rice – Rush The Court

2016-17 RTC Preseason O26 All-America Teams

Tommy Lemoine — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 16:31:33 +0000

At long last, college basketball has arrived. Here are our Preseason O26 All-American and Player of the Year selections.

Player of the Year

Valparaiso’s Alec Peters is our pick for O26 Player of the Year. (Jeff Zelevansky / Getty Images)

Alec Peters – G – Valparaiso. Peters, an outstanding shooter with tremendous size, could have transferred nearly anywhere he wanted this offseason and probably started immediately—something people thought might happen following the departure of head coach Bryce Drew in April. Instead, the senior chose to withdraw from the NBA Draft and return to Valparaiso, making the Crusaders instant favorites to win the Horizon League [...]

C-USA Breakdown: Louisiana Tech & UTEP Atop Decidedly One-Bid League

Tommy Lemoine — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 17:01:54 +0000

As recently as last Thursday, Conference USA still had a legitimate shot at becoming a two-bid league. Old Dominion – in second place behind Louisiana Tech – was considered among Joe Lunardi’s “Last Four In” selections, a team capable of sneaking into the Big Dance even if failed to win the league tournament. But life outside power conferences can be cruel, and the Monarchs all but squandered those at-large chances over the weekend, suffering back-to-back road losses at UT-San Antonio (Thursday) and UTEP (Saturday) while falling to fifth place overall. In fact, with several other would-be contenders also stumbling badly [...]

O26 Weekly Awards: Harvard, Jalen Cannon, Jim Les & Rice

Tommy Lemoine — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 16:01:34 +0000

Throughout the season, the Other 26 microsite will run down our weekly superlatives, including team, player, coach and whatever else strikes our fancy in that week’s edition.

O26 Team of the Week

Harvard. One could argue that Harvard’s season was at stake against Yale on Saturday, or at least close to it. The Crimson, 4-1 in Ivy League play, faced the prospect of falling two games back of the undefeated Bulldogs and severely damaging their hopes for a fourth-straight outright conference title. A victory for Tommy Amaker’s group would even up the records with a return game in Cambridge still ahead on [...]

Pac-12 M5: 01.10.14 Edition

Connor Pelton (@ConnorPelton28) — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 16:00:21 +0000

Colorado is 7-11 in league road games since joining the Pac-12, and the 15th ranked Buffaloes will play their first of the 2013-14 season this Sunday in Seattle. The team says they’re ready to take the next step; they’ve beaten a pair of top ten teams at home and took down two solid Mountain West clubs on the road by a combined 29 points. But in order to join the top ten realm themselves, the Buffaloes need to get the Pac-12 road monkey off their back. Things didn’t go too smoothly in Colorado’s first conference game away from home two nights [...]

Big East M5: 12.04.13 Edition

Dan Lyons — Wed, 04 Dec 2013 13:20:05 +0000

What was supposed to be a promising season for a young, talented Providence team has gone off the rails a bit as suspensions and injuries have reared their ugly heads. Ed Cooley lost Kris Dunn to injury for Sunday night’s showdown with national power Kentucky, while freshmen Brandon Austin and Rodney Bullock remain suspended indefinitely. All three players, especially Dunn and Austin, were expected to be major contributors for a Friars squad looking for an NCAA berth, but for now Cooley has to dance with the players that brought him: “I’m going to coach the team that’s on the bus.” So Feast Week was fun, right? Well next [...]

Oregon Post-Mortem

Connor Pelton — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:31:25 +0000

Now that we are officially in the offseason, it’s time to take a look back and evaluate each team’s 2012-13 performance. Next on our list: Oregon.

What Went Right

Considering most Oregon fans hadn’t even heard of former Rice standout Arsalan Kazemi until less than a month before Midnight Madness, the last-minute addition of the Iranian Sensation did wonders for the Ducks’ play in 2012-13. The team clicked well with Kazemi on board as he added the final piece to an almost-complete puzzle. His hustle and ability to grab seemingly every loose ball on the court made him a quick fan favorite.

Morning Five: 04.01.13 Edition

nvr1983 — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 11:40:40 +0000

We are nearly at the finish line as we have whittled the field down to four. The Regional games were not exactly things of beauty as outside of two games (Michigan-Kansas and Ohio State-Arizona) the games were not particularly exciting. Hopefully next weekend provides a little more drama, but there should be no shortage of story lines with one semifinal pitting Syracuse against Michigan (possibly Boeheim’s last run and Michigan’s first trip since the Fab 5) and Louisville against Wichita State (winning for Kevin Ware and the Cinderella trying to make history). We are sure that more story lines will come out as [...]

Celebrating The Oregon Seniors

Connor Pelton — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:45:10 +0000

On a night when the biggest story will be the return of an injured freshman, arguably the best group of seniors in the league will play their final home game at Matthew Knight Arena tonight. From a four year, in-state star to a trio of junior or senior transfers, all four graduating Ducks have had major impacts at separate points throughout the season. We break them down below.

Arsalan Kazemi and Tony Woods Have Dominated The Inside In 2012-13 (credit: Tess Freeman)

Arsalan Kazemi has been Oregon’s difference-maker this year, bringing the Ducks from what most thought would be a bubble team at [...]

Oregon Basketball and The Season of New: Giving Thanks and Getting Transfers

Rockne Roll — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:47:51 +0000

Welcome to Oregon Basketball and The Season of New, a weekly Pac-12 microsite column from Rockne Roll (@raroll). His column will focus on the various issues facing college basketball through the prism of the Oregon Ducks, a program ostensibly on the rise with top-notch facilities and coaching but still subject to many of the same problems suffered by many of the other high-major programs around the country.

Thanksgiving is a time to take a step back from the grind and routine of life and appreciate that which we often take for granted. Family, friends, employment, even simple things like food and shelter [...]

Wrapping Up The DirecTV Classic in Anaheim…

AMurawa — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 16:15:02 +0000

Andrew Murawa is an RTC correspondent and a Pac-12 microsite writer. He filed this report after attending the DirecTV Classic over the weekend in Anaheim.

The field at the DirecTV Classic in Anaheim this weekend was anything but classic. The play was ragged at times, there were more than a couple of teams working through the growing pains of major roster overhauls, and so coming up with a coherent all-tournament team was no easy task. But, in the end, we come away with what looked like the most likely outcome going into the holiday weekend – a California win. It wasn’t [...]

Who Won the Week? Not the ACC…

Kenny Ocker — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 23:08:02 +0000

Who Won the Week? is a regular column that will outline and discuss three winners and losers from the previous week. The author of this column is Kenny Ocker (@KennyOcker), an Oregon-based sportswriter best known for his willingness to drive (or bike!) anywhere to watch a basketball game.

WINNER: Kevin Ollie

Kevin Ollie Has Gotten Off to a Nice Start at UConn (credit: CT Post)

The debutante coach of the UConn Huskies still has a huge task in front of himself this season in trying to motivate a team ineligible for the postseason because of terrible academic performance. But he couldn’t [...]

Pac-12 M5: 11.16.12 Edition

KDanna — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 16:01:31 +0000

Great news for the Ducks, as the NCAA has granted transfer Arsalan Kazemi a waiver and he will be available to play for Oregon right away. It’s a good thing, because Oregon has a huge home date with Vanderbilt later tonight. Many figured this was coming since Omar Oraby, a fellow Rice transfer, was not required to sit out a year given similar circumstances. An interesting point of contention with the Oraby and Kazemi transfers is that USC and Oregon alleged that the two faced racial discrimination at Rice, primarily by Rice AD Rick Greenspan. Rice head coach Ben Braun and Greenspan [...]

Morning Five: 11.09.12 Edition

nvr1983 — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 12:30:55 +0000

We have seen a lot of inopportune suspensions leading up to the start of the season, but Florida may take the prize with the worst timing as they suspended their starting point guard, Scottie Wilbekin, indefinitely just one day before their first game. Neither the school nor Wilbekin has offered any additional insight into the reason for the suspension but from the words of Billy Donovan it sounds like a relatively minor offense. Fortunately for the Gators, they have quite a bit of perimeter depth. Unfortunately for the Gators, much of that perimeter depth is not particularly skilled at passing the ball. As bad as [...]

2012-13 RTC Conference Primers: Conference USA

Brian Goodman — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 17:32:25 +0000

Ryan Peters is the RTC correspondent for Conference USA. You can find him on Twitter @pioneer_pride and read his musings online at Big Apple Buckets and Pioneer Pride.

Top Storylines

A Conference in Considerable Flux – Before Memphis, Houston, UCF, and SMU defect to the Big East – which officially makes a geographic mockery of the Big East’s name – C-USA will have one final season together as a full-fledged “upper-level” Division I conference. With only six NCAA Tournament teams and zero NCAA tournament victories in the past three seasons, however, can C-USA muster together a respectable showing for the 2012-13 campaign that doesn’t rival most mid-major conferences? [...]

Morning Five: 09.24.12 Edition

rtmsf — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 12:31:58 +0000

Andy Katz reported on Friday that the Saint Mary’s men’s basketball program is currently under investigation by the NCAA for potential recruiting violations of an as-yet unknown variety. Few additional details were forthcoming over the weekend, but what little smoke that there appears to exist is surrounding former assistant coach David Patrick (currently an assistant at LSU), an Australian who was instrumental in recruiting former star guard Patty Mills to the campus. The tiny school that is coached by Randy Bennett has become one of the pre-eminent mid-major programs in America in large part due to its Australian talent pipeline [...]