1. Arkansas remained one of three power conference schools (joining Boston College and Utah) to not own a road victory in Division I after being clubbed by Tennessee in Knoxville on Wednesday night. Among the 74 current power conference coaches, none of them owns a worse road record over the past two seasons than Mike Anderson. Anderson at Missouri went only 2-7 last year and this year’s Razorbacks are 0-8 so that porous road record could easily be reason #1 why they are likely NIT-bound and not returning the NCAAs for a fourth straight year, matching the program’s longest drought since the 1970s.
2. Anderson and Tennessee head coach Cuonzo Martin, the SEC’s two first-year coaches, met for the first time on Wednesday night. Knoxville News Sentinel‘s Mike Strange writes that  the schools that hired these two coaches, both leaving schools in Missouri (and in Martin’s case at least a rumored candidate to replace Anderson), are satisfied with their respective choices.
3. South Carolina’s Malik Cooke and Georgia head coach Mark Fox already knew each other quite well when the two schools met on Wednesday. Cooke played for Fox at Nevada for two years so of course when the Gamecocks and Bulldogs met for the first of two times this season Cooke took advantage of his chance to beat his former coach for the first time in three tries. He hit the game-winning shot with 20 seconds left. “He’s just a winner,” Fox said. “I hate to see the ball in his hands.” “I respect him a lot,” Cooke said about Fox, “but I was just trying to get a win for South Carolina because we really needed one.”
4. Kentucky opened up its practice to the public on Wednesday, allowing students, faculty, staff and a national television audience in on the top-ranked Wildcats’ preparation as they seek to become the first team since 2003 to finish the Southeastern Conference undefeated.”I want the students into it, I want the players alert and focused through the week,” head coach John Calipari said. “Our practices are pretty consistent in how we go about it, then it turns into … `Why don’t we call ESPN?’ Then it was like, ‘I bet it rates higher than games.’ It’s Kentucky. That’s the Kentucky Effect.”
5. Sports Illustrated‘s Zac Ellis found former Tennessee Athletic Director Mike Hamilton and his new career path he has charted for himself since resigning in June. Hamilton began work in October as the president of U.S. Operations for Blood:Water Mission, “a non-profit organization based in Nashville that addresses Africa’s clean water and HIV/AIDS crises, two of the leading causes of orphanage in sub-Saharan Africa.” Hamilton has three adopted children from Africa, one of whom, five-month-old Kalu,  is HIV-positive. There are certainly worse things he could be doing with his time.

To preview the match-ups in the Big East/SEC Challenge, the RTC Big East & SEC Microsites are facing off in conversational analysis. Gerald Smith and Patrick Prendergast will battle one-on-one to break down Providence’s visit tonight at South Carolina.

Gerald Smith: The first Big East/SEC Challenge matchup is a cold, calculated move by the WORLDWIDE LEADERS at ESPN: After 30 minutes of Providence at South Carolina, fans nationwide will be eager to jump into the St. John’s @ Kentucky game 30 minutes later. Prior to Providence’s better performance against Holy Cross Tuesday night, both teams scored less than 62 points their last three games. Opponents of bothhave been averaging seven three-pointers made per game. The Gamecocks and Friars didn’t have the highest of expectations this season yet both have chalked up some disappointing losses — Providence was manhandled by Northern Iowa and South Carolina dropped its fourth game of the season to Southern California on Saturday.

Will Gill Get Rowdy? (credit: 247sec.com)

Perhaps the national audience might get drawn in if freshman forward Anthony Gill gets kinda rowdy early. When Gill is active, coach Darrin Horn’s team has a pulse: Gill uses his athleticism and size to grab rebounds (5.2 RPG), score inside (61.3% FG on 31 attempts) and draw fouls. When Gill is too rowdy, he is forced to sit; Carolina is 1-3 when Gill plays 23 minutes or less. Gill is a legitimate talent that could steal SEC Freshman of the Week honors at least once this season.

For Providence, which player (or players) might keep fans from switching the channel?

Patrick Prendergast: The Friars (5-2) run on the “3 Cs,” a backcourt trio consisting of 6’2” junior point guard Vincent Council (18.0 PPG, 5.6 RPG, 5.7 APG), 6’5” sophomore wing Gerard Coleman (16.7 PPG, 6.7 RPG, 2.7 APG) and 6’1″ shooting guard Bryce Cotton (14.6 PPG). With no seniors on the roster the junior, Council is the leader and floor general. Coleman, a starter a year ago,” has been used predominantly in a sixth-man role to add scoring punch off the bench for a team that can be offensively challenged. While Council and Coleman lead the charge, Cotton may be the best barometer of success for Providence as he has averaged 19.2 points per game in their five wins and just three per game in their two losses.

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***** – quit your job and divorce your wife if that’s what it takes to watch this game live
**** – best watched live, but if you must, tivo and watch it tonight as soon as you get home
*** – set your tivo but make sure you watch it later
** – set your tivo but we’ll forgive you if it stays in the queue until 2013
* – don’t waste bandwidth (yours or the tivo’s) of any kind on this game

Brian Otskey is an RTC contributor.

It’s a light night across the college basketball landscape but two teams will look to increase their NCAA chances with a win tonight. All rankings from RTC and all times Eastern.

Tennessee @ South Carolina – 7 pm on ESPN (***)

Hopson Should Have a Big Night Tonight

The Volunteers are likely in the NCAA Tournament with their quality wins against the second-ranked schedule, but it would be in their best interest to win at least one of their final two games. It’s possible that Tennessee could lose both and fall to 7-9 in SEC play heading into the conference tournament and therefore need at least a win or two. After tonight, the Vols host Kentucky in the regular season finale on Sunday.

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It’s October.  The leaves are starting to turn colors.  Halloween candy is already in the stores.  There have been a few nights where you may have even turned on the heat.  Midnight Madness is imminent and RTC is full bore into the 2010-11 Season Preview materials.  For the second October in a row, we’re bringing you our RTC Impact Players series.  The braintrust has gone back and forth on this and we’ve finally settled on a group of sixty players throughout ten geographic regions of the country (five starters plus a sixth man) to represent the who and where of players you should be watching this season.  Seriously, if you haven’t seen every one of these players ball at least once by the end of February, then you need to figure out a way to get a better television package.  As always in a subjective analysis such as this, some of our decisions were difficult; many others were quite easy.  What we can say without reservation is that there is great talent in every corner of this nation of ours, and we’ll do our best to excavate it over the next five weeks in this series that will publish on Mondays and Thursdays.  Each time, we’ll also provide a list of some of the near-misses as well as the players we considered in each region, but as always, we welcome you guys, our faithful and very knowledgeable readers, to critique us in the comments.

You can find all previous RTC 2010-11 Impact Players posts here.

South Atlantic Region (VA, NC, SC)

• Kyrie Irving – Fr, G – Duke. To get an idea how highly touted Kyrie Irving is, consider this: coming off a season where Duke won the national title and only lost one key playmaker on offense, most people believe that the Blue Devils will run their offense through the talented freshman from New Jersey who many recruiting experts rank among the best to ever come from the state that has produced so many great college players, including Duke legends Bobby Hurley and Jason Williams. His development during his sophomore year of high school when ESPN analysts stated that he “would be a top 300 player nationally in the 2010 class” and then said a few months later “could be an impact player in the Atlantic 10 or a high-major role player” to his senior year when he was a top five recruit (#1 according to some services) and those same recruiting analysts were stating “it will be shocking if he isn’t an all-conference performer and possible all-american his freshman season” portends the potential for his development into a truly special player. Irving is one of the rare players who arrives on campus with the ability to both score and distribute the ball to his teammates. After all the talk about how Coach K had lost his edge in recruiting, Irving might be his most dynamic recruit since Williams arrived in Durham back in 1999. Despite only being on campus for a few months, his Blue Devil teammates have probably already begun to appreciate his high basketball IQ, competitiveness, and all-around ability.  Even though many will question his inclusion on our Impact Player team over his more proven teammate Nolan Smith, Irving has demonstrated a skill set in high school that goes beyond what Smith has demonstrated even with three additional years of experience under the watchful eye of Coach K. If Irving is able to make a smooth transition from the high school game to the college game (and having Singler, Smith, Seth Curry, and the Plumlees around should help), his game could make the Blue Devils heavy favorites to repeat when March arrives. With Irving’s game we don’t think it will be question of if but rather when he feels truly comfortable at the college level, so all the Duke haters should be preparing for a long season ahead.

Kyrie Irving Could be the Best Duke Guard Since J-Will

• Malcolm Delaney – Sr, G – Virginia Tech. If you’re a Hokies fan and a Twitter fiend, back on May 8th you were probably just a little surprised but very happy that Malcolm Delaney tweeted that he was going to put off NBA riches for a year and return to school for his senior season. Nobody, however, could have been happier than Virginia Tech head coach Seth Greenberg. We shudder to think at the number of blood pressure medications that man must be taking these days, having seemingly been the victim of more last-second heartbreakers and burst NCAA Tournament bubbles (are we allowed to refer to “the bubble” in October?) than any one man should ever be expected to endure, but the return of Delaney to Blacksburg should have lowered Greenberg’s systolic by about 20 points. It probably went back up over the summer, though, after Greenberg lost two of his forwards for the season — specifically presumptive sixth man J.T. Thompson to a left ACL tear and Allan Chaney to viral myocarditis (a condition slightly less than 0.6% of all people in America have) — and has another one in Cadarian Raines recovering from surgery in March to repair a re-fractured left foot. The importance of Delaney, then, and the impact he’ll have in this geographical region become obvious. VT will have to go small, and that means more touches for Malcolm, who we’re guessing will have no problem taking on more responsibility in terms of both scoring and rebounding, and we’re saying this about the top scorer in the ACC last season (20.2 PPG). He played an average of 35.8 MPG last year (4th ACC, 58th nationally) and we wonder if he’ll even sit at all this season. Most importantly, if the Hokies are going to attempt to return to only their second NCAA Tournament in the last 15 years (and what would be Delaney’s first), Greenberg will be counting on emotional and vocal leadership on the floor and in the locker room from Delaney, his RTC South Atlantic Impact Player and ACC Player of the Year candidate.

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On the eve of college football’s start…  let’s get caught up on the news and notes from the last week in roundball.

• Preaching to the Choir.  Gary Parrish wrote an article that was ostensibly about the A10’s financially-motivated decision to move from its ancestral home of Philadelphia to its Sun Belt environs of Newport News, Virginia, but morphed into a scathing critique of the rapidly increasing revenue gap between the power conferences and the mid-majors.  We liken this a little bit to what has happened in major league baseball over the past twenty years or so.  It’s not an issue of there once being equality where now there is none; it’s more an issue of relative inequality being much larger than it ever has been (and only increasing).  The Yankees and other major market franchises in MLB always had more money to spend on players, marketing, etc., and were summarily rewarded with larger media deals and ticket prices.  This is similarly true for the power conferences in football and basketball.  But in the modern era of 100-million dollar contracts for baseball players and billion-dollar contracts for media rights, what we’re witnessing is an acceleration of the revenue gap between large and small to a future point that is completely unsustainable.  As an example of the disparity, the $2.2B television contract that the SEC has with ESPN is probably worth more than the contracts of every mid-major league in existence has ever had, combined.  Seriously.  As Parrish points out, this sort of exposure leads to recruits, and the cycle starts all over again.  We’re really uncertain as to how the NCAA plans to deal with this over the next decade, but if we know anything about the entity at all, we’re betting that they’ll be completely behind the curve when something happens.        
• Vegas Watch: Big 12 Preview.  We mentioned this in a previous FBs, but Vegas Watch is leading an exercise previewing each of the six BCS conferences using last year’s Pomeroy rankings, this year’s incoming recruits, and the sharp eye of his respected cronies (Money Line Journal and Sports Investments).  He invited RTC along for the ride this time around, and we tried to provide some value where we could.  Keep an eye out for the remaining installments over the next several weeks.  (note: not even a regression analysis is needed to determine KU is #1 in the Big 12)
• Get Creative, SEC Schools.  Look, it’s not every year that a player named Nimrod Tishman comes into your league as a freshman, assuming that the NCAA clears his amateur status in the next few weeks.  But Billy Donovan’s Florida Gators picked up the 6’6 Israeli to replace Nick Calathes and you should expect to see his curious name all over the place next season.   So here’s our request of the other 11 SEC schools – get creative.  Come up with some really clever signs and chants for when Florida visits your house this winter.  If we hear a school derisively chanting his first name with no further thought or effort put into it, we’re going to be extremely disappointed.  Come on, UK and UT fans, we know you’ve got something up your sleeves – an opportunity like this only comes around once a decade. 
• SI’s 25 Things We Miss in Basketball.  This wasn’t exclusively a list of college basketball memories, but the ones chosen by Grant Wahl, Seth Davis and others were exceptional.  It’s not every day we can honestly say we learned something completely new about the modern era of CBB, but the piece about Bo Ellis designing Marquette’s national title year “untucked” jerseys indeed was (image here).  It was so ugly that the NCAA banned it a few years later.  We also enjoyed the pieces on great team nicknames, Len Bias and the SEC in the 80s.  Give it a read.  You won’t regret it.
• Closing Out Pitino/Sypher.    An awful lot of bandwidth was used writing about the Pitino/Sypher Scandal, and presumably there’s more to this story coming down the road.  But the best piece we read last week was this one on CNNSI by Pablo Torre, who attempts to describe Pitino’s inner circle and how intertwined they all are.  The worst one was this abomination by Jason Whitlock.  Then there was this hard-hitting interview from WLKY in Louisville… 
• Comings and Goings.  J’Covan Brown was cleared to play at Texas this season.  Ditto with Mississippi St.’s John Riek, who will sit out the first nine games of the season over extra benefits.  Pitt’s Gilbert Brown, on the other hand, will be sitting out the fall semester due to academic troubles.  South Carolina picked up a heckuva transfer in walk-on Malik Cooke, who averaged 9/5 for Nevada last season.  Darryl “Truck” Bryant’s legal troubles don’t appear to be too burdensome – he’ll face no jail time after leaving the scene of an accident and striking a WVU student with his vehicle in separate incidents this summer.  What’s that get you under Huggins?  A one-game suspension?  Finally, in the let’s-keep-our-fingers-crossed dept., BYU’s Dave Rose got a clean bill of health after his pancreatic cancer surgery earlier this summer.  He’s hopeful that he’ll be back on the court this season (his next scan is in two weeks).
• Quick Hits.  John Wooden: On death, penises and politics.  Calipari: disappointed in Memphis penalties.  NCAA Selective Enforcement: we need as many people writing as many articles about these inconsistencies as possible.  Tom Crean: Marquette HOFer.  Kevin Stallings: forgoes $100k raise for team trip Down Under.  Greg Paulus:  starting QB at Cuse.  Goodman: impact transfers for 09-10.  Patrick Christopher: the new JJ Redick.  Eric Bledsoe: better than Wall?  Scout: summer all-americans and class of 2011 rankings.   Delaware: looks like NFL parlays or nothing at all, folks.  Arizona: can the Cats scratch their way to 26 in a row?  Billy Clyde: the least hirable coach in America?  FIU: caves, will play UNC after all.  Jarvis Varnado: heading home, but what caused his sudden illness?  Ed Davender: ticket scammer.  BBall Prospectus: careful slurping that class of 09 just yet…  Nebraska: inventing new ways to hold scholarship players.  Teddy Dupay: 30 days in jail.  NCAA Ethics: John Beilein is the head man, and here’s what coaches want to see.  Bank Robber Recruit: Anthony DiLoreto signs with Utah St. 

Kevin McCarthy of Parsing the WAC and Sam Wasson of bleedcrimson.net are the RTC correspondents for the WAC.

Last week was a week of opportunities. Some took advantage while others did not. Boise State took their opportunities by the horns as they completed a home sweep to put themselves into third place. New Mexico State on the other hand did not falling twice on the road after having a chance to rise to third in the standings, instead of coming out of the week in fifth place. Idaho had an opportunity at redemption and took advantage by avenging an earlier loss to New Mexico State, a game that head coach Don Verlin felt they should have won. This week is another week of opportunities. Utah State has the opportunity to give themselves a two-game lead on the rest of the league. Idaho has the opportunity to lay claim to being the best team in the state of Idaho and then the opportunity to sweep Nevada for the first time since the 1998-1999 season.

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Kevin McCarthy from Parsing the WAC and Sam Wasson from bleedCrimson.net are the RTC correspondents for the WAC.

Making Headway. The league had a decent week in the win-loss column as the collective went 10-5 against their competition since the last check-in. Hawai’i (over Eastern Washington), New Mexico State (over Texas-El Paso) and Nevada (over Southern Illinois) all earned solid wins and the league also had a couple of close losses to decent opponents (San Francisco and Montana) . The WAC has another big week of competition upcoming as they’ll face teams from the Pac-10, Missouri Valley Conference, West Coast Conference, Mountain West Conference and Conference USA.

The WAC needs to earn some key victories as they are currently the 15th ranked conference in terms of RPI and just one of the league’s teams, Utah State (40) is inside the Top 100 RPI.

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