March 2008 Archives
Thank you, Davidson players, coaches, staff, students and fans. It was a ride that was both sweet and elite. We'll close Season 4 with an epilogue on Tuesday. We received a lot of messages in response to the query as to whether or not I should wear the "Just Balls" tie to the game today. With a 2-to-1 split in favor of donning autographed neckgear, the votes against stuck out and haunted my sleep. Several people brought up the possibility of a double-reverse tie jinx, and a few brought up the Naismith-Kansas association. But I'm wearing the tie. Repeat, I am wearing the tie. The letter that really sold me was T. Jensen, a self-described Jayhawk fan who commented on the nervousness this morning in Rock-Chalk land. They know that they're up against something special today. Wear it, please. Wear that piece of nylon with the basketballs on it. And I am even a Jayhawk fan, but in respectful support of mid-major b-ball, please wear it. I have never heard Jayhawk fans talk more adamantly than now... we need to "dispose of the 10 seed Cinderella." But still have spent moments reflecting on the pace master, the guy who has the most unique feeling for the college game, Steph Curry... who we have to have patience with, and lock-down mentality, to beat... But yes, wear the darn tie. I know it'll be right. I know, I know. This is a dangerous line I'm walking with the tie, but the postseason is all about danger, looming heartbreak, sudden death. It's win or go home for not only the Davidson players, coaches and staff, but for their fans too. It's win or go home for all the Charlotte media who sit here in the vast media room at Ford Field, biting their nails and whispering about individual matchups. It's win or go home for everybody in America who loves Cinderella -- if Davidson loses tonight to create a who-cares Final Four made up entirely of one-seeds, it's on to baseball season. And, of course, it's win or go home for Bally and I. At this moment, we don't know which highway we're taking on our way out of Detroit tonight: I-75 south or the Canadian 401 east.
I adopted the practice of wearing a shirt and tie to every game that year (inspired by my new colleague Andy Katz), and wore the gift tie to my first game as a representative of the Worldwide Leader, a game on November 19 between Vermont and Harvard. It is certainly a little awkward wearing a tie with basketballs all over it to a basketball game, in all honesty. It's something that you'd expect some eccentric alumnus to do, someone who hasn't been to a basketball game at his school in five years. Or maybe Dickie V, if he was more like Don Cherry. Wearing a "Just Balls" tie is not something you do if you're trying to be anything resembling cool. After all, they make a clip-on version as well. I don't remember wearing the "Just Balls" at all that 2005-06 regular season, not until March. I broke out the tie out again at the NCAA tournament in Dayton, and it hung around my neck for four games during the first round on Saint Patrick's Day 2006. One of those games was No. 11 George Mason's stunning 75-65 upset of Michigan State, a six-seed that had gone to the Final Four a year earlier. As I was standing in the Patriots locker room collecting quotes for a story, the winning coach interrupted my question. "That's some tie you got there, Kyle," said Jim Larranaga, inspecting the thing. "Thanks, coach," I replied.
There was that sophomore in red who outscored the entire Wisconsin team in the second half (22-20), but he wasn't the only player out on the court last night. Some of the supporting numbers were really astounding -- take, for example, point guard Jason Richards' perfect 13:0 assist-to-turnover ratio (a figure Bob McKillop made sure to repeat at least six times on postgame interviews). Or the perfect 5-for-5 shooting by Nigerian junior Andrew Lovedale, who's gone from third on the forward depth chart at the beginning of the season to unsung hero (let's fix that: Andrew Lovedale is 6-8/His two-point dunk-shots are rea-lly great). And there were the efforts that didn't get on the stat sheet, but were important nonetheless. Lovedale, Thomas Sander and Boris Meno sacrificed their bodies for the cause, making the lane a gauntlet for the Wisconsin offense. They were so effective that Bo Ryan spent much of the first half whining on the sideline about all the fouls the officials weren't calling. Davidson, double-champions of a league the ACC and SEC fans down south call the "So-What" Conference, beating up the big boys down low. Imagine that! While we get ready for the in-between day interviews, let's empty out the rest of the notebook from last night.
One of the great things about the day before an NCAA subregional, regional or Final Four is that the public can come and watch the teams practice for free! This is enormous Ford Field in Detroit, which is normally used for American-style football. The stadium will have 72,000 available seats for this weekend -- for basketball! You can't tell from this shot, but the Davidson Wildcats are out there on the floor. Can you find Bally in this picture?
As my new friend TuckyBill likes to say, "mid-major" is just another name for "more bang for your buck." Our two remaining candidates were out-dollared in every possible way, but they're right here alongside the big spenders from the power conferences. Will deeper pockets finally defeat Davidson's and Western Kentucky's dreams? In our third installment of this particular feature, we show exactly the kind of spending power these two are going up against. As with the other two grids, data is culled from the Office of Postsecondary Education's Equity in Athletics report, using 2006-07 information (the latest available).
Bowling Green has been painted Big Red ever since the home team clinched its first Sweet 16 berth in 15 years last weekend. After the jump, more pictures of the scene in B.G. as Western Kentucky University prepares for Thursday's No. 12 vs. No. 1 matchup against UCLA.
Bowling Green At 2:45 p.m. Central Time on Tuesday, the message came in, with a time stamp that indicated it had been left an hour earlier. "The plane leaves around 3 p.m.," the sports information director said. "We'll see you down there at the airport." I'd have received the call on time if I'd been anywhere else. Bowling Green, Kentucky is one of the few places in America where my phone doesn't work correctly, a time-warping non-Verizon vortex where every call is a roamer and new voicemails don't show up on the readout. But there I was on the campus of Western Kentucky University, in the direct shadow of the roundhouse called E.A. Diddle Arena. Two days earlier, the Hilltoppers had clinched a spot in the Sweet 16 with a win over San Diego; hundreds and hundreds of fans had greeted them on Sunday night at the Bowling Green/Warren County Regional Airport. I was in town to cover the sendoff to the West Regional in Phoenix, which was rumored to be an even bigger deal.
Birmingham This month has its place in the weather calendar, a rock-solid role. March thaw helps keep April showers warm, and as long as everything happens in the right order, May flowers won't be DOA. March basketball, however, is as unpredictable as global warming. You don't know who's going to win, where the path will lead, or how long it will last before you get sent home. I left Rhode Island on March 13, the middle of Championship Fortnight, and haven't been back since. I didn't rent a car, since nobody could have guessed how long I'd be out for, or where I'd be going. So I drove the family sedan down to Atlantic City that Wednesday morning, just in time for a noon tip, and spent four days at the Atlantic 14 tournament. I had a routine, parking in the Caesar's lot by day, and disappearing out of town when the action was over. On Selection Sunday, I packed up and headed west towards Dayton for my annual trip to the Play-In Game. That annual evening of 65 fates, I sat in a Bread Restaurant in Western Pennsylvania, the bracket matchups dribbling into my web browser in plain text, in silence. Without waiting for the full bracket, I excitedly fired off an e-mail. Birmingham. That was the hot one. I could feel it.
Mr. Welmer is the Iron Man of basketball officials. He racks up gigantic per-game paychecks and strings together Ripken-like streaks of 16 consecutive days calling games during the regular season. I am a jerk who drives tens of thousands of miles around the country, sleeps in the car, and covers college basketball for a couple of national media outlets. I'm also definitely a decidedly unranked underdog against anybody who say this: "Arguably, there probably may never be a guy like me that is able to get a schedule that big," Welmer said. "I take pride in that because I guess that’s the American way on everything. I guess it’s kind of the male ego thing." Well, put this in your male ego thing, Steve... after being down as many as 14 games five weeks ago, Whelliston has caught, overtaken and surpassed Welmer -- in the third, second and first person. The furious rally was not quite unlike Davidson's comeback against mighty Georgetown on Sunday, as I got hot like Curry and exploded for 22 games during Championship Fortnight. When I dropped seven during the first week of the NCAA Tournament, Welmer didn't have an answer.
Two brave, fighting groups of men... two long dormant small-college basketball legacies reborn... two tourney champions turned Sweet survivors. The Sun Belt and the SoCon, two leagues the general public can't tell apart from each other, are sending representatives to the NCAA Regionals. Hoo-zah! Courtney Lee and Stephen Curry... what can we say? Or rather, what can we say that hasn't been regurgitated before in a long series of heroic odes, in these pages and elsewhere? Two young men with champions' hearts, two red-clad stars of Hoops Nation... two people who are extremely good at playing basketball. Both will showcase their respective awesomenesses later this week, for all of the country's VHF-watching audience to see. Lee, nothing short of 29 points and best-player-on-the-floor status for his role in keeping San Diego at bay in a wire-to-wire Topper victory, making sure No. 13 did not overcome No. 12 in the City of Upsets. Curry, nothing but pure basketball magic. After being shackled with two fouls in the first half, he leapt off the bench with 25 second-half points (to close with his jersey number) and pulled the Wildcats from a 17-point deficit. We're not going to make any sort of religious parallels to anything on this Easter, the most holy of days... but gosh-darned if we're not biting our tongue.
But now we're on to the second round, where big time players make big time plays, and recruiting them generally takes big time money. First, each matchup ranked on the basis of overall athletic budgets, then by the government-mandated report of specific men's basketball expenses. For those of you just joining us, data is culled from the Office of Postsecondary Education's Equity in Athletics report, using 2006-07 information (the latest available).
We saw it coming, the nation saw it coming, everybody knew that this had the opportunity to turn into a track meet. You, Super Saints, are perfectly capable of that kind of stuff. What we didn't expect was that you'd run your overrated, overhyped SEC competition off the floor... The 83-62 final was the second-largest margin of victory ever for a No. 14 over a No. 3. The 21-point margin was two short of the 78-55 spread in 1985, when Navy destroyed Louisiana State in Dayton. Next, it's Villanova. Much like that other teenage riot on Sunday, it's a No. 12 vs. No. 13. But your opponent will be a sad-sack .500 Big East team, one of that conference's weakest offenses, that surfed on the miniscus of the bubble all February. You'll be able to run on these guys too, so rest those legs up. They're even less threatening than Vandy on the boards, and they sure like to foul a lot. So will we see you in the Sweet 16? Should we start checking flights to Detroit? We're getting ahead of ourselves. Men of the green and gold, hearts that are brave and bold... Fight, fight, fight with all of your might! You can win if you will fight, fight, fight!
Mid-Majority SoCon Player of the Year Stephen Curry, teenage idol, crowned boy-king of western North Carolina... nobody will ever pronounce your name wrong, ever again. If they do, they have to wear a red Davidson No. 30 jersey for two days as penance... and we will do our best in enforcing that law. Twenty-four points in the first 14 points of the second half -- against every type of defense ever invented -- on the way to four-oh. Eight 3-pointers, but none as big as the one with a minute to go that split open a tie and greased Gonzaga's skids.
O Hilltoppers... it must have been cold there in South Alabama's shadow, to never have sunlight on your face. Now, there on the citrus coast of Florida, you shine with a fearsome brightness. You are the 2008 tournament champions in the Sun Belt, and you are the conference's last remaining survivor. The Commonwealth of Kentucky's third party is now its first entrant in the Thirsty 32. They said you didn't have any signature wins, that you always fell short when it counted, that Hoops Nation was somehow denied the pleasure of a final showdown with South Alabama in the SBC. Did they forget to consider that Courtney Lee and Ty Brazelton might not want to go home yet? And Ty Rogers, honorary mayor, president and one-man city council of Eddyville, Ky., take your throne among the NCAA immortals. A brief moment of silence for Drake's season, a double championship in Hoops Nation's toughest conference... followed by 44 minutes and 58 seconds of brilliant, stirring, beautiful, glorious basketball. We'll always remember what you did.
The true underdogs, teams from the lower and smaller leagues, went zero for nine on the first day of the NCAA Tournament, and March 20 will be our Bill Murray Groundhog Day for the foreseeable future. We will discuss these games endlessly, reference these results constantly, on this site and elsewhere. We will frame 2008-09 campaigns with them. The sad scorelines will hang over entire leagues for the next 12 months, will define the perception of entire conferences among casual fans. These results will live on, and will somehow have to be defended at this time next year... if and when we talk of extra bids for the MAC, or the CAA, or the Big West. If there's any one common thread in the losses yesterday, it's a lack of offensive consistency. Heck, that's a common thread in most of these first-round games featuring mid-majors, we've had our hearts cracked open for years like this. But we knew that Winthrop would struggle to score points, they have all year; we knew that George Mason looks bad when all its cylinders aren't firing. And we knew that Cornell basically had to hit 25 3-pointers if it wanted to slay bigger, badder Stanford.
Well, here we are in Birmingham. I'm watching practices, asking dumb questions in press conferences, eating all the Cheetos at the media buffet spread, and waiting for the upsets to start happening on TV. While I'm doing Real Serious Work, Bally is living it up VIP style at the Big Dance. Follow along as he takes you behind the Madness, and hang out with his cool celebrity friends! The State of College Basketball is a brand-new ratings system that uses a lot of good basketball sense, per-game team performance ratings and degradation of older results to rank the teams from No. 1 to 341 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of the Final Four in a simulation of last season. For our purposes here, it gives the world's only hype-free, non-voting, computer poll of teams in the lower 22 conferences. This is the full 246-team chart (which stopped hourly updates right before the selection show), and this is a doctored, spliced recording. As of 3/16/2008, 6 p.m. ET 1. Drake (Missouri Valley), 102.66, 28-4 (15-3) There have been about five messages a day, wondering if I'd forgotten to post a final State out of shame or something. I think the index did pretty well in its first full season, mostly because it knew what it was. This never pretended to be a predictor of future events, or a measure of Tournament worthiness, it simply rewarded schools at our level that played excellent, well-rounded basketball, and would be in position to win the kinds of games. Some of these teams did just that and will in the near future, and others fell short.
So here (for free) is the entire grid, minus the pithy commentary, which -- let me tell you -- was toally worth every penny of that ESPN membership dollar. We've even added all the power-on-power matchups, so you can look at all the pretty numbers. As always, data is culled from the Office of Postsecondary Education's Equity in Athletics report, using 2006-07 information (the latest available). I remember my first March Madness office pool. The year was 1992, I was about to leave my teenage years behind. I had just nabbed my first real actual journalism job, working for out-of-state tuition as a junior copy editor at a farming magazine in Oregon. I recall that the whole bracket thing was a strange and off-putting experience. The keeper of the brackets was one of the publishing partners at the company. His name was Jeff, I think. Jeff was one of the pioneers in "business casual," coming to work every day in a polo shirt with the embroidered logo of some golf course or other. Everywhere he went, he carried a cellular phone the size of a Subway sandwich. During a weekly meeting (there was no mass e-mail in the Stone Age), he announced that we'd be having, once again, the annual office bracket contest. Ten-dollar fees and completed brackets would be due into him on Wednesday. Everybody knew how it worked, except for a few secretaries. And me. "So we fill the bracket out, the whole thing?" I asked him privately afterwards, hoping to save myself some public embarrassment. "Yes, jackass, the whole thing," came the reply. "That's how you win, see." I'd filled out brackets before, sure, but not like that. And people don't believe me when I say this, but I haven't filled out a bracket like that since 2003. And I know I don't have time -- the deadline's coming up fast -- but I'm going to try and convince you that you shouldn't either. Don't fill out a bracket this week. I can't think of anything that captures the essence of modern corporate America better than Selection Sunday. Four and a half months of sweat and blood spilled by on-court workers is distilled into numbers and charts, spreadsheets and presentations. Merits are debated by people in suits in a locked room -- it's the ultimate performance evaluation. It's the day when Hoops Nation takes a back seat to Powerpoint Nation. Yesterday evening, when this season's final flowchart was made public, there was the same mixture of overjoyed jubilance and crushing heartbreak outside that hotel that we see every year. At our level, seasons with disappointing ends were validated and brought back from the dead: we're literally beside ourselves with glee that South Alabama was deemed worthy despite a semifinal exit, as Team USA generated the first two-bid Sun Belt since 1994. We exchanged happy e-mails (with lots of all-caps and exclamation points) with Saint Mary's fans, who will see their team go on to the Dance in the first-ever three-bid West Coast Conference. But the side of the bubble wall with broken hearts had more of an emotional impact, it always does. Virginia Commonwealth couldn't follow up a regular-season title with a tourney title, and were punished with cold non-inclusion. And nothing was sadder than reading a series of stream-of-consciousness monologues from Illinois State fans, some of which made me dewy-eyed (in a Real Man way, of course). The Redbird faithful spent an entire week creating logical arguments that their team's credentials were NCAA-worthy for the first time in a long decade marked with mediocrity. If you've been living with this team day in and day out all year, then went through the past seven days inside your own head convincing yourself that Cincinnati was a "good win," today it feels like your pet died. And this is why I hate Selection Sunday. The system of at-large bids, the cottage industry of at-large prediction, the will-they-won't-they that has less to do with basketball than psychological torture. All over a damned committee meeting. Bullet Points
Bullet Points
Bullet Points
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. -- It's fitting that we're here in Jersey -- just as there were 86 episodes of The Sopranos, there were exactly that many daily weekday posts this year. This right here is the final edition of the season -- this 86th Boubacar, too, was "Made in America." Not that this is the end of things, however -- the believing has only started. Tourney Centrals will continue through Monday, and then we go into full-on NCAA Tournament mode. Coverage will be as unpredictable as the Big Dance itself, as we move from the Play-In Game in Dayton to the first weekend (and hopefully beyond). As site tradition dictates, we shut down for the summer the day after all the mid-major schools are eliminated. Then we do one of these. Hopefully that'll all happen later rather than sooner -- with a weak overall bubble and strong double-champions representing our ranks, we like our chances to stick around for a while. Unlike that show about this state's first fictional family of crime, we're not ending The Boubacar on a blank screen. We promised you pretty girls to end the season, and damn it, that's what we're going to give you. After the jump, we launch this site's first annual Tradition of Traditions -- lots of pictures of mid-major (and A-14!) cheerleaders. Bullet Points
It was a special number once, an emotional milestone, an achievement of a lifetime. Four years ago in this space, I attended exactly one hundred college basketball games in a single season and wrote something faintly humorous about each one. It was a journey that culminated in a loss. Because it always ends in a loss, that's just the way it works. That loss was followed by a major personal victory: the work that resulted from my 100 Games Project transformed me from a jerk with a blog into an occasionally-respected national basketball commentator. Within days of completing the five-month task, several major media outlets contacted me about writing for them, and I ended up working with a certain four-letter entity. I went to a lot of games during my first year with the Worldwide Leader, there in 2005-06, and was able to view and cover "The Year Of The Mid-Major" from a seat on press row, all the way to the Final Four in Indianapolis. I didn't get to 100 games that season, though -- only 93. I could have padded my stats with a lot more power conference games during the NCAA Tournament, but you and I know full well that I can't sit through that crap.
The Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference is great with gifts -- they give you stuff that you can use in your daily work, like the classy pen set from last year and the flash drive they gave us this past weekend (at 256MB, it could fit everything I've ever written about basketball 10 times over.) The Ohio Valley Conference takes a different approach, preferring to invade your casual, everyday life with its logo. The 2007 gift was a great big fleece blanket, which The Official Wife™ uses on the couch when I'm not home and the bed gets too big. This year's offering was a sleek, tall stainless-steel black travel mug that fits in every cup holder ever invented. I wonder what they'll give us when the conference wins its first NCAA game since 1989. Then there's our beloved Atlantic 14, which has escalated the ante in recent years. Yesterday, they gave us all mini-mouses. I've tested it against the $50 wireless model I've been lugging around the last two seasons (which cuts out reception every eighth time I want to click on something), and it's vastly superior. I've got to say -- that's a high-major gift right there. But we're not really here to talk about rewards, this is about awards. We're in the business of giving out some virtual hardware today. We've seen all the Player and Coach of the Year awards, given out by league coaches in secret ballots, and we respectfully disagree with a lot of their decisions. Here, then, on this second-to-last Boubacar of the year, are our picks. ("We" being the two-member panel of myself and Bally, who disagreed on only one pick. Can you guess which?) It's the first time we've done this, and we're still trying to figure out why that is. And attn. sports information directors: if you're queasy about linking to a "blog" post about media swag, if that's too "informal," you can just go ahead and copy and paste the relevant sections into your releases. We don't need the extra bandwidth-hogging traffic this time of year anyway. Bullet Points
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. -- As we promised earlier this week, we're going to take one last look at some seasons that may not have resulted in a Dance card or a lot of national headlines, but were breakthroughs or returns to form. Here, then, are eight teams that few saw coming... in alphabetical order. Brown (19-9, 11-3 Ivy League) -- It'll be forgotten behind Cornell's perfect Ivy season, but the Bears had a stellar year, only losing their two games with the Big Red and the season opener at Yale. (They didn't get a one-and-done chance to even the score with the regular-season champs, but that's not the way the Ancient Eight rolls.) The Bears had a five-game Ivy improvement over last year, won 10 games on the road, and sat just outside the RPI's top 100 at 104. The ninth-best 3-point shooting team in the nation featured great years from senior guards Mark McAndrew and Damon Huffman, who combined for 31.4 ppg. Bullet Points
ALBANY, N.Y. -- The thing that people don't get from television is how hot it is inside a court-storming. I mean, it's sweltering and blistering (and a little humid) in there with all the body heat and kinetic energy. Oh, and loud too. Inside a court-storming, you'll find a sound that can never be duplicated on a recording or anywhere else in the world -- joyful yelling at 110 decibels in a tightly enclosed and constricted space. I've been critical about students storming the court at times they shouldn't (the only two acceptable conditions: conference tourney championship, or a home win over a rival you haven't beaten in at least 15 recent tries). But there is one area in which I'm not shy about abusing my privilege as a member of the credentialed press: during Championship Week, I will hop over the table and run out on the floor -- no matter who's the winner -- and jump around with some crazy kids. In a suit. I will do that, and no security can stop me. Last night here in Albany, Siena beat Rider 74-53 to claim its first MAAC championship since 2002. It was our fourth conference tournament in three days, and should have been our third court-storming. But as you'll soon see, it was not to be. Bullet Points
ALBANY, N.Y. -- Yes indeed, the regular season is over. Everybody's into their conference tournaments now, and four are over already. And since The Boubacar is a regular-season thing, we'll be winding down this particular portion of the entertainment this week. But first and foremost, I wanted to let you know that I'm hosting a Four-Hour MegaChat over at the Worldwide Leader today. We're not going for The Record like last time, this is just a jog around the park, not a marathon. It all starts at noon ET (I hope you remembered to set your clocks ahead). Bring lots of questions, we're going to talk about Championship Week, Drake, the VCU and Saint Mary's double connumdrums, it's going to be more fun than those four-hour Indian musicals. Bullet Points
With the end of the regular season today, all conference tournament brackets in the mid-major (and A-14) domain have been finalized. After the jump, opening brackets for this week's events: the MEAC, SWAC, Mid-American, Big West, Atlantic 14, WAC and Southland. Bullet Points
Bullet Points
Kent State at Akron (Mid-American) So it's come to this. The final G!O!T!N! of the year, the last contest our virtual crew will travel to on the last day of the regular season. Everything's pretty much been settled as far as the MAC race goes (Kent clinched the regular-season title early this week) and all that's left to fight for is pride. And when we're talking about Kent-Akron, there's a lot of that at stake. Separated by only 10 miles, they're the conference's least friendly neighbors. In American-style football, they tussle over the Wagon Wheel, but on the hardcourt they prefer just to drive over each other. Kent (24-6, 12-3) pulled a second-half comeback out of a 10-point halftime deficit in the first meeting of the season, 75-69 on Jan. 23, and holds a slim 63-60 advantage in the all-time series. But Akron (21-8, 11-4) had won the previous four matchups, including a bruising 61-54 eliminator in last March's MAC semis that left marks on each and every spectator's eyes. As for those 2007-08Zips, don't count them out as a potential MAC tourney spoiler. The key to Akron's fortunes in this game and at the tourney in Cleveland likely will be 6-6 senior Jeremiah Wood, the team's leading scorer and rebounder (13.5 ppg, 7.9 rpg) who's coming back from a knee injury that looked liike it would end his season. But he's performed well in his three games back, playing above his season averages with 14.3 ppg and 8.3 rpg. NASHVILLE -- There is nothing in the world more fun that this fortnight, this extended Championship Week. Days full of games, wave after wave of cheerleaders, pep bands, student sections and players' moms. Every two hours new ones come along come, a blurry time-smear of orange, red, green, blue, gold. It's also the first March sighting of "Basketball Guys"... you know, those silver-haired dudes in jumpsuits who stand around in groups staying close to the game, talking about the old days when there was no 3-point line. Some of them are convinced that there's still one last D-I job left in them if they just make the right contact, even if they haven't coached anybody for over a decade. Promised it yesterday, overnight delivery today. We've been here at the Atlantic Sun tournament for the past couple days, and thought it would fun to show our readers what kind of stuff goes into making this March magic. Here, then, is your exclusive behind-the-scenes backstage pass to the A-Sun. Bullet Points
And he's done it again. During his senior season at Rider, he's averaged 20.2 points (on 55 percent shooting), 11.8 rebounds (second-best in the nation behind Michael Beasley), and 2.8 blocks. Along the way, he's collected 20 double-doubles, and has reached 20 and 20 in points and rebounds on two occasions. On top of all that, he's a team leader who carries himself on the floor with supreme confidence and poise. Earlier today, Thompson was named the player of the year in the Metro Atlantic Conference by a panel of league coaches, in advance of this weekend's MAAC tourney in Albany. Not quite surprisingly, Thompson's physique, statistics and composure have attracted lots of pro interest. At the recent BracketBuster game at Cal State Northridge, there were no fewer than 14 NBA scouts in attendance. He's currently projected as a low first-round draft pick, and could end up joining Calvin Murphy and Rik Smits as players who've gone from the MAAC to the mainstream. We caught up with Thompson last Friday after his second-to-last home game, in which he scored a career-high 33 points and grabbed 12 rebounds in an 88-76 win over St. Peter's. Listen in as we talk about his Rider career, stats, scouts, the temptation of larger schools, that snappy new Rider logo and uniforms, and his surprising lack of a good nickname.
Xavier at Saint Joseph's (Atlantic 10) Xavier (25-4, 13-1) comes into tonight's G!O!T!N! on an 11-game win streak, has an RPI of six, and is the only team in the entire Atlantic 14 that could leave for a 10-day all-expenses-paid vacation to Tahiti and return to find an NCAA Tournament bid in the mail. They're in the national top 30 in every offensive stat, outscore opponents bby an average of 14 points, and feature a defense that gives up only 62 points a game. The worst thing that's happened to the Musketeers in recent weeks is that Stanley Burrell had four straight performances with fewer than 10 points, and now the X has only five double-figure scorers. Boo hoo. Saint Joe's (17-10, 8-6), on the other hand, has lost five of seven to have its at-large hopes all but evaporate -- they need this game badly to go into Atlantic City with any momentum whatsoever. Only one of those drops was an old-fashioned butt-kicking (that 102-88 defensive meltdown out at Duquesne), and each of the other nine have been wasted opportunities that fell away in the final minutes, including that 76-72 loss at the X last month. It's gotten so bad that local folks are cracking fresh about Phil Martelli petitioning the NCAA to shorten games to 38 minutes. Bad jokes aside, it's a team that's been crafting less satisfying endings than those of Philly native M. Night Shymalan. OK, I'll stop now. There's one final chapter that SJU won't get wrong, however. It's also a time to say goodbye to one of the great underappreciated arenas in college basketball, Alumni Memorial Fieldhouse, and a special ceremony (featuring Dr. Jack Ramsay and Mike Bantom) will pay tribute to the building at 7:30 pm ET (watch here). When I lived in Philadelphia, I was three miles away from Hawk Hill. I'd drive up City Avenue to buy a ticket to see the Hawks play, and nearly every time, I'd drive back home grumbling to myself five minutes later. The place was always sold out. Once I was able to, I got in via ticket or credential as often as I could. The Fieldhouse had elements my Palestra couldn't match: shoulder-to-shoulder intimacy, closeness to the court from any seat. And, of course, those white walls and beams, those pendulous dome lights hanging down, and that tiny red scoreboard that looked like a floating first-aid kit above the court. I'm just sorry I didn't get to more games there.
Last night, that children's storybook that has never been written nearly came to fresh, vivacious life here at the Atlantic Sun tournament. No. 8 seed Campbell came tantalizingly close to sipping the fresh, delicious waters of victory. Against No. 1 seed Belmont, the two-time champions of the A-Sun Conference, they were dropped into an early hole by a 14-1 run, but didn't give up. Struggling to score against one of the top-shooting teams in the nation for the entire first half, all seemed quickly lost. Bullet Points
The State of College Basketball is a brand-new ratings system that uses a lot of good basketball sense, per-game team performance ratings and degradation of older results to rank the teams from No. 1 to 341 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of the Final Four in a simulation of last season. For our purposes here, it gives the world's only hype-free, non-voting, computer poll of teams in the lower 22 conferences. This is the full 246-team chart (updated hourly), and this is a recording. As of 3/5/2008, 4 p.m. ET 1. Drake (Missouri Valley), 101.07, 25-4 (15-3) [1] Well, this will be the second-to-last State sheet we'll be digitally printing for the season. By this time next week, some of these teams will be eliminated and gone forever! But we feel pretty confident in the top 10 we have here in terms of Tournament toughness; remember that this index is a measure of well-roundedness, multi-dimensionality, and general overall solidity. That's why you see a lot of teams with one great statistical attribute, or one great scorer, down in the lower reaches. One-trick ponies don't survive March, we all know that.
La Salle at Massachusetts (Atlantic 10) Perhaps the most frequently asked question (that's "FAQ," for all you kids who've never been on the internet before) posed to me recently goes something like this. What's wrong with the Atlantic We here at TMM Mobile HQ can understand where all that's coming from, this is a nation obsessed with bid size. And this league has undergone some serious shrinkage in that regard, from five to somewhere around a two and a half in six short weeks. To that, we say: it ain't the meat, it's the motion offense. If you look at it a certain way, La Salle (14-14, 8-6) is everything wrong with the A-14, but anybody who loves the underdog has to think otherwise. One of the many teams dabbling with variants of the hot new DDM offense, the Explorers have rocketed from total obscurity (a 4-8 nonconference start and a 3-4 beginning to league play) to serious player in the league race. By winning four of its last five league games, Dr. John Giannini's crew has taken the nation's 10th best long-distance shooting (40.2 percent from 3) to third-place status in the conference. All this despite having the third-lowest RPI in the league, at 158. Though its league record is identical, UMass (19-9, 8-6) is a lot more saleable as an at-large candidate. A four-game win streak has lifted the Minutemen back into the conversation, and a healthy 38 RPI will likely get the team into the Big Dance should it achieve and lose the conference title game. This team boasts the best 3-point defense in the league (33.6 percent allowed), so that might be able to nullify La Salle's explosive shooters. The 'Men run, rebound and block well, and they do feature 6-7 senior Gary Forbes, who leads the team in points (20.1) and rebounds (7.9) and has proven a heavy handful. But a loss tonight in the two teams' only regular season meeting, and UMass will likely be asked a lot about what's wrong with them. NASHVILLE -- Our day-long drive down from our Rhode Island home down to Music City was like the 2007-08 season in intricately-styled microcosm. There were a lot of miles driven (about a thousand), hours upon hours of XM radio (we like the new "Thriller" channel) and spotty cell reception just about everywhere. Then we stopped at a Panera and filed a story with the free wi-fi, like we always do, slept for a couple of hours in a rest area, then took a shower at a Flying J. There was also a punishing rainstorm through Maryland and West Virginia that was like a million tiny fists against the glass, symbolic of the annual February drag and grind when we question why we do this, when we think about giving up and going back to systems analysis. But the sky cleared up, like it always does, and then there was a 2 a.m. breakfast at Waffle House. (Nobody gives up on anything after a waffle with butterscotch chips on it.) And then, as usual, we got into town in plenty of time for tip-off. It's the beginning of our fifth annual overdose of conference tournaments (it predates the blog), a total of 24 games in 11 days. This is the time we live for: an extended blur of furious rallies, surprise heroes, buzzer-beaters, broken-hearted cheerleaders, twine-cutting, and three-minute sideline catch-ups with old friends. All due respect to the NCAA Tournament, but this is the best time of the year. We don't usually give out our travel plans in advance, but we're so excited that we just can't hide it. Here, then, is our schedule for the week. Bullet Points
Miami (Oh.) at Kent State (Mid-American) Kent State (23-6, 11-3) was the biggest winner of the whole BracketBuster VI thing, earning a late-night victory out at nationally-ranked Saint Mary's and inspiring talk of the first two-bid Mid-American Conference since 1999. But the line forms to the right, dear, now that the MAC is back in town. After taking seven days off, Bowling Green dropped a cement bag on Kent with an 89-83 decision out at Anderson Arena, leaving the Golden Flashes 0-2 in the Toledo area. Next comes defending champs Miami before the season finale at loathed rival Akron. Nobody said it would be a pleasant night on the town, capped off by a 9 p.m. Bobby Darin show at the Flamingo. So it'll be Senior Night tonight at the M.A.C., a chance for Kent fans to pay tribute to longtime fixture Mike Scott (team-leading 13.3 ppg) and 6-8 do-everything Haminn Quaintance (10.1 ppg, 7.4 rpg, 1.7 spg, 2.1 apg), one of the most well-rounded players the league's seen recently, a surefire POY candidate. (Then those fans will try to sneak into Akron's building next Sunday to pay some more tribute.) They'll see if the Flashes can replicate an earlier 12-point win at Miami, which was really the breakout performance by incoming junior transfer guard Al Fisher, who was the star of the Saint Mary's contest. He shot 7-for-11 for 21 points in that one. As for Miami, it's been a hard team to get a read on. They've fought off injury (to former MMBOW Michael Bramos), and general frustration all year. In nonconference play, there were close losses to Dayton, Louisville and Wright State, but then came that huge win at Illinois. MAC play has been up and down too: after losses in four of the first five league games, the Redhawks went on a five game tear to reach back above .500. More recently, three losses in five games... but they're coming off a serious statement versus Ohio, a 73-49 superblast in which Ohio shot just 25 points and Bramos struck for 31. If Miami is regaining momentum, it could spell a severe narrowing of Kent's at-large hopes. Bullet Points
PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- M is for March, and madness, and mania, and magic; any etymologist knows they all came from the same source, Ma-, a Anglo-Saxon derivative meaning "super-awesome." M is also for Mid-major. It's our time, and this is our year. With so many struggling power-conference teams trying to figure out if they want to be on the bubble or not, we might have more 12-over-5 and 13-over-everybody games than you can count. A is for ARRRGH, the feeling you get when your school's team storms through the regular season, then loses in the tourney semifinals and misses out on the NCAA's. A is also for ass, which is what you feel like after trash-talking to opposing fans about your big Tournament plans. The text messages are piling up, friend, better just shut your phone off. Turn it back on in April. R is for referee, the man who's going to steal a game from your team in the final seconds and change your mood to raw rage. It's also the second letter in the word "bracket," which is a term that virtually nobody associated with March just three short decades ago. C is for center, which is something your team needs this month. You don't want to be outrebounded by 20. It's also for catatonic, which is what you'll be in three weeks after prolonged exposure to life in 40-minute timed increments. And finally, H is for 'hell with this Sue Grafton garbage, let's look at some of the remaining multi-bid scenarios.
North Carolina A&T at Hampton (MEAC) Morgan State has pretty much run away with the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference race, clinching the No. 1 seed last week and winning a 39-36 American-style football game at defending regular-season titlist Delaware State. But there are plenty of seed battles to be determined, and that's where our preseason favorite and early-season standouts come in. It's the league's top offense against the league's best D in this evening's M!E!A!C! G!O!T!N!. North Carolina A&T (14-14, 9-7), tonight's visitors, had all the markings of a team ready to claim the championship: six seniors, lots of returning scoring, and a steady year-over-year progression up the win column. And the Aggies rebounded well from the type of guarantee-game schedule most MEAC teams face, and even claimed a win at DePaul over Thanksgiving. A long road trip through places like Tennessee, Miami (Fla.) and Washington State was quickly forgotten when A&T won six MEAC games in a row in January. But February's been less kind: five losses in eight games, and a lot of inconsistent effort on defense. But as expected, this is the league's top offense, scoring a league-high 70.6 points. It's that 72.3 given up that's been the problem. Hampton (16-11, 11-5) made a huge nonconference splash, beating eventual CAA regular-season champion VCU by nine points in November. They followed that up with a crushing 65-31 league-opening win in the battle of the HU's over Howard in New York City, and have established themselves as the top defensive team in the league. But the Pirates have fallen back to second after losing four of six last month, and have been swept by Morgan. Their road issues, however, are deceptively easy to figure out: they don't do well at gyms to the north. Hampton is 0-4 at Del-State, Maryland-Eastern Shore, and the two Baltimore schools (Coppin and Morgan). Lucky for them, their final two regularly-scheduled are at home, and the conference tourney is down south in Raleigh.
Mr. Reid, who was named as Big South POY today for the second consecutive season, becomes our first two-time winner of 2007-08. We had him as our 10th honoree back in mid-January. The Panthers were doing quite well back then, claiming a 62-61 Big South season-opening home win against the defending champions from Winthrop. But a lot's happened since. High Point lost three of its next five to disappear from the race while WU and UNC Asheville fought it out for the conference lead. A return loss at Winthrop in early February began a tailspin that threatened to send the Panthers into low-seed oblivion: four losses in five games. That's when the 6-5 senior, who's averaged 24.2 ppg and 11.1 rpg this season, took the team on his shoulders. He turned in two stellar performances last week that turned HPU's fortunes around, and helped the team rebound to claim the No. 3 seed in this week's tourney. Last Wednesday against Radford, he scored 34 points on 12-for-21 shooting, including four 3's to tie a season high, and the Panthers came away with a 77-54 win. But in the regular-season finale at the Virginia Military Institute -- a 99-88 victory -- "AZ" nearly contributed as many points as Arizona has delegates to this summer's conventions. High Point sealed the No. 3 seed thanks to a 42 point, 14 rebound effort from Mr. Reid. It was, efficiency-wise, his best performance of the year, as he shot 17-for-27 from the floor, shot 5-for-7 from the line, and played every single minute. Thanks to Reid's huge week, the Panthers ended the season 8-6 and will host a tourney game on Tuesday against No. 6 Coastal Carolina, instead of having to pack up and bus somewhere. Congratulations, Mr. MMBOW, and good luck in the postseason. PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- The calendar does not deceive you, it's been March for two-plus days now and we haven't seen one conference tournament game. We'll take care of that tomorrow (the Big South, OVC and Horizon get underway), but this in-between day gives us a chance to catch our collective breath and warn you about what's coming next. Folks who read along last year probably remember the daily Tourney Central posts, which laid out constantly-updated brackets for each of the 21 conference tourneys, provided scores and links to boxes, and featured the occasional insightful comment. We're doing that again this year! The big difference is that all the stat stuff is over at Basketball State now, and we'll be throwing links over there at a thoroughly alarming rate in the next two weeks. So we've instituted some new March pricing: get access until April 2009 (from now until the end of next year's NCAA's) for $29.95, and if you just want to hang around short-term, it's ten bucks for this month only (non-recurring). When you compare that to girlie sites, that's a darn good deal. And as the days get longer, The Boubacar will get shorter as the action shifts to tourneys. We'll do Game! Of! The! Night! posts until early next week to showcase the last few key regular-season games, and there'll be Ballers of the Week from here on out. We'll sprinkle in some interviews, cartoons and random jokes just so it doesn't get too stagnant. Tomorrow, we'll take a look at some two-bid scenarios, but it's time to recap the weekend! |
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When ESPN.com brought me on in the summer of 2005, my good friend Sarah bought me a 
DETROIT -- The alarm clock went off this morning, like it normally does... but we're still trying to figure out when, exactly, we fell asleep. Around 6 p.m. yesterday? That timeframe makes more sense than what we were hallucinating about. Davidson? A No. 10 seed? Slaughtering the Big Ten champs in Big Ten country? 
There are 16 teams left to fight over the National Championship, each with just four more wins to go to achieve the ultimate prize. Strangely enough, they spent widely disparate amounts of money to get here.
If you've been reading this site with any sort of regularity this year, you know about my 
Back by popular demand, it's another chart of who's got money and who doesn't. Basing your prognostications on athletic budgets isn't a perfect method -- you would have gone 24-8 in the first round, which seems about average for all those suffering from Tampa Madness (you would have had WKU over Drake, though). 
BIRMINGHAM -- On mornings like this, after days like that, I'm envious of people who can simply move on with their brackets and think about the next round's matchups. For those of us who cover the mid-major schools, we'll be reliving this day over and over again for the next year. 
We had quite a few mail inquiries and chat questions yesterday about the chat that was published in 
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. -- I don't know if I'm ripping the cover off some secret clandestine something, or exposing some horrible underbelly of The Business here. But one of the best things about Championship Fortnight is the media gifts. Yes, many conferences bestow presents upon us ink- and pixel-stained wags, presenting us with tokens of appreciation when we pick up our credentials. It's not like the Oscars or anything, we're not taken into a big room full of tables and goodie bags and asked which iPhone we want, but it's pretty darned close.
Jason Thompson isn't the kind of talent you often find at the mid-major level. Heck, there aren't that many players in the power conferences like him. He's a 6-11 specimen who can shoot mid-range jumpers just as well as he can lay it in, and can muscle his way to any rebound, anywhere. Entering this season, Thompson was the only returning player in the nation who averaged 20 points and 10 rebounds per game in 2006-07.
NASHVILLE -- There's a little Fighting Camel in all of us -- that piece of our soul that's tragically misunderstood, a little out of place. It's the part of you that's told you'll never make it, never achieve your dreams. Silly camel, you aren't supposed to fight for or win anything... you're supposed to live your preassigned role of giving dudes rides across the desert, and you're going to like it. And too bad if you want a drink, you're not getting one. 
The really good players are the ones who can lift their teams up when it counts, who deliver in the clutch, who take it upon themselves to lift their team out of a funk. And the very funky-haired Arizona Reid of High Point is our seventeenth Mid-Majority Baller Of The Week.
