RTC Live is back in MSG tonight as the next week-plus of pre-conference tournaments start tipping off everywhere around the country. Texas A&M will take on Mississippi State in the first game, with Arizona visiting a young but talented St. John’s squad in the nightcap. Join the conversation from the Garden, after the jump.

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Tonight’s Lede. Say It Ain’t So, Joe! On the second night of games of the opening week of college basketball, we’d be completely remiss if we didn’t comment on the insane evening that took over the airwaves while the Coaches vs. Cancer games were going on in the background. The number of stomach-turning things about this entire sordid Penn State affair are too many to count, but the absolutely shameful response by PSU students more concerned with protecting their beloved coach than recognizing the basic simplicity of right from wrong is beyond incomprehensible. Where have we come to as a society when the middle 80% of this great land are only moved to demonstration when our sports heroes are under duress or we’ve killed an enemy of the state? Why not take the streets in outrage over the numerous children whose innocent lives were destroyed by the selfish and criminal actions of a powerful few? That folks would care when it matters, and matter when they care. Mistakes were made at Penn State; it doesn’t mean that Joe Paterno is a horrible person, but it does mean that he has to go.

Lavin Returned Early From Medical Leave and Led His Team to a Victory (NYDN/A. Theodorakis)

Your Watercooler Moment.  Lavin Returns, Surprises His Team.  How about some good news in an emotionally rough night? St. John’s head coach Steve Lavin, not someone we would characterize as a man content with sitting around at home, made an early return from his recent prostate cancer surgery and surprised his young team so much that they forgot to play the first half. Truthfully, despite a surfeit of talented parts, St. John’s is going to have evenings when the Red Storm will fall behind by 16 points in the opening stanza because players are still figuring out how to play with each other. But, as Lavin’s interchangeable pieces learn to synergize and feed off one another as they did for the game-changing run in the second half against Lehigh, the ceiling for his team this year appears fluid. And we referred to this angle the other night, but it bears repeating — cancer is an insidious disease, so we love the fact that Lavin was able to make his season debut during one of the Coaches vs. Cancer games. Even before his own diagnosis of prostate cancer, Lavin was a vocal supporter of the various anti-cancer charities related to college basketball. We wish him nothing but the best on his road to complete recovery (having a God’s Gift on hand doesn’t hurt!).

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Gerald Smith of HalftimeAdjustment.com is the RTC correspondent for the SEC. He also contributes to the RTC SEC Microsite. You can find him on twitter @fakegimel.

Reader’s Take I

The SEC/Big East Invitational features all 12 SEC teams in action.

Top Storylines

• Everything In Its Right Place: After several years of coaching changes and lackluster out-of-conference performance, the SEC is finally ready to jump back into the national discussion of powerful basketball conferences. The movement is powered by young coaches (Alabama’s Anthony Grant), older but new-to-the-SEC coaches (LSU’s Trent Green, Georgia’s Mark Fox) and the SEC coaching stalwarts (Vanderbilt’s Kevin Stallings, Florida’s Billy Donovan, Mississippi State’s Rick Stansbury, Mississippi’s Andy Kennedy, Kentucky’s Johhn Calipari). Thanks to the solidifying of the coaching guard, the conference is flush with top talent: 13 McDonald’s All-Americans will be playing this season across six different teams. The national basketball pollsters have noticed and have rewarded the SEC’s upward mobility with four teams in the preseason Top 25 polls; the first time the conference has had four or more teams in a preseason poll since the 2006-07 season (incidentally, also the last time an SEC school won it all).
• Sit Down. Stand Up. (Snakes & Ladders): Kentucky head coach John Calipari brings arguably the greatest recruiting class in SEC history to join an already-talented roster. The hype for this season was already building in Lexington even before the 2010-11 season began when Calipari netted McDonald’s All-Americans Anthony Davis, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Marquis Teague and Kyle Wiltjer; when Terrence Jones and Doron Lamb elected to return for their sophomore seasons to rejoin senior Darius Miller, expectations were raised to national championship status. It remains to be seen if Calipari’s freshmen will wilt against more experienced teams that will play them tough physically and mentally. One thing is for sure: This Kentucky team will score in downpours not seen in Lexington since the 1995-96 National Championship team.

Will Sidney Finall Reach His Full Potential This Year?

• My Iron Lung: After an infamous season that included fighting his own teammate, Mississippi State’s Renardo Sidney realizes that the college basketball public is watching him for more screw-ups. He spent this summer working out in Houston with former NBA player/coach John Lucas in order to improve his conditioning and attitude. Sidney’s lackluster performance in MSU’s first game Monday (nine points and three rebounds in just 23 minutes of play) won’t easily squelch his critics. Unless he can finally meet the expectations of his talent level, the Bulldogs will be wheezing all season long.
• Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box: This season the Southeastern Conference removed the divisional formatting for its basketball conference standings. The teams with the top four overall conference records regardless of schedule strength will receive a first-round bye in the SEC Tournament. The SEC East and SEC West divisional championships now exist only in the past. And perhaps the future: With the addition of Missouri and Texas A&M in the 2012-13 season, going back to the two basketball division format may be necessary.

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Tonight’s Lede. Year the Fifth. Welcome back for another year of late-night — or overnight, depending on where you are — coverage of the nightly events in college basketball. When we started this feature at the beginning of the 2007-08 season, this was pretty much the only place you could find comprehensive national coverage of the sport posted as soon as possible after the games had ended. Now, everybody does it. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but we don’t mind — in fact, it only makes us better. We assume you’re familiar with what this post is about, but each weeknight when there are games of national significance going on, we’ll be here with the After the Buzzer wrapup. On weekends, we’ll put together an overview on Sunday nights that will cover the previous couple of days of games. The intent here, mind you, isn’t to bore anybody with game recaps. We hate those probably more than you do. Rather, we try to mine the universe of nightly games to ferret out the most interesting information in terms of what people are (and will be) talking about the next morning. As with anything we do here, feel free to contact us with ideas for improvement or, really, anything else. We’re always listening.

Grabbing the Cats Wasn't Going to Help Tonight (LHL/C. Bertram)

Your Watercooler Moment. Kentucky Lays Waste to Morehouse College. Even though it was opening night for six schools Monday in the 2kSports Coaches vs. Cancer Classic, the game people will be talking about Tuesday morning didn’t even count on anyone’s record. And it’s a good thing, because the NCAA may have had to award John Calipari’s team two or three victories while remanding a completely overmatched Morehouse College down to Division III, or IV, or V, or whatever basketball purgatory teams that lose by 85 points end up. You read that correctly — the final score in last night’s exhibition game between UK and the D-II school better known for notable alumni such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Spike Lee was 125-40. We won’t cover all the ridiculous stats in this space (The Dagger has you covered for that), but at one point late in the first half the Wildcats finished off a 29-0 run to put their lead at 63-6. It only grew from there, eventually peaking at an 89-point lead that caused the nation’s #1 recruit in the class of 2012, Shabazz Muhammad, to profess his awe. Does it mean anything to lambaste a D-II team by so many points? Probably not. But in just viewing some of the highlights from tonight’s victory, it is abundantly clear that the stable of long, lean athletes that Calipari has at his disposal this season is unmatched in college basketball. At a glance, the Wildcats looked like the Oklahoma City Thunder out there.

Three Dollops of Hoopsurdity.

• A Hopeful Family. Everyone is no doubt now familiar with the interesting name of one of St. John’s new star recruits, God’s Gift Achiuwa. But the names of his brothers and sisters helps to give a little perspective. We learned during tonight’s broadcast that the transfer has five brothers and sisters with equally hopeful names: sisters Peace and Grace; brothers Promise, Precious and God’s Will.

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1. The biggest news of Thursday related to a player who is still a year away from actual collegiate game action. Mitch McGary, a 6’10” power forward who has been desscribed as “Tyler Hansbrough on Red Bull,” committed to Michigan on Thursday. RSCI has him rated as the #3 overall prospect in the Class of 2012, and his range is between #2 and #5, so it’s not like there’s much disagreement on the ridiculous talent of this guy. An Indiana native, he’s certainly someone that not only his other two finalists — Duke and Florida — would have liked to have nailed down, but the fact that John Beilein’s Michigan program was capable of invading Hoosier territory to grab an elite talent like McGary is demonstrative. IU won’t be truly ‘back’ until prep players like McGary are theirs to lose, and at least one national writer is sold on UM as a program on the verge of greatness again.
2. Tough news on Thursday from Virginia Tech, as hard-luck case JT Thompson reportedly tore his ACL for a second time in two seasons this week. Granted, last year it was his right ACL and this year it was his left, but the point remains the same: Instead of a comeback recovery season for Thompson as a fifth-year senior, he’s faced with another long year of rehabilitation and recovery as we head into the season. Thompson’s injury doesn’t necessarily put the Hokies into a precarious position with respect to the bubble, but as usual for the team from Blacksburg, it doesn’t help either. Then again, it wouldn’t be a Seth Greenberg team unless it was 18-12 and sitting on the bubble on Selection Sunday, so although we wish Thompson all the best on his recovery, we can’t say that we’re surprised.
3. One week after announcing an optional initiative that will allow major conferences an opportunity to provide $2,000 per student-athlete to ‘fill the gap’ between the cost of a full scholarship and its incidentals, NCAA president Mark Emmert was quick to say on Thursday that such a stipend was not “pay for play.” No matter where you fall on this issue, we think that everyone can agree that opening up this Pandora’s box is equitable in name only — the power conferences are those who ultimately stand to benefit. Imagine if everyone in America were offered a fantastic deal of a brand new Maserati well below list price of only $50,000! Well… you see the point.
4. Speaking of Emmert’s organization, it wouldn’t be the NCAA without preseason suspensions and Mississippi State is once again on the wrong end of a major delay in one of its key players actually suiting up. The good news for Rick Stansbury is that MSU appears to have Renardo Sidney and Arnett Moultrie ready to hit the floor this season, but they will do so without the backup support of Kristers Zeidaks, a Latvian forward whom he would have liked to have had on his bench. Zeidaks will essentially suffer the Deniz Kilicli rule in that he must sit out a substantial number of games before the NCAA will deem him eligible. In this case, Zeidaks will miss the entire upcoming season and the first 11 games of the 2012-13 season if he ever desires to play college basketball. The issue is that he competed against a professional club team in Europe and must apparently pay his penance with the NCAA for doing so.
5. Truth. Spoken. Alexander Wolff’s article this week on the complete irrelevance of college basketball on decision-making among the taskmasters of collegiate sports is both sickening and enlightening at the same time. Nearly twenty years ago, Wolff followed up the greatest college basketball game ever played with perhaps the greatest college basketball article ever written, “The Shot Heard Round the World.” What the piece lacked in titular form — much like the game itself (most people do not realize that Duke was a HEAVY favorite over Rick Pitino’s Wildcats that evening in Philadelphia) — it made up for in tone and reverence. There is no such reverence in an era where regal programs such as Kansas, St. John’s and Georgetown are thrown to the wolves for the sake of football dollars. While Wolff clearly reminisces about a bygone era where Jayhawks, Johnnies and Hoyas mattered, he also recognizes that, in some ways, the college hoops overlords brought this on themselves. Read it for yourselves.

I. Renko is an RTC columnist.

Question: Which Transfers Will Have the Biggest Impact This Season?

Every year, college basketball fans draw up their preseason predictions of conference champions and NCAA Tournament fields based on returning players and incoming recruits.  But each year, a handful of key transfers play a pivotal role in leading their teams to a conference championship or NCAA Tournament bid.  Which transfers are most likely to play that role this year?

Pierre Jackson and Gary Franklin, Baylor — With the return of Perry Jones and the addition of blue-chip recruits Quincy Miller and Deuce Bello (coming soon to an All-Name Team near you), expectations for the upcoming season in Waco are high.  The Bears have more raw talent than almost anyone in the Big 12 and have a realistic shot at a conference crown.  But Baylor also had quality talent and relatively high expectations last year, only to find their season upended by mediocrity at the most important spot on the floor — the point guard position.  AJ Walton was thrust into the role of replacing Tweety Carter and responded by posting an obscene 32.1% turnover rate.  In a not-unrelated phenomenon, the Bears finished the season ranked 322nd in Division I in team turnover percentage.

The Development of Franklin and/or Jackson Could Be the Difference-Maker for Baylor This Season

If Scott Drew can’t find someone to settle things down at the point this year, the Bears may disappoint again.  And that’s where Jackson and Franklin come in.  Jackson is a well-regarded JUCO transfer and Franklin a formerly touted recruit who transferred from Cal after just a semester.  Franklin will not be eligible until the spring semester, but both will have a chance to pin down the starting point guard job.  If either proves to be a stable floor general, the Bears could have their first conference championship in more than 60 years.

Iowa State’s Starting Lineup — Okay, so maybe the entire starting lineup won’t consist of transfers, but it might come close.  Fred Hoiberg is trying to resuscitate the Iowa State program by resuscitating the careers of several D-I talents, including Chris Allen (Michigan State), Royce White (Minnesota), Anthony Booker (Southern Illinois), and Chris Babb (Penn State).  They make this list as a group because collectively, they will have the single biggest transfer impact on any BCS program this year.

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It’s Halloween night across college basketball nation and all the ghouls, goblins and ghosts are out trolling for sugary goodness. Whether Gary Williams shows up on your doorstep requesting a chicken wing or it’s an exasperated Jay Bilas wearing VCU garb from head to toe, Halloween is the only night of the year where everyone can act how they really want to act if there were no social mores, norms or YouTube. With the start of the season only one week away, RTC has put together a list of five tricks and treats for some of college basketball’s most notable people, places and things. Here’s our list of Halloween night goodies for all of college basketball’s kiddies, but don’t blame us if the bullies from over at Chapel Hill Street or Lexington Avenue jump out from behind a bush and steal all of your candy.

• Treats to Purdue’s Robbie Hummel & Arizona’s Kevin Parrom— in the form of  confident minds and an even more explosive sets of wheels. The good-guy Hummel returns for his senior season after rehabilitating his knee from a second ACL injury last October. He’s taking it slowly, wearing a massive knee brace and practicing only on second days, but the obvious fear is that he’s one of those hard-luck cases who simply can’t get healthy (he has also experienced back issues in the past).  Parrom, on the other hand, found himself a victim of a shooting in September as he was home visiting his mother with terminal cancer (who has since passed). The versatile wing is projected to be back in the Arizona lineup in about a month, but despite his positive attitude and diligent rehabilitation of a leg pierced by a bullet, both he and Hummel will have to overcome the mental hurdles necessary to compete at the highest level of college basketball.  Let’s hope both players find all kinds of treats as two of the biggest success stories of the season.
• Tricks to Connecticut Basketball – for using a wink-and-a-nod to find a scholarship at the last minute for superstar freshman Andre Drummond, while former orphan Michael Bradley volunteered to give his up for the good of the team.  No matter what the courageous Bradley says publicly, we still find the whole thing rather smelly. The NCAA may have stepped in and already provided a nasty little trick for the Huskies, though, in the form of an APR ban from participation in the 2013 NCAA Tournament — which, incidentally, is likely to impact Bradley rather than the one-and-done Drummond. Oy.

Treats to These Two For Finding Their Confidence in 11-12

• Treats to Kansas’ Thomas Robinson — this kid more than any other deserves a breakout 2011-12 campaign. After a nightmarish year in Robinson’s personal life where he lost both of his maternal grandparents and his 37-year old mother in a span of a mere month, the talented big man is on the credit side of karma in a huge way and hopefully ready to cash it in. We’d like nothing more than to see Robinson become an All-American this year by leading Bill Self’s team to its eighth consecutive Big 12 regular season title, before heading off to the NBA Lottery as a superstar in the making. 
  
• Tricks to the NCAA’s $2,000 Optional Stipend –– although we agree that football and basketball student-athletes are vastly underpaid relative to their value to the schools, making the stipend optional at the leisure of the conference only opens the door for even more of an inequitable distribution of talent than already exists. The power conferences can easily weather the extra couple million bucks such a measure will require, but as for the mid-majors… they’d best keep scouring those patches for the Great Pumpkin of Mid-Major hope to find their future stars.

Last week we examined the sixty or so major programs that Vegas feels is worth offering as action to win the 2011-12 national championship. Unsurprisingly, the top several teams in the preseason Coaches Poll — North Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio State, Duke, Syracuse — generally mimic the top several teams in terms of the odds Vegas is offering. The one stunning exception to that trend is Connecticut, whom the pollsters have listed among the few teams most likely to cut the nets down in New Orleans next April, but from whom the oddsmakers still aren’t seeing much value (+2000, or a 4.8% chance, as of now).

This week we’ll take a step further into the odds and consider the probabilities that Vegas has assigned to each power conference team to win its regular season championship. These odds are by no means foolproof. In reviewing last year’s preseason tables of the same six leagues, only Pittsburgh in the Big East and Arizona in the Pac-10 were favorites that came into the money by March. The other four league favorites this time last year? Try Duke in the ACC (UNC), Baylor/Kansas State in the Big 12 (Kansas), Michigan State in the Big Ten (Ohio State), and Kentucky in the SEC (Florida). So while all of these favorites looked reasonable one year ago today, keep in mind that college basketball seasons have a tendency to work themselves out differently despite what the oddsmakers and pundits think.

Ed. note: These odds are published on The Greek as of October 27, 2011. If you’re unfamiliar with how futures odds work, +150 represents the amount of money a potential gambler would receive back if he placed a $100 wager on that team and it won.  He would, in other words, win back 1.5 times his original wager.  Those few teams sporting a negative odds notation (e.g., -175) represents a situation where someone would have to wager $175 to win back $100. Since the aggregate of futures odds are designed to add up to a figure much larger than 100% (removing the incentive to wager on every team), we’ve added a far right column normalizing the odds to a true 100% value for each conference.    

ACC

Quick Thoughts on the ACC:

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Brian Joyce is an SEC microsite writer and a regular contributor.  He can be reached @bjoyce_hoops on Twitter.

Question: Will Renardo Sidney Get In Shape and Behave This Year?

Mississippi State coach Rick Stansbury is cautiously optimistic that troubled big man, Renardo Sidney, is on the road to redemption. Sidney has had numerous difficulties ranging from weight and conditioning issues, well documented fights with teammates, and even questions over his amateur status due to receiving improper benefits before stepping foot on the Starkville campus. Mo’ money has meant a lot mo’ problems for Renardo Sidney.

Renardo Sidney Behaving Himself

ISSUE 1: CONDITIONING – Now there is reason for Bulldog fans to be hopeful. Sidney lost 23 pounds over the summer while working out with former NBA star John Lucas. The weight loss has helped the 6’10” power forward improve his conditioning so far this year. He is actually finishing conditioning drills, according to Stansbury. “That doesn’t mean he was winning every race,” his coach says, “but he made it through it. For him, that’s a step in the right direction. We’ve just got to keep stepping the right way and not step back.”

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The old adage is that there’s no “I” in team, but many people fail to remember that there’s actually a healthy dose of “me” within that word — half of it, in fact.  The current collegian who most embraces the modern and more cynical interpretation of that aphorism is none other than Mississippi State’s Renardo Sidney.  The 6’10”, insert-weight-here, conundrum of a talent is entering his third year in Rick Stansbury’s Bulldog program, and his fifth as the sport’s poster child for more headaches and hype than peace of mind and production.  But give the portly kid from Jackson, Mississippi, credit — he keeps finding new and inventive ways to alienate himself.  The latest and greatest act in his own personal passion play is his decision to skip out on his team’s August trip to Europe in favor of returning to John Lucas’ training facility in Houston to try to get his weight under control before the start of next season.  According to Brandon Marcello at the Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger, Sidney recently said:

Another Strike Against Sidney?

Everybody has their own opinion but I’m doing what I have to do.  There’s nothing else going on. They can say what they want to say but, like I said, I know what I have to do basketball-wise. I wasn’t ready to go (to Europe) and I felt like I really wasn’t in shape. I wanted to come back down here and get some more work.

At one point during the late spring, Sidney had reportedly ballooned up to 320 pounds, well above his listed playing weight of 270.  He lost 23 pounds during his first cycle through Lucas’ camp at the early part of the summer, but his stated goal is to lose the remainder before school begins at Mississippi State on August 17.  Why Sidney doesn’t feel that traveling and training with his own team and setting an example as an upperclassman coming off an underachieving year is beyond us, but the enigmatic center has often made decisions that inspire head-scratching among most observers inside the sport. 

The big question on everyone’s mind is whether this decision is simply cover for something else, and if such a strange allowance on the part of the coaches and Sidney himself (who willingly gives up a free summer trip to Europe with your team?) represents the beginning of the end for him at Mississippi State.  Marcello’s follow-up column today addressed this very concern and it’s worth repeating — with as much trouble as Sidney has caused during his two-plus years at MSU and barely anything to show for it (unless you count a 10-9 record chock full of half-winded performances as something), it might simply be the right time for the two to permanently part ways.  Even if Sidney loses the requisite weight in Houston over the next month, he’ll have missed out on another chance to bond with his teammates and will no doubt find additional trouble somewhere else before the start of next season.  For a Bulldog program that has been consistently good for the better part of a decade, the best outcome for Rick Stansbury and the MSU faithful may be to simply hope that Sidney never returns.  We hate to completely write off a kid like that, but at what point do you finally say “enough is enough?”  Another month, and Bulldog fans may know the answer to that question.