1. One of the great offshoots of the partnership of CBS with Turner Sports for the upcoming fourteen years of NCAA Tournament is that they’ve finally figured out a clean and easy way for fans to watch every game live if they want to.  No more signing up for Mega March Madness or waiting on Greg Gumbel to shoot you to a better game (after a commercial break, of course).  Now, they will have four different channels through which to put the games, and with a more realistic staggering of tip times, there will be fewer scenarios where three games are coming down to a final possession at the same time.  As Mike Aresco, CBS’ executive VP for programming said, this will allow for “wall to wall coverage from Noon to Midnight.”  How awesome is this?
2. Is former Kentucky and Texas A&M head coach Billy Gillispie interested in the open Wyoming job?  Frankly, we don’t understand why he would have any interest at all.  Texas Tech is going to have an opening next month and the Longhorn State is his recruiting base.  And despite all the troubles he ran into in the Bluegrass State, he is a perfect fit for football-oriented schools in the footprint of the old Southwest Conference.  This potential move just doesn’t make a lot of sense to us.
3. The 2011 McDonald’s All-Americans were announced yesterday for the March 30 game in Chicago featuring the stars of tomorrow.  The big winners:  Kentucky (4), Duke (3), Louisville (3), Syracuse (2), UNC (2) — sooooo… what else is new?
4. Here’s a solid analysis of the Duke-UNC game from Wednesday night.  The thing that jumped out at us from this game was just how dominant UNC looked against Duke in the first half.  Sure, we all knew that the Blue Devils would come back, make the game competitive, and probably even win the game.  But we never thought that this collection of North Carolina players were capable of dominating this collection of Duke players at any time, anywhere, even for one half.
5. Luke Winn’s Power Rankings are always fun, but the little animated graphic he came up with to illustrate the assist difference between Larry Drew II and Kendall Marshall really cracked us up for some reason.  We half-expected the scientists from the Dharma Initiative to show up and tell us why we need to keep pressing that infernal button.

The Lede.  Here’s hoping everyone had a very safe and happy New Year’s 2011.  Just typing those numbers makes it hard for us to believe that there are ten-year olds who never experienced the awesomeness of the 1990s.  Speaking of irrelevant references to timing, with the calendar change we’re now heading into the heart of the season.  Frankly, the first two months in some ways seemed interminable, with far too many mismatches merely acting as a prelude for the conference season where the contenders and pretenders will be inevitably ferreted out.  As a case in point, take a look at last year’s AP Top 10 from one year ago today.  Texas, a first-round NCAA loser, was #2; Kansas and Villanova, both second round losers, were #1 and #6, respectively; the #9 team, North Carolina, ended up in the NIT.  The lesson here is that there are no finished products yet — many teams have barely tested themselves, and it wouldn’t be the first time that a school with a lofty pre-conference record collapses after seeing its own blood on the road.  Who will those teams be?  We have some ideas but it’ll have to wait until later this week.

Your Watercooler Moment.  Memphis Fan Ejected From Game.  This is a no-brainer.  There weren’t all that many great games this weekend, but an incident that took place near the end of Memphis’ 91-86 win over Tennessee State on Sunday is what will be talked about on Monday morning.  After an on-court scrum where a prominent donor’s wife (is she really the spouse of the Lenny’s Sub Shop guy? — someone please confirm) got agitated from the front row and allegedly yelled at one of the TSU players to “choke on” his mouthpiece, the nearby referee Mark Whitehead threw her out of the game.  Yes, you read that correctly, a fan!  And not just any fan, but a middle-aged female fan who quite obviously presented a clear and present danger to the players on the floor, especially considering the way that she was pumping and waving around those blue pom-pons.  (h/t Chris Littman for the video)

Your Watercooler Moment, Vol. II. Dear Ron: Don’t Eff With Jeannine Edwards — Signed, Billy Gillispie.  This has absolutely nothing to do with college basketball per se, but it involves two media personalities who regularly cover the game and it’s hilarious nevertheless.  SportsByBrooks reported over the weekend that ESPN commentator Ron Franklin (he of the Big Twelve games, mostly) condescendingly called reporter Jeannine Edwards “sweetcakes” and “a-hole” during a production meeting prior to the Chick-Fil-A Bowl on New Year’s Eve.  Franklin was allowed to work that game but he was then pulled from the Fiesta Bowl radio broadcast on Saturday night.  We’re not sure if this is a much more common occurrence with female reporters or what, but people seem to enjoy talking down to Jeannine Edwards.  Former Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie of course was widely ridiculed for his treatment of the sideline reporter during an Ole Miss game in 2009, and many people in Wildcat country believe strongly that particular embarrassment was the straw that broke his back as the UK coach.  It’s undetermined what will happen to Franklin as a result of his latest comments, but it should be noted that he had a similar incident five years ago with Holly Rowe and he still remained with the company.  Will Jeannine go two-for-two in her latest battle of the sexes?  Let’s hope so.

This Weekend’s Quick Hits…

• Kansas: Best Team in America. So says Miami (OH) forward Antonio Ballard, whose team has had the privilege to play the top three teams in the polls so far this season.  The Red Hawks lost to Duke by 34, Ohio State by 21, and Kansas by 27, but it was the athleticism of the Morris twins who combined for 38/15 coming off the bench that seemed to make the biggest impression.
• Illinois Starts off Big Ten 2-0.  The Illini got a key home win on Sunday with its victory over Wisconsin in Champaign.  Combined with a win at Iowa last week, and Bruce Weber’s team crystallizes just how important scheduling is in conference races.  A winnable road game followed by a home game against a team they’ll likely battle all year in the second tier of the conference race.  Contrast this with Minnesota who currently sits at 0-2 as a result of road games to Wisconsin and Michigan State.
• Syracuse, Cincinnati & St. John’s Do Likewise.  With respect to SU and UC, again, scheduling.  Syracuse feasted on two more home meals with Seton Hall and Notre Dame visiting the Carrier Dome, while Cincy got DePaul and the Hall to visit the Queen City.  The anomaly of this group is Steve Lavin’s Johnnies.  Somehow the same team that lost to Fordham and St. Bonnie managed to get Big East road wins at WVU and Providence last week.  If his team is turning a corner, we’ll find out on Big Monday as they host Georgetown at MSG.

• Read the rest of this entry »

One of the best things about college basketball is the rivalries. Whether rational or not, rivalries usually manifest themselves through the players and fans of the involved schools in the form of true, unmitigated disdain for the other side. Because we love making trouble, and with apologies to Orwell, we give you the Two Minutes’ Hate, a series of posts in which we give fans/bloggers/writers of both sides of a given rivalry a chance to vent about the other side, with minimal but identical prompting from us. We encouraged them to cut loose and hold nothing back, and we’ll be doing this with various rivalries throughout the year as such games arise. If you want to nominate a rivalry or even offer a submission, email us at JStevRTC@gmail.com. And remember, the published opinions are those of the respondents and not necessarily those of RTC, heh heh.

Today’s Rivals: Louisville and Kentucky

Coaches Crum And Hall Might Be Smiling Here, But BOY, Do These Two Teams Hate Each Other.

First, speaking on behalf of the Cardinals, we have Mike from the excellent Louisville site Card Chronicle. You can follow him on Twitter here. And you should, if for no other reason than because his bio describes him as the “fourth-ranked Chaucer scholar in the Ohio Valley.”

1. In your opinion, what was the Ville’s greatest win over UK?

The 1983 “Dream Game” without a doubt.

Even after Louisville had established itself as a national power, Kentucky refused to play them. The game finally happened in ’83 when the teams were paired in the same region and met in the Mideast Regional championship on March 26 in Knoxville. Despite a buzzer-beating shot by Jim Master to send the game into overtime, the Cardinals ran off 14 straight points in the extra period and prevailed, 80-68.

The U of L community erupted and quickly the governor, legislators and even the boards of trustees at both universities began to talk about a series between the two. Shortly thereafter, the announcement was made that Louisville and Kentucky would begin playing each other annually.

The game played a huge role in making the rivalry what it is today. If Louisville loses that day, the two might still not be playing annually.

2. What was the most painful loss?

Probably the ’04 game where Louisville led by 15 at half and as many as 18 before the Cats came all the way back and won it on Patrick Sparks‘ free-throws with less than a second left. Sparks walked twice. Neither were called. Louisville won the game.

Still, we went to the Final Four a few months later and UK didn’t.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Mike Krzyzewski said on his XM radio show on Wednesday that he expects Kyrie Irving will be out of action for “a long time.”  He didn’t specifically elaborate on what that might mean, but given the relative gloom and doom coming out of Durham over the last week, we’re leaning toward not seeing him in a Duke uniform again this season.  Coach K has been called many things in his career over the years, but one of the things we’ve not heard about him is that he’s an embellisher or BSer — he pretty much tells you what he thinks to be true.  With that in mind, we believe him when he says Irving may not play again this season.
2. Well, it’s not the Nobel Peace Prize, but maybe that’s next…  Bill Self, John Calipari, Ron Hunter, Mike Sutton and Scott Nagy have been nominated for the first United Nations Nongovernment Organization Positive Peace Awards in the coach category.  Yes, there actually is a coach category.  Self and Sutton were nominated for work with other charities, but the other three were honored as a result of the work they’ve done with Samaritan’s Feet, a charity that provides footwear to needy children around the world.  The article actually says that two of those places were “Haiti and Detroit,” which is rather depressing that an American city has such inherent structural and poverty problems that it appears in the same sentence as a third-world country.
3. Luke Winn is back with his weekly power rankings, a compendium of information where if you don’t walk away after reading it having learned sixteen new things, then you’re smarter than the average bear.  This week is particularly insightful because he talked with numerous assistant coaches to get the insider scoop on all of his ranked teams and their best players.
4. Kansas’ Mario Little has been suspended indefinitely by Kansas for a late-night altercation on Wednesday involving his girlfriend that resulted in his arrest for battery, criminal damage and criminal trespassing.  Without reading too much between the lines, it appears that Little got upset when he found another man at his girlfriend’s residence, and things escalated to a bad place from that point.  Regardless of the reason, it’s clear that Bill Self and KU are taking this seriously, especially in the light of the past year-plus of poor decisions by KU athletes.  The 6’6 Little was averaging 6/4 in around sixteen minutes per game, but certainly Kansas has plenty of depth at the guard position especially with Josh Selby debuting on Saturday against USC.
5. In this article at the Omaha World-Herald, Lee Barfknecht writes that former UTEP, Texas A&M and Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie could be a candidate for the Texas Tech job if things don’t turn around for Pat Knight there soon.  From the entire blogosphere to TTU brass, we believe that such a move would be a great hire — Billy Clyde needs to be back in college basketball somewhere (big grin).

As we wrote in our piece earlier today listing the biggest “Midnight Madness” events planned for Friday evening, it’s really not appropriate to refer to these things as “Midnight” any more than it is appropriate to call Jennifer and Scott Petkov “humans.”  Neither entity has any semblance to the word regularly used to describe them.  Imagine our surprise, then, while researching some of the various Madnesses around the country that we came across relatively unknown Florida Atlantic’s notice for their extravaganza.

Notice anything out of the ordinary here?  Well, first of all, they tout the event as “Midnight Madness” but as discussed above we know that nobody actually has their event at the witching hour anymore.  It’s a little odd that they didn’t call it something else to make that clear ((Mike) Jarvis Jaunt?  Owl Madness? Hoot n’ Holler?), but that’s not the biggest item that jumped out at us.  No, look at the date — FAU is having their Midnight Madness tonight.  As in, a few hours from now.

Last we checked, Florida Atlantic was still a member of Division I men’s basketball, so our immediate reaction was that we were uncovering a case of a clear NCAA rules violation; but cooler heads prevailed, and after calling the FAU media relations folks for confirmation, we quickly realized that tonight’s Basketball Kickoff will not actually be a practice as much as a promotional event where fans can meet players/coaches, sign autographs and win various prizes throughout the evening.  How are they allowed to do this?  Well, it’s right there in the rulebook under Section 17.3.2.4.1 (yes, we had that memorized) —Team Promotional Activities.

So this begs the question — is FAU ahead of the curve on this or is this just a meaningless outlier from a school trying desperately to drudge up interest in its basketball program in a difficult place to do so (South Florida isn’t exactly a college hoops hotbed)?  Considering we’re writing this story about Florida Atlantic and Florida Atlantic alone, it could represent a crafty strategic marketing move on their part; although their hoops SID said that the primary reason for the school having it tonight was that they didn’t want to interfere with the football stadium’s ground-breaking tomorrow.  So there’s that, too.  Still, we wonder if some other enterprising school in future years might try to jump the gun a little by having a heavily-marketed “first” Midnight Madness in a similar manner as this one.  It’s well worth watching, and if Billy Clyde Gillispie ever gets another head coaching job in D1, we think we already know who the candidate will be to try this.

After a week off due to some outside issues we are back with a lot of links that should keep you satiated while waiting for college football to come to its anti-climatic finish and the nation can turn its full attention to college basketball.

• ESPN has a new #1 in the class of 2011 rankings: Austin Rivers. Rivers has not committed yet, but most of the speculation that we have heard has him leaning towards Duke although he apparently will also visit Kansas and UNC.
  

  Your new #1 recruit?

• Mike DeCourcy disagrees with the ESPN rankings as he has a new #1: Adonis Thomas. We have previously profiled Thomas and his decision to go the reality TV route for his recruiting process. We never said we doubted his ability. We just questioned his methods of making himself a household name.

More Adonis after the jump.

• Score another one for Kentucky as they landed Kyle Wiltjer, a top 5 power forward in this year’s class, to go with their already ridiculously loaded class of 2011. The question now is whether or not they can land Quincy Miller to complete yet another super class for the Wildcats and essentially end the conversation about whether or not this 3-year run by Kentucky is the greatest group of recruits ever.
• For his part, Miller visited Louisville this weekend and appeared to like it there. Jody Demling has more here about Miller and other top recruits if you are willing to scroll through his chat.
• Speaking of Kentucky, KSR provides us with a quick rundown of Kentucky‘s latest recruiting efforts. As you can guess John Calipari is only going after the big names.
• Josiah Turner, the #2 point guard in this year’s class, has narrowed his list of schools to 5 (Louisville, UCLA,Arizona, Oregon, and Kansas) and has set dates for his projected visits.
• Steve Lavin is beginning to build his “Noah’s Ark” at St. John’s with the addition of Maurice Harkless, a small forward who had initially committed to UConn before backing out recently.
• Rutgers landed its top recruit of the early Mike Rice era when top 10 power forward Kadeem Jack committed to the Scarlet Knights.

Read the rest of this entry »

The NCAA unleashed the database for academic progress ratings (APRs) for coaches in six different sports on Thursday.  While it’s fun to plug in coaches from a few other sports — anyone surprised by Pete Carroll’s 971, 24 points higher than the college football average in 2008-09, and six-for-six over 925? — the most fun for us comes from plugging in the names of college basketball coaches and seeing how they did each year.

First, though, just a little background.  The NCAA uses this little metric to determine how a team’s athletes are moving toward the ultimate goal of graduating, and the formula they employ to come up with the number is pretty simple.  Each semester, every athlete gets a point for being academically eligible, and another for sticking with the school.  You add those up for your team, then divide by the number of points possible.  For some reason, they decided to multiply those  numbers by 1,000 to get rid of the resulting decimal point (otherwise, it would have been as confusing as, say, a batting average), so if you get a score of .970, that means you got 97% of the points possible, and your APR score is 970. If you fall below the NCAA’s mandated level of 925, you get a warning, and then penalties if you don’t improve.  Keep in mind, though, that if a coach changes schools, he shares his APR with the coach he replaced.  And, the database only goes through 2008-09 right now.  That’s why if you search for John Calipari, you’ll notice he has two APRs — a 980 that he received at Memphis which he shares with Josh Pastner, and a 922 for the same season at Kentucky which he shares with Billy Gillispie even though Calipari technically didn’t coach a game at Kentucky during that season.  Because he was hired in 2009, he shares the APR with the preceding coach.  You get the picture.

Why is this man smiling? How about two straight perfect APRs?

A couple of the numbers that people have been talking about the most since the database was released are the two perfect 1,000s put up by Bob Huggins‘ last two West Virginia teams.  Most college basketball fans like to point the dirty end of the stick at Huggins when it comes to academics, and he’s been a lightning rod since his days at Cincinnati; rightly so, since his last three years as Bearcat boss saw APRs of 917, 826, and a eyebrow-raising 782.  But his scores in Morgantown have been excellent, so he’d appreciate it if we all found a new poster boy for academic underachievement.

An AP report today specifically mentioned Connecticut’s Jim Calhoun, who, in the six years the database covers, has had teams better than the national average — and over the 925 cutoff — only three times.  In fact, the APRs of his last three teams have steadily declined, posting scores of 981, 909, and (ouch) 844 from 2006-2009.  The same AP report fingered Kelvin Sampson as having even more harrowing results, having only two years in which he topped 900 (his 2004-05 Oklahoma squad scored exactly 900) — his 2003-04 Oklahoma team posted a 917, and his final roster at Indiana in 2007-08 turned in a downright hurtful 811.

With a new toy like this, there was no way we could keep from checking all of the APRs of the Ivy League schools.  The most impressive tally was by Columbia’s Joe Jones, who posted six straight perfect scores of 1,000 but will now evidently become an assistant on fellow Ivy man Steve Donahue’s Boston College team next season.  Only two teams in the league didn’t score a perfect score for the 2008-09 season.  The two bad boys of the league were Glen Miller, whose Penn team from that season put up — gasp! — a 950 (he had two straight perfect scores before that), and Tommy Amaker’s Harvard squad from that year, which posted a 985.

School: Kansas

Will Xavier Henry live up to his NBA potential?

In less than 48 hours, our televisions will be taken over by the biggest sporting event the world has to offer.  Your TweetDeck (or whatever Twitter application you use) will be lousy with friends, celebrities, and sportswriters tweeting about it.  Your Facebook friends will be centering their status updates about it.  And, for the next five weeks, when you walk into your favorite sports bars, as you peer at the flat-screens you’ll notice an increased presence of a game to which you might not be accustomed.

It’s World Cup time.

Like the Olympics and the Fields Medal, this is an every-four-year event.  It pits nation against nation in the sport that still stirs up the most passion among its fans on a worldwide scale.  Imagine if we only got one NCAA Tournament every four years.  Well, this is the one summer in four that soccer (the word we’ll use for this article, though we’re aware that most of the world calls it football) lovers get to enjoy their chance to crown a champion.  If you follow RTC on Twitter (if you don’t, shame on you, and go click our logo at right), you’ve probably been impressed by our occasional tweet about other sports or even current events.  It’s not exactly a long limb we’d be going out on for us to assume that if you’re a college basketball fan, you’ve probably got an interest in other sports, too — though international soccer might not be one of them.

Want to talk to her? Know your World Cup. Yeah, we thought that'd keep you reading.

Worry not, our fellow college hoopheads.  We’ve got you covered.  We want you to be able to hang in those conversations at those sports pubs.  We want you to be able to approach that lovely blonde bespectacled German girl wearing her Deutschland jersey in the supermarket (this actually happened to us a week ago).  We want you to impress your friends with your world vision and increased overall sports knowledge.  You think those kids in the stands at Duke or Xavier or Utah State are both well-prepared and berserk?  Wait until you hear the crowd at a World Cup soccer match.  We want you to enjoy that vital aspect of it all, as well.  We’re by no means experts on the subject, but to those ends, we give you — trumpet flourish — Rush The Court’s College Basketball Fan’s Guide to Watching the World Cup.

If this England squad is like Kentucky, then Wayne Rooney is their John Wall.

THE TEAMS

First, let’s list some of the participating  teams and define those squads in terms familiar to college hoop fans.  As you’ll see, by the way, national soccer teams have some of the best nicknames you’ll ever hear.  The best?  Cameroon.  The Indomitable Lions.  I mean, COME ON…

Read the rest of this entry »

Could Billy Gillispie be making his way back into coaching?  That’s the rumor going around the University of Houston, at least.  The former Texas A&M/Kentucky head coach turned scofflaw has presumably been living large back in his home state of Texas for the last year after he sued and ultimately settled with UK for roughly three million dollars. 

Where Will Penders Land Next?

Why Houston, you say?  Well, Cougars head coach Tom Penders announced his resignation from the school today.  He was 121-77 in six years at the school, culminating with the program’s first trip to the NCAA Tournament in eighteen years over the weekend.  The 64-year old man who has coached for over thirty years at five different schools along the way was quick to say that he’s not retiring:

I came to the University of Houston in 2004 with the goal of getting UH back to the NCAA tournament.  We achieved this goal and now it is time for me to move on.  We’ll go down in history as the team that brought UH back to national prominence, and I’m so proud of my players and staff.

It’s odd that he would resign without having another job in hand, but maybe there’s more to the story than meets the eye.  We won’t speculate on what that might be, but he spent three years in the early 2000s as a tv and radio analyst between jobs at GW and Houston, so maybe he figures he’ll fall back on that for a while until another coaching challenge presents itself. 

As for the Gillispie angle, current Houston AD Mack Rhoades has a connection with the embattled coach that dates back to their time spent at UTEP together in the early part of the last decade.  That could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on Rhoades’ point of view, but he was quick to say that Gillispie might be a possibility for the opening.  This could actually be a very reasonable spot for BCG to resurface, as he’s very familiar with the Texas recruiting landscape and the expectations in Houston will be considerably more tempered than they were at Kentucky.

If he gets the job, the first thing on an ESPN programming director’s agenda should be to set up a Houston road game at Lexington.  With Jeannine Edwards as the sideline reporter.  And Alan Cutler as the first questioner in the postgame press conference.  Please… somebody make this happen.