DailiesATLANTIC CITY, N.J. -- It's fitting that we're here in Jersey -- just as there were 86 episodes of The Sopranos, there were exactly that many daily weekday posts this year. This right here is the final edition of the season -- this 86th Boubacar, too, was "Made in America." Not that this is the end of things, however -- the believing has only started. Tourney Centrals will continue through Monday, and then we go into full-on NCAA Tournament mode. Coverage will be as unpredictable as the Big Dance itself, as we move from the Play-In Game in Dayton to the first weekend (and hopefully beyond). As site tradition dictates, we shut down for the summer the day after all the mid-major schools are eliminated. Then we do one of these. Hopefully that'll all happen later rather than sooner -- with a weak overall bubble and strong double-champions representing our ranks, we like our chances to stick around for a while. Unlike that show about this state's first fictional family of crime, we're not ending The Boubacar on a blank screen. We promised you pretty girls to end the season, and damn it, that's what we're going to give you. After the jump, we launch this site's first annual Tradition of Traditions -- lots of pictures of mid-major (and A-14!) cheerleaders.
The Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference is great with gifts -- they give you stuff that you can use in your daily work, like the classy pen set from last year and the flash drive they gave us this past weekend (at 256MB, it could fit everything I've ever written about basketball 10 times over.) The Ohio Valley Conference takes a different approach, preferring to invade your casual, everyday life with its logo. The 2007 gift was a great big fleece blanket, which The Official Wife™ uses on the couch when I'm not home and the bed gets too big. This year's offering was a sleek, tall stainless-steel black travel mug that fits in every cup holder ever invented. I wonder what they'll give us when the conference wins its first NCAA game since 1989. Then there's our beloved Atlantic 14, which has escalated the ante in recent years. Yesterday, they gave us all mini-mouses. I've tested it against the $50 wireless model I've been lugging around the last two seasons (which cuts out reception every eighth time I want to click on something), and it's vastly superior. I've got to say -- that's a high-major gift right there. But we're not really here to talk about rewards, this is about awards. We're in the business of giving out some virtual hardware today. We've seen all the Player and Coach of the Year awards, given out by league coaches in secret ballots, and we respectfully disagree with a lot of their decisions. Here, then, on this second-to-last Boubacar of the year, are our picks. ("We" being the two-member panel of myself and Bally, who disagreed on only one pick. Can you guess which?) It's the first time we've done this, and we're still trying to figure out why that is. And attn. sports information directors: if you're queasy about linking to a "blog" post about media swag, if that's too "informal," you can just go ahead and copy and paste the relevant sections into your releases. We don't need the extra bandwidth-hogging traffic this time of year anyway. ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. -- As we promised earlier this week, we're going to take one last look at some seasons that may not have resulted in a Dance card or a lot of national headlines, but were breakthroughs or returns to form. Here, then, are eight teams that few saw coming... in alphabetical order. Brown (19-9, 11-3 Ivy League) -- It'll be forgotten behind Cornell's perfect Ivy season, but the Bears had a stellar year, only losing their two games with the Big Red and the season opener at Yale. (They didn't get a one-and-done chance to even the score with the regular-season champs, but that's not the way the Ancient Eight rolls.) The Bears had a five-game Ivy improvement over last year, won 10 games on the road, and sat just outside the RPI's top 100 at 104. The ninth-best 3-point shooting team in the nation featured great years from senior guards Mark McAndrew and Damon Huffman, who combined for 31.4 ppg. ALBANY, N.Y. -- Yes indeed, the regular season is over. Everybody's into their conference tournaments now, and four are over already. And since The Boubacar is a regular-season thing, we'll be winding down this particular portion of the entertainment this week. But first and foremost, I wanted to let you know that I'm hosting a Four-Hour MegaChat over at the Worldwide Leader today. We're not going for The Record like last time, this is just a jog around the park, not a marathon. It all starts at noon ET (I hope you remembered to set your clocks ahead). Bring lots of questions, we're going to talk about Championship Week, Drake, the VCU and Saint Mary's double connumdrums, it's going to be more fun than those four-hour Indian musicals. NASHVILLE -- There is nothing in the world more fun that this fortnight, this extended Championship Week. Days full of games, wave after wave of cheerleaders, pep bands, student sections and players' moms. Every two hours new ones come along come, a blurry time-smear of orange, red, green, blue, gold. It's also the first March sighting of "Basketball Guys"... you know, those silver-haired dudes in jumpsuits who stand around in groups staying close to the game, talking about the old days when there was no 3-point line. Some of them are convinced that there's still one last D-I job left in them if they just make the right contact, even if they haven't coached anybody for over a decade. Promised it yesterday, overnight delivery today. We've been here at the Atlantic Sun tournament for the past couple days, and thought it would fun to show our readers what kind of stuff goes into making this March magic. Here, then, is your exclusive behind-the-scenes backstage pass to the A-Sun.
Last night, that children's storybook that has never been written nearly came to fresh, vivacious life here at the Atlantic Sun tournament. No. 8 seed Campbell came tantalizingly close to sipping the fresh, delicious waters of victory. Against No. 1 seed Belmont, the two-time champions of the A-Sun Conference, they were dropped into an early hole by a 14-1 run, but didn't give up. Struggling to score against one of the top-shooting teams in the nation for the entire first half, all seemed quickly lost. NASHVILLE -- Our day-long drive down from our Rhode Island home down to Music City was like the 2007-08 season in intricately-styled microcosm. There were a lot of miles driven (about a thousand), hours upon hours of XM radio (we like the new "Thriller" channel) and spotty cell reception just about everywhere. Then we stopped at a Panera and filed a story with the free wi-fi, like we always do, slept for a couple of hours in a rest area, then took a shower at a Flying J. There was also a punishing rainstorm through Maryland and West Virginia that was like a million tiny fists against the glass, symbolic of the annual February drag and grind when we question why we do this, when we think about giving up and going back to systems analysis. But the sky cleared up, like it always does, and then there was a 2 a.m. breakfast at Waffle House. (Nobody gives up on anything after a waffle with butterscotch chips on it.) And then, as usual, we got into town in plenty of time for tip-off. It's the beginning of our fifth annual overdose of conference tournaments (it predates the blog), a total of 24 games in 11 days. This is the time we live for: an extended blur of furious rallies, surprise heroes, buzzer-beaters, broken-hearted cheerleaders, twine-cutting, and three-minute sideline catch-ups with old friends. All due respect to the NCAA Tournament, but this is the best time of the year. We don't usually give out our travel plans in advance, but we're so excited that we just can't hide it. Here, then, is our schedule for the week. PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- M is for March, and madness, and mania, and magic; any etymologist knows they all came from the same source, Ma-, a Anglo-Saxon derivative meaning "super-awesome." M is also for Mid-major. It's our time, and this is our year. With so many struggling power-conference teams trying to figure out if they want to be on the bubble or not, we might have more 12-over-5 and 13-over-everybody games than you can count. A is for ARRRGH, the feeling you get when your school's team storms through the regular season, then loses in the tourney semifinals and misses out on the NCAA's. A is also for ass, which is what you feel like after trash-talking to opposing fans about your big Tournament plans. The text messages are piling up, friend, better just shut your phone off. Turn it back on in April. R is for referee, the man who's going to steal a game from your team in the final seconds and change your mood to raw rage. It's also the second letter in the word "bracket," which is a term that virtually nobody associated with March just three short decades ago. C is for center, which is something your team needs this month. You don't want to be outrebounded by 20. It's also for catatonic, which is what you'll be in three weeks after prolonged exposure to life in 40-minute timed increments. And finally, H is for 'hell with this Sue Grafton garbage, let's look at some of the remaining multi-bid scenarios. PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- The calendar does not deceive you, it's been March for two-plus days now and we haven't seen one conference tournament game. We'll take care of that tomorrow (the Big South, OVC and Horizon get underway), but this in-between day gives us a chance to catch our collective breath and warn you about what's coming next. Folks who read along last year probably remember the daily Tourney Central posts, which laid out constantly-updated brackets for each of the 21 conference tourneys, provided scores and links to boxes, and featured the occasional insightful comment. We're doing that again this year! The big difference is that all the stat stuff is over at Basketball State now, and we'll be throwing links over there at a thoroughly alarming rate in the next two weeks. So we've instituted some new March pricing: get access until April 2009 (from now until the end of next year's NCAA's) for $29.95, and if you just want to hang around short-term, it's ten bucks for this month only (non-recurring). When you compare that to girlie sites, that's a darn good deal. And as the days get longer, The Boubacar will get shorter as the action shifts to tourneys. We'll do Game! Of! The! Night! posts until early next week to showcase the last few key regular-season games, and there'll be Ballers of the Week from here on out. We'll sprinkle in some interviews, cartoons and random jokes just so it doesn't get too stagnant. Tomorrow, we'll take a look at some two-bid scenarios, but it's time to recap the weekend! LAWRENCEVILLE, N.J. -- Last night was a great evening for regular-season champions, all of which have now clinched at least a spot in the National Invitation Tournament. In addition to five crownings last night, Belmont took a share of the Atlantic Sun title with an 11-point win over Campbell. We have more coming this weekend, with Cornell within a win of a precedent-setting Ivy League championship (and autobid), the Patriot League, Sun Belt and WCC one-seeds are about to become unsettled, and UNC Asheville and Winthrop are squaring off for the Big South. It's the kind of madness that make you happy. Let's celebrate some titles!
It's a magical evening, with capacity crowds paying homage to careers great and small, offering cheers and respect to the players they'll always remember as being the ones that represented their school while they were there. Twenty years from now, when two VCU alums meet and catch up over a cold beer, one will say, "Remember Jamal Shuler? Now there was a basketball player." And the other will nod and agree, they'll raise their glasses, and both will drink to the tough, gritty 6-3 guard who always played several inches taller than he really was. RICHMOND, Va. -- We don't do a lot of Mid-Major Mailbag action around here anymore (we get plenty interactive enough with the chats, you know). But there's something about the combination of assisted research and the last slow Wednesday of the season that makes us want to break out the blockquote tags. This, recently, from brilliant reader Max: Hey man. You probably already know this or mentioned it somewhere, but I got bored and checked the records for the games the mid-majors hosted this year (based on your Oct. 1 column you did at ESPN) - the big dogs of course came out on top, but only by 24-19! Wow! My fear is that if this info gets out, we may be facing the facist wet dream of a guarantee-game mandated non-conference sked by the big boys, exempting only games played as part of incestuous inter-BCS-conference "challenges" and the like. May God have mercy. My goodness, that's a future freakier than Total Recall. And I didn't know that! But I think we'll continue to see a fair number of these games in the future, but more of the USC at The Citadel variety and fewer of the Michigan State at Bradley types. With the loss of the 2-in-4 rule, power-conference teams can go play in a Multi-Team Event every year to play schools with decent RPI's, and they can get a relatively easy road win by playing a Big South or Atlantic Sun team or something. Those schools are good about not walking into losing propositions when they don't have to. All of this makes for a great excuse to revisit some of our numbers that we were following on a weekly basis before league play started. DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- We're all just getting over the thrills of BracketBuster weekend, but there's plenty to get to as the regular season winds down to its electrifying conclusion. Just 19 days until Selection Sunday...
But if Patty Mills' offensive game against Kent State was stifled, last night's was wet-blanketed. The Australian freshman phenom followed up a five-point performance with a two-point one, as he battled fouls and irrelevance all night. He only took three shots, made just one, and though he had five dimes, his assist-to-turnover ratio of 1.2-to-1 now ranks fifth on the team. And he's the starting point guard! All I'm saying is that asking him to save the team's fortunes this early in his career might be a bad idea. Gonzaga looms again this Saturday.
So I got to spend most of Saturday in the ESPNU studios in Charlotte, watching all the games on a bank of screens. (It wasn't ex-Wonk John Gasaway's house, but rather the next best thing.) Somewhere in the middle, I got to tape a segment for SportsCenter U, and I'm glad to say I didn't embarrass myself. There was, however, a "two-shot" that I completely blew, looking into Camera 1 when I should have been looking at the anchor. When you do that, it looked like you're distracted and looking off into space like an idiot. Here are some other observations and hard lessons about doing TV from the weekend: CHARLOTTE -- That was fun. Yesterday, we proved conclusively that you can talk about mid-major basketball for six hours and that the topic will attract a couple thousand questions, not the six or seven most people would expect. There were a lot of awesome questions about everything from hoops to the Grateful Dead to Lost to truck stop showers, and I want to personally thank everybody who participated. I'm just feeling guilty (as always) that I couldn't talk to everybody. Yesterday's ESPN.com chat is now certified as the third-longest in SportsNation history, at six hours, one minute. I got a lot of messages during the Davidson-Winthrop game about The Record, which is held by a personality so big that he goes by two sets of initials: B.S. and T.S.G.. The moon shot of seven hours was a big deal in December, and it was for charity and stuff. A few wondered if there was a Worldwide Leader conspiracy to keep the record safe, or if I just wasn't capable of "Simmons stamina" (ewww). I did come up one hour short -- I had trained perfectly (voided my fluids before noon so I didn't have to go to the bathroom all day), and I would have been capable of going many hours more, deep into the night. And yes, ESPN did pull the plug on me before 6 p.m. Eastern, but there's no conspiracy. The true fact is that the questions started to dwindle at 5 p.m., the end of the workweek for all the East Coasters whose mid-major degrees earned them cushy office jobs (or cubicles). So I offer this challenge for the next time (and there will be another attempt someday): we need more support from the midwest and the Left Coast during those late hours. We'll prove that mid-major basketball matters, and that the non-EST time zones matter as well. I hope Simmons can hear Hoops Nation knocking. Our day will come.
CHARLOTTE -- Just a reminder from myself, Bally and Dunk'n Dolphin that there will be a Marathon BracketBusters Chat today at ESPN.com starting at 12 noon Eastern. I'll also likely be talking about that huge South Alabama win at Western Kentucky, and the Stephen F. Austin blowout of Sam Houston that lifted the Lumberjacks into the top 20 of our State ratings. But five hours is indeed a lot of time to fill, so we might end up discussing spring training baseball, Lost and indie rock as well. So we'll see you tomorrow, Boubacar-wise, for a full wrapup of Thursday and Friday's action. To submit a question for the big chat, click on the picture. JACKSONVILLE -- Lots and lots to get to today with a full slate of red-hot mid-major action, but first I wanted to pimp n' plug tomorrow's Gigantic BracketBusters Marathon Chat on ESPN.com. There are always hundreds of people who don't get their questions attended to during the regular Wednesday deals, so here's your chance! We'll be starting at noon Eastern and going until about 5 p.m., and you can submit your questions early. More, more, more questions! "Marathon" is just such an overused term, the season is that and not a sprint and all, and people always forget to mention . It's also generally a depressing word around here. I've run five of the 26.2 kind in recent years but came into the 2007-08 season in bad physical shape... and I'll end it in even worse shape, thanks to the toll of the road and the constant driving and sitting down this job requires. So what better way to celebrate that than five straight hours of sitting and typing! That's a total calorie burn of about 27. And whenever an ESPN.com chat longer than two hours comes up, there's always talk of The Record, the one held by a certain Mr. Bill Simmons. SportsNation has specific rules about that, and they require thousands of questions an hour to be considered a valid run. I'm not going to pretend I have any chance in hell of even approaching that, the Cult of the Mid-Majority is about 1/100000th the size of his and I don't have the number of movie references at my disposal as he does. But we're going to see how we do tomorrow, and get as many questions in before they pull the plug. Join us! BOCA RATON, Fla. -- We've been mentioning the Atlantic Sun prominently this season, what with all the early upsets and Belmont's run at a third straight title and all, but we haven't talked much about its most improved team. Stetson has never achieved the NCAA Tournament since Glenn Wilkes (552 wins) brought the school up from NAIA in the Seventies. But they're pretty decent this year. At 13-15 overall, the Hatters have a chance to break .500 for the first time since 2000-01, and they have a solid player in junior Garfield Blair, a 6-5 Orlando native who makes half his shots and leads the team in rebounds as well. Stetson's been hanging around fourth-place position in the league all year (8-5 at the moment), and had a big 12-point home win against East Tennessee State 10 days ago. And contrary to what I've heard about the idea that non-ACC or SEC basketball in Florida not being able to draw fruit flies, Stetson fans are great. There was a good weekday crowd last night, even for a nonconference game with Savannah State, and the atmosphere was rich and homey. A guy with a hoop walked around inviting kids to take a shot with a plastic ball, and you'd get a balsa-wood airplane if you made it. There were cheerleaders in windbreakers. That's right, windbreakers! DELAND, Fla. -- Last night on press row at Florida A&M in Tallahassee, my inbox full of nasty notes from Penn fans (more about that later on), I was reminded once again about the key differences between Ivy League and MEAC basketball. And there are differences, even though both conferences would likely split the theoretical Ivy-MEAC Challenge I'd give up a year's salary to see. You're a bandleader, it's a second-half media timeout, and your student section needs to be fired up for the final stretch. What do you play? The Penn band will play Hoops Nation's national anthem, "Rock 'n Roll, Part 2" by Gary Glitter. Fans of the soon-to-be-deposed Ivy champions will get so geeked, so excited, that they will carry the tune through after the time out is over, the haunting strains echoing through the Palestra as play resumed, punctuated occasionally by a rousing "You Suck!". Fans at FAMU do the same sort of thing. Last night as the soon-to-be-deposed MEAC champions fought tooth-and-nail with Coppin State (a battle they'd eventually lose, 89-88), a tune rose up during a media timeout from the band, passed to the students as the game continued. Just as in the Palestra, the Gaither Center rafters echoed with an a capella version of the song that had been begun by a subset of the Marching 100. But the song was very different -- no Seventies glam rock here. It was "Da Butt." You can have your "Rock, Chalk, Jayhawk" -- nothing is as bone-chilling and soul-stirring as hearing a student section in full voice sing Hey yeah-ee yeah. Yeah-ee, Yeah-ee, Yeah-ee Yeah. It's something I'll always carry with me... the sight of hundreds of FAMU students doin' da butt. All. Night. Long. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Plenty of folks have the day off for the holiday today, but we have a patriotic duty to provide you with a Supersized Boubacar that takes into account all the action from the weekend that was. We'll get to that in a second, but I wanted to share with you my most recent fantastic idea: The Mid-Majority Network.
TMMN, a broadband network that may be available on cable and satellite in the upcoming unlimited-bandwidth 3,000-channel era, would be very simple in production and delivery. Nothing but mid-major scouting tapes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. At games, you always see those team staff with the handy-cams making recordings for future review and exchange (they're always aiming the camera at the scoreboard during time outs, I love that). In the future, folks will just make a DVD copy and send it to us. We'll show it all on our network. Imagine tuning in at 2 a.m. on a Friday and seeing Troy playing Florida Atlantic in a Sun Belt showdown from two weeks ago. If that doesn't interest you, maybe we'd have some WCC or Big South at 4 a.m.. TMMN would be ignored by 99 percent of the population, but it would instantly become the only entertainment option for pro scouts, assistant coaches and nutty fans. Some would simply throw out their remotes and watch TMMN all the time. If anybody knows anybody who can help make this happen, please drop a line. I haven't been this excited about something since Friday. |
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ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. -- I don't know if I'm ripping the cover off some secret clandestine something, or exposing some horrible underbelly of The Business here. But one of the best things about Championship Fortnight is the media gifts. Yes, many conferences bestow presents upon us ink- and pixel-stained wags, presenting us with tokens of appreciation when we pick up our credentials. It's not like the Oscars or anything, we're not taken into a big room full of tables and goodie bags and asked which iPhone we want, but it's pretty darned close.
NASHVILLE -- There's a little Fighting Camel in all of us -- that piece of our soul that's tragically misunderstood, a little out of place. It's the part of you that's told you'll never make it, never achieve your dreams. Silly camel, you aren't supposed to fight for or win anything... you're supposed to live your preassigned role of giving dudes rides across the desert, and you're going to like it. And too bad if you want a drink, you're not getting one. 
Butler. All hail your Horizon League regular-season champion Bulldogs, who at 15-2 have claimed one of the titles that eluded them last year. They did that by holding off recent nemeses and 2007 double-champions Wright State, 
WEST LONG BRANCH, N.J. -- One of the great traditions in college basketball is Senior Night, the last home game of the regular season. All outgoing seniors, no matter if they were four-year starters with awards and all-league selections, or guys who played the parts of opposing players on the practice squad, averaging 0.2 points and 0.1 rebounds in limited minutes. 
Saint Mary's. In last night's G!O!T!N!, the Gaels proved that yes, they can win a slow-paced game. As in the previous meeting with San Diego, the Toreros made sure that the contest unfolded at a methodical and grimy pace. And as in this weekend's BracketBusters loss to Kent State, SMC's primary under-the-basket threat 
FORT MYERS, Fla. -- Sometimes I just have to pinch myself (even though dreams can be complicated enough that I wouldn't wake up if I did). Three years ago, I was just another computer programmer with a college basketball blog, and the next thing I know I'm talking over BracketBusters highlights with the legendary 
