Happy Fiscal New Year, everyone.  We hope that your 2010-11 is filled with great financial security and hoops hysteria.

1. Here’s some somewhat dated news, but it didn’t seem to get much attention until this week, which is that Mississippi State’s Renardo Sidney evidently sees himself as a 1-and-doner when he finally gets to play this coming season.  Sidney tweeted during last week’s draft the following: “NYC #2011  Believe dat.”  The big man who sat out the entire 2009-10 season over concerns with his eligibility certainly has the ability to become a top prospect, but he may want to check next year’s draft location before he makes his reservations.
2. It was an odd summer day for comings and goings yesterday, but Michigan dismissed junior guard Laval Lucas-Perry from its team for an undisclosed violation of team rules, while Oregon forward Jamil Wilson is transferring back east to Marquette for his final three years of eligibility.  Lucas-Perry was a sometime starter for John Beilein’s team, now facing a huge rebuild after losing his two stars and another key contributor in LLP.  Wilson was a starter at Oregon, averaging 5/3 in just under 17 minutes per game — nice coup for Buzz Williams to grab the talented forward from nearby Racine.
3. Insert New Jersey chemical plant joke here…  Rutgers will offer naming rights to its football and basketball stadiums (“the RAC”) as a way to offset some of the expense of a recent renovations.  Some RTC ideas: The Honeywell Hive?  The Prudential RAC?  Toys R Us Arena?  Campbell Soup Bowl?  We could go on…
4. An interesting discussion over at Fanhouse as to whether, with John Wooden’s passing, if Coach K is the best coach alive.  He’s certainly on the short list, but it’s hard to believe that he’s above Phil Jackson or Scotty Bowman, much less Pat Summit or Geno Auriemma in his own sport.
5. At the Under-19 World Championships, Team USA led by Duke’s Kyrie Irving (21 pts) and rising prep senior Austin Rivers (19 pts) won the gold medal when Quincy Miller (another rising senior) hit a three with 25 seconds remaining to give the Americans a three-point lead that stuck.  Good job, fellas.

Since the SEC expanded to twelve teams in 1991, it has utilized the two-division format, with Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Vanderbilt in the East and Alabama, Auburn, Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Arkansas and LSU in the West.  Each team plays a home-and-home series with the other members of its division annually, and switches home games every other year with the six teams in the other division, making for a fairly clean sixteen-game conference schedule.  According to SEC Commissioner Mike Slive, though, the league is considering doing away with the two divisions altogether (as it has already done in women’s basketball), or at a minimum, keeping the divisions intact but seeding the postseason SEC Tournament according to overall W/L records. 

This SEC Cheerleader is a Fan of Slive's Idea

The driving force for this is the current perception that the SEC East is the varsity squad to the SEC West’s JV group.  Last season, with Kentucky, Tennessee and Vanderbilt leading the way, the SEC East went 27-9 (.750) against the other division, and those same three teams represented three-quarters of the semifinal round in the SEC Tournament.  In the past four seasons, thirteen of the eighteen SEC teams to make the NCAA Tournament came from the East, and all four SEC participants in the 2010 NCAA Tourney were from that division.  So long as coaches such as John Calipari (or whoever is at Kentucky), Bruce Pearl and Billy Donovan are in the same division, it’s difficult to argue that this is a cyclical thing where the SEC West will eventually rise to equal or better standing that its eastern counterparts.  The last true powerhouse program in the West was Nolan Richardson’s Arkansas teams of the early to mid-90s, with the other five programs since making short-term claims but none truly rising to seize the mantle.  For what it’s worth, it should also be noted that the twelve-team ACC and Big 12 conferences have successfully utilized the no-division basketball/two-division football formats for some time now and it seems to work well enough for them. 

Maybe we’re becoming overly cynical and paranoid in our old age, but we wonder if this talk belies something else going on with the conference realignment debate and is actually a pre-emptive maneuver by the SEC brass to prepare for expansion of some sort.  Consider that if the SEC raids the ACC and/or Big 12, as described in options here, what defines a school as eastern or western may suddenly shift a couple hundred miles on the map.  By removing the divisions in basketball and testing possibilities with respect to scheduling and so forth, the SEC would be in better organizational position to accept its new members if or when that ever comes to pass.  If you’re Florida State fan or Texas fan hoping that the call comes from the SEC someday, this seemingly small initiative could actually signal much greater changes down the line. 

1. Finally.  UConn’s Jim Calhoun will receive his long-awaited extension this morning, which will keep him employed in Storrs through the 2013-14 season.  The five-year deal is retroactive to the 2009-10 season and will reportedly pay Calhoun over $13M.  Where’s Ken Krayeske now?
2. With just a little over 36 hours until the early entry withdrawal deadline passes, a few more players have made their decisions.  UTEP’s Arnett Moultrie will stay in the draft even though he is not considered a first round lock, while Seton Hall’s duo of Jeremy Hazell and Jeff Robinson are returning for another season of Big East basketball.  Mike DeCourcy points out that there are several teams sweating out decisions today and tomorrow as players who probably shouldn’t be in the draft pool are still considering the draft process — most notably, Purdue, Mississippi State and Illinois.  Check back over the weekend for updates on the final decisions of many of these players.
3. Houston starting point guard Desmond Wade is transferring out of the program, preferably to a school closer to his home base of the New York area.  He started 31 of the Cougars’ 35 games this year in an NCAA season, averaging 6/5 APG in a productive season.  With new coach James Dickey and all but one starter now moving on, UH will have to rebuild quickly to compete again in CUSA next year.
4. We know that the Wear twins are moving back west after their single season in Chapel Hill, but where will they end up?  Our completely unsubstantiated rumor of the day suggests UCLA’s Ben Howland will be the winner here.
5. Duke’s inestimable Cameron Indoor Stadium could be getting a significant facelift in the near future.  A two-story building attached to the front of the arena is proposed to act as a hospitality space for alumni and fans to gather before Duke basketball and football games.  Wait, Duke has a football team?

This has been discussed repeatedly since the late April announcement that the NCAA Tournament would be moving to a 68-team design beginning in 2011, but we’ve yet to come across a piece that outlines all of the iterations that the new four-PiG format might take.  Hashing it out on the phone with The Kiff (a longstanding member of the Cult of 64) last weekend, we ultimately settled on two major bones of contention — who gets to play in the four play-in games, and how do you structure it so as to maximize interest, revenue and bracketing?  We’ll discuss each of these questions in turn, but first, it’s interesting to read a quote from one prominent member of the NCAA Selection Committee for insights as to what may or may not be on the table here.  Laing Kennedy, the Kent State athletic director who will finish up a five-year term as a member of the NCAA Selection Committee, has this to say about it:

Going from 65 to 68 means four first-round games. Our committee, when we meet in May, will look at some models on how to bracket that. For example, you can have two afternoon and two night games in Dayton, or two games at two different sites.  But the big question to be decided by the committee is which teams should play those play-in games, and how the winners will be seeded into the field.  Speaking individually, I would look at the last eight, and rewarding the AQs [automatic qualifiers].  Those would be highly competitive first games. But those are things we have to look at in May.

Additionally, Greg Shaheen, the NCAA Senior Executive VP who got lit up by the media in the week leading up to the Final Four, said during a radio interview with Doug Gottlieb recently that all options are on the table with respect to logistics but one of the primary considerations of the committee in structuring the new games will be to remove some of the stigma from them.  A noble endeavor, indeed.

How to Avoid the Dreaded Stigma?

With the hope that reasonable minds ultimately will prevail, here are our thoughts on the matter.

Who Plays In It?

This is the part most fans care about, and with good reason — they want to know whether as standard practice they can continue to ignore PiG Tuesday.  As it currently stands, roughly 99.9% of America* fails to so much as recognize that there is a Tuesday night game ostensibly involving NCAA Tournament opponents.  Only the truly anal among us wait until Wednesday to fill out our bracket on the ridiculous off chance that the winner of the PiG is the “right” matchup to give its corresponding #1 team trouble (and you know who you are).  So let’s cut right to it.  For the last ten seasons, there have been only four groups of people who care about this game.

* unscientific sampling of the three guys walking around the office hallway

1. #16A’s fans, players and families.
2. #16B’s fans, players and families.
3. Overly nervous fans of the corresponding #1 seed waiting on an opponent for Friday’s #1/#16 game.
4. The good citizens of Dayton, Ohio, who keep attending this thing year after year.

Just about six weeks ago, we saw this played out in real time as the “Opening Round” of the NCAA Tournament between Arkansas-Pine Bluff-Winthrop competed directly with the first round of the NIT and several interesting matchups that included UConn-Northeastern, UNC-William & Mary, Texas Tech-Seton Hall and NC State-South Florida.  From that night’s ESPN coverage to the trending Twitter topics and later to the Nielsen ratings, it was painfully clear that on this mid-March evening, the NIT games were the preferred matchups for college hoops fans.  As anyone working at 700 West Washington Street in Indianapolis is surely aware, that should NEVER happen.  Even on its worst night, for an NCAA Tournament game to be overshadowed by another basketball-related sporting event in March should be an impossible achievement, and yet on that particular evening it was not.

This NIT Contest, Not the NCAA Game, Was the Featured Event of the Night

And therein lies the problem.  Most people, even hardcore college hoops fans like us, don’t consider the Tuesday night PiG to be a legitimate part of the NCAA Tournament.  It involves the two worst-rated teams in the field, which means nobody knows anything about them; and it has zero impact on our brackets, which means there’s no corresponding reason to care to learn about them either.  So the question for the NCAA becomes: how do you legitimize it?  How do you remove that stigma that Shaheen mentioned as problematic?  How do you make people care about the (now) four play-in games on Tuesday so that random NIT games involving struggling national powers don’t take priority over NCAA games on the sports page?  Here are the two viable alternatives as we see them.

Status Quo (x4)

Keeping things as they are now where the #16s play the ‘other’ #16s (or possibly #17s in the new scheme) wouldn’t seem to do much to enhance the legitimacy of the PiGs, but there is precedent for this.  From 1978 to 1985, the NCAA Tournament doubled in size from 32 to 64 teams (can you imagine the outcry in today’s environment??).  There were several fits and starts along the way as it expanded a little more almost every year in-between, but suffice it to say that in 1983, the NCAA invited 52 teams to the ball with the final eight automatic qualifiers slotted as #12 seeds into four play-in games (or the “preliminary round” as they called it then).  In 1984, there were five play-in games with an additional #11 seed added to the mix.  In both of these years, all of the play-in games were played on the Tuesday prior to the first round games, and the teams were sent to PiG sites of Philadelphia’s Palestra or Dayton’s UD Arena depending on relative proximity to the school(s) involved.  The winners advanced to play #5 seeds in the true “first round,” with the one exception of the #11 seed (Northeastern) in 1984 who played a #6 seed in that round.

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Lots of goings today…

• Syracuse all-american forward Wes Johnson will enter the NBA Draft after one season with the Orange.  He burst onto the national scene with two scintillating performances in Coaches vs. Cancer games versus California and UNC at Madison Square Garden, and for a few fleeting moments in November and early December he was considered the frontrunner for NPOY.  Prior to February injuries to his back and shooting hand, Syracuse was playing as well as anyone in the country.  He will sign with an agent, a good move considering that he will likely become a high lottery pick in June.  He also expects to graduate later this summer.
• UNC forward Ed Davis will also enter the NBA Draft.  After a superb freshman campaign where he was a key contributor to the 2008-09 national championship Tar Heels, Davis had an up-and-down sophomore year that ended with a broken wrist suffered in a game against Duke.  He averaged 13/9/3 blks per game prior to that injury, but there was a lingering feeling among folks that he could be doing more with his ample athletic gifts.  Nevertheless, he is still viewed as a lottery pick in the draft.  Finally, remember the flap about Davis supposedly signing with an agent back in February?  Trust us, today’s news shocked nobody.
• It’s draft day for forwards apparently, as West Virginia’s Devin Ebanks also declared his intention to go pro today.  The 6’8 swing player who averaged 12/8 in his sophomore year really distinguished himself as an elite defender this season, and could probably play at the next level on that talent alone for many years.  Mock drafts have Ebanks falling into the middle of the first round at this point.  He plans to sign with an agent.
• In a mild surprise, Purdue center JaJuan Johnson is reportedly planning to announced that he too will enter this year’s NBA Draft but he will not sign with an agent, leaving the door open for a return to school next season.  Boiler Nation awaits his final decision (by May 8) with baited breath.  Unless JJJ is dead-set on going pro, he’s a likely candidate to return because most experts have him as a late first-rounder at this point.
• Mountain West POY and New Mexico guard Darington Hobson also plans on evaluating himself over the next few weeks before making a final decision as to whether to enter the draft, as ESPN.com reports that he will make a formal announcement tomorrow.  He has some work to do, as he’s considered a second rounder by most experts, and could stand to spend another season honing his game (particularly strength) in Las Cruces.
• Memphis guard Elliot Williams‘ strong sophomore season (18/4/4 assts) has resulted in his decision to declare for the draft today as well.  We suppose it was not only a good decision to leave Duke for his family concerns but also for his professional career — he is projected as a mid-first rounder.
• Finally, Illinois junior guard Demetri McCamey also declared today, but he is expected to be only testing the waters as he will not sign with an agent.  He is currently projected as a late first/early second round pick.

Another going involves two Missouri players — Miguel Paul and Tyler Stone — who are transferring out of the program.  Neither player saw much run for Mike Anderson, averaging sixteen minutes per game combined in 2009-10.  With the spring signing period starting later this week, we’re sure Anderson has a couple of athletic replacements already in mind.

It’s not a coming or a going, rather a staying, but Mississippi State’s Rick Stansbury has reportedly turned down the Clemson job vacated by Oliver Purnell.  This is interesting given that the ACC is more prestigious in basketball than the SEC West, but Stansbury has built a solid program in Starkville and he may have the services of Renardo Sidney next year at his disposal.

For the third consecutive year, Roy Williams will lead his North Carolina Tar Heels to the Final Four of a postseason national tournament.  Ok, it’s the NIT, but Carolina should get a little credit for winning tough road games at Mississippi State and UAB to move into the semifinals at Madison Square Garden next week.  Tonight two other teams joined UNC and Ole Miss: Rhode Island, who went into the cauldron of Blacksburg and came out with a 79-72 win; and Dayton, who ran all over Illinois to send two Atlantic 10 teams to MSG.  Here’s the remaining bracket, schedule and times.

It’s interesting to note that none of the four #1 seeds made it to the semis despite having home court advantage for the first three rounds.  #1 Arizona State was knocked off in the first round by Jacksonville, while UNC outlasted #1 Mississippi State in the last round before the other two — #1 Illinois and #1 Virginia Tech — lost tonight.  It’s dicey to draw conclusions from NIT performance because you never know how motivated teams will be to try their hardest, but at least from the eye test, all of the above teams other than perhaps ASU were taking the experience seriously.

Regardless, these two matchups next week should make for an appetizer in the middle of next week while we’re all starved for action waiting for the other, more grandiose Final Four to get busy in Indianapolis.

We realize that 99% of you are only interested in the NCAA Tournament, but we’d not be doing our job as the ubiquitous college basketblog (who the hell came  up with that slogan anyway?) unless we at least kept tabs on the other national tourneys that have been going on in the background of the Big Dance.

NIT

Imagine our surprise when during one of Sportscenter’s lead-ins yesterday showed the familiar light blue uniforms of North Carolina as part of their highlight package.  Despite what CBS’ “Rules of Engagement” promo would have us believe, UNC and UConn are not a part of the NCAA Tournament.  They are, however, part of the NIT, and they’re both still lacing them up in the other “national tournament.”   On Friday night, Ole Miss defeated Memphis 90-81, while on Saturday Texas Tech, UAB and the aforementioned Heels got a nice road win on a buzzer-beating layup by Larry Drew II at top seed Mississippi State.  All of those teams will now advance to the quarterfinal round, one step away from the semis in Madison Square Garden next week.  Here’s the remaining schedule:

Second Round Games – Monday 3/22

• Nevada @ Rhode Island – 6pm  (ESPNU)
  
• Connecticut @ Virginia Tech – 7pm  (ESPN)
• Kent State @ Illinois – 8pm  (ESPNU)
• Dayton @ Cincinnati – 9pm  (ESPN)

Quarterfinal Games – Tuesday 3/23

• Texas Tech @ Ole Miss – 7pm  (ESPN)
• North Carolina @ UAB – 9pm  (ESPN)

CBI

In the CBI, the quarterfinals are set for Monday night, as follows:

• Charleston @ VCU – 7pm (HDNet)
• Morehead State @ Boston U. – 7pm
• Princeton @ IUPUI – 7pm
• Green Bay @ St. Louis – 9pm (HDNet)

CIT

Ditto for the CIT, who will play four quarterfinals on Monday evening at campus sites:

• Appalachian State @ Marshall – 7pm
  
• Fairfield @ Creighton – 8pm
• Louisiana Tech @ Missouri State – 8pm
• Pacific @ Northern Colorado – 9pm
  

Welcome to the Real Dance, Bluffers.  Arkansas-Pine Bluff 61, Winthrop 44.  Well, we’re off to a great start so far this year.  With tonight’s convincing win over Winthrop, UAPB becomes the 64th entrant into the bracket, and those who fret about completeness (“I can’t make my picks yet!!”) are able to finally concentrate.  For a team that started the season 0-11 as it traveled all over the country taking regular beatings, a win tonight and another roadie to Jacksonville to face Duke on Friday feels like just desserts.  Allen Smith had 14/5 and Tavaris Washington contributed 8/13/5 assts as the Golden Lions broke open a close game at the half to slowly pull away in the second.  Even though it is only the PiG, this is the first win by a SWAC team in the NCAA Tournament since Southern University pulled the trick as a #15 in 1993.

Allen Smith Moves On to Play Duke (DDN/L. Powell)

Argument for the Play-In-Game.  In watching some of this game tonight in front of 8,000+ fans at the UD Arena in Dayton, while switching over to some of the more interesting NIT games tonight, we once again come back to the idea of expansion and how the NCAA might look into integrating ideas into the existing system using something that approximates logic and reason.  Obviously, the preferred scenario is no additional expansion, but it’s also the least likely.  We’re never going back to a perfectly symmetrical sixty-four team bracket now that we’re at 65, so let’s consider the next best alternative.  The Tuesday night PiG is widely mocked among bracketeers around the country, but as you can see by clicking through the link above, people in Dayton attend and enjoy the game.  We’ve said for the better part of a decade, though, that having a single game hanging out on a thread like that is weird and feels a little funny — it’s like finding a box of raisins in the paper towels section at the grocery store.  We think that the fix for this is to have four play-in games, which means 68 teams would be invited to the NCAA Tournament.  Each region would have one PiG, and all four of them would be played in the 7pm and 9pm time slots on Tuesday night, with winners moving on to the Friday games around the country.  Dayton could host two games and another great basketball city such as Salt Lake or Memphis could host the other two.  Here’s the rub, though.  Rather than making the four PiGs a situation where the worst eight teams (#16 seeds) are slotted into them, make it so that the games utilize the unyielding buzz and conversation about the bubble that dominates the entire previous weekend.  You achieve this by slotting the last eight at-large teams into these four play-in games.  This year, that would have meant the following scenario:

• Utah State vs. Mississippi State
  
• UTEP vs. Illinois
  
• Minnesota vs. Arizona State
  
• Florida vs. Virginia Tech

How ridiculously fun would that be to watch on Tuesday night?– no offense to tonight’s competitors, but it’s no contest!  Bubble teams, this is the chance for you to make your case against a similarly situated team — it’s win or go home.  The UAPBs and Winthrops of the world would already be in the round of 64 (aka the first round) as #16 seed auto-bids.  The winner of these four PiGs comprised solely of the eight lowest at-larges could be slotted as #12 or #13 seeds regardless of who wins.  Can someone tell us what’s wrong with this idea?

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We know that some people will be looking for this Monday morning, so here it is… your 2010 NIT bracket.

Pretty compelling evidence that Illinois, Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Virginia Tech were the last four out of the NCAAs, eh?

Keep in mind that if the NCAA Tournament expands to 96 teams, all of the above would have been added to our field.  This means that fourteen additional BCS teams would have been added to the Big Dance, making it a grand total of 46 total teams from the super six conferences.  Of the 73 schools in those leagues, that would represent 63% making the expanded tournament (vs. 49% now).  Do we really need teams like Texas Tech, St. John’s and UNC in the field this year?  Of course not.

One other interesting note is that the NIT shows the depth of some of these leagues by how many additional bids they receive.  The Big East (+5) has 13 teams going to either the NCAA or NIT, while the ACC (+3) has nine.  The SEC (+2), Big Ten (+2), Big 12 (+1) and Pac-10 (+1) make up the rest.  What’s amazing is just how poor the Pac-10 was this year, with only three teams among the top 96 in America.

Paul Jordan of Wildcat Blue Blog is the RTC correspondent for the Southeastern Conference.  The SEC Tournament begins Thursday at Noon ET.

EAST

1. Kentucky 29-2 (14-2)
2. Vanderbilt 23-7 (12-4)
3. Tennessee 23-7 (11-5)
4. Florida 20-11 (9-7)
5. South Carolina 15-15 (6-10)
6. Georgia 13-16 (5-11)

WEST

1. Mississippi State 21-10 (9-7)
2. Mississippi 21-9 (9-7)
3. Arkansas 14-17 (7-9)
4. Alabama 16-14 (6-10)
5. Auburn 15-15 (6-10)
6. LSU 11-19 (2-14)

Despite all the hype and hoopla over the SEC being a much improved conference this season, at this time the SEC still has as many teams locked into the NCAA Tournament as they did last year — three. Kentucky finished up the regular season with their 44th SEC regular season championship and the number two ranking in both the AP and the ESPN/USA Today Top 25. Tennessee finished #13 in the ESPN/USA Today poll and #15 in the AP top 25. The Vanderbilt Commodores finished the season ranked #20 in the AP Top 25 and #23 in the ESPN/USA Today poll. Other than these three teams, no other SEC school even received votes in either poll so you would figure that if any other teams are to go dancing, they need to get some wins in the upcoming SEC Tournament.

Now that the regular season is over, I am pleased to present my first and second team ALL-SEC roster, as well as my choice for Player of the Year and Coach of the Year:

FIRST TEAM ALL-SEC

• G- John Wall, Kentucky
• G- Devan Downey – South Carolina
• F- DeMarcus Cousins – Kentucky
• F- Trey Thompkins, Georgia
• C – Jarvis Varnado – Mississippi State

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