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Category Archives Season 5 (2008-09)
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S5 March 25, 2009 I. Into The Wild INDIANAPOLIS, Crowne Plaza Indianapolis Airport, March 25 -- One of my favorite books of the past 15 years is Into The Wild. It was a national New York Times bestseller that was made into a major motion picture (Emile Hirsch was great in it). It's the non-fictional story of a young ...
S5 March 23, 2009 MADISON, Wisc. -- I've long felt that the word "heartbreak" doesn't do a proper job as a member of the English language. It implies shatter or malfunction, and sounds so dry. The true feeling is more of a burst -- so closely related to the challenge of capacity that joy brings, but with a method of ...
S5 March 22, 2009 MINNEAPOLIS -- You work in an office. It's a big office with hundreds of people. You all have hard jobs: everyone toils at their stations every day, struggling to put in efforts that will be recognized. When you get a pat on the back and a "good job," it always seems so fleeting... nobody remembers...
S5 March 21, 2009 [12] Western Kentucky vs. [4] Gonzaga - 8:10 pm ET South Region - Portland, OR Athletic Budgets (2008): WKU: 19,957,908 GONZ: 11,009,859 Gonzaga beat the MAC champions from Akron by 13 points, but it's a DVD that I plan on giving to anybody who thinks that scoring margin, adjusted or otherwise, ma...
S5 March 21, 2009 It's the NCAA Tournament, and Bally's got a front row seat! Our little orange friend got so close to the first round action that the refs almost snatched him off the press row table and put him into the game! Not that he'd complain about that! Bally has never been to the Metrodome, but he's seen i...
S5 March 21, 2009 MINNEAPOLIS -- Just so we're clear, we don't care about your brackets. We know you want to talk about who you "have," about how three of your eight website entries are totally and thoroughly busted, and how you'll never win that $84.50 in the office pool now. We don't want to hear about how you...
S5 March 20, 2009 MINNEAPOLIS -- There's no day more exciting and more highly anticipated than First Round Thursday, and there's no 12 hours quite as difficult to get through. As soon as the games begin, the NCAA Tournament teaches a hard lesson about the perfection that's necessary to compete against enemies with mo...
S5 March 19, 2009 MINNEAPOLIS -- Not to get all Jean Shepherd on you, but when I started as an undergrad at the University of Oregon there were no coffee shops near campus. Then one opened up on the corner near the bookstore, and it had couches and soft music and 50 different ways to drink coffee. It was the hottest ...
S5 March 19, 2009 ...
S5 March 18, 2009 Even though I keep posting these distant dispatches, some folks are still convinced that I'm lying about all these places I go to. I'm from "the internet," and everything on the internet is a lie. Some think I'm not even a real person, that I'm a "profile" created by a 14-year-old girl who just lov...
S5 March 18, 2009 Let's get this out of the way: it's not the Opening Round, because that implies there's a "round." It's one game. And it's the Play-In Game, a/k/a the Notorious P.I.G., because it's for true mid-major players. And Bally... well, he's the P.I.G. P.O.P.P.A.! Bally loves going to the P.I.G. every ye...
S5 March 18, 2009 INDIANAPOLIS -- The year 2006 wasn't really all that long ago. Sure, we're dealing with problems light years beyond those we faced back then, and anybody would trade in total world financial meltdown for another "bird flu" scare. But Nelly Furtado's "Loose" feels like it just came out yesterday, inn...
S5 March 17, 2009 DAYTON, Oh. -- Back during a time when the years had smaller numbers than they do now, I went to Drexel University, a fine, upstanding and expensive mid-major school. In my studies there, there always seemed to be fellow students who skipped out on the first eight weeks of class, then showed up for ...
S5 March 16, 2009 CLEVELAND -- Lately I've been reading When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball by Seth Davis, a man I'm privileged to know and lucky to share a bond of mutual respect with. It's a tremendously fantastic book by a supremely talented writer, one that documents the famous 1979 national...
S5 March 16, 2009 Aside from reality show winners and one-hit wonders, nothing is forgotten quite as quickly as Championship Fortnight when the NCAA Tournament brackets are released. Some of the teams we've been following all season are destined for great and lasting glory, which will be fulfilled and certified once ...
S5 March 16, 2009 Bullet Points Stephen F. Austin punched Hoops Nation's final NCAA Tournament ticket Sunday afternoon, its first appearance ever. Championship Fortnight is over, and the national postseason is just ahead. Completed brackets and scores for all 23 TMM leagues are included below. Southland Texas...
S5 March 15, 2009 Bally loveslovesloves the NCAA Tournament, it's his favorite time of year! After the Play-In Game in Dayton, we'll be headed off to a first/second round pod. But where? Will it be Philly or Portland? Miami or Minneapolis? Kansas City, possibly? Boise, maybe? Greensboro is keen this time of year. Or...
S5 March 15, 2009 The State of College Basketball is a decrepit old 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 344 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of th...
S5 March 15, 2009 Bullet Points Seven championships were awarded on Saturday. Binghamton won its first-ever America East title; Morgan State is in the NCAA Tournament for the first time ever out of the MEAC. Temple repeated as Atlantic 14 champions; Akron is on the Big Bracket for the first time since 1986. Alabam...
S5 March 14, 2009 Bally had an exciting first week of playoff action, visiting the Atlantic Sun, Missouri Valley and Sun Belt. But was he tired after all that fun? Absolutely not! Bally can't be stopped, he's going all the way to the hoop! Here are some highlights from his stops in Texas and Ohio for the Sun Belt an...
S5 March 14, 2009 Bullet Points American won its second consecutive Patriot League championship, and is on to the NCAA Tournament once again. Dayton and Xavier, the two higher seeds, went down in the Atlantic 14 semifinals; this sets up an improbable 4/7 matchup between Temple and Duquesne. Other semifinal w...
S5 March 13, 2009 CLEVELAND -- Hundreds of seasons lie in ruins now, but there's never time to properly mourn them. Instead, mid-March is for celebrating mid-major championships and great victories, for getting golden tickets to the other side of the great gate of Selection Sunday. It's a time for Robert Morris' rede...
S5 March 13, 2009 Mid-Majority Chat #7 ...
S5 March 13, 2009 Bullet Points One championship to be decided this afternoon: that of the Patriot League, which has been winnowing down its field verrrry slowly since Tuesday, March 3rd. The Atlantic 14, MEAC, MAC, Big West, Southland, SWAC and WAC are down to final fours as the last weekend of Championship Fo...
S5 March 12, 2009 KATY, Tex. -- Quick programming note: we've run into some technical difficulties here in Texas, so that marathon chat we promised has to be postponed. Next week seems a better fit anyway, since there will be an actual 65-team bracket to talk about. We'll do a regular chat tomorrow from Cleveland at ...
S5 March 12, 2009 Bullet Points Two more titlists after last night's action. Portland State defended its Big Sky title, and Robert Morris will return to the NCAA Tournament out of the Northeast Conference. The Southland Conference begins today with quarterfinals in Katy, Tex.. It's the last of our 23 conference...
S5 March 11, 2009 HOT SPRINGS, Ark. -- With our third-to-last GMHN of Season 5, we have a very special treat for you, yes we do. The image you see over and over during Championship Fortnight is students running all willy-nilly onto the floor after their beloved teams win mid-major titles. So it's only fitting that w...
S5 March 11, 2009 Bullet Points Congratulations to North Dakota State (Badlands/Summit), Western Kentucky (Sun Belt) and Cleveland State (Horizon League). All three have reserved space on the Big Bracket with title game victories last night. Two championships tonight: the Northeast Conference and Big Sky will d...
S5 March 10, 2009 Some are still under the impression that this is just another blog, that I'm sitting at home and ranting about mid-major basketball from my couch. That is definitely not the case. TMM Mobile HQ is very real, and has already logged over 22,000 miles and over 90 games this season. Put that in your pa...
S5 March 10, 2009 HOT SPRINGS, Ark. -- There are 248 teams in conferences below the Red Line. Only 25 or so will move on to compete for the coveted Division I title next week, have their names known by everybody, reflect in the fleeting glory that's reserved for champions. Most of our favorite teams are already packe...
S5 March 10, 2009 Bullet Points Four more champions were crowned last night, teams that will automatically continue on to the NCAA Tournament. Congratulations to Virginia Commonwealth (Colonial), Siena (Metro Atlantic), Chattanooga (SoCon) and Gonzaga (West Coast). Three autobids will be granted tonight: the Su...
S5 March 10, 2009 Bally loves the excitement of March basketball as much as anyone, and he gets to travel all around the country seeing lots of games and meeting new friends! Here he is on Monday night with the South Alabama Jaguar mascot right after the team upset Arkansas-Little Rock in the Sun Belt semifinals as ...
S5 March 9, 2009 With our final weekly award of the season, we celebrate the work of a young Spider who used a two-game stretch to strike a little bit of arachnophobia into the hearts of Atlantic 14 opponents heading into the league's elimination event. Kevin Anderson of Richmond is our seventeenth, and final, Mid-M...
S5 March 9, 2009 HOT SPRINGS, Ark. -- Our year is a blur of quick-cut transitions: from total silence to Midnight Madness, pre-season to regular season, games outside conferences to games inside parentheses. Standings grids give way to brackets, and before you know it, campaigns are cut short in early elimination ro...
S5 March 9, 2009 Bullet Points Northern Iowa has qualified for the NCAA Tournament by winning the Missouri Valley championship. Davidson was eliminated in the Southern Conference semifinals by the College of Charleston. After semifinal rounds yesterday, finals are set in seven leagues: the CAA (George Mason...
S5 March 8, 2009 With the end of the regular season today, all conference tournament brackets on our side of the Red Line have been finalized. After the jump, opening brackets for the second week of Championship Fortnight: the MEAC, SWAC, Mid-American, Big West, Atlantic 14, WAC and Southland. Atlantic 12 Begins We...
S5 March 8, 2009 Bullet Points Radford (Big South), East Tennessee State (Atlantic Sun) and Morehead State (Ohio Valley) have qualified for the NCAA Tournament. Cleveland State, the Horizon No. 3, eliminated No. 2 Green Bay in that conference's semis, and Illinois State upended Creighton in the Missouri Valley...
S5 March 7, 2009 Nevada at Boise State (Western Athletic) Taco Bell Arena - Boise, ID 10:15 PM EST This is it: the final regular season weekend, and the last Game! Of! The! Night! of 2008-09. Adieu, adieu, parting is such sweet sorrow. So is partying, which is what the virtual G!O!T!N! camera crew will be doing in...
S5 March 7, 2009 Bullet Points Cornell became the first school to punch its ticket to the NCAA Tournament. For the second straight year, the Big Red claimed the Ivy League title, beating Penn 83-59. The upsets began in earnest on Friday. Ohio Valley No. 4 Morehead State took out No. 1 Tennessee-Martin. CAA No....
S5 March 6, 2009 The State of College Basketball is a rapidly-aging 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 344 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of t...
S5 March 6, 2009 Bullet Points Four-time Atlantic Sun champion Belmont barely escaped Mercer, and Big South top seed Radford fought off a strong challenge from No. 4 UNC Asheville in that league's semifinals. The Big South final on Saturday is set: VMI at Radford. The three top seeds in the Northeast Confer...
S5 March 5, 2009 Dayton at Xavier (Atlantic 14) Cintas Center - Cincinnati, OH 9:00 PM EST In a conference with a geographical footprint so big you can see it from space, tonight you can boil everything down to four letters: XU and UD. Or just X and D, if you think the University identifier isn't necessary. There...
S5 March 5, 2009 NASHVILLE -- You might recall that there was a marathon chat announced to be held Friday (tomorrow) from the Valley quarterfinals. Due to a number of factors, that's being postponed. Instead, we'll try for a 12-hour chat next Thursday, and do a regular chat at 3:00 EST tomorrow that will overlap wit...
S5 March 5, 2009 Bullet Points Three of four top seeds moved on in the Patriot League, including No. 1 American. Atlantic Sun No. 2 East Tennessee State advanced. Two small upsets occurred in last night's action. Patriot No. 6 Colgate upended No. 3 Navy on its own floor, and No. 9 Florida International squeake...
S5 March 4, 2009 Saint Louis at Duquesne (Atlantic 14) A.J. Palumbo Center - Pittsburgh, PA 7:00 PM EST Last year's A-14 geosuperleague standings presented a big problem, you might remember: you had teams with high noncon content like Dayton and Rhode Island finding their .500 league records were good for one-way ...
S5 March 4, 2009 NASHVILLE -- They're the greatest two weeks in Hoops Nation, these. Conference teams are racked up in brackets according to regular-season performance, we determine a championship for each league on the court, and the ultimate winner gets to go all the way to March Madness, the kind on CBS. League t...
S5 March 4, 2009 Bullet Points Championship Fortnight is under way, as the top seeds won in the Big South and Ohio Valley. The first minor upset occurred in the Horizon League, where No. 7 Illinois-Chicago outhooped No. 6 Youngstown State. Both finished the conference slate at 7-11 and were separated by tiebre...
S5 March 3, 2009 Weber State at Montana State (Big Sky) Brick Breeden Fieldhouse - Bozeman, MT 9:05 PM EST One of the first conference games we attended this season was between Northern Colorado and Idaho State, an early Big Sky test for both. Since then, there hasn't been much mention here of the only league to b...
S5 March 3, 2009 HOUSTON -- Think of it this way: this is the only time when team rankings are based in reality. It's all posturing and conjecture in November, it's a popularity contest every Monday afternoon, and it's not necessary to hash over the imperfection of a convoluted process that will take place in downto...
S5 March 3, 2009 Bullet Points Here we go again: it's Championship Fortnight. Three leagues kick off with campus-site first rounds: the Horizon League, Ohio Valley, and Big South. There are 12 games on tap this evening. On Tap Tonight Big South Radford will begin its quest for its first championship since 19...
S5 March 2, 2009 Those datelines you see on this site's posts aren't just a collection of random cities we like, or an indication where we are on our fantasy trip in our dreams, or where the magic teevee is taking us that evening. The city in all-caps is actually where we are, this is not done from home. Getting to ...
S5 March 2, 2009 Our first conference tourney will be the Atlantic Sun event in Nashville, a league we took you behind the scenes for last year. This year's seen a fantastic race between three strong teams: three-time champs Belmont, revenge-minded Jacksonville, and an ETSU squad that hasn't quite made it over the t...
S5 March 2, 2009 Boise State at New Mexico State (Western Athletic) Pan American Center - Las Cruces, NM 9:00 PM EST Every year, there's one undisputed apex of Championship Fortnight, that one title game that ESPNU chops up into a 90-minute clip show and Hoops Nation remembers forever. In 2005, it was Ohio's come-...
S5 March 2, 2009 INDIANAPOLIS -- Every day we get just a little more physically vulnerable, every day another step closer to the inevitable finish line of life. The positive trade-off is that whether we've cheated the reaper by strengthening our bodies or not, our minds are always increasing in power. Every day, we ...
S5 March 1, 2009 Bally wants to take teams No. 130 to 161 on the longest summer road trip since the And 1 Mixtape tour. ...
S5 February 28, 2009 When somebody pretending to be Tom Petty asked a question 49 minutes into our eight-hour marathon BracketBusters chat, it seemed at the time like any other funny non-sequitur we've encountered in four-plus years of doing those things. But then the Heartbreakers references kept flying for the next s...
S5 February 27, 2009 The State of College Basketball is a relatively 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 344 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of ...
S5 February 27, 2009 North Dakota State at Oral Roberts (Badlands) Mabee Center - Tulsa, OK Saturday, 8:05 PM EST It's the plot of just about every Bruceploitation fight flick ever made: a young, promising, upstart kung-fu fighter rises through the ranks, gaining respect and love on the streets when he gains a small v...
S5 February 27, 2009 Mid-Majority Chat #5 ...
S5 February 27, 2009 INDIANAPOLIS -- Though nobody has time to read them anymore, and the economy's so bad that folks are burning them for heat, writers aren't really considered "writers" until there's a stack of dead tree scrapings covered with their scribblings available for general purchase. Especially since writing ...
S5 February 26, 2009 Maryland-Baltimore County at Binghamton (America East) Mid-Majority Events Center - Vestal, NY 7:05 PM EST We strongly suggest that you tune in for the Morehead-Murray matchup on ESPNU tonight if you haven't seen either strong OVC contender. But here in the calm before this weekend's storm of cru...
S5 February 26, 2009 ATHENS, Ohio -- As was noted in this kind piece by the newspaper I spent my college career wishing I could work for, next week marks the beginning of what we're really here for, what this is really all about. The conference tourneys mark the third of the four seasons within a season in college baske...
S5 February 25, 2009 Dayton at Rhode Island (Atlantic 10) Ryan Center - Kingston, RI 7:00 PM EST While the titans of college basketball sportswriting are off drooling over Kansas, or boo-hooing over Pittsburgh, or whatever they do up there, they're missing out on the big fun of the high-stakes race at the top of the A...
S5 February 25, 2009 HARRISONBURG, Va. -- Still trying to figure out what all this means. So you're saying that if I had just auctioned off a crate full of Ballys last month, we wouldn't have had to do that whole bailout thing? But seriously, it's amazing to see that we've touched off the hottest plushie trend since Pea...
S5 February 24, 2009 In honor of Fat Tuesday, here's Bally with a king cake on a recent Louisiana trip to Northwestern State. The plastic baby is usually hidden in the cake somewhere, and whomever gets the piece containing it is the king and has to buy the cake for the next party as proof of his (or her) ultimate Mardi...
S5 February 24, 2009 Northern Iowa at Illinois State (Missouri Valley) Redbird Arena - Normal, IL 8:05 PM EST And so we approach the end of one of the most strange, random, Bizarro MVC regular seasons in memory. Hopefully next year at this time, we'll be discussing two, three and four bid possibilities -- or rather, t...
S5 February 24, 2009 LYNCHBURG, Va. -- In the late stages of a Sunday flight from Raleigh to Nashville, after the announcement about portable electronic devices, I did what most people in need of an info-fix do: page through the Sky Mall catalog. It's only in those 20 minutes at the end when full-size Lord of the Rings...
S5 February 23, 2009 Slumdog Millionaire (a film we saw in Indianapolis hours after penning this paper plane), was easy enough to predict as a Best Picture winner, although others of these supposed lead-pipe locks would have lost you your mortgage money. And so it is with predicting the machinations of another academy. ...
S5 February 23, 2009 Tennessee-Martin at Murray State (Ohio Valley) Regional Special Event Center - Murray, KY 8:30 PM EST With BracketBusters complete, it's time to make the mad dash towards the first tourneys. In just a little over a week, a number of smaller conferences will begin elimination procedures; one of the...
S5 February 23, 2009 CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. -- BracketBusters VII is safely in the history books now. It was more fulfilling than a Dave & Buster's appetizer (six chips do not qualify as "nachos"), and fell somewhere between Buster the crash-test dummy and Buster Bluth on the entertainment scale. Longtime readers will r...
S5 February 21, 2009 So here we are again, it's late February and it's time for Mid-Major Christmas... BracketBusters VII, brought to you locally by Flying J Travel Plazas and Ballito's Powdered Horchata. Here's a handy clip-n'-save list of all Saturday's televised games, with links to handy print-n'-collect Basketball ...
S5 February 20, 2009 The State of College Basketball is a somewhat 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 344 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of th...
S5 February 20, 2009 Bally definitely has a West Coast Bias, and this week we knocked once again on that golden door. We visited San Jose State on Tuesday. Spartan fans, get on your feet! No trip to the middle of the Golden State is complete without a side trip to Gilroy, a town that actually smells like garlic. The...
S5 February 19, 2009 BracketBusters Marathon Chat ...
S5 February 19, 2009 Troy at Florida International (Sun Belt) Golden Panther Arena - Miami, FL 8:05 PM EST With mid-majordom's top Sweet 16 aspirants like Saint Mary's, Davidson, Butler and Utah State taking recent losses and struggling through February, the number of double-digit win streaks on this side of the Red L...
S5 February 19, 2009 MORAGA, Cal. -- I've come to avidly dislike "bracketology" in all its forms, I don't make any bones or excuses about that. I can't stand bubble watching or seed projecting. I respect Joe Lunardi for combining computer power and over-the-top braggadocio to single-handedly ignite a cottage industry, a...
S5 February 18, 2009 Drexel at George Mason (Colonial) Patriot Center - Fairfax, VA 7:05 PM EST Leagues at our level generally prefer their parity limited, and to put their best team forward. But the Colonial race, once a three-team race with a round-robin that decided momentary supremacy, is now a deathcore mosh pit....
S5 February 18, 2009 SAN LUIS OBISPO, Cal. -- Morning really is a relative concept, isn't it? It's always morning somewhere, or 5 p.m., or the night time (a/k/a "the right time"). And it just might be Morning in America all over again, depending on what economic time zone you're in. I write this to you as the a.m. hours...
S5 February 17, 2009 Evansville at Creighton (Missouri Valley) Qwest Center - Omaha, NE 8:05 PM EST The Bizarro Valley race is, and I think we can all agree on this, mercifully about to end. There are only three regular-season games to go, and then we can get to the important business of sticking all these teams into ...
S5 February 17, 2009 If you've been watching the Big South standings (and if you haven't, please write us a 2,000-word essay why not), you may be wondering what this "Radford" is, why it's won 13 of 15 league games, and how you can get some for yourself. The Highlanders are on a seven-game streak and now lead the BSC by...
S5 February 17, 2009 SAN JOSE -- Hundreds of votes have been counted, and Lester Hudson now has a nickname. (Figures it would be the one with the cool poem attached to it.) In this space, all future references to Tennessee-Martin's future NBA star will include "Done Ruthless," which is a fantastic anagram of his name, o...
S5 February 16, 2009 College of Charleston at Appalachian State (Southern) Holmes Center - Boone, NC 7:30 PM EST We're out here on the far edge of the country on this sorta-holiday, driving past exits full of Spanish-named roads and listening to smooth jazz in a rented Chevy Aveo. While we figure out what time it real...
S5 February 16, 2009 On Saturday, I drove down from St. Louis to see Tennessee-Martin play Tennessee Tech. It was no six-hour journey, and things weren't too much different from the last time I came down, but I definitely encountered a Ben From Cincinnati Effect there at the Elam Center. The staff told me that his gues...
S5 February 14, 2009 Quinnipiac at Robert Morris (Northeast) Charles L. Sewall Center - Moon Township, PA Saturday, 7:00 PM EST The Northeast Conference has always been a favorite, and it's one of the key collectives that deepened my love for mid-major college basketball. Big metropolitan areas, tiny schools, and high...
S5 February 13, 2009 Mid-Majority Chat #3 ...
S5 February 13, 2009 Thursday, 1:05 PM -- I don't know what made me think this, but I went to the Hyatt Regency first and looked for anything that said "Mock Selection." There was an NCAA Life Skills conference on the second and third floor, so I asked somebody at the ballroom reception where it was. "Who are you, and ...
S5 February 12, 2009 The State of College Basketball is a kinda-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 344 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of the F...
S5 February 12, 2009 Temple vs. Saint Joseph's (Atlantic 10) The Palestra - Philadelphia, PA 7:00 PM EST It's super-exciting in the grand old Atlantic 14 this week, no? Those who tuned into ESPN Classic last night looking for a rerun of the Cheap Seats Superdogs/Superjocks episode were treated to a thrilling ballgame ...
S5 February 12, 2009 INDIANAPOLIS -- Well, here we are. Today is Mock Selection III, and I still have no idea what I did to deserve an invitation -- or why I've been listed as representing Basketball State all along. It's a real thrill, even though we've had to detour from our regularly scheduled travel and will be goin...
S5 February 11, 2009 Long Beach State at California-Riverside (Big West) UCR Rec Center - Riverside, CA 11:00 PM EST Don't worry, we'll be doing plenty of breakdown of Dayton-Xavier tomorrow (or you can get a very fine BBSU-aided preview here). But one league we haven't talked about too much this season is the Big Wes...
S5 February 11, 2009 LITTLE ROCK -- Just one more day until that whole Mock Selection thing, and we're still chewing over this wonderful binder full of information. After decades of hearing this or that from NCAA representatives every March, it's nice to see this stuff printed in black and white. From a 7,000-foot persp...
S5 February 10, 2009 NATCHITOCHES, La. -- Tomorrow I'll drive the four hours back up to Little Rock, jump on a jetliner and return to the hub-and-spoke center of Hoops Nation, the city of Indianapolis. On Thursday at 1:30 p.m., I'll walk into the Hyatt Regency with 19 other journalists and engage in the third annual NC...
S5 February 9, 2009 Sure, we have our favorites. There are players who we enjoy watching endlessly, the mid-major stars who have stood in this space for the past five years and have gone on to great and lucrative levels. The next one in that class could be the 6-2 senior guard from a little school in the Tennessee back...
S5 February 9, 2009 Stetson at East Tennessee State (Atlantic Sun) Memorial Center - Johnson City, TN 7:00 PM EST The Atlantic Sun is providing many of these mid-major hot-shot conferences a clinic on how to organize its standings. You want three teams up top with gaudy records, a strong .500 midsection, and a couple...
S5 February 9, 2009 BATON ROUGE -- When the ax started falling in the SEC last month with midseason firings, the thought around here was that it was kinda cute. Four such severances in four years seemed like another indication that the pressures of BCS basketball were getting to be more in line with those of the pros, ...
S5 February 8, 2009 Charles Kuralt once said, "Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything." While we consider each Flying J a roadside attraction unto itself, the wise old sage of America's roads had a point. Last Tuesday, we asked you to nominate...
S5 February 7, 2009 Presbyterian at Radford (Big South) D.N. Dedmon Center - Radford, VA Saturday, 7:00 PM EST There are some fascinating contests that will shape league races on Saturday, mostly games that pit a runaway leader with a team that may or may not be capable of knocking them down a half-peg -- most specif...
S5 February 6, 2009 Mid-Majority Chat #2 ...
S5 February 6, 2009 The State of College Basketball is a gracefully-aging 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 344 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three o...
S5 February 5, 2009 Tennessee-Martin at Austin Peay (Ohio Valley) Winfield Dunn Center - Clarksville, TN 9:00 PM EST One of the greatest hidden coulda-shouldas of Championship Week 2008 occurred on the first Friday, when Tennessee-Martin and junior star Lester Hudson came just one point short of upsetting NCAA-bound ...
S5 February 5, 2009 PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- Let's get this out of the way first: when the first place team loses to the last place team, it's definitely not good for the league profile. And when the overwhelming preseason favorite takes one in the collective stomach from a team that long ago unanimously passed a team rule b...
S5 February 4, 2009 Sam Houston State at Texas-San Antonio (Southland) Convocation Center - San Antonio, TX 8:00 PM EST When I hitchhiked across the country and back between my junior and senior years in high school, one of my rides took me into a two-calendar café in Amarillo, Texas. He and the waitress...
S5 February 3, 2009 Northern Iowa at Bradley (Missouri Valley) Carver Arena - Peoria, IL 8:05 PM EST The Great Unknown is a scary thing, isn't it? We pattern-seeking creatures require some sort of assurance that future events will mirror the results we've already seen. Staring into the anti-void of endless possibilit...
S5 February 3, 2009 PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- BracketBusters pairings are out, and we're temporarily reunited with our own bed and desktop computer, so it's a good time for a game reset. Who am I? Why am I here? Seventy-five percent of what The Mid-Majority is about during the regular season is analysis. There are check-ins o...
S5 February 3, 2009 The picture on the left does not depict the hot club dance move or the new way the kids these days are expressing their excitement, it's just a snapshot of the most pure and perfect shooting mechanics in Division I right now. (And as you can see in the background, it's making the girly-girls go craz...
S5 February 3, 2009 As is annual tradition here at TMM, we've put together a full rundown of all 51 announced BracketBusters matchups, and this will likely be the most clicked-on page of the season once again. It's incredibly difficult to find a complete list of all the non-TV games, which are quietly announced by the ...
S5 February 2, 2009 Arkansas-Pine Bluff at Jackson State (SWAC) Williams Athletic Center - Jackson, MS 8:30 PM EST Tonight in the Swickity, a battle between two 6-2 teams looking up at defending regular season champion Alabama State. If either were to win the conference's coveted ticket to the Big Dance, they would u...
S5 February 2, 2009 CHICAGO -- So much of modern life is blocking, filtering, limiting. There is so much information coming at us every day that we must become fighters of information, lest it overwhelm and submerge us completely. We battle back with fast-forward buttons, delete keys, spam-guards, RSS newsreaders, trus...
S5 January 31, 2009 As luck would have it, we got a somewhat decent response to our First Annual Bally Refrigerator Art contest. There were entries from actual kids, annnnd others who are probably old enough to do this. But how are we to prove anything? This is the Internet, where people talk with their fingers and lis...
S5 January 31, 2009 Saint Mary's at Portland (West Coast) Chiles Center - Portland, OR Saturday, 9:00 PM EST Most of the games we feature on G!O!T!N! are the sorts of contests that feature interesting matchups or players, or tilts that will determine the direction of league races. But once or twice a season, there's ...
S5 January 30, 2009 The State of College Basketball is a sorta-newish 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 344 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of th...
S5 January 30, 2009 Mid-Majority Chat #1 ...
S5 January 30, 2009 INDIANAPOLIS -- Every once in a while, I receive a hit through the feedback form, written in a language I don't understand. Sometimes these are in French, or German, cast in a Cyrillic alphabet or rendered in simplified Chinese. I'd like to think these are messages of support, and they indicate to ...
S5 January 29, 2009 This is totally unprecedented. In nearly five years, there has never been more than one G!O!T!N! at a time. But tonight, there's no way to choose. Maybe you can pick between these supergood gems, but we can't. Nevada at Utah State (Western Athletic) Dee Glen Smith Spectrum - Logan, UT 9:05 PM EST ...
S5 January 29, 2009 CHARLESTON, Ill. -- Being an East Coaster with a family tree that only extends thin branches into the midwest, freezing fog is definitely a new experience. Yesterday morning, driving the long straight Interstates of Iowa headlong into the sun, the sky was thick and golden, just like heaven would pro...
S5 January 28, 2009 Davidson at Chattanooga (Southern) UTC Arena - Chattanooga, TN 7:00 PM EST When the Wildcats barely escaped the Mocs at home in the SoCon season opener on Dec. 13, bailed out of a 100-95 shootout by Stephen Curry's 41 points, this date immediately grew a red circle. For one, it was the first game ...
S5 January 28, 2009 Silver Jews - "People" CEDAR FALLS, Iowa -- Since 2004, I've gone through a lot of different bags, pens, cell phones, cameras, iPods and Moleskines. The only item that I currently carry around the country that came with me on trips four years ago is a taped-together copy of "Actual Air" by poet and...
S5 January 27, 2009 I just wrapped up paying for every single one of my remaining rental cars, plane flights and weekly hotels for the rest of the 2008-09 season, which was a great relief and a testament to the wonderful support you've given the site. So the least I could do is turn the floor over to you for a while, a...
S5 January 27, 2009 Northeastern at Virginia Commonwealth (Colonial) Siegel Center - Richmond, VA 9:00 PM EST How many eyes do you need to finish this fight? You're gonna eat lightning, and you're gonna crap thunder! See that look in their eyes, Rock? You got to get that look back, Rock. Eye of the tiger. Get him a b...
S5 January 27, 2009 OMAHA -- It's been half a forever since we gave away a Bally. It's mostly due to a backorder situation, something that will be rectified when we head home for a couple of days next week. There are two people out there still waiting on their orange globular friends, and those will be forthcoming. Sor...
S5 January 26, 2009 There was that 51-minute, 60-point effort against Stephen F. Austin that earned him MMBOW honors back in December, which would have earned wider play had his team actually won the game. No matter about that, because ever since the North Dakota Bison have entered the Badlands Conference schedule, the...
S5 January 26, 2009 The Citadel at Samford (Southern) Pete Hanna Center - Birmingham, AL 8:30 PM EST It's easy to get caught up in the Davidson excitement. The Wildcats are 9-0, scoring 81 points against 67 allowed in league play, and they have this one player who can shoot lasers out of his toes or something. They'r...
S5 January 26, 2009 OMAHA -- You know what I don't understand? Hubris. How anybody could believe that they're the center of the universe, or better than everybody else, or the owner of unassailable opinion, has always been beyond my comprehension. Walking the world demands humility, and is full of reminders why our liv...
S5 January 24, 2009 OMAHA -- Every so often, I'll get a long note from one of you detailing exactly when you found The Mid-Majority, the post you first discovered, and occasionally you'll remind me of something that I completely forgot I wrote. I'm always taken aback, floored and flattened by these letters, mostly beca...
S5 January 23, 2009 Niagara at Siena (Metro Atlantic) Times Union Center - Albany, NY Saturday, 12:00 PM EST One of the most honored traditions on this site is to spread the G!O!T!N! goodness around. Focusing on a small group of teams is what the traditionalists do, but TMM likes to keep things as complicated as poss...
S5 January 23, 2009 "Like many Web sites that traffic partly in gossip, The Big Lead's information is not always correct." - SI.com, March 2008 CLEVELAND -- What is the truth? The truth is one part fact, one part perspective, and zero parts perspiration. The truth is the vessel, the conduit that carries it, and it cann...
S5 January 22, 2009 The State of College Basketball is a sorta newish 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 344 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of th...
S5 January 22, 2009 Wisconsin-Green Bay at Butler (Horizon League) Hinkle Fieldhouse - Indianapolis, IN 7:00 PM EST Cakewalks, even the kind where no cake is expected, are no fun. Constant winning gets monotonous, boring even, when you don't have to break much of a sweat to do it. Folks get content, bloated, and they...
S5 January 22, 2009 EMMITSBURG, Md. -- They call them the blues because of blue notes, those tones hidden in between the in-between places there on the pristine straight streets of the music scale. Each one of us has had the blues at one time or another, stuck in the gutter, the ditch, the rut, been down soooo loonnngg...
S5 January 21, 2009 Bradley at Northern Iowa (Missouri Valley) McLeod Center - Cedar Falls, IA 8:05 PM EST A lot of people don't like when things don't go according to prognostication -- folks can get downright prickly in some instances. Here's some stuff that has defied simple prediction: gas prices, the career arc ...
S5 January 21, 2009 David Byrne & Brian Eno - Everything That Happens PHILADELPHIA -- It was written nearly 30 years ago, but "Once In a Lifetime" remains the most concise four-minute statement on modern humanity that rock musicians have ever come up with. There are two mantras and a zen koan within it but at its l...
S5 January 20, 2009 PHILADELPHIA -- I have just received word, within the hour, that I have been immediately relieved of my duties with ESPN.com (all of them, not just half). I have truly enjoyed a period of almost four years working with the Worldwide Leader in Sports. I thank the staff for taking a chance on a blogge...
S5 January 20, 2009 Miami (Oh.) at Bowling Green (MAC) Anderson Arena - Bowling Green, OH 7:00 PM EST Tonight in the Mid-American Conference, a battle between two teams in an Eastern Division that could literally be won by any of the six competing teams. Miami head coach Charlie Coles, who's been through over a decad...
S5 January 20, 2009 WASHINGTON -- In the next several days, you're likely to read many accounts of these days by special columnists (even some sportswriters) who have spent the last few days being whisked from inaugural ball to celebrity gala, who've worn tuxedos to fine restaurants and will sit in special boxes watchi...
S5 January 19, 2009 There's certainly precedent for being chosen multiple times in a season... back when we did this five times a week (hoo boy, Tuesdays were tough), Nick "Big Freak" Fazekas of Nevada was a regular attendee of our daily TMM party. And truthfully, there really weren't any mid-major players who had as g...
S5 January 19, 2009 Jackson State at Prairie View A&M (SWAC) Baby Dome - Prairie View, TX 8:30 PM EST Last Monday was Laundry Day, the regular weekly laundromat trip an endless road trip like this requires. I stopped off at a faded old strip-mall laundromat in Gastonia, N.C., just west of Charlotte, before drivin...
S5 January 16, 2009 INDIANAPOLIS -- We are on the cusp of a wonderful new chapter in American history. Our great nation will once again be a place of logic and reason, a country where simple answers don't cut it, where perpetual double-digit percentage growth is no longer expected nor demanded, where an enterprise's t...
S5 January 16, 2009 Boise State at Utah State (Western Athletic) Dee Glen Smith Spectrum - Logan, UT Saturday, 9:05 PM EST There are a lot of "championship" banners and claims around the Western Athletic Conference right now -- since the conference split its title four ways last year at 12-4, nearly half the gyms and...
S5 January 16, 2009 INDIANAPOLIS -- As we begin every Friday around here, a reminder that there's a chat over at ESPN today at 4 p.m. It's about American mid-major collegiate basketball, and I'm in it and so are you, and there's this one part when we're chillin' in my basement listening to old Wilco records. It's like ...
S5 January 15, 2009 The State of College Basketball is a new-esque 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 344 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of the F...
S5 January 15, 2009 Xavier at Rhode Island (Atlantic 10) Ryan Center - Kingston, RI 7:05 PM EST On seventh thought, maybe the conference that contains four more teams than advertised and extends to the Gateway Arch should just rename itself the American 14. Think of the marketing excitement that would generate: "The ...
S5 January 15, 2009 INDIANAPOLIS -- It is so cold, so unstoppably frigid, that the view outside the window is completely frozen in place like a badly composed painting: the skyline, the cars on the roads, the birds in the sky, the smokestack steam. All perfectly still. Also suspended in invisible amber is our weekly Ba...
S5 January 14, 2009 Drake at Illinois State (Missouri Valley) Redbird Arena - Normal, IL 8:05 PM EST There's a lot of relativity, onion-peeling and head-shaking involved in mid-major analysis. It's generally accepted that the Missouri Valley is headed to a second consecutive one-bid year, because there isn't the kind...
S5 January 14, 2009 Steely Dan - Kulee Baba (demo) INDIANAPOLIS -- In 1980, Steely Dan released Gaucho, a seven-song album full of disco-jazz pop songs about getting laid and drugs and revenge, all set in Los Angeles. All three are popular enough themes that the record went double-platinum. Due to various production pr...
S5 January 13, 2009 Northern Illinois at Ball State (Mid-American) Worthen Arena - Muncie, IN 7:00 PM EST I've probably said this before, but if you're a mid-major conference and you're smart, schedule games on Tuesday nights and Sunday afternoons. (And Friday nights, if your geographic footprint is small enough that...
S5 January 13, 2009 NASHVILLE -- I'll be honest with you: I don't know which time zone I'm in, what time it is, what I'm doing here, who I am or who I work for. After last night's Davidson-App State game, I drove 340 miles west (with two hours' worth of sleep, in 30-minute increments, taken in rest areas), back to Nash...
S5 January 12, 2009 Before the 2007-08 season, Josh Akognon transferred from Washington State to Cal State Fullerton with two years of eligibility remaining -- his point production doubled, and he set school single-season records for 3-point field goals and free throw percentage. That's an indication that maybe he wasn...
S5 January 12, 2009 Davidson at Appalachian State (Southern) Holmes Center - Boone, NC 7:30 PM EST Every so often, the rules must be broken. There are some very traditionally great yet somewhat diluted matchups out there on this Monday night -- the Atlantic Sun's Battle of the Boulevard is back on (Lipscomb's struggl...
S5 January 12, 2009 BOONE, N.C. -- I'm going to get into my grandpa rocking chair and tell you what's wrong with pop music. I'm sorry that you had to get this from a basketball writer, but that's just the way it worked out. Most music specifically released for public consumption is far too dependent on context and repu...
S5 January 9, 2009 Lehigh at American (Patriot League) Bender Arena - Washington, DC Saturday, 2:00 PM EST Looking back at the first two months of our fifth season here at TMM, we've only referenced the Patriot League in passing, if at all. There are reasons for that; things have changed over the years. The Formerly...
S5 January 9, 2009 BIRMINGHAM -- First of all, there's a chat today over in the ESPNet SportsZone at 4 pm Eastern. With 2009 and conference play now well-entrenched concepts, we shouldn't have too little to talk about. Please join us, won't you? More importantly, this is a wonderful morning here on The Mid-Majority, a...
S5 January 8, 2009 Wright State at Butler (Horizon League) Hinkle Fieldhouse - Indianapolis, IN 7:00 PM EST Tonight marks the first slate in which every college basketball game nationwide is a league contest. We have action in the CAA, SoCon, NEC, OVC, Horizon, America East, Sun Belt, Badlands Conference, Big West, ...
S5 January 8, 2009 BIRMINGHAM -- Normally in this space, I'll meander on about some philosophical thing or some other non-basketball topic, and then field a pile of back-channel comments about what a horrible job I'm doing and how I should just give up. This is exciting for me, because I get to play out this daily scr...
S5 January 7, 2009 The State of College Basketball is a new-ish 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 344 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of the Fin...
S5 January 7, 2009 High Point at Winthrop (Big South) Winthrop Coliseum - Rock Hill, SC 7:00 PM EST This is a season for big changes in mid-majordom, and most are not necessarily the positive kind that our president-elect talks about. There have been massive shifts in power as multi-bid conferences like the Valley, ...
S5 January 7, 2009 ATLANTA -- One of the upsides to spending so much time in basketball arenas is that my connection to popular music remains simple, true and direct. In this atmosphere, with athletic competition on the floor and fans demanding two hours' worth of entertainment, organized payola can't find purchase. I...
S5 January 6, 2009 He was a breakout superstar from 2007-08 who came out of nowhere to lead a perennial OVC flounder to a salmon-jump in the standings. He was a juco transfer who learned how to study and landed at Tennessee-Martin, and nearly left after a year in the wake of an impressive showing at pre-Draft camp. In...
S5 January 6, 2009 Miami (Oh.) at Dayton U. of Dayton Arena - Dayton, OH 7:00 PM EST "Super" Tuesdays are tough for finding games during January and February. It's the in-between night when the power conferences hog all the TV time as well as the good officials, and a number of mid-major leagues have been wise to av...
S5 January 6, 2009 NASHVILLE -- A lot's happened in the past 48 hours. I've driven 1,450 miles through high Colorado mountain passes, endless Kansas, Oklahoma hailstorms. I've watched Southwest Airlines' careful domino-stack of hourly gate departures collapse under the weight of a weather delay, into a maelstrom of sc...
S5 January 5, 2009 Hofstra at Northeastern (Colonial) Matthews Arena - Boston, MA 7:00 PM EST During George Mason's Final Four run, when head coach Jim Larranaga said that the initials "CAA" stood for "Connecticut Assassins Association," he wasn't kidding. The Colonial earned two double-bid years, as well as nationa...
S5 January 2, 2009 Creighton at Illinois State (Missouri Valley) Redbird Arena - Normal, IL Saturday, 8:05 PM EST We don't often keep the G!O!T!N! camera crew in one place for any significant time, but after the events of New Year's Eve afternoon, we have a situation in the Valley that requires additional monitoring...
S5 January 2, 2009 POCATELLO, Id. -- First of all, we have a chat today over at ESPN SportsNation at 4 p.m. Eastern, or 2 p.m. Mountain Standard. Don't forget! One last blast of mid-major mystery before we turn our attention solely to conference races, and forget that the top eight conferences exist -- a luxury we'll ...
S5 December 31, 2008 The State of College Basketball is a 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 344 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of the Final F...
S5 December 31, 2008 Evansville at Illinois State (Missouri Valley) Redbird Arena - Normal, IL 3:05 PM EST Much of today's action is of the afternoon variety, because Americans are conditioned to party like rock stars on New Year's Eve. And as 2008 comes to a close with a full slate of Valley games, here's one game th...
S5 December 31, 2008 LOGAN, Utah -- It's the final day of the year, the end of the holidays, and a bad day to buy a calendar (they'll be 50 percent off tomorrow). Here in college basketball world, the ringing out of the old has more to do with crossing the bridge between nonconference and league play -- happily so -- an...
S5 December 30, 2008 Cleveland State at Wright State (Horizon League) Ervin J. Nutter Center - Dayton, OH 7:00 PM EST Teams in most conferences are just now finishing their city games, guarantees and D-II walkovers. Not the Horizon, it's gone full-bore into league season and has pretty much completed its quest for nat...
S5 December 30, 2008 LOGAN, Utah -- Yesterday's GMHN closed with a query to the cosmos as to why there will be nearly 300 fewer mid versus major games in 2008-09 than there were in 2007-08. And when I end a daily post with a question, I should expect that my mailbox will contain a few answers. And they arrived! Response...
S5 December 29, 2008 The holidays wiped out half the week's schedule (in a good way, of course), but some players made the most of the four-day week. And just to be clear, a shortened week does not mean that the award is less than 100 percent full strength, the same way that some fans tried to undercut the importance of...
S5 December 29, 2008 Davidson at College of Charleston (Southern) Carolina First Arena - Charleston, SC 9:00 PM EST As the egg nog wears off all across Hoops Nation, it's time to start operating the heavy machinery that will move us from non-league to conference season. Thanks to the result of a few summer phone calls...
S5 December 29, 2008 LOGAN, Utah -- Whenever I travel to this part of the country, the Tetris-stack of states that makes up the intermountain west, I feel a great sense of unease. This goes back to when I lived in western Oregon for seven years, and would occasionally come further inland, but my advancing age allows me ...
S5 December 23, 2008 NATCHITOCHES, La. -- And so it's come to this. Folks are out there on the roads living like it's 2004, cramming their SUV's into parking lots and buying Christmas gifts from "brick and mortar" establishments. The third crazy night of Hanukkah is set to begin. A chain e-mail with blinking green text ...
S5 December 22, 2008 One of the great things about TMM -- okay, maybe it's the only good thing about any of this -- is that we get to introduce you to players those other websites don't have time for. Like this 6-4 NYC product who turned in two of the most efficient performances in mid-majordom last week, work that went...
S5 December 22, 2008 Belmont at Austin Peay Winfield Dunn Center - Clarksville, TN 8:00 PM EST One crisp spring Saturday in Nashville, we shuttled between two Music City arenas to watch two conference champions crowned -- first, the Austin Peay hoopsters took out Tennessee State to win the OVC crown, then two hours la...
S5 December 22, 2008 NATCHITOCHES, La. -- I can't prove this, because it came out of one of those directionless garbage-time conversations amongst us proud folks who refuse to leave any game early. But one of my most brilliant ideas ever was The Sportswriter's Thesaurus, which would give sportswriters all the material t...
S5 December 19, 2008 Illinois-Chicago at Illinois State Redbird Arena - Normal, IL 8:05 PM EST Here's a very interesting tilt between two Illinois programs who have been dormant in recent years, but are having breakout seasons heading into play in their respective conferences. If the NCAA field ends up being littered ...
S5 December 19, 2008 GREENVILLE, S.C. -- Just a reminder that there's a chat today at 4 pm over at ESPN, so come on by. Mediocrity is a touchy subject around here, generally because the word mediocre shares the same Latin root as mid-major, which confuses people into thinking that basketball at our level is just, you kn...
S5 December 18, 2008 The calendar hasn't turned yet, which means that mid-majors are often spending time in power-conference arenas doing things they'd rather not do. Bally also prefers not to set foot in these places if at all possible, but this is just the way November and December are. Here are some of our little ora...
S5 December 18, 2008 Western Kentucky at South Alabama (Sun Belt) Mitchell Center - Mobile, AL 8:05 PM EST The teams in the Sun Belt may not have scheduled well (coming off a two-bid year, the conference RPI is 22 and the noncon record is 49-55), but the league office sure did. Nothing like a mid-December matchup of t...
S5 December 18, 2008 GREENVILLE, S.C -- Nonconference Thursdays, especially the ones right before the holiday season, are tough. Some schools are out of finals and on break, others are in finals, there aren't very many games out there. So a couple quick notes: I know only a handful of you are on Twitter, but it's fun an...
S5 December 17, 2008 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 344 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of the F...
S5 December 17, 2008 Akron at Virginia Commonwealth Siegel Center - Richmond, VA 7:30 PM EST The best thing about BracketBusters, in my opinion, is the BracketBusters return game. Sure, the chance for TV exposure in February is nice, but that only affects the handful of teams angling for NCAA consideration. All 100 or...
S5 December 17, 2008 CLINTON, S.C. -- What's the value of a score? The market has it much less than the 1/1000th of a cent that manufacturer's coupons are worth -- interested parties expect to get them for free, that a score should cost the same over a computer network as it does transmitted from mouth to ear. Is "Tenne...
S5 December 16, 2008 Cal State Bakersfield at South Dakota State Frost Arena - Brookings, SD 8:05 PM EST Tonight I will be covering North Florida at Clemson, one of those ultra-rare instances when the No. 1 RPI team plays the last-place RPI team. To include that here would break the only two rules of the G!O!T!N! (rec...
S5 December 16, 2008 CLEMSON, S.C. -- It's Tuesday, which means that we give away a Bally. Last week's question was an intermediate-level brain buster that a lot of people got right: name a team that lost twice to a conference regular-seaosn champion in January and/or February, then took its revenge at the conference to...
S5 December 16, 2008 Cleveland State 72, at Syracuse 69 The senior guard took an inbounds pass from J'Nathan Bullock with 2.2 seconds left, turned and swished a two-handed, 60-foot shot at the buzzer to give the Vikings a shocking 72-69 victory over... Syracuse on Monday night. [*] ...
S5 December 15, 2008 Usually, this feature is reserved for players at our level who a.) have great performances in games that matter and b.) win. But sometimes we have to make an exception, or one-and-a-half. Ben Woodside of North Dakota State is our fifth Mid-Majority Baller of the Week for the 2008-09 season. On Frida...
S5 December 15, 2008 Louisiana-Monroe at Louisiana-Lafayette (Sun Belt) Cajundome - Lafayette, LA 8:05 PM EST Some schools had finals last week, some are heading into it now. The rolling parade of all-nighters and books means that the two middle weeks of December are a piddling pastiche of guarantee games, mid-on-mid ...
S5 December 15, 2008 CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Let's get this out of the way first: the Atlantic 14 owned this weekend. Pwned it. The A-14 was in yr weekend, steelin yr basketballz. This conference put such a stamp on the last two days that the second weekend in December should be a three-day hoops holiday, by proclamation of...
S5 December 12, 2008 CHICAGO -- First of all, chat today. When that happens, I will be in a different place, far from here. Flying today is going a lot better than the last first flight of the season. Almost missed my air ride this morning out of rainy Providence, though -- Joan as security woman ran my wallet through t...
S5 December 11, 2008 Troy at Middle Tennessee (Sun Belt) Murphy Athletics Center - Murfreesboro, TN 8:00 PM EST With most schools in finals, it's a light schedule this week. But the Sun Belt has found the time to squeeze in a league preview on an eight-game Thursday, to the relief of our intrepid G!O!T!N! crew, all of...
S5 December 11, 2008 PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- Not to get all Good N' Plenty on you, but I am at home for the first day in 17, the last day I'll be home for 56. I've severely cut down on a lot of the deeply personal oversharing from previous years, which has resulted in a sharp and welcome decline in the number of creepy lette...
S5 December 10, 2008 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 344 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of the F...
S5 December 10, 2008 Dayton at Creighton Qwest Center - Omaha, NE 8:05 PM EST Even though they rarely play each other, Dayton and Creighton just go great together. Not only do they rhyme, they're both small schools in non-power conferences that have the kind of remarkable infrastructure, organization and long-term vis...
S5 December 10, 2008 BALTIMORE -- Last Thursday, I saw my first conference tilt of the year. It was at the Truman-era art deco palace known as Memorial Auditorium, one of my favorite places to see a game, and the Badlands Conference clash featured the homestanding UMKC Kangaroos hosting the Oakland Super Golden Crisp Gr...
S5 December 9, 2008 San Francisco at Pacific A.C. Spanos Center - Stockton, CA 10:00 PM EST Tonight we have two western teams on the road back to respectability -- one's trail, however, is a little longer than the other. San Francisco, the center of the WCC's Jesuit triad, will always have a better NCAA Tournament re...
S5 December 9, 2008 LEXINGTON, Va. -- I think we can chalk up the weekend voting on the Ultimate Project contest an unqualified, unmitigated disaster. There were more complaints about the voting mechanism (clicking through either brought up a "please log in" screen or a full-screen ad to start your own poll) than actua...
S5 December 8, 2008 The Mid-Majority tries to keep it fresh, mix it up, to stay frisky and funky in a world full of stale coach-speak and paint-by-numbers analysis. But this time, it's impossible. For one of the very few times in this site's obscure history, we are recycling a subject line letter-for-letter. For the se...
S5 December 8, 2008 Fairleigh Dickinson at Monmouth (Northeast) Boylan Gym - West Long Branch, NJ 7:30 PM EST In tonight's only league game, we have a couple of case studies in how difficult it is to maintain success, much less consistency, at the low-RPI end of the mid-major pool. In 2005, Fairleigh Dickinson's Hors...
S5 December 8, 2008 LOUISVILLE -- This week marks the one-month milepost of the 2008-09 season. Most of the action we've seen has consisted multi-team tournaments of questionable merit or importance, early league games, and power-conference teams beating the snot out of mid-majors. While we've made a lot of the signifi...
S5 December 5, 2008 Albany at Siena Times Union Center - Albany, NY 7:00 PM EST When you think great mid-major city games, there are matchups like Loyola and UIC in Chicago (also being contested on Saturday), or maybe the NEC's Battle of Brooklyn between St. Francis and Long Island. But don't forget a pairing with a ...
S5 December 5, 2008 SOMEWHERE IN MISSOURI -- Our Ultimate Project contest ends today -- or rather, the first phase of it. There were so many great entries (over 40) that I personally can't decide on who The Mid-Majority's No. 1 work-in-progress big man should be. So we are going to put it to you, gentle readers. The fi...
S5 December 4, 2008 The State of College Basketball is a 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 344 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of the Final Four ...
S5 December 4, 2008 Saint Mary's at Kent State Memorial Athletics Center - Kent, OH 7:00 PM EST It was the BracketBuster game few stayed up to watch, but its effects had a resounding impact on the way the 2008 bracket was shaped. Al Fisher (28 points) helped propel the Golden Flashes over the nationally ranked Gaels ...
S5 December 4, 2008 KANSAS CITY -- Later today, I'll be posting the first version of the State of the Other 22, the mid-major (and A-14) subset of the complicated ratings system I put together last year (with the help of some great coaches who helped define the important ingredients) on the Basketball State site. The r...
S5 December 3, 2008 SPRINGFIELD, Mo. -- Tonight I'll be making my first visit to Missouri State's brand new JQH Arena, which was just christened within the month. I've been really excited about this for a couple weeks now, for a few reasons. I like shiny new things as much as any American, but most of all I'm curious a...
S5 December 2, 2008 Valparaiso at Cleveland State (Horizon League) H. J. Goodman Arena - Cleveland, OH 7:00 PM EST If you were to pick a better way to open the conference season (you know, by "random draw" and everything), you could do worse than the Horizon League. Tonight, the slate of parenthetical games begins wi...
S5 December 2, 2008 CARBONDALE, Ill. -- The fact is that sometimes in this business, you just have to kick a little ass. I'm really sorry when my turn comes up, it isn't in my upbringing to upbraid people. But when I announced last week's contest, I thought I could count on folks to be creative on their own. It didn't ...
S5 December 1, 2008 Most fans know him for "the Dagger" against Duke two seasons ago, but he's been making opponents say "dang" for the better part of three years. Over the past seven days, he put together one of the most impressive three-game stretches seen in Hoops Nation so far this season. Eric Maynor is our third ...
S5 December 1, 2008 South Carolina-Upstate at Kennesaw State (Atlantic Sun) KSU Convocation Center - Kennesaw, GA 7:30 PM EST Unless it's the absolute beginning of the season, we don't generally spotlight games involving winless teams (such as the visiting 0-4 Spartans) in the G!O!T!N!, but in a way this really is th...
S5 December 1, 2008 TERRE HAUTE, Ind. -- It's the first of December. Do you know where your college basketball team is? (Arkansas State, by the way, is here in town.) More importantly, do you know what it is? So much of this right now, at this point of the season, is involved in figuring our what is real and what is tr...
S5 November 26, 2008 Southern Illinois at Western Kentucky E.A. Diddle Arena - Bowling Green, KY 8:00 PM EST 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 a...
S5 November 26, 2008 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 act...
S5 November 25, 2008 Mount Saint Mary's at George Mason Patriot Center - Fairfax, VA 7:00 PM EST 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...
S5 November 25, 2008 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 ...
S5 November 24, 2008 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...
S5 November 24, 2008 Miami (Oh.) at Wright State Ervin J. Nutter Center - Dayton, OH 7:00 PM EST 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 th...
S5 November 24, 2008 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...
S5 November 21, 2008 Winthrop at Davidson Belk Arena - Davidson, NC 7:00 PM EST 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 Bracke...
S5 November 21, 2008 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 ...
S5 November 20, 2008 North Texas at Sam Houston State Johnson Coliseum - Huntsville, TX 8:00 PM EST 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 ...
S5 November 20, 2008 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, havi...
S5 November 19, 2008 Charlotte at Appalachian State Holmes Center - Boone, NC 7:00 PM EST 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 los...
S5 November 19, 2008 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 procedure...
S5 November 18, 2008 Nevada at San DiegoJenny Craig Pavilion - San Diego, CA10:00 PM EST 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 sque...
S5 November 18, 2008 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 l...
S5 November 17, 2008 Maryland-Baltimore County at Morgan StateHill Field House - Baltimore, MD7:00 PM EST 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 finish...
S5 November 17, 2008 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 bei...
S5 November 14, 2008 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 t...
S5 November 13, 2008 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...
S5 November 12, 2008 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 (ei...
S5 November 11, 2008 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 pl...
S5 November 9, 2008 It's been a long seven months. ...
S5 November 9, 2008 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 su...
S5 November 8, 2008 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,...
S5 November 7, 2008 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 colleg...
S5 November 6, 2008 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, selectiv...
S5 November 5, 2008 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 fore...
S5 November 4, 2008 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...
S5 November 3, 2008 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 pe...
S5 November 2, 2008 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...
S5 November 1, 2008 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...
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