Remember just a couple of weeks ago, when basketball games scheduled to be played on aircraft carriers were getting condensationed out, Illinois magically stormed through the Maui Invitational bracket, and Arizona defeated Florida, Miami (FL), and San Diego State, all in the course of 10 days? Well, it may seem like just yesterday, but in reality another college hoops season has flown by. Today, two Pac-12 teams will honor their seniors in their final home games of the regular season. We’ll do the same, highlighting the guys that will be missed the most over the next few weeks.

Joe Burton’s No-Look, Over The Shoulder Passes Have Become A Staple In Oregon State’s Offense. (credit: Washington Post)

We look today at Oregon State, as the Beavers’ Senior Day comes when they host white-hot California. Joe Burton will be the lone honoree, as the only other senior on the roster, Angus Brandt, sat out the majority of the season with a torn ACL and hopes to return in 2013-14. Burton was head coach Craig Robinson’s first commitment of his initial recruiting class, and ironically, he’s the only one playing his final game in Gill Coliseum tomorrow. Roberto Nelson had to sit out his first season in Corvallis due to an NCAA Clearinghouse issue, Jared Cunningham left after his junior season for the NBA Draft, and Rhys Murphy transferred to Chaminade after the 2011-12 campaign. Burton made history when he signed with Oregon State, becoming the first Native American men’s basketball player to ever earn a scholarship at a Pac-10/Pac-12 school. After a quiet freshman season playing outside of Robinson’s seven-man rotation, Burton became a regular on the court from his second year forward. But without question, this final season with the Beavers has been Burton’s finest.

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From the moment it was first rumored, the relocation of the conference tournament to Las Vegas has created quite a buzz among Pac-12 basketball fans. Adam Butler (@pachoopsAB) of PacHoops will be here every week as he offers his unique perspective along our March to Vegas.

I got a text from my Cal buddy last night, “You’re welcome for Cal again… But 48 points…” This of course set off a chain of text exchanges that culminated in a conversation about whether or not I’d be joining him at Bonnaroo in June – a welcome digression, albeit extremely tangential. But my dear friend had a point. Those 48 points are a less-than-exciting, underwhelming, slow score. It’s for this very count that many of us declare Bo Ryan an eye-ripping excitement-suck for whose style we’d wish the NCAA death penalty upon our own program before enduring a season. The funny thing about that is Bo Ryan wins. Not one of my friends who attended Wisconsin or cheer for the Badgers has seemed to have a problem with his .725 winning percentage. Wisky wins and so too did the Cal Bears on Thursday night. And this is the only stat that matters this time of year.

It Hasn’t Always Been Pretty, But Mike Montgomery Has His Golden Bears Playing The Best Ball In The Pac-12 (credit: Mark J. Terrill)

We are on the cusp of March and by most accounts (check this aggregation out) the Golden Bears are shoving (get it?) their way into the madness. And they most certainly will not be dancing with a statistically intriguing loss. That’s to say, had they shot 48%, outrebounded the Ducks, and committed just 10 turnovers en route to disappointing loss, 74-71, the committee would’ve seen just another loss on a team that’s already wearing nine of them (including a home loss to Harvard). Statistically speaking, Cal had a 27% chance of winning that game. The projected final was 71-64, which is to say that based on the standard game for these two, Oregon was going to win relatively handily. Something different had to happen. So Cal forced a deviation from the norm, limited the game’s possessions, and adjusted the dynamic of the game’s pace.

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1. Thursday night the Pac-12 race got even tighter as California’s Justin Cobbs took advantage of Oregon’s 5’8” point guard Jonathan Loyd in the waning moments of their meeting, knocking down a game-winning jumper over the smaller man’s outstretched arms. As we head into the weekend, we’ve got three teams atop the conference with four losses while a pair of teams, including those Golden Bears, lurk just one game back in the loss column. The game itself wasn’t pretty, as Cobbs turned the ball over eight times, the teams combined to shoot 3-of-21 from deep and nobody on Oregon shot better than 50% from the field, but Cal continues to be the hottest team in the conference with six victories in its last seven games. As for Oregon, this current group of Ducks still remains winless in their careers against California.
2. In the wake of Washington State’s seventh straight conference loss on Wednesday night, the talk about whether head coach Ken Bone is the man for the job in Pullman for the long term has reached a fever pitch. The talk has been slowly bubbling up since way back before the season began as Reggie Moore got booted from the team and incoming transfer Brett Kingma ran afoul of the law, highlighting some off-the-court issues that have troubled Bone’s program for some time. But, as CougCenter pointed out a couple weeks back, if the university hopes to go a different way, they’ve got to figure out a way around Bone’s hefty contract, which promises the coach $2.55 million over the remaining three years. Given the amount of money the WSU athletic department already has tied up in paying current and former football coaches, that amount of money may be too much to bear at this point. And, as I pointed out back before the season, expectations in Pullman have to be realistic. The fact of the matter is that prior to this season, Bone had the second-highest winning percentage of any coach in school history who had coached at least 20 games. Unfortunately for him, however, the one guy ahead of him was his predecessor.
3. USC will take a crack at earning a season sweep of crosstown rival UCLA at the Galen Center on Sunday afternoon. And if they’re going to get it done, they’ll need to lean heavily on senior point guard Jio Fontan who, after dealing with ACL surgery last year and the heavy-handed offensive structure of former head coach Kevin O’Neill, is now thriving with more freedom under interim coach Bob Cantu and more confidence in a knee that gets stronger by the game.
4. One thing we haven’t talked a lot about here this season is the Player of the Year race in the Pac-12. No worries though, as Pachoops has got you covered on that mark. Adam Butler scouts the candidates out and narrows the race down to two guys: Arizona State’s Jahii Carson and Cal’s Allen Crabbe. I wanted to quibble (Carrick Felix anyone?) but in the end decided that yes, those are the two guys atop the leaderboard right now and somebody from the next pack back (some combination of Solomon Hill, Shabazz Muhammad, Spencer Dinwiddie and Felix) would have to go absolutely nuts for that to change. In my mind, however, Carson is the favorite, as he has been for at least a month; but as Cal has heated up, Crabbe has made a big time charge to the point where it is just about even money right now.
5. Lastly, in case you forgot, DirecTV has still not come to an agreement with the Pac-12 conference to carry the Pac-12 Networks. I’m sure all of you have done the right thing and dropped DirecTV like a hot potato, but apparently there are people out there sticking with the satellite television behemoth instead of watching tons of Pac-12 action this season. And, if you’re somehow still among that crowd, you’ve missed the 20 out of Arizona State’s 27 games this season that have aired on the Pac-12 Networks. Don’t hold your breath on a deal getting done any time soon as both sides appear entrenched in their positions.

Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn.

Tonight’s Lede. Preparing For A Packed Weekend. Tuesday night and Wednesday night stole most of this week’s college hoops goodness. They brought us the Kansas-Oklahoma State double-overtime nailbiter, Indiana’s show-me victory in East Lansing and an expected and enthralling Mountain West showdown at UNLV. Thursday night didn’t feature as diverse a selection of intriguing games or storylines, but one bad night of hoops – taken alongside a loaded weekend slate, which includes the last-ever BracketBusters event – is probably not going to fly over the high-level hardwood drama that played out over the past two nights. If anything, a one-night dose of relative mediocrity (at least schedule-wise) will whet your appetite for the weekend ahead.

Your Watercooler Moment. Justin Cobbs Lifts Cal.

A huge last-second shot by Cobbs lifted Cal over Oregon in Eugene (Photo credit: AP Photo).

The national media spotlight directed at Cal coach Mike Montgomery following a controversial second-half sideline encounter with star guard Allen Crabbe dwarfed the positive aspect of the Golden Bears’ eight-point win over USC. Cal was winning, and winning against solid Pac-12 competition (USC regained its competitive edge since getting ride of Kevin O’Neill; they are unequivocally a nuisance to play). Their three-game winning streak, which began with an eye-opening eight-point victory at Arizona, was extended Thursday night by a gutsy two-point win at Oregon, who had only lost once beforehand at Matthew Knight Arena. The Ducks were without freshman point guard Dominic Artis, and Cal’s superior guard play only magnified Oregon’s shaky backcourt. But for as much as Artis’ absence may or may not have altered Oregon’s backcourt functionality, you can’t disabuse the fact that Cal picked up another huge win in a late-season surge full of them. This team’s recent rise has been a steady climb into the thick of Pac 12 contention; as of Thursday night, the Bears sit just one game back of Arizona and Oregon (and 0.5 games back of UCLA), with a manageable closing schedule that should allow the Bears to close the gap should the Duke or Wildcats slip the rest of the way. Justin Cobbs’ last-second heroics are just the latest evidence; right now, Cal is the best thing the Pac-12 has to offer, full stop. The only question is, why didn’t we see this the first, I don’t know, three months of the season?

Also Worth Chatting About. This Could Get Ugly For Cincinnati.

This has been a disappointing set of games for Cronin and Cincinnati (Photo credit: AP Photo).

Let me start by saying this: I don’t envision any realistic scenario where Cincinnati misses the NCAA Tournament. Entering Thursday night’s game at UConn the Bearcats owned a top-40 SOS and RPI figure, nonconference wins over Oregon and Iowa State and commendable league triumphs against Marquette and at Pittsburgh. There are bubble teams that would give anything for that collection of wins and computer power. The Bearcats remain in decent bubble shape, but Thursday night’s overtime loss in Storrs brought to the surface a potentially grim reality for Mick Cronin’s team. Dating back to a February 6 loss at Providence, the Bearcats have now dropped four of their last five, the lone win coming against Villanova. Looking back and rattling off the factors (individual and schedule related) behind the losing skid is simple. It’s what most optimistic fans would do after watching their once-formidable Big East favorite endure the toughest portion of its conference schedule. Here’s where that logic falls flat. If you look at Cincinnati’s remaining games, the only one that you can honestly qualify as anything remotely resembling “easy” is the season-finale against South Florida. In the meantime, Cincy has to play at Notre Dame, a revenge game with UConn and at Louisville. Best case scenario: Cincinnati splits the final four, carries a totally respectable .500 Big East record into the league Tournament, and reboots for a postseason push. The Bearcats have already damaged their seeding prospects beyond what anyone could have reasonably imagined. Botching this final stretch could really diminish their stature in seeding and locational committee discussions.

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Bennet Hayes is a regular contributor for RTC. You can find him @HoopsTraveler on Twitter. Night Line runs on weeknights during the season, highlighting a major storyline development from that day’s games.

If you are a college basketball fan and don’t reside under a rock, you know all about Mike Montgomery and Allen Crabbe’s testy exchange on Sunday. An unfortunate incident worthy of at least most of the debate and discussion that followed, but it’s officially time to move on, folks. Don’t despair if you still want to talk Cal basketball, however, as the Golden Bears are providing plenty of reasons on the court to keep the buzz going. A 48-46 win at Oregon tonight now has them winners of four in a row and six out of seven, with wins over Arizona, UCLA, and now a season sweep of Oregon included in the surge. For those keeping track at home, that’s a win over each of the top three teams in the Pac-12 standings, with a respectable loss at Arizona State standing as the only February blemish. Winning hasn’t always been pretty or easy for the Bears, but they are suddenly as likely a candidate as any to steal the Pac-12 regular season title. Yes, you read that right – California, once 3-4 in league play, could wind up as your Pac-12 champs.

Allen Crabbe Was Relatively Quiet On Thursday Night, But His Pac-12 Player Of The Year Profile Grows With Every Golden Bear Victory

Give credit to the collective resourcefulness of the Bears, the coaching of Montgomery, and the proficiency of Crabbe (his Pac-12 POY stock soaring right now), but the reason the recent push has the Bears sitting with realistic championship dreams has far more to do with every other team in the conference. After spending the 2011-12 season facing constant derision (and deservedly so), the Pac-12 conference has bounced back in a big way this year. Recent bracket projections have included as many as six conference teams in the NCAA Tournament field, a development that would be a veritable windfall for a league that sent just one at-large team to the Dance a year ago.

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1. Shove-gate, day four. With California getting back into action tomorrow night, thankfully this overreaction to Mike Montgomery’s regrettable decision to physically contact his star player, Allen Crabbe, is ready to come to a close. The final words on the incident from both sides: First, Montgomery regrets his action, if for no other reason than the fact that all the focus this past week has been on that incident rather than on the fact that his team has risen from mediocrity to, well, more mediocrity, but at least mediocrity that is in contention for an NCAA Tournament bid. Meanwhile, on the other side, Allen Crabbe has brushed off the incident with the brand of typical Crabbe-esque nonchalance that got Montgomery so riled up to begin with. His parents, however, were not so quick to put it behind them. While both his mom and dad have handled the situation with class, each has indicated that Montgomery’s action didn’t sit entirely well with them. Nevertheless, Montgomery’s apology coupled with Crabbe’s mature response to the incident make this story completely ready to be put to bed.
2. Last night was perhaps the biggest snoozer on the Pac-12 conference schedule thus far, as both Arizona schools handled their opponents from Washington with relative ease, so in lieu of wasting pixels on games that we already spent time watching, I’ll instead refer you to a Dana O’Neil piece about how Mark Lyons wound up back with Sean Miller in the desert after blowing off Miller’s final meeting at Xavier three years earlier and ignoring his former coach’s texts out of anger with him for leaving the Cincinnati school. But now they’re reunited at Arizona and have a chance to accomplish something special together in Lyons’ last go-round in college.
3. Looking ahead to tonight, Dana Altman and Oregon host California in what will be Altman’s first crack at attempting to reach the 600-win mark for his career. Just 66 of those have come in Eugene, and only 476 were chalked up at the Division I level, but with the 54-year-old Altman seemingly having a lot of basketball left in him, we wouldn’t be surprised at all to see him top the mark in Division I victories alone in the relatively near future. Unfortunately, Duck fans, we also wouldn’t be all that surprised to see him eventually top that 600 mark somewhere back close to his Midwestern roots. As for tonight’s game, if the Ducks can pull off the win, it will mark the first time that anybody on this current roster, including Altman and his 599 career wins, has ever beaten Cal. And if that’s going to happen, it’ll likely have to happen without the services of point guard Dominic Artis, who appears to be on the verge of missing another week of basketball. Unlike Duke’s Ryan Kelly, however, Artis is making visible progress, as his crutches are at least a thing of the past and he is reported to be doing some minimal basketball-related drills.
4. Oregon State, meanwhile, will host Stanford tonight, and in doing so Joe Burton will play his second-to-last game in front of the home crowd in his career. Yep, believe it or not, we’re to that point in the season where senior days (or nights, I suppose, depending on when the game is played) begin to crop up. As for Burton, he’s a special kid. The first Native American to earn a scholarship to a Pac-10/Pac-12 school for men’s basketball, Burton has made a name for himself as a below-the-rim space-eater and a phenomenal passer. The first recruit signed by Craig Robinson, Burton is on track to become the first OSU player to ever amass 1,000 points, 700 rebounds and 300 assists in his career. It’s always bittersweet this time of year, knowing that we’re seeing some of these guys that we’ve gotten to know and love over recent years play their last basketball games for us (even though many, likely including Burton, who aren’t destined for NBA futures have the chance for a pro career somewhere else should they so choose), but it is also a great time to be thankful for the moments we’ve been able to experience.
5. Lastly, Ryan Kartje of the Orange County Register writes that with Ben Howland having drastically simplified his offense, UCLA is experiencing smooth sailing on the offensive end. Now, apparently, Mr. Kartje skipped the recent Arizona State, USC, Washington and Cal games in favor of simply watching the Stanford game, but his note that Howland has thrown away 36 of the 45 sets he had set up for teams in years past in order to focus on executing a simplified game plan is an interesting one.

With only three weeks remaining, Adam continues to edge out the rest of us. Last week was rough on all of us, thanks to Stanford choking away what we thought would be easy home wins against the LA schools. I was the only one to correctly pick California’s home win over the Bruins, but I was also the only one to miss Oregon State’s road upset of Washington State. That seems to be the trend in the past few weeks, as all the parity in the conference is taking away any opportunities to make a comeback. In our games of the week, Colorado ran by Arizona on Thursday, while Georgetown went on the road and knocked off Cincinnati. So now, we enter the home stretch. California’s visit to Oregon and Georgetown’s meeting with Syracuse headline the list as our games of the week.

The biggest differences in opinion this week come in California’s visit to Oregon State. Adam and I took the home Beavers for the upset, while Drew and Parker took California. I was the only one to take both road teams in our games of the week, opting for the Golden Bears to rally and upset the still Dominic Artis-less Ducks and for Georgetown to get another big win at the Carrier Dome. I also differed in a couple other games, taking the Beavers to defeat Stanford on Thursday and the Trojans to complete their sweep of UCLA on Sunday.

With the end of the semester in sight, some students are making big strides while others continue to underachieve. This week Professor Pac has a couple of A’s to hand out, while the rest of the conference is bunched together in the B’s and C’s this week. Check back later today for seven different C- performers.

Oregon – A

Still without Dominic Artis, the Ducks reaffirmed the fact that they belong among the teams at the top of the conference by going on the road and taking care of both Washington schools this week. It wasn’t always easy and it wasn’t always pretty, but with five games remaining on their schedule, including the next three at home, the Ducks not only have a one-game lead, but they also have wins over the two teams a game back of them, making it, in effect, a one-and-a-half game lead.

Focus on: Damyean Dotson. When the Ducks lost three games in a row, the easy explanation was that they missed Dominic Artis. While that is certainly true, it is also worth noting that Artis’ freshman backcourt mate hit a slide at the same time as well. In the first four games without Artis, a stretch that included those three losses, Dotson averaged 7.3 points per game and wasn’t even finding any good shots. In conference play, Dotson has only failed to put up 10 or more field goal attempts just five times, and four of those five occasions came in the first four games without Artis. But, over the course of the three-game winning streak, Dotson has regained his mojo, averaging 15 points per game and 13 field goal attempts per night. Certainly part of the reason for Dotson’s slide was the absence of Artis, but don’t forget the fact that Dotson may be just as important to Oregon’s long-term goals as Artis is.

Looking ahead: The Ducks host the Bay Area schools, beginning with the suddenly hot Cal Bears on Thursday night, but also including Stanford on Saturday. That game will be noteworthy because just a few weeks back, Oregon went into Stanford with a 7-0 conference record and got absolutely drilled, losing by 24 to the Cardinal. Oh, and the weekly Artis watch? Still no word as to his status for this weekend.

After Struggling In His First Games Without Dominic Artis, Damyean Dotson Has Regained His Form of Late (Photo by Rockne Andrew Roll)

California – A

All of a sudden, the Golden Bears, once a team that looked like a lock for a lower division finish, have won three in a row, and five of its last six, including wins over Oregon, Arizona, and UCLA. Read the rest of this entry »

As we’re now fewer than four weeks from Selection Sunday, it’s always fun to start speculating about resumes of teams on the bubble. On some of the days when Daniel Evans (@bracketexpert) isn’t providing us with his updated Bubble Watch (Sunday nights and Thursday afternoons) or his weekly Bracketology (Fridays), he’ll give us an interesting comparison or two of teams that he finds difficult to distinguish. Today, he offers up a couple of bubble teams that have made considerable news in the past week as to their placement (in or out). Here are their blind resumes:

Team A

• Record: 17-10
• Conference Record:  8-6 (major conference)
• RPI: 56
• SOS: 36
• BPI: 63
• Sagarin: 48
• KenPom: 56
• Record vs. RPI top 50: 3-6
• Record vs. RPI top 100: 6-9
• Record vs. teams below top 100 in RPI: 10-1

Team B

• Record: 16-9
• Conference Record:  8-5 (major conference)
• RPI: 54
• SOS: 37
• BPI: 52
• Sagarin: 50
• KenPom: 60
• Record vs. RPI top 50: 3-5
• Record vs. RPI top 100: 4-9
• Record vs. teams below top 100 in RPI: 12-0

The two teams are revealed after the jump…

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Nick Fasulo is an RTC correspondent who writes the column College Basketball By the Tweets, a look at the world of college hoops through the prism of everyone’s favorite social media platform. You can find him on Twitter @nickfasuloSBN.

So this Harlem Shake viral phenomenon. You’ve heard of it. I shouldn’t have to explain it. Heck, there’s a chance you’ve made one or been forced to watch your co-workers’ rendition in the last seven days. Anyway… from the Soulja Boy Superman to the Dougie to Gangnam Style, college basketball always has a say in the direction and popularity of dance crazes. So with the latest flash in the pan fad reaching its apex over the weekend, naturally it pervaded DI to NAIA gyms and arenas over the weekend. Like, literally.

Every single college basketball game I’ve watched this weekend has played the Harlem Shake at least five times

— Colin Crowley (@Colin_Crowley_4) February 17, 2013

Based on my observations, Colin is not exaggerating.

Mike Montgomery Shoves Alan Crabbe

In sports today, almost any altercation, whether physical or verbal, is going to spark conversation on Twitter. Drama moves the needle, and the latest occurrence of that was Saturday when Cal head coach Mike Montgomery shoved his star player, Alan Crabbe. Video shows nothing too aggressive, but a love jolt enough to upset Crabbe and cause a bit of short-lived dissent among the team. Some quickly compared the act to that of Morehead State’s Sean Woods, who verbally abused a player earlier this season The difference is that Sean Woods humiliated his player because of how personal Morehead’s game against Kentucky was. Woods is a former Wildcats star whose jersey hangs in the Rupp Arena rafters, now coaching against his alma mater and trying to squeeze as much out of his players as he could. But only for his own good. Montgomery was passionate and truly trying to motivate, unfortunately displaying that passion in a not-so-ideal manner. Many people saw it the same way.

California Coach M. Montgomery shoving Alan Crabbe isn’t a big deal. It wasn’t malicious N anyway. Theres a certain way a Coach can do that.

— 1 LIVE STEW® (@1livestew) February 18, 2013

See absolutely nothing wrong with the way Mike Montgomery motivated Allen Crabbe. We have to stop micro analyzing everything. #passion

— Jay Williams (@RealJayWilliams) February 19, 2013

Surprised at the hoopla over Montgomery pushing Crabbe. I didn’t have a problem with it. Dealt w/worse in HS. I must be old.

— Charles Kilburn (@CharlesInNM) February 19, 2013

Haven’t heard a former player take issue w/Monty jolting Crabbe back into the game- lotta guys w/ pens/twitter handles

— Doug Gottlieb (@GottliebShow) February 19, 2013

So I think we can agree that the action was understandable. We can give Montgomery a pass. But what he said in his postgame press conference probably didn’t award him a get-out-of-jail free card, thus leading to the undisclosed punishment.

Montgomery should be suspended bc his immediate reaction was “it worked, didn’t it?” instead of “my bad, I fraked up” #Cal #Crabbe

— (author) Paul West (@firstcausenyc) February 19, 2013

Oh yeah, and, Montgomery’s act sort of worked, as Crabbe led the Golden Bears’ comeback against the Trojans, and also this…

Congratulations to Allen Crabbe, who was just named the @pac12 Player of the Week for the second-straight week #BerkeleyRepresent

— Cal Men’s Basketball (@CalMensBBall) February 18, 2013

Assuming Montgomery has spoken to Crabbe privately about this, I’ll tip my cap to the heady coach.

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