Recap. Interesting weekend of games. We went into the weekend with five unbeatens, and we came out of it with only three as Vandy lost at Kentucky and Wazzu lost at UCLA. That leaves #1 Memphis, #2 UNC, and #3 Kansas as the only remaining unblemished teams. #4 UCLA at 16-1 is undoubtedly the best team of the one-loss group, which brings us to a midseason conclusion that these four teams have laid stakes as the top tier of college basketball this year. After these four teams, there is a fairly significant dropoff in talent, experience and depth. Which, of course, isn’t to say that these four are locks to make the F4 – teams sometimes stop improving, get lethargic and/or simply lose focus by March Madness. But out of the above group, we’d be absolutely and positively shocked if one of them doesn’t cut the nets down on April 7.

Where is GameDay? One other note from Saturday night. Kansas at Nebraska was the featured ESPN Gameday matchup, but for the second consecutive weekend, we noticed that the crew was offsite. Does this mean that ESPN is no longer doing live broadcasts from the schools? If so, that really sucks and is stupid and we hate ESPN and hope it dies. Seriously, though, last year, some of those sites were utterly insane before the games, and that was half of the fun. What’s the problem? (note: if they’re onsite beginning this week, we’ll issue an apology)

Saturday’s Games. Saturday was absolutely packed with games, and for the first time all season, we felt like playtime was over, and it was time for teams to get down to some real business of winning a conference. Here were some highlighted games, and our take:

• Florida 72, Auburn 56. We don’t think the Baby Gators are all that good yet, but we have to give credit to Billy D. for scheduling soft this year and giving his young guys some momentum going into conference play. 8-8 might get this team to the NCAAs, and they’re already 2-0 in the SEC.
• #2 UNC 93, NC State 62. 43-13 at the half? And NC State was supposed to compete for an ACC title this year??? Pfshaw…
• Depaul 60, St. John’s 54. The Blue Demons are now 3-1 in the Big East and appear to be clicking.
• Kentucky 79, #17 Vanderbilt 73 (2OT). This was a must-win for UK, but Vandy has to be kicking itself for dropping another winnable one at Rupp.
• Missouri 97, #16 Texas 84. Mizzou is going to be tough at home. Damion James with 27/16 in a losing effort.
• #10 Georgetown 72, Connecticut 69. Everyone has seen the Roy Hibbert game-winning 3 by now, but how smooth was that shot?
• Minnesota 76, Penn St. 73. The UK message boards continue to implode.
• Virginia Tech 67, Maryland 66. The Terps (0-2) are digging themselves a huge hole.
• #14 Marquette 92, Notre Dame 66. Um, forget what we were saying about ND the other day… carry on… nothing to see here…
• Columbia 64, NJIT 52. 0-18 now for the NJITers. 11 games to infamy.
• #4 UCLA 81, #4 Washington St. 74. We’re not sure which was more impressive – the UCLA clobbering in the first half, or Wazzu’s comeback in the late second half.
• Boston College 112, Wake Forest 73. Where did this come from???
• Purdue 75, Ohio St. 68. This one surprised us a little, considering how well OSU has been playing.
• Kansas St. 84, Oklahoma 82. A solid road win for KSU – Beastley with 32/11.
• USC 66, Washington 51. The battle between teams with great talent but not much in the way of coaching.
• Clemson 97, Florida St. 85 (2OT). Clemson was just this close to losing another home game… perhaps the collapse has been averted (for now)?
• Indiana St. 64, S. Illinois 62 (2OT). What has happened to the Salukis (7-9) this year?
• #14 Dayton 68, St. Louis 57 (OT). SLU took Dayton to OT, but only scored 2 pts in that extra period.
• #1 Memphis 68, Marshall 45. The only question is how complacent will the Tigers get?
• #7 Tennessee 80, South Carolina 56. Vols roll on…
• Drake 65, Missouri St. 54. The Drake (14-1) is a new name to watch in the MVC.
• Iowa 43, #6 Michigan St. 36. How does a top 10 team lose like this? 36 pts is pathetic with all their talent.
• #3 Kansas 79, Nebraska 58. Methodical and effective. Why wasn’t the GameDay crew in Lincoln again?

Sunday’s Games.

• Louisville 64, Rutgers 49. UL continues to get back on track…
• #18 Rhode Island 80, Duquesne 78. URI’s Will Daniels with 28/11.
• West Virginia 81, Syracuse 61. The Big East is gonna be tough to figure this year.
• #8 Indiana 62, Illinois 58. Does anyone get less press than DJ White (15/10)?
• Oregon 71, Stanford 66. The Ducks just don’t lose at home.
• #8 Duke 87, Virginia 65. UVa looked like it couldn’t even dribble the ball most of this game.

Update: turns out the GameDay show will begin on-site this coming weekend – boy, that Creighton-SIU matchup sure looks the stinker now, doesn’t it? Why doesn’t college hoops make weekly decisions on where to go, like football does???

January 19 Kentucky at Florida
January 26 Creighton at Southern Illinois
February 2 Arizona at UCLA
February 9 Georgetown at Louisville
February 16 Michigan State at Indiana
February 23 Tennessee at Memphis
March 1 Kansas State at Kansas
March 8 North Carolina at Duke

Ok, so this is our first attempt at liveblogging a game, so bear with us if it sucks (or if the game sucks). But it’s worth a shot, so here goes…

10 mins pregame: early scores indicate UNC throttled NC State, Xavier dropped Fordham easily, Florida defeated Auburn, and the suddenly resurgent Depaul Blue Demons beat St. Johns in NYC to go 3-1 in the Big East. Oh, and Kentucky is up ten in the first half against undefeated Vandy (thanks CBS for showing me this worthless Oklahoma St.-Texas Tech game instead).

5 mins pregame: just switched over to FSN to find that the Nebraska-Kansas women’s game still has two minutes left. Thank God this game isn’t going to OT, but STOP FOULING!!

2 mins pregame: this UConn-Georgetown game has the feel of being a good game so far – Hoyas up 1 mid-first half…

1 min pregame: ok good the women’s game is over…

2:30pm: Marques Johnson is the color guy, that’s a good thing. He played at UCLA, right? Frankly, the crowd seemed a little quiet, but maybe they’re not all there yet. After all, it is 11:30am in LA.

2:33pm: UK’s up ten at the half. Vandy did this last week against UMass, but that was at home. Still, we don’t expect that score to hold the entire game. Vandy will hit some 3s and close the gap.

2:34pm: Wow, only the sixth time the Pac-10 has had a Top 5 matchup – wanna bet how many of them involved the Bruins?

2:35pm: Gametime spread is UCLA (-6) – don’t think I’d take that many points this year.

19:22: Collison already shows his worth with a steal on Wazzu’s first possession, then turns it right back over…

18:04: has anyone figured out Kevin Love’s wannabe Justin Timberlake beard thing yet?

16:06: predictably ugly so far, but moreso for Wazzu. Derrick Low is getting penetration, but can’t finish inside. Some particularly poor passing from Wazzu as well – 4 TOs so far. Man, Russell Westbrook can get up…

Read the rest of this entry »

#4 Washington St. @ #4 UCLA preview.   Ok, let’s get this out of the way immediately.  Wazzu is 1-49 all-time at Pauley Pavilion.  What else do we know?  We know that the last four games at UCLA have come down to the last possession of the game (UCLA won all four by 3/3/2/3 pts).  We know that both of these teams play old man ball (each has a tempo hovering near the bottom of D1), but they also play stifling defense (Pomeroy has UCLA as the fifth best D and Wazzu as the eighth) and don’t make many mistakes (each is in the top thirty most efficient teams on both ends of the court).  We know that both teams play a high-caliber basketball and do not suffer fools lightly (poorly coached teams simply stand no chance against these two).  We know that Tony Bennett and Ben Howland are both tremendous motivators and tacticians.  We know that Wazzu has been criticized for a soft nonconference schedule (#304 – Pomeroy) to get to their 14-0 mark but we also know that winning at Washington and USC are no cupcakes, and UCLA already lost once this year at Pauley to Texas.  And we know that the old-school game of Kevin Love (16/10) and how Wazzu handles him with Aron Baynes (12/7) and Robbie Cowgill (8/5) will probably be the deciding factor in what will likely be another very close matchup tomorrow.   

Fwiw, Pomeroy is only giving Wazzu a 24% chance of winning the game, teamrankings.com gives them a 30% chance and Sagarin has the Bruins as a seven-point favorite. 

Let’s see what’s coming out of both camps today – it appears that both sides are expecting an all-out war:

From UCLA:

Well we are going to need lot more of Love, Mata-Real, Westbrook, Shipp and AA2 on Saturday when taking on the Cougars. Howland described what Saturday is going to be like to Dohn:

“It will be like getting a root canal without any pain killers,” UCLA coach Ben Howland said. “Playing them is going through the grinder. It is unbelievably hard because of how patient they are offensively, and how they just wait for a breakdown.”

Hopefully Luc and DC will be ready to go on Saturday. And if one of them can’t or they are not 100 percent, rest of their team-mates will have to step up through the adversity. It is going to be another all out war. And judging from the past we know our warriors will battle through the adversity and give it everything they have.

From Wazzu:

If there’s one thing to worry about heading into Saturday, it’s this: Low, Rochestie and Weaver each played 37 minutes or more, including 38 high-effort minutes for Weaver, who had the unenviable task of chasing O.J. Mayo around for most of the game. He’ll likely draw Josh Shipp on Saturday, who doesn’t figure to run off 32 screens the way Mayo did.

One key factor could be the availability of UCLA uber-guard Darren Collison.  According to Bruins Nation blog:

“Right now, my hip hurts a lot,” Collison said. “I’m going to be doing treatment (today) and I don’t really know the status of how things are, if I’m even going to play or not. Hopefully, I can play Saturday. Right now, they’re looking at it as a hip contusion.”

“I am frustrated, but I’m going to continue to stay positive,” Collison said. “This team has a bright future ahead, and all I can do is keep my head up and stay positive. I’m going through a lot of adversity right now. It’s going to really challenge me to see how I’m going to progress and mature through those situations.”

If Collison can’t go, Russell Westbrook is a more than adequate replacement at the point.  But knowing Howland players’ penchant for toughness, we’d expect to see DC out there tomorrow afternoon.  At least we hope so.  Should Wazzu pull the upset, we’d like to know that it happened with a full-strength UCLA.  Not that we’re calling the upset.  Just sayin’… 

Recap. The most important thing that happened last night was centered in the City of Angels. On one side of town, #4 UCLA handily took care of business against Washington 69-55, while across town #4 Wazzu kept its unbeaten season alive against USC with little problem 73-58. This sets up the first big matchup of the conference season – UCLA v. Washington St. tomorrow at 2:30pm EDT at Pauley Pavilion. In a normal year, this could have been a #1/#2 matchup, but as we talked about earlier this week, the upsets among the elite have been sparse. Looking at the conference representations in the blogpoll, however, this game and its counterpart in February may be our only chance at top five matchups for the remainder of the season, so let’s enjoy it. Given the enormity of this game, we’ve put together a separate preview which will be posted later today.

Other Games Last Night.

• Louisville 63, West Virginia 54. The Cards appear to be getting healthy, and that’s not good news for the rest of the Big East. Earl Clark 11/12 off the bench.
• George Washington 49, St. Louis 20. See post here.
• Oregon 79, California 70. Just bank it – pick Oregon at home every time, and pick against Cal on the road every time.
• Arkansas 76, Auburn 70. Our boy Frank Tolbert had 17/9 in the loss.
• Stanford 66, Oregon St. 46. Lopez boys with 20/13 combined.
• #19 Wisconsin 70, Illinois 60. Illinois fans have said this year was coming due to Weber’s recruiting (8-8, 0-3 B10).
• #12 Butler 74, Wisconsin-Green Bay 65. BU’s Matt Howard with 22/9/2 blks.
• San Jose St. 62, Nevada 60. Mark Fox’s team is running out of time to get it together (8-6, 0-1 WAC).

Friday Night. Nothing much going on. Let’s move on to Saturday…

What the hell is going on out there in the nation’s midsection? Just three short days after Savannah St. laid a second-half egg against Kansas St. to the tune of four pts in the second half (25 total for the game), Rick Majerus’ St. Louis squad put up a blistering twenty points last night in its game against George Washington. This total of sixty-nine points (49-20) set a new record for offensive futility in the shot-clock era of D1 basketball. Let’s take a quick look at the Billikens’ stats:

• 14.6% shooting (7-48 from the field)
• 5.3% 3FG shooting (1-19)
• 50% FT shooting (5-10)
• 0.35 pts per possession
• leading scorer (Bryce Husak) came off the bench for 5 pts
• SLU missed 23 straight shots at one point in the game

Hey, Coach, do you think you have some offensive issues?

“I thought GW played tough on defense. We had some issues. You have to credit GW for playing very well. We have some issues in terms of our offensive proficiency,” Majerus said. “I tried to keep coaching the game. Sometimes you miss. We are a team that has some issues. That is why we are practicing [Friday]. We did miss some good shots, yes. Anyone can look at us and see we don’t have height, we don’t have depth.”

What gets us is that St. Louis really isn’t that bad of a team. Their record is 9-6 with a win over Southern Illinois to their credit, and their RPI ranking is #144, which puts the Billikens in the range of Maryland and Oklahoma St. Still, their offensive output is troubling in their six losses – 58, 56, 40, 39, 53, 20. We realize their tempo this year is among the slowest in the nation (#336), but clearly something isn’t being communicated well between Majerus and his players. SLU was 20-13 last season and returned four starters, so what’s up? [insert joke here about Majerus spending more time eating than coaching]

Update: our blogpolling colleagues Vegas Watch and Super, Scintilliating & Sarcastic beat us to the punch on this last night, and have better takes than us. Enjoy.

We’re back in action, and actually contributing to the blogpoll again!

Note: keep in mind that the blogpoll did not take into account games from Tues. and Wed. nights (i.e., Ole Miss’s loss to Tennessee, or Clemson’s loss to Charlotte).

Justifying Our Ballot. We haven’t voted for a while, but the last time we did, we were voting UCLA #1. We still think they’re the team to beat in March, but they have sice lost to Texas, so we dropped them down a tad. Most of our colleagues are voting Memphis to the top spot, but after Carolina’s scintillating comeback win against Clemson on Sunday night, we’re convinced the Heels deserve the pinnacle for now. It’s notable that every pollster believes that Memphis or UNC is the best team in America, but nobody is voting for Kansas (also undefeated and looking great) at that spot. As for the rest of the poll, we’re pretty closely aligned with the rest of the bloggers with the exceptions of Vanderbilt (we think they’re much better than people are giving them credit for), Clemson (you’ve heard our tirades on the Tigers, but they’ll be outie next week anyway), Oklahoma (not sure why they’re rising faster than, say, Ohio St.), and West Virginia (not sold on them quite yet). We had Stanford (#21), Arizona (#23) and Notre Dame (#24) on our ballot instead.

The Curious Case of Vanderbilt. We understand Marquette, Pitt and Villanova all dropping from last week (hint: they all lost). But we wanted to figure out how an undefeated team actually fell a spot, as Vandy did (from #16 to #17) this week. As far as we can tell, APAIS.net is responsible for this strange occurrence. Slackers like us, they didn’t provide a ballot last week, but this week they ranked the ‘Dores #22, which aggregated their average total a little lower than last week. So send all your hate mail to those guys, Vandy fans. :-)

Variance. As we alluded to earlier this week in our post about the lack of parity this year, the top nine teams are tightly woven into their respective positions. Among the Top 10, only Georgetown creates some dissonance (ranked from #4 to, shockingly, STF has them unranked). Dayton and Clemson (as usual) are the other two teams that have widely variable positions this week.

Conference Call.

• Big East – 5
• Big 12 – 4
• A10, ACC, Big 10, SEC – 3 each
• Pac-10 – 2
• CUSA, Horizon – 1 each

Real quick ATB today…

Kenny George. Yeah, UNC won the game 93-81, Asheville kept it reasonable, and all the other stuff (Psycho-T: 23/9; Lawson: 17/5/7 assts)…

But all we really want to talk about is the sheer enormity that is Kenny George. This was the first time we’d actually seen him standing near other players, and to say that he dwarfed the rest of them is to insult the word itself. George absolutely miniaturized them. It was like some gentle giant had been released from his cave to mortify and terrorize the citizens of Far Far Away or Whoville. Look, for the college game, Tyler Hansbrough is a beast of a guy – 6’9, 250 lbs and cut like a Rodin sculpture – but he looked like a little snot-nosed kid when standing next to George (which isn’t to say that George could handle the Psychotic One – taking advantage of his superior quickness (a hint right there that George is um, rather, lumbering), Hansbrough had a nasty cram below right in George’s mug).

George is listed at 7’6, 360 lbs on the UNCA roster, but we’d like to take a look at the calibration of that scale. He looks more like four bills to us. The thing is, unlike some supersize-me players we’ve seen in the past (Shagari Alleyne and Escalade, er, Troy Jackson come to mind), this guy may actually have a little game. He’s contributing 13/9/5 in just over 22 mins per game (14/11 against Carolina), which is more than double his output from last year. Who knows – with a little more conditioning… he might just redefine the damn sport.

Other interesting games.

• Tennessee 85, Ole Miss 83. Looks like Ole Miss is better than we thought. The Rebs were very close to winning this game, and UT has become a difficult place for opponents to win games. Does Cincy regret letting Andy Kennedy get away yet?
• Charlotte 82, Clemson 72. Here we go! The annual Clemson collapse is now under way…
• Arizona St. 64, Arizona 59 (OT). Hmm… ASU is now quietly 13-2 while Arizona is 10-5. Maybe Herb Sendek can coach a little bit after all?
• Dayton 92, Rhode Island 83. The Flyers draw first blood in what will be an exciting and competitive A10 this year.
• Mississippi St. 61, LSU 39. Clearly John Brady’s charges were partying all week with the football team. This was in Baton Rouge too.

Vandy & Memphis also remained unbeaten last night, so there are five remaining (+UNC, Kansas and Wazzu).

Since we admittedly pretty much suck, and didn’t do an ATB last night, we felt it necessary to step away from our oh-so-important work for a few moments to preview some of the better games going on tonight.

• #2 UNC v. UNC-Asheville (ESPNU) 7pm – UNCA is 10-3, but they’ll get bombed no matter what tonight
• Duke (-13) v. Temple (ESPN) 7pm – another made-for-tv garbage Duke game on the WWL
• #14 Dayton (-3) v. #19 Rhode Island 7pm – two ranked A10 teams? why would ESPN want to show that??
• #20 Pittsburgh (-2.5) v. South Florida (ESPN2) 7:30pm – Pitt needs to be careful to avoid dropping this game on the road
• Georgia (-1.5) v. Georgia Tech 7:30pm – two teams going nowhere fast…
• UMass (-3) v. St. Joseph’s 7:30pm – another key A10 game that isn’t shown nationally
• #22 Clemson (-15.5) v. Charlotte 7:30pm – can Clemson bounce back strong after their heartbreaking loss to UNC on Sunday night?
• #1 Memphis (NL) v. East Carolina 8pm – the 16-0 CUSA slate begins for the Tigers
• #16 Vanderbilt (-8.5) v. South Carolina 8pm – Vandy looks to stay unbeaten
• #7 Tennessee (-9) v. #17 Ole Miss (ESPNFC) 9pm – Vegas giving no respect to Ole Miss and its unbeaten record in Knoxville
• Arizona St. (-2) v. #24 Arizona 9:30pm – a surprising Wed. night Pac-10 game

Recap. Only one game of note tonight (aside from OSU’s usual title game loss on the gridiron):

Kansas St. 85, Savannah St. 25. Yes, that’s the correct score. KSU outscored Savannah St. 48-4 in the second half, who managed to set a new record for futility in both shooting percentage (4.1%) and points scored in a half during the shot-clock era (since 1986). Wow. We think we experienced a game like that once back in grade school. From the WWL:

Savannah State (8-13) missed its first 15 shots of the second half, falling behind 72-22 as Kansas State opened with a 35-1 run. Joseph Flegler finally ended the drought with 5:48 left, hitting a 3-pointer from the wing, and the Tigers figured to at least get a couple more baskets.

Nothing else fell.

The previous records were set just last week, when Pennsylvania went 1-for-17 (5.9 percent) and scored six points in the first half of a 60-30 loss to Florida Gulf Coast. Savannah State shot 15.5 percent overall, making just nine field goals — four from 3-point range.Savannah State coach Horace Broadnax, a guard for Georgetown’s 1984 national championship team, has seen his share of defensive dominance. But even he had to just throw his hands up after this one.”It was good — I was hoping that we’d set a record,” Broadnax said sarcastically. “Hey, what can I do? The guys were playing hard, they weren’t making shots. I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning, if I’m fortunate, and I’m going to move on. And I expect them to move on. “

We love this scoring chart – straight line = bad:

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.450749&w=425&h=350&fv=null]

#13 Butler also won tonight (Butler 66, Loyola (Md) 55) and BC lost to someone named Bob Morris at home (Robert Morris 57, Boston College 51).

Is it just us, or has college hoops halfway through the season been almost completely devoid of big upsets so far this year? Last night’s UNC-Clemson game was exciting on many levels, but it failed to deliver in the one key area that makes the college hoops regular season so great – the big upset (leading to a home team RTC, of course).

On the Horizon – More of This?

In the aftermath of the wild and wacky college football season that saw several teams out of the national title hunt/back into the picture/out/then in again, as well as some eye-opening early college basketball losses (ahem, Gardner-Webb, Mercer), pundits wondered aloud whether we were in store for another zany hoops season where a new #1 team would last about as long as it takes to hang the banner (sup, Carolina fans).

This may all become completely irrelevant as conference play begins in earnest, but this is one of the quietest pre-conferences we’ve seen in many years. It turns out that the Kentucky loss to Gardner-Diego wasn’t that much of an upset as anyone with a starting five can beat UK this year, and the few other eyebrow-arching intra-top 25 losses (e.g., Texas over UCLA and Tennessee) aren’t what we’re talking about. Don’t agree?

• Consider that we’re two months into the season and the AP top 10 consists of nine of the same teams as the preseason poll (Louisville has been replaced by Duke).
• Consider that those preseason top ten teams are a combined 127-9 and four of those nine losses are accounted by Rick Pitino’s injury-prone Louisville squad.
• Of the five other losses, two of them came against other preseason top tenners (Georgetown against Memphis; Michigan St. against UCLA), and two of them were against Texas (#15 preseason). The other top ten loss was Indiana against Xavier.

So this means one of two things. Either we can expect an oligarchy of about 6-8 power teams this year running roughshod through their respective conferences; or, none of this analysis means a damn thing and we’ll have a brand new top 10 in a couple short weeks of conference play. Let’s lace em up and find out.