* not all games guaranteed to be gooey or delicious

What can we say – after all these many months hoping and waiting for this day, the hugest of days, we’re absolutely thrilled that it has finally, inevitably, encouragingly come to pass.  No, not the election of the first minority president in our nation’s history…  rather, the release of ESPN’s 2008-09 Full Court television schedule!  And it’s bigger and better than ever – that’s some change we can believe in!  There are 579 games on the docket, and at first blush, it appears to us that there are more mid-major games than ever before.  We’ll do some further analytics later, but for now, here is the schedule.

(h/t Patrick Marshall of Bluejay Basketball is the RTC correspondent for the MVC and Big 12 Conferences).

Ed. note – we cleaned up the chart a little, finding there were some womens’ games mixed in, so after removing those we’re down to 562 games from opening night to finish.

Here are some quick-hit stats – if you’re an SEC/Kentucky fan, it looks like you’re in business this year.

There are also 38 conference tournament games, including portions of the Atlantic Sun, CAA, MAAC, Big Sky, Southland, Big 12, ACC, and SEC Tournaments.

Here are the fifteen most intriguing games we see on the package this season:

1. American @ Pittsburgh  (11.14.08)
2. UT-Martin (Lester Hudson) @ Tennessee  (11.18.08)
3. Nevada @ San Diego  (11.18.08)
4. West Virginia @ Ole Miss  (12.03.08)
5. Texas A&M @ Alabama  (12.13.08)
6. Siena @ Kansas  (01.06.09)
7. Syracuse @ Connecticut  (01.17.09)
8. Louisville @ Syracuse  (01.25.09)
9. Kentucky @ Florda  (01.29.09)
10. Stanford @ UCLA  (01.31.09)
11. Texas A&M @ Oklahoma  (02.04.09)
12. Miami (FL) @ Duke  (02.07.09)
13. Vanderbilt @ Tennessee  (02.14.09)
14. Pittsburgh @ Connecticut  (02.15.09)
15. Pittsburgh @ Louisville (02.28.09

Update: here’s a link to the updated schedule.

Click through for the full schedule: Read the rest of this entry »