A Very Wise Man.  Arizona 76, NC State 74. Why is this our lead game tonight?  Because it’s not often that you see two difficult length-of-the-court layups within the last ten seconds of a game, and it’s even less often that the player who hits the game-winner does so for the second game in a row.  Nic Wise must have been a very good boy this year because Santa is treating him right this holiday season.  Just two nights after making a ridiculously difficult touch/push three from about 25 feet to win a game against Lipscomb (we’ll overlook the fact that it probably shouldn’t have counted), Wise (17/3) did it again tonight.  NC State’s Javier Gonzalez (18/3/6 assts) had tied the game at 74-all with a part-the-waters layin with around seven seconds to go.  Wise immediately grabbed the inbounds pass and pushed downcourt.  After a couple of hesitation/crossovers at three-quarter speed, he found a seam to his left and beat the trailing defenders to get the shot up off the glass with the wrong hand and won the game with a mere tick left on the clock (when we get the vid, we’ll post it below).  Wise is like the anti-Jamelle Horne for Arizona.  Awesome finish, and gives Arizona two more wins that they’ll need en route to putting together a resume for inclusion to their 26th straight NCAA Tournament later this season.  UA shouldn’t have put themselves in this position, but they managed to blow a late eight-point lead by allowing NCSU to hit several threes down the stretch — the Wildcats’ Derrick Williams had 24/6 in the win.

Wise Keeping Arizona Afloat (AP/Dean Knuth)

Upset of the Night.  Oral Roberts 75, #12 New Mexico 66. Unbeaten no more.  We’re now down to just six undefeated teams left this season, and all six of those are currently ranked as the top six teams in America after Missouri State and now New Mexico dropped games this week.  ORU has already beaten Stanford and Missouri thus far this season, so this shouldn’t be a huge shock (especially in Tulsa), but the Golden Eagles have also had some blowout losses (most notably, by 37 to Louisville, 21 to Virginia and 20 to Wake Forest).  Tonight was a different story, though, as Scott Sutton’s team built a first-half lead and was able to hold on when UNM made its expected run late in the game.  Michael Craion had a great game, going for 18/13/7 assts/2 blks, and Dominique Morrison had 17/4/4 assts/3 stls, but more importantly, the ORU defense forced the Lobo stars into tough nights — Darington Hobson shot 5-14 for 11 points and Roman Martinez was even worse at 1-9 for 4 points, and their 15 total points tonight was nineteen points off their combined average this year.

Braggadocio.  Missouri 81, Illinois 68. Here’s the thing about naysayers who thought that Missouri would take a hard fall after losing DeMarre Carroll and Leo Lyons from last year’s team.  So long as Mike Anderson has a stable of ten or so athletic players to run his modified 40MoH system, his teams will always be successful.  Now, will this year’s version be as good as last year’s E8, thirty-win team?  No way.  But they’re still pretty darn good, and we’d expect to see the Tigers back in the Dance again, especially after a performance like tonight.  For the first time in a decade, Mizzou won this rivalry game, and they did it behind their standard MO of forcing turnovers (21), hitting threes (10) and causing a faster-than-normal pace for their opponent.  Kim English led the way with 24/6, but he got help from freshman Michael Dixon, Jr., (16/5 assts/3 stls) and JT Tiller (12/5/5 assts).  As for the Illini, other than their amazing comeback win at Clemson in the Big Ten/ACC Challenge, we haven’t been impressed with this team yet this year.

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The Face of the 2009-10 Season.  #4 Kentucky 64, #12 Connecticut 61. Ladies and gentlemen, if there was any doubt whatsoever about who the face of college basketball was, is, or will be this season, consider it no more.  The buzz was already there.  There have been sketchy highlights of  Johnathan Hildred Wall  from Raleigh, NC, dressed in a Kentucky uniform and easily floating game-winners over Miami and Stanford; there have been a couple of filthy dunks and drives against North Carolina that had you out of your seat shaking your head when you saw them on SportsCenter; but there wasn’t this.  No, not this.  This being a nationally-televised game with no other competition on the tube where the too-young-to-know-how-good-he-is Mr. Wall emphatically and with reckless abandon introduced himself to the sports world beyond the hoops diehards, shouting from the top of New York’s Empire State Building to the rest of the world… “I am College Basketball.”  Dramatic?  Possibly.  Truthful?  Absolutely.

Sure - Why Not??

John Wall (25/2/6 stls) scored twelve of the last fifteen points of the game for his team, and as our RTC Live correspondent Ballin is a Habit put it at the game, “Garden security should kidnap Wall and throw a Nate Robinson jersey on him. Who will know?”  That’s the point.  Wall is probably nearly as good as anyone on the Knicks (or Nets) roster, and the star-studded NYC crowd was electric tonight as they knew this was but a first glimpse of WonderWall and that they would be seeing this kid play for a very long time  at the Garden.  When it came down to the last five minutes of the game tonight, the scoring went back and forth, but as you were watching the action you already knew where the ball was going when Kentucky got it.  You also knew what the result would be — several clutch jumpers followed by a strong and-one when Wall drove from the left side, absorbed contact, and still finished the play to put UK up two with a half-minute left.  After a Kemba Walker (12/8/6 assts) miss and  Ramon Harris FT for Kentucky, UConn took and missed a couple of threes to finish the game and push Calipari’s team to 9-0 and John Wall into hype overdrive.

We’re just as guilty as anyone of being awed by the guy, but the last time we saw a freshman player who was so spectacular (must-see tv) was when Kevin Durant was dominating everyone in his path at Texas.  You tuned in because you sensed that anything could happen when Durant had the ball, and people are starting to sense that about John Wall as well.  One key difference in their careers at this point – Wall has already won three games down the stretch by himself.  We’re not sure that even Durant did that before Christmas of his freshman season!  John Wall — the 2009-10 Face of College Basketball.

Upset of the Night.  Green Bay 88, #23 Wisconsin 84. Students RTC’d after the Fighting Phoenix of Green Bay upset the flagship university of the state in overtime tonight (send pics or vids!) in a classic trap game for Bo Ryan’s Badgers.  Bryquis Perine (22/3/3 stls) and Randy Berry (13/12) led the way for UWGB, who, despite having ten fewer boards than Wisconsin were able to force 18 turnovers from normally surehanded Badgers to grit out the win.  For the Phoenix, this was the first win in their last fifteen games against Wisconsin, and the Badgers will now face home games against Marquette and UW-Milwaukee in the next two weeks to try to regain state supremacy.

Another Upset.  Oral Roberts 60, Missouri 59. We had a feeling that this would have upset written all over it, and sure enough it did (complete with a mini-RTC at the end – see below video).  Missouri fans have to be beating themselves up over this one, though, as the Tigers had a ten-point lead on the road with just over five minutes remaining and they couldn’t close out the game.  Michael Craion’s layup with 0.9 seconds remaining (first video) capped a 15-4 closing run for ORU that gave the Golden Eagles their second win over a BCS team this season (although a considerably better one than Stanford).  ORU got 21/7/4 assts from Dominique Morrison and 10/13 from Kevin Ford, and it was just enough for Scott Sutton’s program to pull off the upset tonight.  One major concern for Mizzou has to be that they only attempted three FTs tonight (making one), which signals a lack of aggressiveness on the offensive end.

And a Third.  Harvard 74, Boston College 67. Is this an upset after how well Harvard has been playing and especially after last year’s Harvard win at BC?  Well, it is still Harvard, so we’ll say yes.  Jeremy Lin continues to impress, dropping 25/3/4 assts just a few nights after ripping the Connecticut defense up for thirty, and BC is at some point going to have to realize that winning a single ACC game doesn’t mean they can take the next night off (as they did last year as well).  The Crimson shot 50% from the field, held BC to 38%, and stood toe to toe with the bigger Eagles on the boards.  Furthermore, when crunch time came around, Harvard, especially Lin, calmly walked up to the line and sealed the win, which is something winning programs tend to do.  It’s been a foregone conclusion that Cornell would once again own the Ivy League this year, but could Harvard challenge the Big Red in the Ancient Eight?

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Eli Linton is the RTC correspondent for the Summit League.

Current Standings (Overall Record/League Record):

1. IUPUI  (6-2/1-0)
2. Centenary  (4-2/1-0)
3. Oral Roberts  (4-4/1-0)
4. North Dakota State  (3-3/1-0)
5. Oakland  (3-4/0-0)
6. IPFW  (2-3/0-0)
7. UMKC  (3-3/0-1)
8. Western Illinois  (3-4/0-1)
9. Southern Utah  (3-5/0-1)
10. South Dakota State  (2-5/0-1)

Top Storylines:

• Whatever could go wrong has gone wrong for Oral Roberts University to start this season.  After getting an emotional win against Stanford, everything came crashing down to earth when they discovered that their junior point guard Rod Pearson became the third player THIS YEAR to suffer a season-ending ACL tear.  To make matters worse, the third string point guard, sophomore Beloved Rodgers, quit the team last week as well.  Apparently he was not happy with the minutes he was seeing.  So Scott Sutton was forced to activate his fourth-string emergency guard, redshirt freshman Mikey Mangum.  Who knew the most valuable player of the Golden Eagles season would not be a player at all, but the personal trainer?  Here is a suggestion:  stretch before games.
• Oakland continues to roll, with Keith Benson earning player of the week honors, averaging 20/11/5 blocks in three games last week.  Also, Oakland guard Jonathan Jones became the conference’s all-time assist leader when he dished out 11 in a win over Central Arkansas on November 28; he now has 639 for his career.  The previous record holder was Valparaiso legend Bryce Drew (626).
• The non-conference schedule is wrapping up for most of the Summit League, with only IUPUI, Centenary, and UMKC coming out on top with winning records.  Oral Roberts and Oakland remain neck and neck according to their records, but in reality, Oral Roberts has fallen back even further with the loss of four key players.  It’s never good when your second-string shooting guard, Kyron Stokes, now becomes your first-string point guard.  The Summit is still the 20th or 21st best conference in the country, so the one coveted bid will hinge on the conference play.  Anything can happen at this point, and this week will be a good indicator as to who are the true contenders.

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We have a pretty big weekend scheduled for you here at RTC Live, with arguably the best game on Friday night (Oral Roberts @ Wake Forest), the best two games on Saturday (Creighton @ Dayton and Davidson @ Butler), and a pretty good tilt on Sunday (FIU @ Tulsa) scheduled.

As for Friday night, the ‘real’ opening night for approximately 252 teams, Oral Roberts brings a team that coaches and media are picking to finish second in the always-competitive Summit League to Wake Forest, a team that is searching for its identity after losing draft picks Jeff Teague and James Johnson to the NBA.  Wake has plenty of big young talent in Tony Woods, Tony Walker and Al-Farouq Aminu, but it’ll be up to point guard Ish Smith to re-establish a leadership role as he did prior to Teague’s ascent as an all-ACC guard last year.  ORU counters with preseason all-Summit forwards Dominique Morrison and Kevin Ford, two talented but undersized players who head coach Scott Sutton is expecting to have breakout years this season.  It should be an interesting game in the Dash tonight as ORU visits the Demon Deacons at 8pm ET tonight.

Eli Linton is the RTC correspondent for the Summit League.

Predicted Order of Finish:

1. Oakland                          22-9        (16-2)
2. Oral Roberts                  21-10     (15-3)
3. South Dakota St.            18-11     (11-7)
4. IUPUI                               17-14     (9-9)
5. North Dakota St.           14-14     (8-10)
6. Southern Utah                13-16     (8-10)
7. Western Illinois             13-16     (6-12)
8. IPFW                               11-18     (4-14)
9. UMKC                             9-20        (4-14)
10. Centenary                      6-23        (2-16)

All-Conference Team:

• Johnathan Jones (G), Sr, Oakland
• Garret Callahan (G), Sr, South Dakota St.
• Dominique Morrison (F), Soph, Oral Roberts
• Jon Avery (F), Sr, IUPUI
• Keith Benson (C), Jr, Oakland

6th Man. Hunter McClintock (G), Fr,  Oral Roberts

Impact Newcomer.  Larry Wright (G), Jr, Oakland.   The junior transfer from St. John’s University, should have an immediate impact on the Summit League. Two years ago he led the Red Storm in three-point field goal percentage, and he should be the perfect replacement for Erik Kangas, The Oakland great who set the all-time single season mark last year with 145 threes. Wright’s long-range shooting could be the key to Oakland’s success.

What You Need to Know. The Summit League is like the little engine that could. Every year, it produces a scrappy team that creates some hype in the NCAA Tournament. Last year Ben Woodside and his rag-tag boys from North Dakota State challenged the defending national champs (Kansas), and just came up short 84-74. This year’s Summit League has the potential to produce a similar Cinderella story, with teams like Oakland and Oral Roberts reloading with some really talented players. Watch out for Oral Roberts and their newcomer Damen Bell-Holter (Mr. Alaska 2007, top 50 center prospect on Scout.com) who has the potential to dominate the lesser big men in the conference. Defense is the key to winning the Summit League. Last years champ NDSU held their opponents to 69.1 points per game, and Oral Roberts, in their three straight championships from 2006-08, held their opponents to 62.0, 64.9, and 68.1 points per game.