It was a busy week in Indianapolis at NCAA headquarters. After going back and forth with Memphis on the status of James Wiseman, the NCAA settled on a penalty of 12 games.

While some wanted to argue whether the suspension was warranted and others felt it was head coach Penny Hardaway who deserved the punishment, there is no argument when it comes to the NCAA’s decision to force Wiseman to repay the $11,500 his family was given…

In addition to the Wiseman saga, the NCAA dropped Level 1 allegations against Oklahoma State. The FBI probe into college basketball continues to makes headlines here…

But let’s not stop there! While the entire offseason was not quite enough time for the NCAA to make all of its rulings on transfer eligibility cases, the NCAA was busy this week.

There was Joey Hauser’s decision…

There was Micah Potter’s decision…

and there was the decision on Joel Ntambwe…

Each decision by the NCAA resulted in reactions from the head coach at each school.

Greg Gard expressed his displeasure in a postgame speech…

Tom Izzo decided the Hauser decision was enough of a reason to resign from the National Association of Basketball Coaches Board of Directors…

…and Chris Beard made a statement following the Ntambwe decision.

On the court this week, there was the usual November wackiness. No game though had more of that than Toledo/Notre Dame. There was this offensive foul on John Mooney — a call that Mike Brey and the rest of the nation are still trying to figure out.

But the wackiness did not stop with there. Down three with under 10 seconds to go. Notre Dame found itself at the free throw line. A missed foul shot led to this crazy sequence, wedgie included.

This week had upsets, including Hofstra taking down UCLA at Pauley Pavilion…

We had big-time players making big-time shots to win a game…

We had an exempt tournament taking place in a ballroom…

We had an ankle-breaking move lead to this wide-open three for Auburn’s Samir Doughty…

We had meaningless baskets with all too much importance for some…

…and not just once, but these are of course, everywhere…

We had this moment with Cassius Winston thanking the crowd for all of the support his family has received following the death of his brother…

And we saw something new with this, “the Flap Counter”…

A reminder to everyone though…

When the Ivy League tipped off last Friday night, it was official: Conference play was underway everywhere, in power conferences and low majors alike. While only a handful of games in March will ultimately matter for those teams in leagues without legitimate at-large candidates, the regular season will still define the favorites to win automatic tournament bids in the smaller conferences. Some leagues have a clearly defined top dog, while others have a handful of teams battling for that status. Either way, if you like March chaos, there are low major teams out there you should absolutely be rooting for to hold serve and earn their way into the field. Here are a few of the team you should be getting familiar with now — whether because of star players, a proven core of seniors, or a collection of “red line” upsets against Power Five schools.

With the dynamic Dallas Moore at the helm, North Florida is in good shape. (AP)

• America East – You probably already know about Jameel Warney, the unquestioned Stony Brook leader, but the rest of Seawolves also have a nice veteran core around Warney (30th in the nation in experience per KenPom). Stony Brook has also been close to scoring a signature victory for the league, leading much of the way at Vanderbilt in November before succumbing in overtime. Unbelievably, the Seawolves have either won the regular season title and/or been in the conference tournament final for six straight seasons, but they are still seeking the program’s first NCAA Tournament appearance. Albany has been the most frequent tormentor, and the Great Danes have matched Stony Brook’s 3-0 start to league play so far this season. Looking for pole position in the America East? The two teams’ first meeting is next Friday on Long Island.
• Atlantic Sun – You probably heard about Ben Simmons’ destruction of North Florida, but did you know the Ospreys had two players (Dallas Moore and Beau Beech) score 31 apiece that night? As a team UNF hit NINETEEN threes against LSU; on the season they’ve connected on 43.4% of their triples, good for 8th in the country. They scorched Illinois in a 12-point season opening victory and legitimately own one of the best offenses in all of college basketball. They lost in a play-in game last March, but a return trip to the Dance may include a spot in the field of 64 for the Ospreys and their dangerous offense.

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Over the next few weeks, we’ll examine and critique some of the more intriguing preseason conference polls. Here, we take a look at the good, the bad and the weird coming out of the Colonial, Conference USA and Summit League polls.

Colonial

There are plenty of question marks in the CAA this season. (Christopher Szagola/US Presswire)

The voters got it right at the top, tabbing Northeastern as the favorite in the CAA, followed by William & Mary and Hofstra. The Huskies are the one unit in this league to add more proven talent than they lost, not only bringing back the vast majority of last year’s roster – including Defensive Player of the Year and rebounding monster Scott Eatherton (15.9 PPG, 10.2 RPG, 1.8 BPG) – but also regaining Quincy Ford, who was one among the CAA’s best all-around players before missing most of last year. Still, the recent departure of fourth-leading scorer Demetrius Pollard, combined with the fact that Bill Coen’s club went just 11-21 last season, makes you wonder if Northeastern can actually live up to its top billing. William & Mary also has an argument for the number one spot after finishing third in the standings a year ago and narrowly losing the CAA title game, welcoming back the conference’s best player (Marcus Thornton) and CAA Rookie of the Year (Omar Prewitt). Hofstra is rightfully slotted at third; despite last year’s 10-23 campaign, an influx of talented transfers and recruits, including former Niagara guard Juan’ya Green (16.5 PPG), justifies the anticipated climb.

1. Northeastern
2. William & Mary
3. Hofstra
4. Drexel
5. James Madison
6. College of Charleston
7. Towson
8. Delaware
9. UNCW
10. Elon

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Heading into a busy weekend of action, here are some key thoughts from a number of scheduled games around the AAC.

Shabazz Napier (left) and Russ Smith have been the two best players in the AAC this season, and they will square off Saturday night.

Game of the Weekend: ESPN’s College GameDay has something special planned for its 10th season premiere — broadcasting its morning and evening shows from the sites of two different games. While both involve AAC teams (more on that in a moment), it’s the nightcap that matters most here, with Louisville visiting UConn. Both teams are coming off Thursday night victories – UConn got a big win at Memphis, while Louisville won big over Houston – and the two preseason favorites need this game. For Louisville, it would bolster a weak resume with no decent road wins. For UConn, a win would get them back over .500 in AAC play after starting 0-2. In addition to all of that is the showdown between the conference’s two best players: Shabazz Napier, the only player in America leading his team in scoring, assists and rebounds, and Russ Smith, following up his spectacular junior season with an even better senior campaign.

Best of the Rest:

• Cincinnati, picked to finish fourth in the preseason, sits atop the AAC at 5-0. It will look to keep its spotless record with a visit to South Florida, a team trying to right its season without its best player. Junior point guard Anthony Collins has been troubled with left knee problems all year, and is now considering sitting the rest of the year and applying for a redshirt. Without him, the Bulls have lost five of seven.

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Here’s to hoping that this week brought you plenty of holiday cheer, because it surely did not supply you (or anyone else!) with much quality college basketball. Entertaining Diamond Head Classic final aside, this week was as slow as the college basketball season gets. Don’t despair, however, because Santa has delivered a Saturday chalk-full of college hoops. Two big-time rivalry games occupy the prime real estate on this weekend’s marquee, but there’s plenty of substance, albeit understated, sprinkled throughout Saturday’s docket of action. Here’s a quick primer on the big games in Syracuse and Lexington, plus a few other worthwhile narratives to monitor on this busy Saturday.

For The First Time In Over Three Decades, Syracuse And Villanova Will Meet As Non-Conference Opponents

A Couple Of Old Big East Friends

In the world of college basketball, eleven months is far from an eternity, but my, oh my; how things have changed since the last time Villanova and Syracuse locked horns! What was a Big East conference game last January will be an ACC versus (new) Big East affair today (2PM EST, CBS), and with both teams set to embark on their maiden voyages in the new leagues next week, the Carrier Dome will serve as the clinic for anyone needing one final dose of Big East nostalgia. Subplots abound in this game, but I’ll be especially interested to see how Villanova attacks the Syracuse zone. The Wildcats haven’t been a bad offensive team to this point in the season, but the Cats’ statistical breakdown on the offensive end puzzles. Villanova is 18^th best in the country in two-point field goal percentage (55.1%), also shoots the ball pretty well from the stripe (72.2%), but struggles from beyond the arc (204^th nationally in 3P% at 32.7%). With those splits, you’d expect Jay Wright’s team to focus their efforts inside the three-point line. So far, however, they’ve done the exact opposite – the Wildcats are 7^th in the country when it comes to percentage of field goal attempts from three-point range (45.7%). Will the chucking continue against an Orange zone that begs opponents to settle for deep shots (43.1% of Syracuse opponent’s field goal attempts are threes), or can the Wildcats throw aside this bit of statistical dissonance and find a way to get quality interior looks against the zone? Remains to be seen, but expect 30,000+ to get a first-hand view of the answer.

Battle For The Bluegrass 

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In October, Louisville coach Rick Pitino held a press conference in which he announced the indefinite suspension of star forward Chane Behanan for violating university policy. Pitino explained the suspension by saying, “This is not about basketball. This is about Chane Behanan becoming the person I think he can become.” Well, apparently it took all of 25 days for Behanan to become that person, because this morning Pitino announced that Behanan was reinstated and could play tomorrow night when the Cardinals play Hofstra.

Chane Behanan Will Be Back On The Court As Early As Tuesday

This announcement shouldn’t be all that surprising considering how quickly Behanan has managed to work his way back into Pitino’s good graces (being 6’6″ and really athletic helps). Behanan was back practicing with the team on Friday and was on the sideline in a suit for the team’s season-opening win against College of Charleston over the weekend. But it is somewhat surprising  to see Behanan back this quickly for those of us who wondered whether Behanan was effectively done as a member of the team after Pitino announced his suspension. In retrospect, we should have expected Behanan would return sooner rather than later. The violations didn’t seem serious enough to tie Pitino’s hands and the Cardinals need Behanan in a big way if they are going to win the National Championship again this season. We should have known that Behanan would find his way back into a uniform eventually, but by bringing him back this quickly we have learned one thing about Pitino — he sure knows how to sound convincing when he wants to be.

Just listen to some of Pitino’s faux-tough talk:

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Mark Selig is the RTC correspondent for the Colonial Athletic Association. You can also find his musings online on Twitter @markrselig.

Reader’s Take

Looking Back

Since the last CAA game — a James Madison championship that its fans waited nearly two decades to see — the league has officially said goodbye to perennial powers George Mason (off to the Atlantic 10) and Old Dominion (now in Conference USA in a football-driven move), and hello to intriguing newcomer College of Charleston (formerly of the Southern Conference). Based on last year’s RPIs, the CAA won’t immediately suffer, but Mason — with a Final Four appearance last decade — is obviously a more high-profile program than Charleston. ODU is too. The swap is just the latest in the CAA’s geographical shift. The league is losing its Virginia members (VCU exited before last season) and seems to be trending south.

New Niagara coach Joe Mihalich is just one of several newcomers to an ever changing CAA. (AP)

The league also said goodbye to Mo Cassara, Hofstra’s hard-luck coach who took the job in tough circumstances (replacing Tim Welsh after a DUI) and was let go in equally difficult ones. His replacement? Longtime Niagara coach Joe Mihalich, who said he’ll have to donate all the purple wardrobe accumulated from 15 years with the Purple Eagles to JMU coach Matt Brady (ironically, Mihalich and Brady both have wives named Mary, and both have three sons, including a set of twins — with the same May 30 birthday!). Brady, meanwhile, parlayed his CAA title into a four-year contract extension, although the talks were a bit drawn out, nearly lingering until his previous contract expired. As for a new coach joining Mihalich in the league, second-year Charleston coach Doug Wojcik becomes every CAA reporter and copy editor’s worst nightmare. Wojcik (I’m already getting the hang of it), is no stranger to the CAA, having played with David Robinson at Navy in the 1980s.

The final goodbye from the CAA was to the city of Richmond — home of the league’s last 24 postseason tournaments. The league offices are still located in Richmond, but the CAA will host its annual playoff in Baltimore this year. Trying to establish Charm City as a sort of hub for CAA hoops, the conference held its media day at the Renaissance Baltimore, a swanky hotel overlooking the Inner Harbor. “Crab Cakes and basketball. That’s what we’re going to do here in Charm City,” Towson coach Pat Skerry, channeling a Wedding Crashers line, said during a lunchtime speech at media day.

Power Rankings

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We looked at the best of the AAC non-conference schedules in Part I, after explaining a bit of what makes for a good non-conference schedule. This season, there’s quite a bit more bad than good, which could drag down the collective RPIs of AAC members and ultimately lead to lower NCAA Tournament seeds come March.

Larry Brown’s SMU Mustangs, a popular sleeper pick, have a lot riding on a trip to Virginia.

The Bad

• Cincinnati: The Bearcats return the favor of a visit last season from MW favorite New Mexico with a road trip of their own to The Pit. They also will play former Big East rival and mid-level ACC squad Pitt at Madison Square Garden. Then… well, there’s the rivalry game with Xavier, which seems poised to finish in the bottom half of a newly constituted (read: relatively weaker) Big East; N.C. State, clearly headed toward the bottom of the ACC, and Conference USA also-ran MTSU. That trio might end up in the RPI top 100; it’s highly unlikely any other team on the schedule will come close.
• Louisville: If the defending champs can escape Rupp Arena with a win, all will be forgiven by both their fans and the committee, as a road win against Kentucky is perhaps the highest quality victory available in college basketball this year. Southern Miss, which finished with an RPI of #30 last season, is favored to win Conference USA. They face a potential Basketball Hall of Fame Tip-Off final against North Carolina at the Mohegan Sun. They need the Tar Heels to be there, because the rest of their foes are middling teams in weak leagues, with Charleston the most likely to crack the top 100, and several – we’re looking at you, Hofstra and UMKC – seeming likely to end up north of #300.

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Mark Selig is the RTC correspondent for the Colonial Athletic Association. You can find more of his written work at jamesmadison.rivals.com or on Twitter @MarkRSelig.

CAA Tournament Matchups/Predictions

QUARTERFINALS

#4 George Mason vs. #5Drexel, Saturday, 3:30 p.m. — If you were to tell me last March that Mason and Drexel would meet in the first round of the CAA tournament, I would have said, “Really? What happened? Did four teams become ineligible for the tournament while the Patriots and Dragons underperformed?” And the March 2012 version of me would have been strangely prescient. But this is a heavyweight bout in Round 1, and the winner could certainly take the whole fruit basket. The teams split two regular season matchups, with each road team winning. Mason blew a 20-point first-half lead in its loss, but for the most part, both games came down to the final eight minutes, when the teams traded leads. This one should also go to the wire —and I’ve got Mason barely holding on in a thrilling opener to the weekend.

Pick: George Mason 62, Drexel 61

#2 Delaware vs. #7 Hofstra, Saturday, 6 p.m. — Hofstra, in this writer’s opinion, is the only team of the seven incapable of winning the tournament. Which means that Delaware, which hasn’t reached the semifinals since 2003, should finally make the final four. The Hens have weapons all over the court, while Hofstra counts on the same few players to log big minutes and try to make something happen. There won’t be many blowouts this weekend, but this game has a chance to be over quickly if Delaware shoots the ball well in the first half. Hofstra’s best gameplan is to limit possessions, remain within striking distance, and catch some second-half breaks. The Pride can hang around, but won’t seriously threaten.

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Mark Selig is the RTC correspondent for the Colonial Athletic Association. You can find more of his written work at jamesmadison.rivals.com or on Twitter @MarkRSelig.

Spotlight On…

Diagramming A Winner: It was featured on SportsCenter under the header “Small School Buzzer-Beaters,” but JMU coach Matt Brady didn’t see a replay of his team’s game-winning alley-oop against Delaware until Monday morning, long after his team arrived back in town after a four-hour bus ride home that was undoubtedly more pleasant because of said play (fast-forward to 2:04):

We do have an end-of-the shot-clock lob play for whoever may be on the court – typically it’s Andre Nation – but knowing that they would have it scouted or that they could have guarded it with just one defender, out of the timeout we kind of changed that play around. We took everybody from the strong-side, the ball-side of the court – we took them out of the play. We had Rayshawn [Goins] duck in on the weakside block, the block farthest from the ball. Most importantly, we had A.J. [Davis] start inside of Andre Nation towards the baseline, and we wanted to wrap him away from the ball and back around the corner that was empty, in hopes that it would draw attention. And to be honest with you, I didn’t see the play until [assistant coach] Rob O’Driscoll showed it to me this morning. It seemed to draw a lot of attention. It worked the kids executed it well. I think the underrated part of the whole play, to be honest with you, wasn’t the design of the play or the finish or A.J.’s hard cut. Really, [it was] the pass. Until I saw it this morning – it was a fabulous pass. It was not an easy play. And it’s not something Devon [Moore] always wants to do because he’s sometimes leery of a turnover, but in that situation he’s interested and eager to make the pass. But in that situation, what a great pass.

It was Kyle Anderson guarding Andre Nation. So I don’t know if we necessarily even needed to wrap A.J., but we wanted to do that to create some confusion. And I do think when A.J. wrapped, it actually pulled Kyle Anderson from in front of Andre Nation guarding the rim. They went to switch. They went to switch and they both ended up behind. But the most interesting part of the play, and Rob showed it to me again this morning, was that immediately upon Andre Nation’s dunk, Kyle Anderson gave Devon Saddler a death stare, like, ‘You son of a gun, I can’t believe you missed that!’ They were supposed to switch, but that’s why we did what we did.

Andre Nation really had the easiest part of the play. He’s gonna get all the credit, but really, the credit should go to A.J. and Devon.

I didn’t get the chance to speak with Kyle Anderson about the miscommunication, but Saddler made it seem like it was Anderson’s fault, saying that he didn’t switch when he was supposed to. That’s for UD head coach Monte Ross to sort out. The Dukes are just happy their clutch lob worked so perfectly.

Power Rankings

This week, we spend ample time celebrating the league’s top talents, but this week’s power poll will focus on X-Factors – the players whose teams’ success hinges on their production from game to game:

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