This is too good to be true, and yet it is absolutely true…

A senior defensive back for the Florida Gators is facing burglary charges, just days before Florida’s showdown with #1 LSU. Gainesville Police arrested Earl “Tony” Joiner, 21, early Tuesday morning outside a towing yard. Investigators say Joiner was trying to get his girlfriend’s car out of Watson’s Towing on SW 1st Street. Witnesses told police a man pushed open the heavy gate surrounding the fenced yard, which was not open at the time. The man got into a car and tried to drive away without paying the $76 towing bill. A police officer heard the suspect, identified as Joiner, tell someone on a cell phone, “I am probably about to go to jail, cuz I did push the gate open.”

Paging Frank Tolbert… you might wanna give your SEC comrade a few tips on the art of automobile retrieval. Such as…

1. Show up drunk at the towing compound in the middle of the night.
2. Climb fence.
3. Retrieve car.
4. Drive car through fence.

Joiner did none of these things correctly, and now he’s facing felony burglary charges.

Predicted Order of Finish.

1. Alabama A&M (18-9) (13-5)
2. Mississippi Valley St. (13-13) (12-6)
3. Grambling St. (14-9) (12-6)
4. Alabama St. (15-14) (10-8)
5. Southern (13-15) (9-9)
6. Jackson St. (12-17) (8-10)
7. Arkansas-Pine Bluff (8-19) (8-10)
8. Prairie View A&M (9-20) (8-10)
9. Alcorn St. (5-20) (7-11)
10. Texas Southern (5-23) (3-15)

What You Need to Know (WYN2K). Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the worst basketball conference in America! For three years running, the Southwestern Athletic Conference has found itself at the absolute bottom of every major computer ranking system (RPI, Sagarin & Pomeroy) as its ten schools have gone a collective 32-229 (.123) in OOC games during the last three seasons (easily the worst). Its sacrificial lamb league champion has received eight straight #16 seeds in the NCAAs and four of those teams were relegated to the dreaded play-in game. Just how bad is it? Consider that tournament champion Jackson St. and regular-season champion Mississippi Valley St. were the only two schools with overall winning records last year – no other conference member won more than eleven games. There are no encouraging signs of change for this season.

Predicted Champion. Alabama A&M (#16 Seed NCAA). Yes, we’re predicting a worst-to-first here, but the Bulldogs are the only SWAC school returning all five starters from last season, including dynamic sophomore guards Trant Sampson and Cornelius Hester as well as 6’11 defensive freak Mickell Gladness (6.3 bpg), who blocked an astonishing 20.5% of shots while he was on the court last season.

Others Considered. Grambling is an interesting team because they return four starters including the SWAC’s best all-around player Andre Ratliff, but they also open a brand-new 7500-seat arena and we shouldn’t discount the “new barn” effect. Mississippi Valley St. is another team to watch because they won the regular-season crown last season and return former Southern Miss coach James Green, who has inspired his teams to play maddening D, which will keep them in the hunt.

Games to Watch. There’s only one game you’ll find on tv from the SWAC, and it’s the only game that matters for this conference all season.

• SWAC Championship Game (03.15.08).

RPI Booster Games. The SWAC plays 28 games against BCS conference opponents, and 26 of those are on the road. In a weird scheduling coincidence, only Auburn deigns to venture into a SWAC gym, and it does so twice – it could lose either of these if Lebo’s team isn’t careful.

• Auburn @ Alabama St. (11.17.07)
• Auburn @ Southern (12.16.07)

Odds of Multiple NCAA Bids. Nil. It’s never happened before, and the reality of the non-conference “guarantee games” in the SWAC will ensure it doesn’t happen again this year.

All-Name Team. Alabama St.’s Grlenntys “Chief” Kickingstallionsims is a cinch for national honors, but Texas Southern’s St. Paul Latham is another worthy candidate.

Neat-o Stat. The SWAC likes to run, as half of its teams were among the top 62 fastest tempos in the nation in 06-07. By the same token, though, none can shoot the ball, as 9 of its 10 teams were among the bottom 35 teams last year in effective FG%.

65-Team Era. The SWAC is 1-21 in the era. Southern University (#13) defeated Georgia Tech (#4) 93-78 in the first round of the 1993 NCAA Tourney.

Final Thought. The SWAC isn’t worth much in basketball, so we’ll give it some love for something it’s actually good at.

Frank Tolbert – RTC’s Sweetheart of 2007-08

Ahh yes, thanks to the miracle of Facebook, we’re now BFFs with Auburn’s #1 Tiger, Frank Tolbert. As you surely recall from earlier this week, Frank is the perp legend who stuck it to the unscrupulous thieves towing companies on behalf of all of us. For anyone who has had to deal with the degrading, humiliating experience of begging for your car (+$275, cash only) from some smelly savage bastard with no teeth, Frank says word.

We also show our love for how Frank rolls, rockin’ the fingercuffs up top, and keepin’ it real down low (far right).

Keep making us proud, Frank.

Our first story of the day comes from Auburn, Alabama, situs of the university formerly known as East Alabama Male College. The natives there have apparently gotten a little restless, what with the gridiron sting of losing to a Tampa commuter school and insert-demeaning-moniker-of-choice-for-Mississippi State University in recent weeks. We haven’t even described how they feel about Nick Saban yet, but we’re getting off track here.

Even members of the hoops team are showing signs of distress:

Auburn senior basketball player Frank Tolbert was arrested Friday for third-degree criminal mischief stemming from an incident at a towing company lot. The Opelika-Auburn News reported the arrest Saturday. Tolbert allegedly jumped a fence at United Auto Collision in Auburn Thursday night to retrieve his SUV, which had been towed earlier in the week. Police said Tolbert damaged a metal fence when he drove through it to leave the lot. Tolbert averaged 11.8 points and 4.8 rebounds last year, starting in 28 of 32 games. He is one of three seniors on Auburn’s roster this year.

Now, we get just as PO’d as the next guy when our sled gets towed – legalized theft, it is. But it never occurred to us to simply hop the fence of the impound lot and ram our neon green Dodge Charger Daytona R/T through the gate. Maybe it had something to do with the open-air drug market going on outside the premises that spooked us. Nevertheless, given what we know about towing companies, we think Tolbert’s act of criminal mischief is about seventeen different kinds of awesome. Instead of Coach Jeff Lebo suspending him, he should give Tolbert a week off.

Ok, so thanks to an insightful UCLA fan, we realized that our exuberant reliance on NCSA data to justify our Athlademic Rankings posted last week was giving them way too much credit for properly vetting their data.  So to make sure we get it right this time, we spent the better part of today going through the 2007-08 US News rankings and the 2006-07 Sears Cup rankings ourselves.  Here’s the revised list, in Table A. 

Table A.  Athlademic Ratings – Division I (revised)

New Arrivals.  In addition to UCLA and USC, we also see the inclusion of Georgia, Texas A&M, Georgia Tech, Minnesota, Tennessee, Rutgers and Auburn onto our list – all driven by strong athletic programs.  High academic schools with relatively weak athletic programs, such as Army, William & Mary and Dartmouth, fell out of the top 50 due to the addition of the above programs. 

The Ivies strike a Nice Balance in Athlademics 

Ivy League Balance.   Speaking of Dartmouth, Keggy the Keg and friends are the only Ivy League school that didn’t make our Top 50.  The other seven did, with Princeton (no surprise there) leading the way at #16 overall.  Granted, the high academics of the schools drives their inclusion here, but we shouldn’t discount that these schools rate above many larger BCS schools in terms of the success of its athletic programs.  Cornell has the 55th most successful athletic program, but there are 73 BCS schools, which means Cornell, Princeton (#63) and Harvard‘s (#64) athletic programs  are outperforming bigger state schools such as Kansas (#66), Iowa (#68), and Connecticut (#82).

Big 10 – ACC Challenge.    As in, the Big 10 and ACC challenge the rest of the BCS conferences to keep up with it when it comes to athlademics.  We rated all 73 BCS conference schools, keeping those ahead of them in place, and Table B below shows the results. 

Table B.  BCS Conference Athlademic Ratings

Why is the Big East so bad?  There’s a pretty clear top tier of Big 10, ACC and Pac-10, a middle tier of the SEC and Big 12, and a bottom tier, where the Big East lurks like Gollum all by itself.  The Big East really gets killed on both sides of the equation – it has seven (of 16) third-tier academic schools, as rated by US News (more than the other 5 conferences combined); and seven schools that finished outside of the top 100 in the Sears Cup (Mississippi St. and Kansas St. are the only other two in BCS conferences).  This includes the dubious case of Seton Hall, who was the only BCS conference school of the 73 to not score a single point in the Sears Cup competition for 2006-07.  How is that possible?? 

Days Long Since Gone at The Hall

Haves and Have-Nots.  The Pac-10 is the greatest example of bifurcation within a conference.  It has five of the top twenty athlademic programs in America (Stanford, UCLA, USC, Cal, Washington), but it also only has five of the top fifty programs – its next highest ranked school is Arizona at #51.  Compare this with the Big 10, who has nine of its eleven members ranked in the top forty, with only Indiana (#53) and Iowa (#58) weighing it down.  Conversely, the Big 12 only has two of its twelve schools ranked in the top forty – Texas (#11) and Texas A&M (#23). 

Non-BCS Stars.  We already mentioned the Ivies, whose eight schools average a 29.9 rating on our list.  But who else steps up to challenge the BCS big boys as an athlademic school?  The Naval Academy (#28) and a couple of the smaller UCs (Irvine (#35) & Santa Barbara (#39)) lead the way.  One surprise inclusion is our Mormon friends at BYU, who used a strong athletic showing to come in at 39th on our list. 

You can do Better.  Not to harp on anyone in particular, but it makes no sense to us that football (read: revenue) schools like Cincinnati (#196 in the Sears Cup), South Florida (#133), Mississippi St. (#120), Kansas St. (#111) and Syracuse (#110) can’t do any better with their overall athletic programs.  Let’s throw in Villanova (#132) and Marquette (#127) for good measure – both schools are wealthy private Catholic institutions, which means they have the resources to spread around the non-revenue sports.  So what’s their excuse? 

August sorta snuck up on us, and with it did the realization that we’re now only about ten weeks away from Midnight Madness. 2007-08 schedules are slowly leaking out (Hey Florida – way to challenge build confidence for your new guys), and students will be back in the school in just a few weeks. We’re getting closer…

• Speaking of schedules, the four Preseason NIT first/second round sites are: Ohio St., Syracuse, Washington, and Texas A&M. Best chance for a first-round upset? Oral Roberts over TAMU.
• Wazzu stepped up to the plate to compensate Tony Bennett for his fine first season, although his pay is still below the Pac-10 average.
• The hits keep coming for New Mexico St. – star forward Tyrone Nelson was dismissed from the team hours after his conviction for the robbery of a pizza delivery man.
• Over forty institutions were named as allegedly taking part in a student loan kickback scheme that could have affected non-scholarship athletes at schools such as Georgetown, UCLA, Kansas and Auburn. As student loan holders, this is a troubling development.
• March Madness All Season released its midsummer Top 25 – Memphis is #1.
• Oh, and a while back Dick Vitale released his 07-08 preseason Rolls-Roycers (we prefer Maybachs) with nary a Dookie to be found.
• Ahh, our friends the Dookies. H/T to The Dude Abides for finding the Duke response to the infamous “This is Why Duke Sucks” vid from earlier this year. There is no way any of the guys in that video actually go to Duke. Also have to mention we love the Audi – is there any car more Duke?
• Speaking of Duke douchebags, McBob has apparently found his way into the back seat with quasi-reality MTV star Lauren Conrad.   
• So what you’re saying is that we’re like every other sports blogger, right? Actually this is a pretty cool (although admittedly unscientific) analysis of the typical profile of sports bloggers today.

Quite a bit of stuff we’ve missed over the past week or so… 

• Iowa transfer and Tennessee native Tyler Smith will be eligible to play at UT next season, as his appeal was approved by the NCAA.  UT just moved into our Top 5 for 2007-08.   
• Florida guard Brandon Powell‘s arrest for possession of a little ganja results in a transfer – expect to see him at Oklahoma St. or WVU next year.
• Cliff Ellis resurfaces at Coastal Carolina – we guess there are worse places than Conway, South Carolina. 
• Apparently the NCAA will revisit its recently-enacted text messaging ban after 34 schools asked for a review.   
• Indiana will tear down Assembly Hall (the House that Knight built) and Auburn will tear down Beard-Eaves Coliseum (the House that…  um…  Barkley?  The Rifleman?  built?) in favor of new barns. 
• New Mexico St. coach Reggie Theus alighted for the Sacto Queens and the golden opportunity to coach Spencer Hawes, opening the door for Louisville assistant coach Marvin Menzies to take over in Las Cruces.  Former UK & Celtic favorite and longtime crooner Walter McCarty will take the open position on Pitino’s staff.   
• John Hollinger at espn.com (Insider, but if you look around you can find it copied/pasted elsewhere) has a tremendous article on evaluating college players before the draft. 
• It’s never too early.  Chad Ford’s Top 10 for the 2008 Draft.  While we’re at it, here’s the projected mocks on NBADraft.net (2008 and 2009).     
• Seth Davis has an interesting piece on the Under-19 USA team.  Looking at Sunday night’s box score – Stephen Curry continues to impress. 
• UK has signed just about everyone lately, as Billy Gillispie has the Wildcat fans giddy over his recruiting prowess during his first three months on the job.  Oh, and he hasn’t found a place to live yet (has he looked?). 
• Duke Dorks feigning comedy.  Jon Scheyer acting walking around campus with a camera nearby.