goran suton – Rush The Court

NCAA Title Preview: Meet the Real Team of Destiny…

rtmsf — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 22:58:03 +0000

Much of what has been written in the last 36 hours about tonight’s UNC-Michigan St. showdown in the national title game has applied liberally the use of the word “destiny.” And on the surface, we can understand some of the hyperbole. Detroit, in fact the entire state of Michigan, is going through hard times. Harder than the rest of us, at least. MSU, personified by its tough-as-nails coach who also happens to be one of the very best preparation NCAA coaches of all-time, has gutted and clawed its way back from multiple injuries this year to put together a [...]

04.06.09 Fast Breaks: Monday Night Edition

rtmsf — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 06:23:15 +0000

Well, here we are. There are two teams left. We’ll have our Monday Night Preview up by mid-afternoon, but for now you can browse around the blogosphere to see what others have to say about Michigan St vs. UNC for todos las marbles.

Gary Parrish makes a strange analogy involving Michigan St. and Marisa Miller, which is where he lost us. Maybe that was the purpose of her invocation. Jason Whitlock believes in destiny. Yep, couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Gregg Doyel, making friends. Credit to Roy for now whining about this (yet). He should know better, considering the Heels get to [...]

Boom Goes the Dynamite: Elite 8 Day Two

rtmsf — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 17:16:37 +0000

After last night’s fantastic games (especially the Villanova–Pittsburgh game last night–probably the best game I have ever been to), we are hoping that today’s match-ups can equal what we saw last night. One of the more interesting things from the coverage last night (other than the fact that CBS cut to their regularly scheduled programming soon after the game was over according to reports that I have heard) is how little publicity ESPN and other media entities are giving the Scottie Reynolds mad dash to win the game. I’d be interested to hear your perspective on this since [...]

Sweet Sixteen: Midwest Region Preview

rtmsf — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:45:46 +0000

Looking back at the Midwest Region 1st/2d Rounds…

Best Game: undoubtedly the game of the Tourney thus far, the Ohio St.-Siena game had not one, but two, game-changing threes by the underdog Saints to keep their hopes alive.

Shocker: Wake Forest’s complete and utter failure to show up for its game against Cleveland St. last Friday night. With three first-rounders on the team, there is no excuse for a team to be this mentally out of it (which they were much of the last six weeks of the season).

Cinderella That’s Not Really One: Arizona [...]

Boom Goes the Dynamite: NCAA Tournament Day Four

nvr1983 — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 03:16:29 +0000

After a thrilling finish last night that made Demetri Goodson a household name for at least a few days, we think the tournament has officially begun. Even being fairly selective, we think there are at least 3 outstanding games today. Here’s a quick rundown of the games we’ll be covering tomorrow:

12:10 PM: #6 Arizona State vs. #3 Syracuse 2:20 PM: #12 Wisconsin vs. #4 Xavier 2:30 PM: #11 Dayton vs. #3 Kansas 2:40 PM: #13 Cleveland State vs. #12 Arizona 2:50 PM: #8 Oklahoma State vs. #1 Pittsburgh 4:50 PM: #6 Marquette vs. #3 Missouri 5:00 PM: #10 USC vs. #2 Michigan State 5:20 PM: [...]

Midwest Region Game-By-Game Previews – 1st Round

zhayes9 — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:58:05 +0000

MIDWEST REGION PREVIEW (by Zach Hayes)

#1 Louisville vs. #16 Morehead State

For Louisville to win: It’s pretty simple for Louisville in this 1-16 matchup: do exactly what has gotten you to the point of receiving the #1 overall seed in the tournament. They shouldn’t have much problem playing their usual lockdown defense, employing their frantic press and letting the pure athletic ability of guys like Earl Clark and Terrence Williams completely overwhelm the star-struck Eagles.

For Morehead State to win: The triumphant [...]

NCAA Preview: Michigan State Spartans

nvr1983 — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:05:20 +0000

Michigan State (#2, Midwest, Minneapolis pod) Vs. Robert Morris (#15) Fri., 3/20 at 9:50 PM Vegas Line: Michigan State, -17

Thanks to Vegas Watch for providing these graphs that measure the moving average of a team’s spread (moving avg.) over time vs. the spread for each individual game (indiv). If a team’s moving average is higher than zero, then Vegas currently has a higher opinion of them than Pomeroy, and vice versa.

General Profile Location: East Lansing, MI Conference: Big 10, At-large Coach: Tom Izzo, 14th season, 331-135 08-09 Record: 26-6 overall, 15-3 in the Big 10 Last 12 Games: 9-3 Best Win: At Illinois on March 1st [...]

NCAA Basketball 2009: The BCS Version

nvr1983 — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 05:15:51 +0000

With the release of the brackets on Sunday evening there has been quite a bit of controversy (Arizona over St. Mary’s being the predominant gripe) and there have been some interesting moments with Jay Bilas and Digger Phelps ganging up on Dick Vitale and almost bringing him to tears. However, it was nothing compared to the furor that we saw when the BCS released its final poll that determined the BCS bowl games and more importantly the national championship. We thought it would be a fun exercise to try to make a [...]

Boom Goes the Dynamite: 03.08.09

nvr1983 — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 15:20:39 +0000

We are finally here. Today is the last day of the college basketball regular season. What’s that? St. Mary’s didn’t get the memo? Ok, after today 99.99999% of the programs will be done with the regular season. After we attempted to write the college basketball version of War and Peace for yesterday’s Boom Goes the Dynamite, we get a little break as there aren’t quite as many high quality games today, but the ones that we do have look like they will be pretty entertaining. Here are the games that we will be following today:

Noon: #20 [...]

Blogpoll Roundtable 02.19.09

rtmsf — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:30:41 +0000

As a member of the CBB Blogpoll, we’ve been asked to join the weekly roundtable, where we’ll be answering a series of questions about the state of the season. A Sea of Blue is this week’s host – be sure to stop by over there to see some of the other blogs’ answers (ed. note: we tried and failed to keep our eyes on our own paper).

Who really looks like the best team in college basketball this season?

On “look” alone, it has to be Pittsburgh. The Panthers have only sustained two losses, and in [...]

ATB: Define “Game Face,” Mr. Calathes

rtmsf — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 08:06:06 +0000

First, Some News & Notes.

UCLA’s Drew Gordon may be slowed down by back spams in the Bruins’ next game at Arizona St. on Thursday night. Pat Forde shows which schools are basketball-philic through an interesting analysis of attendance and success this season. We give approximately a 1% chance that this girl is actually Duke forward Miles Plumlee’s girlfriend, and approximately 0.01% chance that she goes to school at Duke. Everybody knows all the Dookies do their chasing of tails over at Carolina (with good reason). No Way She’s From Duke (photo credit: Uncoached)

Getting Down To Business With [...]

Set Your Tivos: 02.04.09

nvr1983 — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:16:15 +0000

After last night’s relatively weak slate of games, we’re back to normal tonight with a great set of games.

Game of the Day #3 Duke at #10 Clemson at 9 PM on ESPN and ESPN360.com: Our second top 10 match-up of the week. Once again the road team is the higher ranked team, but I feel like this time they are also the favorites coming in to the game. All of you know about Duke by now thanks to their frequent appearances on national TV so I will keep it brief. Kyle Singler and Gerald Henderson have emerged as their [...]

Dynamic Duos in Search of a Third Wheel

rtmsf — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:06:45 +0000

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

Ask any college basketball coach what a team needs to succeed in March and you’ll get a variety of answers — solid point guard play, a big inside threat, conditioning, luck, a guarantee that John Stevens will NOT bet on you — all popular answers. A “go-to” guy is also a popular response, but I think history has shown that simply one standout player will not prove sufficient. These days you have to have a balanced squad in addition to having at least [...]

ACC – Big 10 Challenge Preview Pt. 2

rtmsf — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:04:50 +0000

So we went 3-2 in our picks last night, which is actually downright terrible when you’re just picking teams straight up. Duke, Minnesota and BC went pretty much as expected, but we didn’t see the Jack McClinton slap coming, and we’re still having trouble fathoming Illinois blowing a solid lead at home. Nevertheless, let’s see if we can do better with tonight’s games. With a 3-3 tie going into tonight, can the Big 10 win at least one road game and hold serve at home to get to the magical six victories?

Wednesday Games (12.03.08)

Indiana (4-2) @ Wake Forest (6-0) – [...]

ATB: Turkey Weekend Wrapup

rtmsf — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 06:01:08 +0000

And we’re back… We hope that our fair readers had a luckier Thanksgiving weekend than we did. Due to substantial computer issues, we were unable to keep the site updated over the weekend. But we managed to watch a fair number of the multitude of games this weekend, so rather than recapping what has effectively become stale news, we’ll instead offer our observations.

What We Learned.

Old Spice Classic.

Maryland is equally as likely to pull a major upset as to lay a gigantic egg (beating Michigan St. by 18, then losing by 22 to Gonzaga and 27 to Georgetown). Michigan [...]