant violation (Kansas with Ol’ Roy’s largesse in Oct 2006), which is the longest such drought in almost a half-century.  Similarly, it’s been fifteen clean months in college football since the last major violation (Oklahoma in July 2007).  So the reasonable conclusion here is that the NCAA has cleaned up its high-profile sports to the point where schools are by and large playing by the rules, right?  Right?

Wetzel has a slightly different take:

The NCAA has expanded its staff of investigators (its cops) to an all-time high of 20. It now has its infractions committee (its judge and jury) meet as often as seven times per year. Still, it hasn’t been this feeble at catching crooks since a 16-month stretch ending in 1962. Back then, it had one investigator. […] It never has been so obvious the NCAA is protecting its big-time programs and television money.  It’s gotten to the point where Jerry Tarkanian’s legendary line about the NCAA’s selective enforcement habits – “the NCAA was so mad at Kentucky, it gave Cleveland State two more years of probation” – has become outdated.  These days the NCAA doesn’t even get mad at Kentucky.

Wetzel goes on to describe just how toothless the NCAA investigations staff has become in recent years despite its recent expansion.  Apparently they’re still quite excellent at catching small-school hopscotch coaches who have the audacity to text recruits outside of the mandated contact periods (check the below list from 2008).  But when it comes to the power conference schools who have big money, big boosters, big media and drive the whole ship into port for the NCAA coffers, the investigators are largely missing. 

What a joke.  We harkened back to this problem when the OJ Mayo allegations came out last spring.  With a notorious character like Rodney Guillory hanging around the USC program, how could the NCAA and the LA media have so completely missed it?  We’ll buy the fact that newspapers don’t have the proper resources to perform comprehensive investigative journalism while entire newsrooms are shuttering, but the NCAA still has no excuse.  Especially when we look at the above list and see what those twenty investigators have been so diligently working on for the past nine months.

We made reference yesterday to coaches like Billy Gillispie finding the grey areas of the NCAA rulebook and making those in charge make decisions.  With what Wetzel has shown us, we ask, why even bother with the gray areas?  Why not just start funnelling booster money directly to recruits instead of worrying about impressing them with big extravaganza weekends?  Make it truly an arms race where the most-moneyed always win.  Then at least we can all walk away from the stench without lying to ourselves as to what’s causing it. 

Found this on Consumerist yesterday, and although it has absolutely nothing to do with college hoops, the March Madness bracket is a cultural archetype.  Some creative general partner with a good sense of humor at Sansome Partners in SF came up with this (click image for the full view).  We’ve got BofA v. the US Congress in the Finals.  You?  Let the financial bloodbath continue…

And of course, we know it’s October now, but the brackets came out yesterday, so we’re sticking with Sept. Madness as a title.