Some notes for your weekend of debauchery…

• It’s harder than it looks, huh?  Former #1 recruit Brandon Jennings was supposed to become a trailblazer by going to Europe rather than Arizona for one year.  According to this Washington Times piece, he’s averaging 5/3 in a mere 17 minutes per game.  As for his peers who matriculated at US colleges, they’re not exactly tearing it up either.
• Gary Parrish points out an interesting stat about Stephen Curry’s shooting vs. BCS and non-BCS opponents this year.  Definitely something to keep an eye on (although this is consistent with Curry’s 41.1% shooting against Georgetown, Wisconsin and Kansas in the NCAAs last year). 
• From the completely shocking and out of character department, Jim Boeheim is upset with the terms of Eric Devendorf’s suspension from Syracuse. 
• John Wooden would like to see the rims raised to some point less than eleven feet high. 
• Kentucky all-time assists leader Dirk Minniefield was indicted in Houston for engaging in a fraudulent real estate scheme.
• Here’s a pretty good piece on Dick Vitale’s vocal cord problems – we love to rip the guy’s partisanship, but we’ve never wavered on his passion and love for the game. 

John Stevens is a featured columnist for RTC.  His columns will appear on Tuesdays throughout the season.

Ah, Thanksgiving week.  As if ESPN’s 24-hour binge of college basketball last week wasn’t enough, here comes the oh-so-appropriately-named Feast Week, another avalanche of hoops awesomeness spread out over seven days that not only launches college basketball right back into the middle of the sports radar where it belongs, but also goes great with Thanksgiving leftovers, paid days off of work, as well as pizza and garlic bread (in case you’re sick of all that turkey by Saturday’s games).  Aside from the month of March, it doesn’t get much better than this for college hoops fans.  The daytime games, the intriguing match-ups…good God, who would want to brave the lines on Black Friday?  THIS is the way to kick off the holiday season.

Maui Turkey

The holiday tournaments are a great time to familiarize oneself with the big boys of the game – see UNC in Maui, Georgetown in the Old Spice Classic (why are these tournaments called ‘classics’ when they’re 2-3 years old?), and so forth – since some of them might be making their first appearances on national television.  I’ve always thought one of the best things about the holiday onslaught of games was the opportunity to find a team that wasn’t getting much hype and, if they give one of the highly-ranked teams a game or even pull off an upset, follow them throughout the season and maybe use them in March when I’m doing way too much bracket-filling analysis, if there is such a thing.  I mean, we all know about Carolina and Oklahoma and Michigan State.  Who will we see that bears watching in these Thanksgiving tournaments that we haven’t been hearing a lot about?  Here, in my opinion, are a couple of squads to keep an eye on not just over this holiday weekend but also to see how they mature over the course of the season: Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re reading this site, then you undoubtedly have a case of the itchies when it comes to college hoops.  Just like us.  We wrote back in September when the idea originally surfaced that we thought ESPN’s “24 Hour Marathon of College Hoops” was a fantastic idea, and it still is.  We’ll overlook that there are no games between 6-10am and they snuck in a women’s game on us in the early afternoon, but still, 18 hours of quality college hoops is nothing to sneeze at.  And if you start right now (just after 7pm EST), you can easily fill 24 of the next 30 hours of your life with nothing but collegians throwing balls through hoops.  What could be better than that?

To up the ante, RTC feature columnist John Stevens has volunteered to take on the herculean task of live-blogging as much of the 24MoCH as possible.  He’s loaded up on ephedrine, espresso beans and Rockstar to get himself through the night.  You’ll forgive him if he lapses into some skin flick on HBO in the wee hours.  But we know John, and we also know that he’ll regale you with yarns and analysis on the games in front of him while the rest of us sleep away the night tonight and toil away in our cubes tomorrow.  We may not outwardly envy him, but deep down all of us do. 

So check on back in the next little while, as JS will be holding down the fort overnight and into tomorrow.  Enjoy!

Here’s the 24MoCH schedule:

• Midnight: UMass at Memphis (ESPN)
• 2 a.m.: Fresno St. at St. Mary’s (ESPN)
• 4 a.m.: Idaho St. at Hawaii (ESPN)
• 6 a.m.: College Hoops Tip-Off Special (ESPN)
• 10 a.m.: Penn at Drexel (ESPN)
• Noon: Liberty at UNC-Asheville (ESPN)
• 2 p.m.: Iowa at Kansas (women) (ESPN)
• 4 p.m.: Centenary at Baylor (ESPN)
• 6 p.m.: Richmond at Syracuse (ESPN)
• 7 p.m.: Purdue v. Georgia/Loyola (MD) (ESPNU) (NIT)
• 7:30 p.m.: Boston College v. St. John’s/Cornell (ESPN2) (NIT)
• 8 p.m.: College GameDay from Chapel Hill (ESPN)
• 9 p.m.: Kentucky at North Carolina (ESPN)
• 9 p.m.: Florida Gulf Coast at Kansas (ESPNU)
• 9:30 p.m.: Oklahoma v. Davidson/James Madison (ESPN2) (NIT)
• 11:30 p.m.: Arizona v. UAB/Santa Clara (ESPN2) (NIT)

Hello again, everyone.  For those of you who might be new to the site this season, we want to introduce you to a feature that we try to run most nights during the season.  We like to call this feature After the Buzzer (ATB) because it’ll be posted well after the witching hour in the East for your first perusal the next morning (make RTC your home page!  you won’t be disappointed…).  The format will change depending on what happened that night, but we’ll typically try to give some brief wrapups of the night’s biggest games and stories of interest with some commentary thrown in.  If we’re feeling particularly frisky, we may also take a look ahead to the next night’s games.  Note that we said most nights; there will inevitably be nights where the games that night were simply unwatchable, or we’re down at the Savoy because some Duke scrub hit a late three to cover the spread, or our better half threw the tv and/or computer out the window.  In any case, like Olbermann and O’Reilly, we’ll be there as many nights as we can muster, annoying the hell out of you with our smug banter. 

Game of the Night.  There was no Game of the Night because there really is no “Opening Night,” and this really irritates us.  Seriously, how stupid is the NCAA when it comes to how it starts the season?  MLB, the NFL, the NBA and even NCAA football have an opening day/night with significant fanfare – it’s something that fans and the media alike can get excited about.  Instead of a showcase night of several good ‘opening’ games, we get Duke vs. Presbyterian on ESPNU (was Methodist unavailable?  how about Baptist?).  Instead of Vitale/Bilas/Digger, we get the painfully monotonous Beth Mowins.  Instead of college basketball nation all at once reaching an orgasmic climax because hoops is finally back in action, we get a game that is hidden away on the least-watched channel in the ESPN suite of programming.  It’s ridiculous.  We’ll say that ESPN is at least thinking the right way with its 24 hour bonanza of coverage next week (Nov. 18), but the NCAA and ESPN need to work a deal out next year so that this happens on a true “opening night.” 

Other Games.  The only games tonight were in the Coaches vs. Cancer Tournament in the Durham, NC, regional.  The first game wasn’t televised, but Georgia Southern pulled off a mild upset (6-pt dog) in defeating CUSA’s Houston Cougars 65-63.  Sleeper schmeeper.  Trumaine Pearson led GSU with 19/11, as the Eagles withstood a late three attempt that was off the mark.  Georgia Southern will now play host Duke, as the Devils got out to a large halftime lead against Presbyterian (24 pts) before mostly coasting in the second stanza to win 80-49.  We actually saw most of this game – here are some quick thoughts.

• Presbyterian is nicknamed the Blue Hose – someone needs to explain this to us.
• Coach K wasn’t very happy with his team’s performance, and with good reason.  The Devils committed 21 turnovers and only shot 3-11 (27%) from long range. 
• Kyle Singler (19/10) and Nolan Smith (15/3 stls) looked solid, if not spectacular, but what was alarmingly apparent was how Coach K’s recruiting in recent years has led to lineups in the Duke lineup that look way too much like the SEC and ACC in the mid-50s.  A Duke ‘whiteout’ will not be an uncommon occurrence again this year.
• Time and time again the Presbyterian offense was able dribble penetrate into the paint for decent looks at the rim.  They rarely finished these forays because they were often too small and intimidated by the Duke ‘bigs,’ but this is going to be a serious problem again for the Devils this year.  Incumbent center Brian Zoubek fouled out in seven minutes of play.  Against.  Presbyterian.  The other option, freshman 6’10 F/C Miles Plumlee had 0/2 in thirteen minutes.  Why can’t Coach K get big man studs anymore?
• ESPN isn’t allowing embedded video on this game yet, so here is the link to the highlights.

On Tap Tuesday (all times EST).  Several more CvC games, but only a few of interest.

• Northeastern (-6) v. IUPUI – 4pm
• Michigan v. Michigan Tech (ESPNU) – 7pm
• Duke (-25) v. Georgia Southern (ESPNU) – 9pm

For those of your who haven’t been spending as much time on Rush the Court the past few months as you should (looking at myself in the mirror), we thought we would offer you a quick guide to what we have been working on over the past few months.

General Overview: Some top quality writing/prognosticating to get you in the spirit for the run from today until the early morning hours of April 7th, 2009.
– Finally, It’s Here: New RTC feature columnist John Stevens offers his thoughts about the upcoming season.
– A Little Preseason Bracketology: RTC co-editor (Do we even have titles?) rtmsf does his best Joe Lunardi impression and makes a surprising pick for his national champion. I’m smelling an attempt to make the RTC preseason bracketology championship the new Madden cover.
– Vegas Odds – Preseason Check-In: For the degenerate gamblers out there, RTC co-founder rtmsf offers an analysis of the Las Vegas odds for the 2009 NCAA champions for pure academic purposes. . .
– Preseason Polls Released: The surprisingly employed (I’m running out of titles here) rtmsf analyzes the AP and Coaches polls going into the season with a deeper look at unanimous #1 UNC’s early schedule.
– ESPN Full Court: 562 Games of Gooey, Delicious Goodness*: Once again, rtmsf comes through with the entire ESPN Full Court schedule with a Steve Nash-style assist from Patrick Marshall of Bluejay Basketball.

Big Early Season News: While there are several big stories going into this season, there were 2 major stories that have come out recently that you should know about before you start watching games.
– Tyler Hansbrough Out Indefinitely: Who? Oh yeah, that guy. Everybody’s favorite for national POY and NBA Draft Day snub (get ready for the annual Dick Vitale rant) Psycho T will be out for a while, but we think the Tar Heels will be ok by March.
– Jai Lucas Leaving Florida: In a story that isn’t getting nearly the attention that the Psycho T story has (for good reason), Billy Donovan has lost last season’s starting point guard on the eve of the new season. While it appears that Lucas was probably heading towards a role as a backup point guard on the Gators, the timing of this announcement is surprising. It will be interesting to see what the Gators will do if freshman guard Erving Walker struggles in adjusting to SEC basketball.

Conference Primers: As part of our attempt to make a new-and-improved RTC, we hired the finest journalists in America to make our site more all-inclusive of the little people in the college basketball landscape. To that end we put together 31 conference previews (31 automatic bids to the Big Dance means 31 previews from RTC) with the help of the aforementioned correspondents.
– ACC
– America East
– Atlantic 10
– Atlantic Sun
– Big 12
– Big East
– Big Sky
– Big South
– Big Ten
– Big West
– Colonial
– Conference USA
– Horizon
– Ivy League
– MAAC
– MAC
– MEAC
– Missouri Valley
– Mountain West
– Northeast
– Ohio Valley Conference
– Pac-10
– Patriot League
– SEC
– Southern
– Southland
– Summit
– Sun Belt
– SWAC
– WAC
– West Coast Conference

As the season progresses, we will have more features and content including updates from all 31 conferences. We hope all of you are looking forward to the new season as much as we are and even if your team looks like it will struggle to make it to the NIT, remember the words of Kevin Garnett, who incidentally didn’t play a minute of college basketball (that’s another post), “Anything is possible!”

One of the cooler stories we posted last year involved the emergence of the ridiculously oversized 7’7, 360 -lb Kenny George at UNC-Asheville.  He gained notoriety for his well-publicized duel with UNC and Tyler Hansbrough early last season (dropping 14/11 on UNC in a relatively close loss), and we kept an eye on him the rest of the year.  Led by George’s 12/7/3 blks on nation-leading 69% FG shooting, UNCA had its best season in a generation, winning 23 games and the Big South’s regular season championship.  We were rooting very hard for the Bulldogs to make the NCAAs, but they got upset in the Big South title game by conference stalwart Winthrop.  Notwithstanding the comical interest we had in George based on his cartoonishly freakish features, we also wanted to see him succeed due to the chronic injuries that a person his size has sustained (multiple knee problems resulting in several missed seasons).  Now comes the sad news that George underwent surgery in September for a staph infection that reportedly resulted in the amputation of part of his right foot, and is definitely out this season (if not for good).  From the AP report:

The source said the amputation, which occurred three weeks ago, was the result of George’s battle with MRSA, a difficult-to-treat and sometimes life-threatening antibiotic-resistant staph infection.  In August, George returned to his Chicago home from Pete Newell’s Big Man Camp in Las Vegas with an infection in his foot.  Doctors there suggested that George immediately see a specialist. He’s been hospitalized in Iowa since then, the source said, enduring several surgeries and at one time battling for his life. He’s expected to remain in the hospital for at least another month.   “This is a terrible setback for his basketball life but there is so much more to him than basketball,” [UNCA coach Eddie] Biedenbach said. “The students at this school think the world of Kenny George outside of basketball. We’re looking forward to him coming back second semester — that’s what he wants to do — and complete his degree. At that point, we’d still like him to be a part of our basketball program and part of this school.”

We’re Really Rooting For The Big Guy  (photo credit: Inside Carolina)

We love Biedenbach’s positivity here, and we’re certainly not a member of the medical profession, but we have to believe that having a partial foot amputation effectively ends George’s basketball career.  We love the underdog stories (inasmuch as George could be considered an under-anything), but this is really disheartening news, and we’ll just leave it at that (along with a couple of ESPN features on George from last year).

 There’s a lot of news out there today…  which only means one thing…

• Goodman continues on his crusade to expose the underbelly of the game with today’s lead – the father of UK’s new hotshot recruit, Daniel Orton, was paid three times over the summer to give talks at Billy Gillispie’s camp.  This is completely legal, by the way.  Discuss. 
• Too many preseason/holiday tourneys?  ESPN announced today that the Diamond Head Classic will begin in 2009 at the University of Hawaii.  It will finish up on Christmas Day, which will provide a nice collegiate alternative to the annual Shaq-Kobe matchup in the NBA.
• Please read this, “conference fans.”  It’s even truer in basketball.
• Is it sad or compelling that this endorsement could tip North Carolina to Obama in three weeks? 
• Ok, great.  Players are graduating more than they used to.  But is that because they’re committed to the degree program or schools are making it easier to get that degree?
• A quick Class of 2009 recruiting update from NW Wins, as well as a nice overview of the likelihood of Carolina running the table in the regular season this year.
• WAC coaches pick Nevada to win their conference, while Big South coaches/media picked Winthrop to win it again. 
• NBCSports picks AJ Price, Stephen Curry, James Harden, Tyler Hansbrough and Luke Harongody as its all-americans.  We’re just not feeling Price, sorry UConn fans.
• Parrish thinks that this year’s Florida squad will be quite a bit better than last year’s, and we can’t say that we really disagree with that.
• Andy Katz assures us that KU’s 2008 national title is safe in light of the re-opening case of Darrell Arthur’s HS transcripts.  You know, because we were worried, or something.
• He also gives his preseason view of 37 teams that he thinks can make a run next March.
• Hey, we’ve always been Stacy Dales fans, BC!  Even when she was married to someone named Schulman.  Looks like we may not be able to root out Psycho T for her attention, though. 

Shamelessly cribbing from last spring’s very clever NBA catch phrase, we here at RTC will present to you the Thirty Reasons We Love College Basketball as we gear up toward the start of the season a little over a month from now.  We’ll be bringing you players to watch for this season and moments to remember from last season, courtesy of the series of dump trucks, wires and effluvia known as YouTube. 

#25 – Where More Bob Knight in the Studio Happens

We’re less than 48 hrs from the quasi-official start of practice (at least at Kentucky, Illinois and a few others)… 

• The Class of 2009 will definitely be keeping an eye on Brandon Jennings’ experience in Europe this year.
• So we can have D2 games on tv, but getting some good mid-majors on the ESPN Full Court package is damn near impossible?
• The Big West signed a new deal with ESPN, but unless you get the U, you’re pretty much out of luck.  Note to ESPN – put ESPNU games on the Full Court Package this year!  Find a way to watch Fullerton’s Josh Akognon anyway this year – trust us.
• STF pegs Purdue and Oklahoma as its breakthrough teams in 2008-09, and Baylor and Tennessee as its tipping-point teams.
• Talent = Title Contender.  Thanks, Gary.  This was a fun idea, but we don’t really trust DraftExpress for evaluating NBA talent that far out, do you?
• The Big 12 coaches like Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas/Baylor in that order.  Over in the Horizon League, Butler is picked fifh?!?!
• Tom Crean to NCAA on further penalties:  Enough is Enough!  Meanwhile, Kyle Taber goes on record stating that Indiana will no-way, no-how, finish last in the B10 this year.
• One jewel from Goodman’s blog – wait, Georgetown recruited a white kid?
• Insert Rick Pitino isn’t walking through that door joke here. 
• Speculation on where the top prospects in the Class of 2009 will end up.
• Dickie V. should stay away from MLB Playoffs predictions.   
• We must say, as an unabashed fan of God Shammgod, this is completely awesome.
• One man’s take on the top NCAA program of all-time.

It’s Wednesday afternoon, 72 degrees and sunny, and we’re heading outside…

• Kelvin Sanctions fires back at Indiana – get this blasted bus off of me!
• Good news – Bob Knight will be back on your television set in some capacity this winter.  Will Digger’s jealous rage get in the way?
• We like this – which coaches got begotten, er, begatten? 
• Let’s call it the “trickle-down effect” of college basketball.  Although unlike the economic version, this kind, you know, actually works?
• Two weeks ago, we (and our bookies – seriously, the check is on the way) might have been worried about this…  luckily, the implosion of the Palin-drone appears nearly complete, and our worries have subsided.
• The guy who allegedly killed Tubby Smith’s nephew pleaded not guilty in Worcester, Mass., yesterday.  There were numerous witnesses – good luck with that. 
• For fear of karmic payback of mammoth proportions, we’ll abstain from captioning the below photo (h/t Hugging Harold Reynolds), but LORDY…  you’ve got Jim Boeheim, Gary Williams and Mark Gottfriend all in one place!  All you need to add is Steve Lavin and Dave Odom (6th man: John Brady) and you’d have a starting five of mediocrity unmatched in history.