We’re back with the second consecutive year of officially losing our minds, but they say the first step toward healing is recognizing the problem.  As of 11 am EDT last Monday, there were 345 hours until tipoff of four games of actual, it-counts college basketball on Opening Night, Nov. 8.  So… beginning that morning, we started releasing our rankings of every Division I team from worst to first as tweets on the social networking platform known as Twitter (you may have heard of it).  We’ll release one team preview every single hour from now until Opening Night, and in case you’re not following us over there, we’ll put the updated list here each night for your review in aggregate.  The key to tweeting, of course, is conciseness, so we’ll try our best to relay some relevant information on each and every team in the requisite 140 characters or less, and hopefully some of you will be paying attention along the way.  Here are Friday’s entries (#236-#213).

For all previous TTP posts, click here.

(major h/t to Matt Patton for his assistance researching and writing these Tweets)

We’re back with the second consecutive year of officially losing our minds, but they say the first step toward healing is recognizing the problem.  As of 11 am EDT last Monday, there were 345 hours until tipoff of four games of actual, it-counts college basketball on Opening Night, Nov. 8.  So… beginning that morning, we started releasing our rankings of every Division I team from worst to first as tweets on the social networking platform known as Twitter (you may have heard of it).  We’ll release one team preview every single hour from now until Opening Night, and in case you’re not following us over there, we’ll put the updated list here each night for your review in aggregate.  The key to tweeting, of course, is conciseness, so we’ll try our best to relay some relevant information on each and every team in the requisite 140 characters or less, and hopefully some of you will be paying attention along the way.  Here are Friday’s entries (#260-#237).

For all previous TTP posts, click here.

(major h/t to Matt Patton for his assistance researching and writing these Tweets)

1. What’s the adage?  Don’t tweet and rebound, or something to that effect?  Kentucky forward Josh Harrellson learned the hard way yesterday after head coach John Calipari shut down his Twitter page after he ripped the coach for not receiving a compliment in the postgame press conference after a 26-rebound effort.  Color us unimpressed, but neither DeMarcus Cousins nor Enes Kanter were on the floor for the Blue or White team in the UK scrimmage, so we’re not sure that Harrellson should be reserving hotels for NBA Draft night in NYC just yet.  After putting the nix on Harrellson’s micro-blogging, Calipari himself tweeted that his player has not “dealt w/ how to handle success” and he will not be on Twitter until he is “responsible enough to handle success & failure.”  Great stuff out of Lexington.
2. Good news for Iowa, as it was learned yesterday that star player Matt Gatens will only be out three weeks after surgery to repair a tendon in his left hand.  There was concern that he could miss a significantly greater amount of time, but this will put the Hawkeyes’ leading scorer back in action at the Paradise Jam during the weekend before Thanksgiving.  They’ll need him, too, as the field is comprised of Xavier, Alabama and Seton Hall.  New coach Fran McCaffery has enough problems facing him this season without injuries being another one.
3. The AP Top 25 came out on Thursday and there were no surprises there either.  Mike DeCourcy has as good an analysis as we could have put together, so here it is…
4. Binghamton’s Kevin Broadus finally got his long-awaited settlement from the university as a result of being let-go without actually being let-go.  Oh, how we wish we too had a government job.  At any rate, Broadus will be paid $1.2M to walk away and never sue the university over his treatment, which included recruiting questionable characters and getting called on it.  Yeah.
5. Rather than eliminating the whole shebang, the NCAA has decided that it will instead spend a year evaluating the summer recruiting environment before making a decision on what to do about it.  A number of concerns were raised over the issue, so the NCAA once again made a reasoned and logical decision to give it more time and consideration.  We’re starting to get a little frightened by the NCAA’s use of logic and reason in recent years here.

We’re back with the second consecutive year of officially losing our minds, but they say the first step toward healing is recognizing the problem.  As of 11 am EDT on Monday, there were 345 hours until tipoff of four games of actual, it-counts college basketball on Opening Night, Nov. 8.  So… beginning that morning, we started releasing our rankings of every Division I team from worst to first as tweets on the social networking platform known as Twitter (you may have heard of it).  We’ll release one team preview every single hour from now until Opening Night, and in case you’re not following us over there, we’ll put the updated list here each night for your review in aggregate.  The key to tweeting, of course, is conciseness, so we’ll try our best to relay some relevant information on each and every team in the requisite 140 characters or less, and hopefully some of you will be paying attention along the way.  Here are Thursday’s entries (#284-#261).

For all previous TTP posts, click here.

(major h/t to Matt Patton for his assistance researching and writing these Tweets)

We’re back with the second consecutive year of officially losing our minds, but they say the first step toward healing is recognizing the problem.  As of 11 am EDT on Monday, there were 345 hours until tipoff of four games of actual, it-counts college basketball on Opening Night, Nov. 8.  So… beginning that morning, we started releasing our rankings of every Division I team from worst to first as tweets on the social networking platform known as Twitter (you may have heard of it).  We’ll release one team preview every single hour from now until Opening Night, and in case you’re not following us over there, we’ll put the updated list here each night for your review in aggregate.  The key to tweeting, of course, is conciseness, so we’ll try our best to relay some relevant information on each and every team in the requisite 140 characters or less, and hopefully some of you will be paying attention along the way.  Here are Wednesday’s entries (#308-#285).

For all previous TTP posts, click here.

(major h/t to Matt Patton for his assistance researching and writing these Tweets)

We’re back with the second consecutive year of officially losing our minds, but they say the first step toward healing is recognizing the problem.  As of 11 am EDT on Monday, there were 345 hours until tipoff of four games of actual, it-counts college basketball on Opening Night, Nov. 8.  So… beginning that morning, we started releasing our rankings of every Division I team from worst to first as tweets on the social networking platform known as Twitter (you may have heard of it).  We’ll release one team preview every single hour from now until Opening Night, and in case you’re not following us over there, we’ll put the updated list here each night for your review in aggregate.  The key to tweeting, of course, is conciseness, so we’ll try our best to relay some relevant information on each and every team in the requisite 140 characters or less, and hopefully some of you will be paying attention along the way.  Here are Tuesday’s entries (#332-#309).

For all previous TTP posts, click here.

(major h/t to Matt Patton for his assistance researching and writing these Tweets)

1. We’ve got a lot of season preview stuff going on, as we’re sure you well know, but we want to draw your attention to our Tweeting the Preview feature which began yesterday and will continue all the way up through Opening Night on November 8 in two weeks.  Every hour on the hour we’ll be providing a 140-character or less tweet previewing a team, and each morning we’ll wrap up the previous day’s tweets with a post outlining all of them in case you weren’t waiting around every hour to see them roll out live.  Here’s Monday’s list, which includes the bottom dozen or so teams for 2010-11 in Division I basketball.
2. Score one for the mids on the recruiting trail.  Norcross (GA) senior forward Alonzo Nelson-Ododa picked Richmond over California, NC State and DePaul yesterday.  Maybe this isn’t too much of an upset after all, as it’s likely that UR will be far better this coming year than any of those schools (we’ll believe in Sidney Lowe’s Wolfpack when we see it…).
3. The NCAA was sued on Monday in federal district court in a class-action matter over its standard policy of offering only one-year renewable scholarships to its student-athletes.  One of the plaintiffs is a former Rice football player named Joseph Agnew; he was released from his athletic scholarship during his senior season at the rather expensive school after a coaching change and injuries derailed his playing career.  Perhaps not coincidentally, the same attorney who is representing Ed O’Bannon, et al, in their lawsuit against the NCAA and EA Sports over use of their playing likenesses in video games is also spearheading this case.  Is it safe to say that Steve Berman is becoming Public Enemy #1 at NCAA headquarters in Indy?
4. It was a Corey Fisher kind of Monday on the interwebs, as both Seth Davis and Dana O’Neil filed reports on Mr. Summer League Century Mark’s upcoming senior season.  There are a million pieces like this in the preseason, of course, but what we found particularly interesting was Davis’ conclusion from watching Villanova’s practice that he doesn’t see a Final Four appearance out of this group.  He qualifies it by saying it’s only October, but this is a fairly experienced team and what you see is usually what you get with squads like that.
5. You’ve no doubt read or heard by now that Pittsburgh head coach Jamie Dixon played the role of Good Samaritan on Saturday night when a car directly in front of him on I-279 struck a barrier wall and flipped over.  In this below video on ESPN, Dixon talks about what happened when he initially saw the accident and how he figured that there was no way anyone could have survived the crash.  It turns out that both women riding in the car survived, and by all indications Dixon did the right thing by helping them get out of the smoking vehicle immediately (even if the first woman he helped ran away?).

We’re back with the second consecutive year of officially losing our minds, but they say the first step toward healing is recognizing the problem.  As of 11 am EDT on Monday, there were 345 hours until tipoff of four games of actual, it-counts college basketball on Opening Night, Nov. 8.  So… beginning yesterday morning, we started releasing our rankings of every Division I team from worst to first as tweets on the social networking platform known as Twitter (you may have heard of it).  We’ll release one team preview every single hour from now until Opening Night, and in case you’re not following us over there, we’ll put the updated list here each night for your review in aggregate.  The key to tweeting, of course, is conciseness, so we’ll try our best to relay some relevant information on each and every team in the requisite 140 characters or less, and hopefully some of you will be paying attention along the way.  Here are Monday’s entries (#345-#333).

For all previous TTP posts, click here.

(major h/t to Matt Patton for his assistance researching and writing these Tweets)

Update: Coach Calipari must have taken our advice, as Gilchrist’s follow-up tweet later this evening said, “Just had a long talk to Coach Cal.. Ill be on campus next weekend.”  If Calipari knows one thing, he knows how to protect his assets.  That didn’t take very long at all.  Still, it doesn’t settle the issue of if or why Gilchrist wants to take three official visits.

Perhaps superstar recruit Mike Gilchrist is just playing with us on a late summer Friday evening, or perhaps he’s having some second thoughts about his early commitment to play his college ball at Kentucky.  Either way, the below tweet (now deleted), sent at around 9 pm ET tonight, is sure to set the recruiting world afire short of a strong statement to the contrary by the consensus top five player in the class of 2011.

Kyle Anderson, a star forward from North Bergen (St. Anthony’s), NJ, in the class of 2012, asked Gilchrist directly on Twitter whether he had de-committed from UK, to which Gilchrist responded with a simple “no.”  But there are hints that the rising senior may be having some cold feet, given the above quote referring to taking three official visits (we have to assume he’s not talking about Kentucky, Transylvania and Lexington Community College) in addition to some other chatter on his Twitter page about not leaving his mother by herself [presumably in New Jersey].

Paging Coach Calipari… coach John Calipari.  You may want to keep Gilchrist handy on your speed-dial.  Stay tuned on this one…

Yep, we’re officially moving into shark-jumping territory on Twitter now, as this is our second post of the day relating to the micro-blogging site (#rushthecourt, btw).  You’ve undoubtedly heard by now that a few days ago several Arkansas players were accused of sexual assault by a freshman woman who at the time belied her story by reportedly telling a bystander who happened upon the lascivious incident that she and her new friends “didn’t do anything wrong.”  Prosecutors declined to pursue the case citing a lack of evidence, but it appears that John Pelphrey will not rest until somebody pays for all this negative publicity.  Well, guess what – even though he was not one of the accused, Arkansas PG Courtney Fortson made reference to the rape allegations on Monday in a tweet (later deleted but available through Tweleted) and he is now facing discipline from the school for his “crass” comment (see tweet below).  We’re not even quite sure what Fortson is trying to say here, actually.  Is he getting blown during a workout?  Or is he making some cryptic reference to one of the accused who has a reputation for working out hard?  It’s pretty much indecipherable to our eyes.  Or maybe he was simply trying to be creative.  If that’s the case, Fortson clearly needs to work on his metaphors, so maybe Pelphrey should force him to take a creative writing class.  If he’s lucky, maybe the “do no wrong” gal will be sitting there next to him.