Southern Illinois at Western Kentucky Southern Illinois: Sweet 16, 2007. Western Kentucky: Sweet 16, 2008. A pair of programs with major March impact over the past two seasons go at it tonight in the land of Big Red. And it might be a bit much to ask the same of either this season, as both are retooling after the losses of key players from those bracket-busting squads. Courtney Lee was as good a talent as you'll see at this level, and it sure was fun to watch him these past few years. But last year's Sun Belt POY is gone, along with Darrin Horn, the coach that guided him through college (off to the green fields of South Carolina). What's left is an array of spare parts that hasn't quite fit together, but WKU fans will have at least a month's worth of patience for new bench boss Ken McDonald, in from Texas' bench. Western's (1-2) offense has been indefensible, scoring just 62.3 ppg and shooting just 40.1 percent on the new season. But this team will get it turned around eventually, and the cross-state Murray State Racers (89-61 winners last Saturday) are advised not to gloat. Southern Illinois' Valley hopes rest on the influx of five talented freshmen, one of the best recruiting classes the school's ever brought in. Learn the name Kevin Dillard, because he's going to be a Valley POY before his career is through. He's scored 11.8 ppg and is already showing the kind of emotion the great Saluki teams have always run on. Unfortunately, new 6-11 big Nick Evans is out 4-6 weeks with a broken wrist suffered at the Coaches vs. Cancer tourney in New York -- the crash when he hit the floor against UCLA still reverberates in our consciousness. SIU has had the better of this series since it resumed as a home-and-home two seasons ago. On Dec. 9, 2006, Tony Young (now a Saluki graduate assistant) scored 21 to pace a 75-70 win at Diddle. Last season, departed Topper hero Lee (getting 10 minutes a night for the Orlando Magic these days) poured in 30, but SIU still prevailed by 10 behind three 20-point performances. Tonight, another chapter in the battle of two storied programs. INDIANAPOLIS -- Lots of housekeeping today. For starters, Feast Week will only be a three-course meal here on The Mid-Majority. There will be no posts on Turkey Day or Black Friday, but we'll be camped out at the Chicago Challenge watching eight games in two days so the Twitter feed will be very active. Stop by, say hello, and remember to use the @ sign. This is The Future, and you have to know the rules. Speaking of rules, about that contest. After an overwhelming response to the Week 1 Bally giveaway, which included a ball-busting trivia question that required a trip to the New York Public Library or whatever, our theoretical and conceptual U'u contest has only three entries so far. I can't figure it out. I'm re-evaluating everything. I mean, do people want stuffed Ballys, or are they really seeking opportunities to torture themselves with arcane mid-major trivia? Please prove me wrong (or right), the contest ends on Friday.
Mount Saint Mary's at George Mason There's plenty of hot mid-on-mid action tonight. There's our game, for example, out in Bucknell as the Bison host Old Dominion, at which we'll all party like it's 2005. The best excuse for a city game in Boston takes place between Boston University and Northeastern -- lots of red and black there, so watch out who you're heckling. But do either of those games feature two teams coming off NCAA Tournament bids? Nooo. So our G!O!T!N! cameras are off to GMU. George Mason (3-1), the school which I probably owe my gainful employment to after its magical Final Four run three seasons ago, isn't afraid to forget about the past. And when I say that I mean, exchange the beloved furry mascot Gunston with this hideous love child of the New England Patriot and Braveheart. (Here's a name for you: "Johnny Badacid.") On the court, however, there are hints of the three-headed monster that made 2006 such a success, this time in the personages of midsize 6-6 Louis Birdsong, bulky undersizer Darryl Monroe (as "Jai Lewis Jr."), and John Vaughan -- the man who spent that run on crutches -- in the backcourt. All three are in double figures scoring-wise, and the Patriots are 3-1 with wins over Vermont, Brown and East Carolina. The NEC champion Mountaineers (1-1) nearly tipped Virginia Tech over the weekend, and earlier beat the Loyola (Md.) Fightin' Patsoses. The scoring leader for the Mount has been its 5-9 superdynamo Jeremy Goode, who's averaging 18 points over the first couple of games, but check out Jean Cajou, the 6-3 sophomore who came on strong down the stretch in 2007-08 and scored 19 in the close loss to VT. Cajou might be ready for a big performance -- he'll have plenty of supporters in the stands, being a Fairfax hometown boy. PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- Tuesdays mean no lollygagging, goldbricking or hanging out in the alley. This is contest day, and we have a prize to give out: a real live stuffed Bally. And in order to keep 99.9 percent of Hoops Nation from feeling sorry for itself, we have another contest on deck. Hello, Bally Tuesday Last week at this time, we asked you to dig through the dusty books of college basketball history and find a mid-major school that had accomplished a feat that Loyola (Ill.) had done over 2008-09's first weekend: lose to a lower-division school and beat a defending power-conference tournament champion in the same season. A whopping 53 of you did just that, many opting to take the hedge clause (a school from this level that lost to a D-II and went on to the NCAA tournament). But we're proud to say that one man has stepped forward and won this thing outright. I have a real treat for you today. I want to introduce you to this special, special player I've discovered. His name's Curry, as in hot like. He's got a regular-looking first name -- Stephen -- but it's pronounced all weird, like STEFF-in. His dad played in the NBA. Nothing about this guy is regular, let me tell you. And his jump shot... creamy smooth like whipped peanut butter. You really should see this guy.
Mr. Curry, a 6-2 junior guard, currently leads the entire nation in scoring at 34.0 ppg, which may be the kind of number you're used to seeing on the NBA leading scorer table, with its extra eight minutes every game. But it's no real shock because he's also the nation's leading scorer (25.9 ppg last season), and it's been common knowledge that the sky has been his limit for some time now. Much of that world-leading average was gained during a 44-point outburst in a losing effort at Oklahoma on national television Tuesday night. That number represented both the highest one-game total in Division I so far, as well as a career high full of career highs. But that was just one highlight in a busy week. On Monday, he dropped 33 on James Madison, on 14-for-19 shooting. In a Friday night BracketBuster return game with Winthrop, a wide Wildcat win, the man shot 50 percent (8-for-16) for 30 points. Oh, and how's that conversion to the point guard slot going? Add up all the assists for the week and you get 25, good for 8.3 apg and the No. 3 slot on the national chart. He owns a 3.2-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio, and has also collected 4.5 steals per contest. All together now: Stephen Curry is good at basketball. We're not trying to keep him from being rich or anything, and this is totally a selfish request, but the petition for him to stay for a senior year starts now, and we'd like to apply the first signature. But that's still a long way off. In the meantime, congratulations to Mr. Curry, you're the Mid-Majority Baller of the Week.
Miami (Oh.) at Wright State You know that phrase, "Throw out the records?" It's such a cliché that it's a Kenny Mayne cliché, which means there's no farther it can go. But in mid-major college basketball, at this point of the season, you really can. They're useless at face value, and usually require contextual inquiry. Here are two teams a year removed from conference tournament championships, which both look strong to make a play for 2009 titles. Miami of the MAC is 1-2, but those losses are to Pittsburgh and UCL-freaking-A. Anybody who stayed up late to watch the game out west on Nov. 13 could see what a stingy, relentless team the Redhawks are, and the close 64-59 loss was in range for a 1 a.m. upset alert e-mail until the very end. And even in the blowout loss at Pitt, there were glimpses of the beautiful shot of senior guard Kenny Hayes (18 points, all 9 foul shots converted), and a glimmer of hope for a closer result next time around if he stops being so darned streaky (4 for 12 from the field). Wright, on the other hand, really would like you to mentally dispose of its 0-2 current mark. The problem so far can be summed up in one word: shooting. Brad Brownell has the Raiders playing fantastic ball-control hoops, but the team couldn't manage 40 percent from the floor against either Illinois State or Central Michigan. With all the returning talent from a squad that finished first in the Horizon League in 3-pointers during conference season (41.3 percent), that's not a trend that's likely to continue. (After 20 years of perfecting your shot, it just doesn't disappear suddenly.) Also expect a defense which has allowed 69.5 ppg so far to clamp down -- this is a team that left opponents bruised and bloody on its way to leading the conference in nearly every meaningful defensive stat. Coach Brownell won't stand for anything less. However this comes out, prepare for a fingernail finish. The last two meetings in this ongoing annual series have been decided by the sum total of two points, with Wright State ekeing out 57-56 and 58-57 wins. Not since 2003 has one or the other cracked 60. PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- For my money, the greatest movie about rock and roll music ever made is Stop Making Sense, the 1984 Talking Heads concert film directed by Jonathan Demme. The movie strikes a very personal note for me, because I take a 40 long jacket. Manufacturers don't tend to make that size, so whenever I buy a 42L off the rack, people tend to ask me, "Why a big suit?" Unlike most concert films that attempt to capture a performance as is, Stop Making Sense has a sort of narrative structure. Each band member appears, like characters in an actual movie, as the band grows by one every time a new song is played. First, the quirky chameleon professor-type. Then the awkward female bassist who appears as if she'd rather be anywhere else. Each player enters the stage until the stage is filled -- the chatty drummer, twisting African-American background singers, and Bernie "Woo Warrior" Worrell. (Byrne gets all the credit, but Jerry Harrison was the only one with the sense to fuse white new wave and black funk.) When the P-Funk ambassador shows up, that sort of ruins the ending of the movie's plot -- you see, everybody gets down at the end.
Winthrop at Davidson It just makes sense that the two Charlotte-area schools that have defined their respective conferences, the Big South and SoCon, for the last decade would play more often. But after February's 13-point Davidson win in a Friday night BracketBuster special, Davidson head coach Bob McKillop pretty much deflected every single question about an ongoing series, preferring instead to talk about Brazilian soccer, team chemistry and Stephen Curry. Which is his right. So we'll get to enjoy this ESPN-mandated return game for what it's worth, and hope that they get matched up again someday. It's hard to talk about Davidson (2-1) without mentioning a certain Wooden Award candidate and All-America selection, but I'm going to take up the challenge of writing a 1,500 word story about the Wildcats without mentioning his name once. That'll be later, though. For now, Curry is the shining, boyish face of mid-major basketball, All That's Good About Our Game, and could probably cure several obscure diseases with his jump shot. He's the nation's leading scorer at 35.3 ppg, shooting 51.5 percent and has settled into his new point guard role nicely -- try 7.3 assists on for size. He was last seen putting up 44 (including 14-of-14 from the line) against Oklahoma on national teevee, in a losing cause. Curry is now scoring 37.3 percent of the team's points. If other people step up, they win that OU game. Curry and Co. will likely have little problem handling Winthrop tonight, but it's a great opportunity to see how the third (by my count) major rebuilding project in Rock Hill is going. Every year, no matter how many pieces they have to replace, Winthrop keeps winning the Big South. There are only four upperclassmen on this year's roster, and a slow 1-2 start, buoyed by a glorified exhibition win over North Greenville, includes two wide losses to South Carolina and Akron. In both, the Eagles allowed over 70 points, something that rarely happened in 2007-08. The key thing to watch this season is how the defense develops under stop-happy Randy Peele.
NEW YORK CITY -- Madison Square Garden IV, indeed the fourth venue to have had this name, is a layer cake built on the corner of 7th Avenue and 33rd Street. It opened in 1968, four years before I was born. By the time I started going to games there, in the mid-1980's, its internal workings were as stained and dysfunctional as those of a 60-year-old lifetime chain smoker. The "blue seats" in the ring farthest from the floor, in particular, were in the worst shape. I learned a lot of things about human nature up there in the ten-dollar obstructed-view seats during Rangers games, where the dockworkers would drink and yell and vomit and piss in the aisles. Folks would come down from Harlem or in from Queens for Knicks games, and I saw more than a few instances of hand-sex up there in the 400 level. I don't recall many people sitting up there for the NIT or Holiday Festivals or Big East tournaments, that is unless Saint John's was playing. Then it was hard to find a seat. Even when the crowds were thin, Madison Square Garden maintained its status as the capital of college basketball. It's always mattered to play here, a feeling that's survived the building changes as well as the generations that have passed since the NIT stopped meaning anything. New York City is the place where the original championship was decided, before the NCAA stole the idea. In sepiatone days, cigar smoke would create a cloud above an arena floor full of set shots and chest passes, scratching and clawing and blood in the post. New York City is the crucible out of which college basketball started to matter, before it was polished and buffed and packaged for mass consumption.
North Texas at Sam Houston State It's great to catch up with our old friends from Texas. At around this time last year, both the Mean Green and Bearkats were burrs in some Big XII saddles -- North Texas beat Oklahoma State by nine, while SHSU took out Texas Tech, both road games. They were impactful enough victories to keep the two teams hanging around the State of the Other 22 ratings, despite the fact that both ran out of gas through league season. We've since adjusted the formula to make more of measurable momentum. Both won at least 20 games (Sam State won 23), and neither made any sort of national postseason. So what now? North Texas returns some key pieces, most notably sophomore Josh White, the 5-10 supershooter that busted OSU for 25 points in just his second college game. He's tallied 17.5 ppg in his first two games, including 23 in the return match with the Cowboys on Monday, which Oklahoma State survived 100-88. That game was notable for the contributions of a newcomer, trickle-down transfer George Odufuwa. From deep in the Arizona State bench, the 6-8 Dallas native sat out a year and reemerged meaner and greener. He notched a 10-and-13 double-double in that OSU game. Sam State did it with seniors last year, and this year it's all about the newcomers. No fewer than six have suited up in orange for Bob Marlin's rebuilding crew, and one to keep an eye on is 6-1 Corey Allmond, a juco transfer from Howard College in Big Spring, Texas. After two games, it's clear that he's the go-to guy, scoring 24 in the 100-42 blowout opener against Schreiner and 23 in the year-after game against Texas Tech. No win this time, but Sam played the Red Raiders to within 11. Both teams have had no trouble scoring, averaging over 87 points a piece. Will there be enough defense to save the scoreboard from blowing up? We'll see tonight. NEW YORK CITY -- I didn't get a chance yesterday, but I wanted to thank all the folks who stopped by during the ESPN SportsNation chat component of the College Hoops Tip-Off Marathon. I ran the anchor leg and I held it down mid-major style for two hours, and I noticed a couple of things. First, having some sort of opening day for our sport is absolutely crucial, an announcement that We're Back. It was obvious that a lot of casual fans noticed, and a lot of people came out of the woodwork and wanted to talk about hoops instead of pigskin. (Later, we'll work on making it an actual opening day and removing the time exemption of a certain preseason tourney that no longer deserves it.) The second is that being connected to the internet via a tethered mobile device creates a magma-hot core in your pocket with the capability of singing the inside of your pants. Just another friendly byproduct of The Future. I love doing the chats, I've done over 60 of them in my three-plus years with the Worldwide Leader. I've been told that I'm one of the few who enjoys it to the point of badgering the SportsNation crew to let me do it more often than I'm scheduled. It's a great way to talk in real time about our favorite subject while downplaying my weaknesses (namely, radio and TV). There are the regulars who always stop by, the power-conference trolls, and as always, the folks who just want to hear something nice about their team.
Charlotte at Appalachian State Tonight in the rarified air of Boone, two very good teams that were out in the cold when the Big Ball started this past March. Charlotte won 20 games and mounted a run to the semifinals of the Atlantic 14 conference, where it lost to eventual champions Temple. App State couldn't convert an 18-7 record into a tourney shot at Davidson, losing in the SoCon quarters to UNC Greensboro in a mild 5-over-4 upset. But you know what they say, that was last year, tomorrow never dies, etc., et al. Both teams have started their 2008-09 campaigns well, but a little unevenly. LaMont Mack, Charlotte's 6-7 senior, is making a successful return from May knee surgery, and his 49ers (1-1) blew out UNCG on Friday by 18 points in a win highlighted by a Mack double-double (18 and 10). Then the team lost a tight battle to Old Dominion two days later, in which they let a late lead slip away. Didn't help that ODU outrebounded Charlotte by 13, a statistic that will bear watching as the season goes on. Houston Fancher's mighty Mountaineers will be making their home regular-season debut tonight. After leading most of the way on Friday against UNC Wilmington, the host Seahawks mounted a late comeback from 18 points down and ran away from ASU in OT, 108-101. App State had six in double figures, including fearless sophomore guard Donald Sims with 23 and slimmed-down giant Ike Butts (10 and 12), but yielded three 20-plus performances by UNCW. Can App State finish a game? Can Charlotte hang in on the boards? Tune in if you're able to. PHILADELPHIA -- This blog has been involved in several pet causes... heck, this entire thing is a pet cause. But TMM is getting involved in a new charitable campaign that strikes to the heart of what's important in Our Game. This is all about getting Drexel students to adopt proper rollout procedures. The rollout is Philadelphia's second-greatest gift to college basketball, between the Palestra (No. 1) and streamers (No. 3). Crepe cascades after first baskets are long gone thanks to no-fun rules and technical fouls, the Cathedral may not last another century, but rollouts are forever. Drexel (which is "my school," after all) had a wonderful epoch-making win yesterday morning, and several of the students' fledgeling missives were very good ("If Ben Franklin was alive today, he'd be a Drexel engineer" was devastating enough to leave the Penn section calling back meekly, "Dre-xel High School").
Nevada at San Diego The Western Athletic and West Coast took completely different paths last season -- the WAC, a perennial multi-bid league despite its allocation of most of its resources to football, languished in the 20's of the RPI scale and squeezed out a champion after that Boise State-New Mexico State final. The WCC grew up fast, going from Gonzaga to gazonga! Three bids later, and even the most casual fans can name multiple teams. The tourney champion, and the owner of the WCC's deepest NCAA run, is San Diego. The Toreros return just about everyone from the team that shocked UConn out of a No. 13 seed, including last year's second-leading scorer, senior guard Brandon Johnson. He scored 14 points in USD's tough season-opening 65-60 loss to UNLV, but it was his 3-for-14 line that was mildly concerning. Taking a hiatus is the top point-producer from 2007-08, all-WCC big man Gyno Pomare, who was suspended by head coach Bill Grier for a team-rules violation. Suspensions are also a big part of the story for the Wolf Pack, which have three players in limbo -- Brandon Fields, London Giles and Ahyaro Phillips, who were cited with petty larceny back in October. But this game will be a great opportunity to see new Wolf Luke Babbitt in action. The 6-9 freshman dropped 20 points on Montana State in his college debut, and added 12 rebounds just to make it more memorable. Can the Wolf Pack make it back to the Dance in 2009? He'll be a big part of the reason why if they do. PHILADELPHIA -- Drexel hosts Penn today at 10 a.m. as part of ESPN's Mega Mammoth Opening Day Explosion. This'll be the last morning game we attend, at least until the next NAIA tournament or summer AAU spectacubash. For that reason, we'll be short with this (MMBOW and G!O!T!N! will be forthcoming later). Just a reminder, though, that I will be anchoring ESPN.com's SportsNation college hoops chat block from 3 to 5 this afternoon, so please stop by. First, though, a couple of things happened last night that we have to get to. Loyola (Ill.) 74, Georgia 53 -- The Ramblers' season started off in bizarre fashion on Friday. Senior guard J.R. Blount established himself as the nation's leading scorer for a moment, scoring a gigantic 41 points on 12-for-22 shooting. However, Loyola dropped that opener by seven points... to Division II Rockhurst, also known as Kansas City's Jesuit University. But when the team moved on to the NIT Season Tip-Off pod in West Lafayette, Ind., the Ramblers came alive. Breaking open a 29-all tie at halftime, Loyola destroyed the SEC tourney champions. It was the school's first win over a team from that conference since a 1964 NCAA upset of Kentucky in a regional third place game, back when they did things like that.
Maryland-Baltimore County at Morgan State The Beltway area enjoyed a mid-major hoops renaissance last season. UMBC won the America East for the first time ever, American claimed the Patriot League title after years of being defined by its runner-up finishes, and then there were the Morgan State Bears of the MEAC, which ran the league all year but was devastated on its final possession in the title game, falling to Coppin State (also a Baltimore school, of course) by a 62-60 count. Now it's a new year -- for the Retrievers, the Bears, and for everybody's favorite Mid-Majority weekday feature, the G!O!T!N!. These two squads do have history together, and are now engaged in a home-and-home back-and-forth series. Last season, UMBC made a Charm City statement by beating Morgan by eight at their place. It was one of those games that we would see a lot of for the rest of the season: four in double figures, and no need for multiple basketballs. Three of those four are gone, but Daryl Proctor is back to run the show. The 6-4 senior is coming off a 20-point performance in a glorified exhibition against Stevenson on Saturday. Morgan State is dealing with some defections too. TMM guiding light Boubacar Coly left early, leaving the Bears in need of some rebounding and defensive-intensity replacement. They were outboarded and outshot in their first game, a tight three-point loss to LaSalle the other day, but holdover Marquise Kately had seven while scoring 13. Morgan had four in low double figures, yet only managed 33 percent shooting while keeping the ballgame close with good ball control (only 11 turnovers). Tonight will be a good opportunity to see how the MEAC regular season champs' offense takes shape. PITTSBURGH -- When something like this happens, when 111-103 happens, when a little military school from western Virginia marches into venerable old Rupp Arena and runs the home team off its own floor, it's never about the victor. That's just the way these things work. The tale, as it's commonly being told, is about the failure of one, and not necessarily the accomplishment of the other. It's another reason why David's shoes don't fit. In the overarching narrative that follows, most will try to explain the cracks in the armor, not the weapons that opened and exposed them. Consider last season -- when Gardner-Webb beat Kentucky, few bothered to follow the story of the winner that day farther, focusing instead on the vanquished. Can you remember how GW's season ended? (In a gym in Nashville in front of a few thousand people.) But this right here, it's really about a school of rigorous discipline hidden deep in the Virginia hill country, coached by an ex-cop with a rebuilt heart who's not afraid to challenge the conventional basketball wisdom any time he can with a deep bag of tricks, and a team led by a pair of identical twins that always takes the first open shot. This should be about the winners, and all they accomplished to get to this point. PEORIA, Ill. -- Remember back when you were a kid, it was a hot summer day out in your backyard... you had your 1980's NBA-style short-shorts on with no shirt, just hanging out in the grass your daddy just mowed fresh that morning. Not a care in the world. Then you got really thirsty, and you were too lazy to go in and grab a Coke from the fridge, and that's when you noticed that garden hose snaking around the corner, just a little bit of water dribbling out the end... you picked it up and just let that water splash on your tongue. So cool, so delicious. But just then, your sister snuck over to the other end, took hold of that little flower-shaped metal wheel. Before you could do anything, before you could hear the creak and the groan of that spigot twist, WAPHOOOSH! That woke you up. That's exactly what today, November 14, is like. It's a torrent of college basketball right in your face. Frankly, we've had just about all we can take of previews, overviews, pre-mortems and outlooks (hopefully this A-Sun preview is the last one, and it's an opportunity to hear how I sound at 8 a.m. with no coffee). I personally have been writing speculative articles about the 2008-09 season since September. Enough already. After just a little taste of action this week with the Coaches vs. Cancer tourney, it's time to stuff the scoreboard, cycle the ESPN ticker, and melt down the Basketball State database. Again. CARBONDALE, Ill. -- It's a day with no games (at least none to attend), and one for catching up on e-mail, writing stories, plugging leaks over at Basketball State and picking up roadtrip supplies at Wal-Mart. It's also probably best that there's a breather after last night's Lazarus act by Southern Illinois, which started out 2-for-7 from the floor and in a 12-4 hole, and ended up blitzing UMass for two bookend runs in the second half. The structure of the 75-67 win was cinematic, but it wasn't even televised. It's also as good as any day to reflect on non-basketball ephemera. I'm breaking out a new gameday uniform this year, which I hope will be the kind of gimmick to shed my "Mid-Major Guy" thumbnail bio, without actually yielding the territory to competitors. I'm upgrading my look from the standard shirt and tie of years past to a full suit... and a pair of silver Nikes.
CARBONDALE, Ill. -- When I switched on the local TV this morning, there was a reel of clips from a Murray State exhibition game, the Racers were beating up on Bethel College. In the inbox, news that Stephen Curry had lit up the scoreboard for 41 points... iin a non-counter against Lenoir-Rhyne (eight turnovers? hmmm...). We here are already inside the season, counting wins and losses and tabulating statistics, but it's easy to forget that "opening day" is still two days out. It's like when Major League Baseball starts in the dead of a March night in Tokyo's Big Egg, or when the NHL plays a weekend of games in Europe. The season has started, but it hasn't. Four games into the 2008-09 campaign, we're definitely in a temporary in-between bizarro world. Gas is a buck-seventy-nine. The Coaches vs. Cancer tournament, the nation's only time-exempt event this year, has again found its marquee hogged by a video-game company that acts as ruling sponsor (it reads a little like "BUY STUFF BUY STUFF cure horrible diseases"). And a lot of these matchups in the first and second rounds look a lot like exhibitions.
DURHAM, N.C. -- So this is how it began. No, the picture above is not of Cameron Indoor Stadium hours before the first game, this was the first game. The 2008-09 season tipped off in relative silence, televised subregionally, radio only. The first 40 minutes of college basketball's new year were played out in front of thousands of empty gray seats. In the Durham pod of the Coaches vs. Cancer mini-tourney, the game that rewarded the winner with a shot at the Duke Blue Devils, Georgia Southern held off Houston 65-63 with a superior inside presence, baseline-driving the Cougars to death and flummoxing their shooters with alternating zone stacks. The win triggered an e-mail to hundreds of Mid-Majority readers, some of whom openly wondered what had made this an "upset." A team from the Southern Conference, a low-budget, Football Championship Series league full of tiny southeastern schools, beat a squad from Conference USA, a lineup with an average $23.7 million athletic budget, fueled and funded by big-time gridiron bucks. We've said this many times in the past, but it's not our fault C-USA can't convert its financial advantages to basketball success. Like the Mountain West, it's little else than a failed power conference. (Originally posted November 13, 2004) It is designed to do a lot of things, but it certainly is not designed to break your heart. The game begins in the late autumn, when everything else has shriveled and fallen and died. Its blossoms come slowly in winter's course like crocus starts popping through icefields. And when it does stop, it leaves you to face the bursting glory of a fresh spring. What the hell's wrong with that? (apologies, Bart) Each November, college basketball fades in slowly, takes its dutiful place in the blurry background of the American sports landscape. Only in recent years have the the Men In Charge decided that the season's opening stages needed to be sexed up to compete with the dominant late-year sports stories - the national pastime that is the NFL, convoluted college gridiron bowl jostlings, the annual start of the increasingly ridiculous soap-opera/freakshow that used to be a pro basketball league. They've done this by staging made-for-television invitationals, power-conference challenges, and sham tournaments with worthless trophies. But I say that while none of this has ruined anything, none of this is necessary in the least. The six weeks that end a calendar year and begin the school hoops season are crucial to the unfolding story. When the first "Midnight Madness" events are staged in October, each and every one of the 342 Division I teams has a 0-0 record and a theoretical chance of winning the national championship. The path is clear. Win your conference, or play well enough to please the gatekeepers on the selection committee, and you're on the March bracket. Go on a six-game winning streak, and you've achieved eternal glory.
Ninth in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season. I have no Wikipedia entry of my own, not even a stub. If I understand the process correctly, you have to be either rich or a character on The Simpsons to get one of those. Being neither, and therefore not sufficiently notable, it's up to me to write my own encyclopedic biography. I was born on May 19, 1972, of German and WASP extraction. I grew up mostly in New Hampshire and New York, and attended a prep school called High Mowing (a year behind action hero Judson Mills of Walker, Texas Ranger fame). When I was 18, I changed my name because I found a better one. I went to journalism school at the University of Oregon, took a two year design degree at nearby Lane Community College, and moved back east to Philadelphia in 1997. Since then, I've never been out of debt. At Drexel University, in the collapsible bleachers, I discovered mid-major college basketball. Since 2004, when I got a crazy idea in the upper east stands of The Palestra, I've been curating a website called The Mid-Majority. It's about two things: mid-major college basketball and travel. Over the past five years, I've been to 508 games from coast to coast and in between, sleeping and showering at truck stops when I've needed to. I run a number of websites -- one's about the Olympics and one's about sports transactions and one's about internet scraps -- but this is the only one that's ever landed me a job. The thumbnail bio-sketch I talked about the other day is this simple: mid-majors, truck stops, ESPN.com.
Eighth in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season. Since the invention of the printing press and discovery of binding, it's been the dream of everyone who strings words together to write a book. A longform work of 80 or 100 thousand words that can be touched, held open, smelled, stacked on a shelf and command a reader's undivided attention for hours on end -- there's a lot of power in that. And it doesn't stop there. When you as a "writer" become a "published author," bulldozers will clear out a forest for you, machines will pulp the trees and stamp your sentences on the flat, double-sided end product. The whole process is a victory of human ingenuity over nature itself. This April, when the season was over and I'd recovered from Detroit, I was approached by two outlets interested in distributing my work. One was a "digital publisher" that wanted to distribute my travelogue series from last season. I didn't think those entries were as good as I wanted them to be, certainly not good enough to receive payment for -- so I said no thanks. Besides, they were already in digital form. The other company was more forward-thinking -- it proposed a project about the 2008-09 season, a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the efforts of several mid-major teams to qualify for the NCAA Tournament, the Big Dance. Sprinkled in amongst, stories of struggle and season survival that would draw the stories of champions in important relief. At last, someone with large printing equipment was reading my mind. I said yes before negotiating, I was excited. I'd get an advance of several thousand dollars on submission of two chapters, and it was arranged that an excerpt would run in a magazine over the summer of 2009. I'd do a reading tour, flog the book like any author, and embed sales pitches in every single blog post and chat session during the 2009-10 season. The contract was minimally restrictive, except for a non-compete clause that stated that I could not offer another publisher a college basketball manuscript until the fall of 2010.
Seventh in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season. For a nation that takes its freedom so seriously, we sure are confused about it. Our society is rigidly segmented and specialized, everyone must find their place. From parental career projections to college "majors" to printed titles on business cards, American life is a series of restraints. To break out of the cycle requires upheaval, doubt, expensive retraining. Culture provides a series of mixed signals about all of that. Nearly every feel-good Hollywood movie ever made concerns itself with a protagonist busting out of a prefabricated life, finally becoming what they truly want to be at the end, overcoming odds to become what they truly are despite a power structure's insistence of obedience. At the same time, there are high-profile dire warnings about the consequences of destiny-smashing: Don Johnson's singing career, Michael Jordan's flirtation with baseball, and more recently, Mariah Carey's acting. Maybe it has something to do with the American idea that there's a military solution to everything, this invisible insistence on lock-step. Over the past century or so, the major sports in this country have conformed their rules and customs to become grey, cold variations on human chess. American football, for instance, is the worst. One's size and IQ determines what their job will be, and when an alternate theory comes along, purists act as if the communists are overrunning the game. In our lifetimes, baseball has evolved from nine positions to 20 -- on every pitching staff, you'll find a setup man for the setup man.
Sixth in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season. Here in early November, we're still at least a month away from the non-stop barrage of "Year In Review" specials, all those tidy bow-snapping recaps that attempt to impose order on a loosely-joined, selectively-selected group of events. But after 11 months, one thing is crystal-clear: 2008 has been a horrible year for old white guys. Old white guys are shriveling before our eyes, falling increasingly out of step with the times, their power and majesty collapsing, judgement and senses slowly taking leave of them as they drift into history. To the younger generations from failing hands they fumble the torch; be ours, indeed, to hold it high. From John McCain to Jerry Lewis to Ted Stevens, off they go into the cold night of history. And then, of course, there's Billy Packer. On July 14, the college basketball voice of CBS was carefully extricated from the business, left at the side of the road of progress by his employer after 27 years. The news interrupted my placid and serene summer, a reminder of storm clouds in my sun-dappled reverie. I was idly taking in a weekday afternoon minor-league baseball game in New Britain, Conn. when the news came in, beeping and ringing by voicemail, tweet and text. Everybody wanted to be the first to let me know, to join in on the celebration. Fifth in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season. In case you haven't heard, our great nation recently concluded a long and protracted and polarizing popularity contest that decided, among other things, our heads of state and guiding ideologies for the foreseeable future. It was often marked by severe disagreements that pitted American against American. Voters in this election had real choices, not only in political parties and candidates, but in information sources as well. Thanks to a wide array of television outlets and a million-website universe, people had no problem locating and latching onto the message they were looking for. Republicans, for instance, had their Fox News and their Drudge Report and their conservative radio hosts and commentators; Democrats could huddle around their Air America, trade Daily Kos journals, and -- in a brilliant example of profitable media positioning -- nod in agreement to MSNBC. It's a level of choice unprecedented in media history, thanks to postmodern technology. In 2012, there will be an entire media complex for the independent middle-of-the-road undecideds, which will view all sides with a shopper's eye, revel in the constant wooing and catering, then not bother to show up for election day by suspending coverage the day before.
Fourth in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season. If you're just now dropping by and don't know what this is all about, this site is all about going to mid-major college basketball games. A lot of them. I attended 117 total games last year, and I've been to 508 over the past five seasons. I'm still married, happily so, in case you're wondering. As I travel around the country visiting mid-major arenas from Big South to Big West, I notice a lot of common elements from venue to venue. The national anthem is played or sung or piped in before every game, the rims are always 10 feet above the court, games tend to be 40 minutes long and the shot clock never, ever reads 36 seconds. But the most striking similarity is the stock character I keep running into from sea to shining sea. The mid-major beat writer.
Third in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season. New technology always takes time to find its proper place, to soak into the mainstream. Over three centuries passed before the printing press changed from a luxury item for the powerful into a tool of the people. There were 50 years between "Watson, come here, I want to see you" and the Model 102 that brought simple telephony to the masses. It took nearly 100 years for television to go from early and halting experiments to worldwide acceptance. The cycles are getting shorter, though. In just 25 years, a global web of interconnected computers grew from a defense communication system to a limitless, bottomless information and multimedia network for consumers. One particular use for this internet contraption is the transmission of sequential packages of information, presented most recent first. Sometimes progress works faster than careful labeling techniques, so the generally accepted and unfortunate term for this mechanism is and always will be "blog." (Which is just as unwieldy and incorrect an indicator as "mid-major," if not more so. At least "mid-major" hasn't yet devolved into a verb.) Second in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season. This being the first Sunday of The Mid-Majority's Season 5 (and a Daylight Savings-adjusted morning upon which thousands of churchgoers will miss their services), it's as good a time as any for a Bible story. Today, we'll be reading from the Old Testament, the first book of Samuel. No tale is as carefully tied to our regular basketball business than one which appears in the midst of that book. 1 Samuel 17:49 is read verbatim during the greatest two minutes of American sports cinema, the second in a devastating emotional triple-apex within the championship-game locker room scene from Hoosiers. Preacher Purl steps forward before the team and intones meaningfully, And David put his hand in the bag and took out a stone and slung it. And it struck the Philistine on the head and he fell to the ground. Amen. First in a series of nine daily essays leading up to the 2008-09 college basketball season. It's not supposed to work out for the best, and the system is designed to anticipate failure. On March 21 in Birmingham, the four lower seeds wore their extra digits like anchors, eliminated one after another at three-hour intervals. I watched from a corner seat as American, South Alabama and then Boise State, and finally Saint Joseph's had their weaknesses cruelly exploited by superior competition, crushed and crumpled on live high-definition television. Each head coach ascended to the press-conference dais with two dejected and downcast players, briefly explained to the assembled reporters how those things that worked so well for five months just didn't seem to click on March 21, had misfired so badly. And then they disappeared, shunted aside, back to their buses behind the BJCC Arena. By the time the weekend was over, Butler was gone too. |
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53 |  |
9,899 |  |
Atlanta, GA |  |
107/804 (13.3%) |
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Okay, this isn't working. No. 30 in red stopped being our little secret years ago, and our common MMBOW format of giving a few paragraphs of personal introduction isn't going to fly. But one thing is for certain -- nobody in mid-majordom had a better week, and so Stephen Curry of Davidson is our second Mid-Majority Baller of the Week of the 2008-09 season.
