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 Four in a simulation of 2006-07, did okay as a predictor last season, and enters 2008-09 ready for more. For our purposes here, it gives the world's only hype-free, non-voting, computer poll of teams in the lower 22 and a half (we include the A-14) conferences. This is the full chart, and this is a recording. 1. Butler (Horizon League), 113.661, 11-1 (2-0) Of course, there was no Week 4 here on this site thanks to the holidays, but the index has been churning out results on an hourly basis anyway. The Bulldogs are first in the RPI, fourth in strength of schedule, and first in the TS-22. They're 3-0 since our last transmission of this type, having beaten Florida Gulf Coast, Xavier and UAB. While ball control has been the No. 1 weapon of the past few years, this team is much more dynamic. Take, for example, the UAB win: +6 on turnovers, but a resounding +9 on the boards and a gentlemanly -11 on fouls.
Evansville at Illinois State (Missouri Valley) 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 that will go a long way in determining what the league will look like in 2009. I didn't see Evansville coming, but my computer did. The Purple Aces are 9-2 (1-0 MVC) against the 21st toughest schedule in the country, with only a couple of roadie losses to popularity-contest chat entrants Butler and North Carolina counting against them. (And other than one gigantic Tar Heel run, Evansville was totally in that game.) Statistically, nothing really pops out at you about the Aces... the interior defense and rebounding has been solid, but that's incongruous with the fact that the regular rotation tops out at 6-5. Shy Ely, the senior guard with the name of a late-night hip-hop DJ, is averaging 17.2 ppg but hasn't shot all that well (44.2 percent). It's just a team that plays well together, and has rode that indescribable wave of hoops magic so far. Just ask chance double-champions Drake, which Evansville dumped by 11 in Sunday's Valley opener. Then there's Illinois State, which spent most of this decade sharing the Valley ashtray with Evansville. The Redbirds broke through with a 25-10 season last year, which didn't result in NCAA joy because of league-wide weakness and the MVC's low number of Red Line Upsets in nonconference. This year, they scheduled way down (SOS: 306), but pollsters and sportswriters across the country are intrigued about the 12-0 team in the Valley. Being a TMM reader, you're smarter than that, and you have retained your healthy skepticism. Especially after a wild 72-69 eke-out at Missouri State out of a 15-point deficit, a game that showed a lot of things, but not dominance. If Illinois State has shown weakness, it's been defending jump shots and giving opponents all the extra possessions they need. Will Evansville take advantage? 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 -- and we made all our resolutions two months ago. Regardless, The Mid-Majority will take the day off tomorrow, primarily because history indicates that there will be nobody around to read it. Now, back to our mystery. To recap, 2008-09 has seen a precipitous drop in the number of mid- versus major games, down by over 300 and 20 percent from last year -- despite an increase in the number of overall games played (due to D-I expansion). Additionally, the percentage of games involving at least one team from the 23 conferences below the Red Line is down from 78 percent to 73 percent from last year. Where have all our chances at the top dogs gone? Longtime reader and brilliant logician Matt M. has a theory. I think that the individual conferences are discouraging their teams from these games. And I think there is going to be a push to separate the "haves" from the "have-nots" even more, kind of like football has. That's right, D-1 and D-1A college basketball baby!!! Wow, would that suck.
Cleveland State at Wright State (Horizon League) 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 national credentials. The results were pretty impressive: a 54-52 noncon record and just three of 10 teams under .500, with eight wins over the eight biggest conferences. On a mid-major comparison level, the HL has winning records against the MAC (10-9), Missouri Valley (5-3) and CAA (1-0). If there's a Butler-Cleveland State title game again (and it would help if both teams win their BracketBusters), I don't know how the Selection Committee could keep one of them out. Simply put, the Horizon League is the only mid-major conference that's taken care of its business in the past two months. One of the hidden feel-good stories of the league in these past few weeks has been the reemergence of Wright State. The schedule was brutal, including having the dreaded HL Wisconsin trip in early December, and the Raiders limped out to an 0-6 record. The loss of Vaughn Duggins (a 14-ppg man last season) to a hand injury after four games kept the point totals at rock bottom. But after the losses at Green Bay and Milwaukee, Wright's defense kicked in. Winning six of the last seven games, Brad Brownell's team has allowed 60 points just once, and has not let an opponent crack 47 during a current four-game win streak. The main weapon is the turnover -- the Raiders force 16.8 per game, at a rate of 26 percent. They'll need that kind of effort tonight, as well as a strong home crowd, to stifle the hot Vikings. Gary Waters' squad, which dropped a close one against Butler in its last league tilt, will be trying to keep from starting out 1-2 in the conference. But Cleveland State has proven its mettle in hostile environments (Syracuse!), can force turnovers too (17.8 topg), and has a POY candidate in 6-5 senior J'Nathan Bullock (14.5 ppg, 7.1 rpg). To put the team's 10-4 (1-1) record in context, this is as many wins as the Vikings had in both 2005-06 and 2006-07, before the team doubled up with last year's 21-13 NIT breakthrough. Next up could be a first NCAA appearance since the Sweet 16 year of 1986. 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! Responses, which contained many solid and plausible theories (some including bullet points), came pouring in from all corners. Because this is a complex question with very intriguing and double-sided answers, I'm going to wring a few days out of this. Douglass in Indianapolis gets us into the right area of general inquiry. How would you explain the sudden, unexpected drop in games between large schools and low-budget schools? Let's do what everyone else is doing these days and blame it on the economy. Perhaps the big budget schools are having to trim some fat and cut back on those expensive guarantee games. If the numbers keep going this way next year, we can blame Cleveland St.
Mr. Dominguez is a 5-6, 155 lb. senior guard for Portland State. It's been quite a Best Year Ever for him. He won both newcomer and player of the year in the Big Sky Conference back in March, led his team to its first NCAA tournament, spent a night in a Mexican jail, battled injury, then went through a snowstorm to engineer a win over the school formerly known as UMPFN. Last Monday night, the Salem, Ore. native shot 8-for-12 from the floor, including seven long-range hits in 10 attempts, to score more points against Gonzaga than any player has so far this season (25). Despite his height, he also chipped in six rebounds as PSU knocked off the Zags by a 77-70 count, a score that scrolled endlessly across the ESPN ticker for a full hour afterwards. It might have seemed like a post-holiday letdown off a historic victory, but Portland State traveled all the way to Texas Southern University in Houston for a Saturday tilt ahead of a Monday guarantee at Baylor. Though they let go of an early lead and had to break open a 55-55 tie with a minute to go with free throws, the Vikings escaped with an eight-point victory over the winless Tigers. In 28 minutes, Dominguez scored a team-high 15 points and had over half his team's 11 steals (six). He's definitely having as big a year as he did in 2007-08, and the circumstances make it all the more remarkable. In the Vikings' crosstown clash against Portland on Nov. 18, Dominguez took a chip fracture in his right (shooting hand) index finger while diving for a loose ball. He kept playing, struggling to three single-digit scoring performances before taking two games off. In his return, Portland State came within a point of beating Washington, as Dominguez shot 5-for-11 for 16 points. He's scoring 13.5 ppg, slightly off his 14.2 from his POY year, and has increased his 3-point shooting percentage from 43.3 to 45.1. The Vikings are 10-3 and look poised to run the Big Sky Conference again once league play restarts this weekend. Will Mr. Dominguez's 2009 be as eventful as his 2008? Yeah, probably. In the meantime: congratulations, Jeremiah, you're our Mid-Majority Baller of the Week.
Davidson at College of Charleston (Southern) 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, there's an ESPNU broadcast tonight that will make this transition all the more easier. As an added bonus, you will get the benefit of hearing Mark Adams calling the game, and you don't know how lucky you are for that. Davidson (8-2, 1-0 SoCon) has had nine long days to stew about its nationally televised implosion in Indianapolis, a 76-58 pounding by Purdue that was a whole lot more devastating than first glance might indicate. Stephen Curry went 5-for-26 with six turnovers, and head coach Bob McKillop admitted afterwards that he was asking too much of his triple-superhero. Now comes the response to adversity, the true test of greatness. What will the Wildcats do? Early indications indicate that Curry might be relieved of the bulk of his point-guard duties, but that may prove a devil's bargain. Davidson's hidden strength has been the same weapon of the most advanced mid-majors, that of ball control. With Curry manning the point, only three teams in America have yielded turnovers at a tinier rate than 15.1 percent. (Davidson is also 16th in flat turnovers per game at 11.4.) But it'll be hard to make the NCAA's again, much less the Elite 8, if the team's porous perimeter defense isn't shored up -- the Wildcats are allowing 37.4 percent from 3, and it's killing them. Meanwhile, Bobby Cremins' bunch has been dealing with various defensive issues of its own (72 PA, 45.5 percent FGA), but the good is certainly outweighing the bad. First of all, the long-awaited new arena is beee-autiful. The Cougars are 10-1 (2-0 SoCon) to open the season, with five double-figure scorers, an 81 point average and a turnover rate just behind Davidson's (16.4 percent, 9th in D-I). Two of those scorers are seniors, including 6-7 60-percent shooter Jermaine Johnson, but there's excellence up and down the age line, including sophomore Andrew Goudelock (17.5 ppg), whose stellar freshman season last year was overshadowed by certain other SoCon achievements up north. Probably the worst thing you could say about CofC is that its schedule has been a tad soft... there are RLU's against South Carolina and TCU and a gift-wrapped giveaway to Temple (all at home), but the team's strength of schedule is still 309 of 343 teams. A win tonight, which would be Davidson's first SoCon drop since Jan. 20, 2007, would more than make up for that stigma. 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 to better articulate the feeling. It will take this nation at least a thousand years to fill up this time zone. The earth will spin into the sun before there's time enough to attach houses to cliff faces, or to string enough long-distance irrigation to turn deserts into magic valleys. A proud line of Colorado mountains, a wide Utah desert, either is enough to force any human being into their proper miniature scale. Disappearing into these vast landscapes would be effortless (even less so after a trip to a Wal-Mart Supercenter for sufficient supplies). Places like these invite loneliness, as much as they demand it, enforce it and amplify it in equal measure. In that open space, there's a lot of time to think about one's relationship to larger things. So it's never been any mystery to me why these lands have been a magnet for those with a religious bent, why Brigham Young said that this was the place and not, say, Laguna Beach. A place of cosmic loneliness inspires higher thought, as much as it compels people to draw closer together into communities and ensure that they continue in the most efficient way possible. Look, I've seen "Saturday's Warrior," and I didn't poke fun. I've been here, I know that zero population is not the answer, my friend. 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 is floating around about how Obama is going to abolish Christmas and replace it with mandatory Kwanzaa. It's the peak of the holiday season, and we're counting down the days until we don't have to hear "Santa Baby" again for another 11 months. This is the last transmission from Mobile TMM HQ until December 29, when the site will re-emerge way out west. We do have a post queued up in the interim, but we hope we don't have to use it... life is complicated, and we're sitting by the electronic chatterbox waiting for pre-warned news that may or may not come. Whether current reality holds or not, however, this will be our final chance in 2008 to wish you the happy holiday of your choice. We also have important business to attend to. After the jump, the much-anticipated conclusion of the Stephen Curry triple superhero contest.
Mr. Feldeine, a 6-4 junior guard, plays for Quinnipiac -- a school more known for presidential polls than basketball. The Bobcats' leading scorer was the Northeast Conference player of the week last week for double-doubling (19 and 10) against Wagner, but we like his two more recent roadies against non-conference opponents better. On Wednesday in a 76-74 away win at Dartmouth, he shot 11-for-20 for 29 points, a performance that also included eight rebounds, six assists and two steals. The Q lost up at America East contender Vermont by five on Saturday, a much smaller margin than would be expected, and Feldeine was a big reason why. He scored 26 on 11-for-18 shooting, and stuffed the stat sheet with eight rebounds, four assists and three steals. Nobody else south of the Red Line had a 55-point week. Could Quinnipiac sneak in and make noise in the NEC? The Q, which now plays in a beautiful bifurcated arena named after a bank (we like to call it the Q-Pod), has only two winning seasons in its 10-year Division I history. But the Bobcats are off to a decent 6-4 start. Despite a very low conference RPI of 29, there's a lot of relative strength in the NEC this year, with defending champs Mount St. Mary's, Central Connecticut and Robert Morris fielding strong entries -- the Bobcats' road prowess (4-1) could vault them into that conversation. Feldeine, who with sophomore Justin Rutty makes up the best rebounding duo in the league, is putting up 18.8 ppg to go with his 7.3 boards. Which is a vast improvement from his sophomore year. Last year, he put up 8.3 ppg and 4.0 rpg on a team dominated by DeMario Anderson and his 21 points per ballgame, but Feldeine is picking up a lot of the production load Anderson left behind. He's more than doubled his scoring average and is grabbing nearly twice the rebounds, and has improved his percentages from the floor, arc and stripe. We notice, Quinnipiac. Congratulations, James, you're the MMBOW.
Belmont at Austin Peay 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 later Belmont destroyed Jacksonville to win its third straight Atlantic Sun title -- an incredible accomplishment considering the Bruins have played just 11 full seasons at the Division I level. Once in the Big Dance, both were granted pinky-toe-in-the-door No. 15 seeds. Belmont beat Duke without really beating Duke, and Peay was laid out by Texas. Now that the season is about six weeks old, how are our champions faring? Austin Peay has already begun its title defense with two OVC road wins at Eastern Illinois and Southeast Missouri, and took their lumps in the games they were supposed to lose, like those at Louisville and Arkansas. Drake Reed, the league's preseason player of the year, has lived up to the high expectations of SID's and local media by posting 20.4 ppg and 6.9 rpg. Like last year, however, the Govs' offense is definitely ahead of the defense... take a look at this ugly 39-point loss to Stephen F. Austin over the weekend. On paper, Belmont looks like a shoo-in for a fourth straight NCAA trip, what with all those seniors. Four fourth-year players, led by guard Alex Renfroe (13.5 ppg), are scoring in double figures, and the Bruins split their first two A-Sun games before another BCS heartbreaker against Tennessee on Saturday. And, as Tennessee mid-major fans know, these two teams have already played once this season. We here at TMM love the in-season home-and-home as a way to combat guarantee games, and the Peay's and B's put on a doozy of an opener back on Nov. 17 at the Curb. Austin Peay won a controversial game of runs by two, the final margin being a foul call with .2 seconds left and the game tied, which gave APSU's Reed the opportunity to claim the game from the line. 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 they need to write decently on deadline. For example, there are lots of ways to describe the distance beyond 20"9': 3-point land, downtown, behind the arc, etc.. Anything to keep from using the same noun or phrase twice in a paragraph, which I just now did on purpose to illustrate how bad it reads. Much of sportswriting language is that of the people, that is to say the people who don't have much time or energy to accept new ideas. One of the most common ways to convey the quality of action is to lay it over a temperature scale. "Hot" is good, while "cold" is bad. Sadly, what separates the AP stringer and the well-heeled columnist is usually the ability to spot points on that spectrum -- icy, lukewarm, torrid, frigid, blazing. I hope I'm not giving away too many trade secrets here.
Illinois-Chicago at Illinois State 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 with Land of Lincolners, which team will President Obama root for? UIC (7-2, 1-0) won two Horizon titles in three seasons during the early part of the decade, but became a decent, non-threatening team as Milwaukee and Butler rose to prominence. This could be the year that everything comes together again. HL fans know all about senior Josh Mayo (20.4 ppg) and his array of loop-de-doop drives, he definitely hasn't received the national pub that his talent deserves. But the Flames are not a one-man show by any means, thanks to a tough front line that features 6-10 senior Scott VanderMeer, who has 9.1 boards per contest. UIC has been winning its games by an average of 10 points, including a couple of huge Red Line Upsets at Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech. We don't really know how good 10-0 Illinois State is yet, because their schedule has been surprisingly tame (witness its No. 330 strength of schedule). Which is surprising -- the Redbirds feature a Missouri Valley POY candidate in junior Osiris Eldridge (15.3 ppg) and a potent transfer power with ex-Oregon Duck Champ Oguchi, who is leading the team with 16 ppg and 6.7 rpg. This is all to say that this isn't a young team that needs coddling and soft wins to boost its confidence. Illinois State ripped through its first eight opponents, but there have been warning signs in the past week with a six-point home win against the OVC's Morehead State, as well as a dangerously close 72-69 road win at MAC West milquetoast Central Michigan. It could be that the team is getting bored and is looking ahead to next weekend's Valley opener at Missouri State, but this UIC team will provide a good yardstick as ISU tries to make the Tournament for the first time since 1998. 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 know, meh. (That's what the Atlantic 14 would have you believe, anyway.) We've spent the last five years hijacking the word, removing it from the tyranny of wins and losses, and recasting it as "to have less" -- mostly because the hyphenate was already in general use, and this route was easier than creating and selling a new word. Besides, we still haven't thought of a good replacement yet. But there has to be a word or phrase out there somewhere that adequately captures "to have less" and "to give great effort." Struggling suggests a ceiling, the yuppies ruined upwardly mobile... maybe endeavor is the best we can do with our incomplete, patchwork language. You can find plenty of disadvantaged complacency at our level. Part of the frustration of loving the MEAC and SWAC, or sizable portions of other low-RPI conferences, is that many in these places truly don't care about moving beyond their station. Teams show up and play out their strings, pick up their guarantee checks, and move like ghosts through Nietzschean basketball landscapes. It's hard to assign value to something that doesn't assign any value to itself. 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 orange friend's recent travels above the Red Line.
Bally began his season in the Cathedral of Eeeeeevil known as Cameron Indoor Stadium.
Western Kentucky at South Alabama (Sun Belt) 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 the two NCAA schools from last season to bring the interest level up. Few will remember the particulars (because the Jaguars rolled over and died in the NCAA first round), but Sun Belt regular-season champion South Alabama had such a strong season last year that its résumé withstood a nine-point semifinal loss to Middle Tennessee in the 2008 conference tourney. The basis of Team USA's argument for skipping the NIT was its strong nonconference play, which included a win over Mississippi State and close losses to Vanderbilt and Ole Miss. Unfortunately, that's not really happening this year. Aside from a minor RLU over Southern Miss, the 6-4 team hasn't grabbed opportunities against Louisville, Arkansas, and the two SEC Mississippi clubs. There's a good three-headed senior scoring machine (former Cincinnati Bearcat Domonic Tilford is averaging 16.6 ppg) and the team shoots and rebounds well, all attributes that will help in defending the regular-season title belt. The Hilltoppers (5-3), on the other hand, took advantage of USA's fall and took the tourney title before climbing to the Sweet 16. They never had to test the "hard to lose to a team three times" maxim after losing the home-and-home to the Jaguars, so the last time the teams played was the tight 69-64 contest on Feb. 21 at Diddle Arena. Sun Belt player of the year Courtney Lee is off getting minutes with the Orlando Magic, so A.J. Slaughter has assumed the scoring mantle (14 ppg) -- but the junior guard went 1-for-10 in a stunning 72-40 loss to Evansville last weekend, and the offense has been prone to complete blackouts. The Tops have a whole Belt season to figure themselves out, and if it comes down to a split-decision at Tournament time, there are always those wins over Louisville and Georgia they can point to. 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 and a lot less fussy than keeping up a blog. I'm doing live twitter-casts of most of the games I go to (unless I'm on ESPN duty) and the banter has been great. We're even starting goofy contests, with one-year Basketball State subscriptions as prizes. We're at Furman tonight, so drop by and something just might happen. After all, it's our 40th game of the season. During the 100 Games Project four years ago, we didn't hit 40 until Jan. 24, the controversial "Snow Day" episode that had readers wondering if I had my "son" do the drawing. Since we're going for 125 this year, the past isn't much of a measuring stick, but the previous record for fastest to 40 was two years ago, a Samford-Murray State game on Dec. 21, 2006. Also, it's your last day to get in on the Stephen Curry superhero contest. As you know, this man is three superheroes in one, so put together a Photoshop or other artistic emission and send it to bally at midmajority dot com. Winners will be announced next Tuesday... Which will be our last posting day for a while. The Mid-Majority will be on holiday break from Wednesday the 24th to Sunday the 29th. But there might be a couple of Bally-related posts in there... so keep your RSS readers on "blast." 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 Final Four in a simulation of 2006-07, did okay as a predictor last season, and enters 2008-09 ready for more. For our purposes here, it gives the world's only hype-free, non-voting, computer poll of teams in the lower 22 and a half (we include the A-14) conferences. This is the full chart, and this is a recording. 1. Xavier (Atlantic 10), 120.033, 9-0 (0-0) Many people challenge me to prove that Xavier isn't the next Gonzaga, or even the first Gonzaga. The G-Men are exempt from our concerns, in large part because they truly transcended the WCC and became a viable TV product. To their credit, they twisted ESPN's virtual arm and put a greater shine on the conference, which helped it become the three-bid powerhouse it is today. The next step for the X is to become its own TV show, and lift the A-14 out of its TV mess. Just like Gonzaga did... and this could very well be the squad and the year and the moment that triggers that. We've talked about their small problems (ball control, general sloppiness), and those are being quickly fixed. This is a very special team with Final Four dreams.
Akron at Virginia Commonwealth 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 so schools have to play a return game the following season, and this helps resist the urge of going out on the road for a check, or staying home and pounding on Southnorthern Bible Academy. It also helps us in the G!O!T!N! selection process, which gets tough around the holidays. Tonight in CAA-land, the presumptive league favorite takes on a recent MAC powerhouse in a return of the exciting five-point contest (won by VCU) that kicked off the televised portion of the BB proceedings 10 months ago. Ram fans still contend that a stronger opponent would have helped the team over that hump that separated it and the NCAA Tournament last year, but one could argue that the snub is the reason head coach Anthony Grant isn't off in the SEC. For now, VCU is 6-3 (1-0 CAA), is a much more offensive-minded team than last year's, and still has that Eric Maynor guy, who is good at basketball. But the Rams' season so far has been marked with missed opportunities: a five-point loss at SEC squad Vanderbilt that could have given the league a key Big Six win, and giveaways against Rhode Island and East Carolina. Without a win next week at Oklahoma, there's no question that the Rams will have to get in the Big Dance the old-fashioned way: ehhhhhrn it in March. Akron is also 6-3, despite being a remarkably young team. Eight underclassmen have suited up for the Zips, and senior scoring and rebounding leader Nate Linhart (11.6 ppg, 5.9 rpg) is really the only link to the teams that put together a string of seemingly effortless 20-win seasons. But unlike past seasons with notoriously soft schedules that kept them out of serious NCAA consideration, Akron is bulking up against solid competition. They did get blown out at Pitt (and would prefer you forget about the whole Eastern Kentucky thing), but otherwise have carried themselves off well. They took Dayton to within four, beat Niagara in a win that will look better as the season goes on, and have a chance to avenge last year's BB loss tonight. 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 "Tennessee 80, Marquette 68" any more valuable than "Savannah State 53, Kennesaw State 49"? One is more rare than the other, but the former is of interest to more people. Neither piece of information, however, is actually worth anything on its face. If I told you that Toney Douglas of Florida State had 28 points and hit nine free throws against Tennessee Tech last night, then told you that Chicago State's Petras Balocka double-doubled with 21 points and 10 rebounds against Hawaii early yesterday morning, which would get your attention? Neither? A fair enough answer, because you've probably never heard of either player, and the statlines are presented completely out of context of wins or losses or NCAA futures trading. But still they sit there side-by-side in the Basketball State database, taking up the exact same amount of real estate as Ben Woodside's 60 point performance from last weekend.
Cal State Bakersfield at South Dakota State 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! (recently enacted), which are a.) it can't be the game I'm actually at, and b.) no power conference teams. Instead, we're going to check out a game out of tonight's 15-contest slate that looks to be a real Space Jam. What's up, Doc? The Jackrabbits (4-7), or Jacks for short, unveiled a new logo recently after a long process that involved very little money, but the rabbit created by Larry Westall of University Relations in 1971 is still hanging around on some websites and on t-shirts. We admit we're dragging out feet a bit. As for the team, it's really struggled since its move to Division I, going 1-12 in its first year (2004-05) and winning just 28 games over four-plus seasons. But SDSU has something that teams like Bakersfield doesn't -- a conference home. The Jacks joined up with the Badlands Conference last season after three years adrift, and are 1-1 this season after beating Centenary in a BLC preview last week. They have a decent young backcourt forming in Garrett Callahan and Clint Sargent, who have combined for 32.4 ppg so far. Meep meep! Cal State Bakersfield (3-7) was a little more subtle in their design, giving its roadrunner a much more mean demeanor than the one that outwits the coyote and sells broadband internet. This is the second year of CSB's transition (the Runners were 8-21 last season), and the school doing what most independents do -- scavenging the land for any game it can get. Thanks to friendly relations with other west coast schools, there are 12 home games including 2008 NCAA teams San Diego, Saint Mary's and Cal State Fullerton. They'll be happy to get off the road next week for a four-game homestand, especially after the air scare that they had trying to get to the Badlands. 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 tourney in March and went on to the Big Dance. Correct answers included the following: San Diego 2008, which lost to Gonzaga twice in the WCC but took out the Zags in the title game; the MEAC's Coppin State 2008 (Morgan State); Oakland 2005 in the now-Badlands (Oral Roberts, Pierre Dukes!); Hampton 2006 in the MEAC (Delaware State); Boise State 2008 in the WAC (Utah State after a four-way tiebreak); the Big South's UNC-Asheville 2003 (Winthrop) and Creighton 2007 (Southern Illinois) in the Valley. There are many others, and thanks to eacha nd every one who took on the challenge. But the winner this week is Alex in Arkansas, who was chosen among the 200+ correct answers at "random" because of pointing out, quite eloquently, that this happens all the time in the old Sun Belt. 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. [*]
On Friday night in the opening round of the Drake Invitational (we can't bring ourselves to call it the Hy-Vee Classic), the traveling fans and a few Des Moines locals witnessed history. In the opposite half of the mini-bracket and the early game, Mr. Woodside scored 60 points in 51 minutes of a triple-overtime game against Stephen F. Austin. All the numbers were big -- the 112-111 final score, the 14 field goals by the 5-11 Albert Lea, Minnesota native, his 30-for-35 performance from the line. He also found the time to grab eight rebounds and eight assists. But that 60 points is what buzzed across the national wires. A full 22 of those points came in the last 8:51 of the second half. This was the highest single-game point total in Division I since 2000, when Arizona State's Eddie House scored 61 in double-overtime (warning: Pac-10 content). But that wasn't all! The next day, in the consolation game, Woodside went off for 31 against Georgia Southern in a 98-77 win for the Bison, shooting 8-for-15 from the floor and 11-for-12 from the line. He also tallied 10 assists to notch the little guy's double-double. All in all, a 91-point weekend is not bad at all. If anything, it gives Stephen Curry a new horizon to shoot for. If you think you've heard this name before, you probably have. Especially if you live in a town called Madison. Woodside's first major national performance came as a freshman on Jan. 21, 2006 when he scored 24 against Wisconsin and helped NDSU bring down the Badgers 62-55 in the school's first year of Division I reclassification. Now a senior, he has a career full of points (1,764 to date) and great 3-point shooting. He's averaging 40.9 percent from behind the arc, and he's one of those guys who doesn't mind the new distance. He's shot 51.4 percent (19-for-37) since the NCAA painted the double-rainbow on every floor. He's also been polishing his dime collection: his assist-to-turnover ratio has increased each year, and now he's sitting at a solid 2-to-1, with 7.6 assists per contest. And about the whole not leading your team to victory thing, let's put that in its proper perspective. This Ruthian round number came in a game that will not matter one iota on Selection Sunday. Let's face it, North Dakota State, as a member of the Badlands Conference, is not a candidate for an at-large bid and will sink or swim based on its league performance (and, thanks to having finished reclassification, NDSU is eligible for the postseason). Does it matter that this happened in a losing cause? In a month, nobody will remember that the Bison had lost, nobody will remember the SFA player's winning layup, just that 60. So congratulations, Ben Woodside, you are the Mid-Majority Baller of the Week.
Louisiana-Monroe at Louisiana-Lafayette (Sun Belt) 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 "trap" contests, and tough decisions on what to feature as G!O!T!N!. The Louisiana university system is all over the map as far as academic calendars go -- Lafayette is just coming of finals, while Monroe took care of its exams by December 6. What do those kids do with the extra week? The ULM Warhawks, who changed their name in preparation from "Indians" two summers ago in preparation for their move to the Sun Belt (and because the NCAA told them to), enjoyed some beginner's luck. With an undersized roster, Monroe surprised everybody by following up a 6-10 campaign in the Southland (10-18 overall) with a nice 18-win season and 11 regular-season wins and a first-place Western division finish in the tougher Belt. In 2007-08, the league was ready for the Warhawks, and buried them in the West with a 4-13 mark and a quick first-round exit. This season, the struggles look to continue for Orlando Early's crew, as they've begun 2-6 with three losses to equal competition and some of the worst shooting in the land. A lot of it has been a matter of principles over basketball, with All-Belt second team guard Tony Hooper (15.1 ppg last year) suspended indefinitely after a November team-rules violation. College basketball has a short collective memory, mostly because of the four-year cycle -- most people leave. So few remember that Lafayette was the premier program in the Sun Belt for the first part of this decade, racking up 20-win campaigns, NCAA berths (three in six years) and engaging in a rough rivalry with Western Kentucky for the title each season. The Ragin' Cajuns haven't had a winning season since 2004-05, but flattened out the record last year at 15 before an embarrassing home loss to Troy in a 5-12 game erased the feeling of progress. The team has started out 3-4 (with a trio of wins in its last four), and has a potential Sun Belt star in lanky Travis Bureau, a 6-7 sophomore who averages 17 ppg and hits half his shots. In the good old days, they had two or three of those guys, and maybe they will again someday. As it stands now, a couple of UL's with tough seasons ahead. 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 Myles Brand and Mayor McCheese. I can't underline or overstate this enough. Ask the CAA, Valley or MAC what a short string of huge wins over BCS teams can do for a league profile. Actually, don't, because none of those leagues have anything like that this year. But look at this: UMass playing Kansas on a neutral court and unleashing Dribble-Drive Motion Jr. on the national champions, holding the Jayhawks to 34 percent shooting in a one-point squeaker. Temple destroying Tennessee on the boards and on the scoreboard. And finally, on Saturday evening, the X expanding its dominance over the Queen City with a second-straight scratch/claw job over the eponymous team that used to rule Cincy. That's all it takes, just three gigantic wins and you're back on the map. 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 the X-ray three times, before she finally found the Victronox Swiss army card with the three-quarter inch blade that's far better suited to picking toejam than murdering stewardesses. She had to check with her supervisor, but I let her have it as a reward for her mad CSI skills. It was something in the way she said, "A-ha!" Now, safely laid over and watching the planes land at Midway's A concourse, I contemplate my status as a member of the final generation to smoke legally on a commercial jetliner. It makes me a little past due, like Don Draper is going to feel in season six of Mad Men if it ever gets made.
Troy at Middle Tennessee (Sun Belt) 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 whom are 1099'ed and need the work. The economy's too tough to preempt this feature. Tonight's Belt East battle gives us a chance to check in on the presumptive league favorite, at least until Western Kentucky started going all nutzoid on power conference teams like Georgia and Louisville. The Blue Raiders are 3-3 and have performed predictably against a Jekyll-Hyde schedule, beating the D-I transitionals it's come up against, and keeping within 10 points of its trio of opponents above the Red Line (Tennessee, Vanderbilt and Houston). The team that returned everybody has the upperclassman leadership it advertised, with four in double figures led by 6-7 junior Desmond Yates (16.5 ppg, 5.0 rpg). We'll have to wait until Jan. 15 for the Blue Pegasi-Hilltopper Classic, but a league game's a league game. As for the Trojans (3-5), it's just another program that's in the wrong place because of the power of the turd-shaped orb. Since moving from the Atlantic Sun to the Belt for football reasons after the 2004-05 season, Troy has gone 17-33 in league games and has seen its seed slip from West-6 to 8 to 12. It's a shame, too, because Don Maestri's 3-happy style is great for the A-Sun, and the Belt is full of tough, muscle-stacked midsizers who will have nothing of your big fun arc party. Its uptempo style has beought the team nice wins over Northwestern State and Georgia State, but in nonconference play, the upperclass-heavy Trojans allowed 95.3 ppg on the road. 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 letters from complete strangers who feel a simpatico twinge when reading the site and want to, umm, "spend time with [me]." But I have a furniture delivery to organize, a heating system to tweak, and a few hometown comforts to catch up on, like Honey Dew donuts and that great Chinese place six blocks down. I'm really looking forward to spending an evening out at a movie, perhaps "Slumdog Millionaire" upon Jimmy Patsos' suggestion. It'll be, at the very least, a few hours not thinking about basketball. This is all a long-winded way of saying that I don't have much for you this morning. 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 Final Four in a simulation of 2006-07, did okay as a predictor last season, and enters 2008-09 ready for more. For our purposes here, it gives the world's only hype-free, non-voting, computer poll of teams in the lower 22 and a half (we include the A-14) conferences. This is the full chart, and this is a recording. 1. Xavier (Atlantic 10), 116.216, 7-0 (0-0) As we mentioned in the ESPN chat last week, the Musketeers have a lot of ceiling left. They're riding their defense and rebounding to wins, and that's helped overcome some sloppy offensive play from a team guaranteed to get a better handle on the ball (15 turnovers a game so far). Junior Jason Love is the only X-Man who plays more than 20 minutes per game that's shooting better than 50 percent.
Dayton at Creighton 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 vision that make them basketball powerhouses year after year. Both have great arenas, and devoted, rabid fanbases that travel well and drink heavily. And both have fine young coaches that are good at making wins happen. Right now, Dayton has a perfect 8-0 record (with wins over Marquette and Auburn) and stands a good chance to upending in-state rival Xavier for the Atlantic 14 crown... or at the very least making it back to the Big Dance after four years off. After an 8-8 conference crash last year riddled with injuries, the Flyers are healthy and ready for a run. Chris Wright is fully recovered from the ankle injury that ruined his freshman year, and he's doing things like leading the team in scoring (13.6) and rebounding (7.3 rpg), and making many exciting two-point dunk shots. But Dayton's dimensionality is its amazing depth, and Brian Gregory has successfully sold the concept of big defense, small stats and a long bench. Creighton is an intriguing study. Currently at 5-2, the overwhelming Valley favorites have a deep bench of their own as well as a talented if not random-minded star in P'Allen Stinnett (15.6 ppg). After a couple of losses to UALR and Nebraska, teams that the Bluejays usually beat, coach Dana Altman called the squad out on its toughness. Creighton responded with a strong 69-58 win at the Palestra over Saint Joe's. So this game will be a good measure of the Jays' momentum, as well as a litmus test on how one of the top A-14 teams stacks up against one of the best in the Valley. Enjoy. 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 Grizzlies. Oakland won. I love conference play, and so does Oakland head coach Greg Kampe. Where our opinions diverge slightly is on conference play in December. "I hate it," he said after collecting his 400th career win. "One minute we're out playing in the Las Vegas Invitational, and the next we're playing two games that are life and death." The Mid-Majority's official position is for (thumbs up) anything that makes December basketball meaningful -- no disrespect intended to the vaunted LVI, whose champion will live on in the halls of history forevermore (remind me, who won that again?). In lower-RPI leagues like the Badlands, the Atlantic Sun and the SoCon, every pre-Christmas conference game is one more day you're not getting your brains beat in at some power-conference arena. What I have a problem with, and this is substantial, is the way the schedules have been set up. Ever since Major League Baseball went to an imbalanced division-heavy schedule and didn't adjust interleague play at all, regular-season records have been absolutely meaningless. If you're a second-place American League West team that drew a strong NL division, and you're in a wild card battle against an AL Central team that pounded on a weak bunch of NL teams in May and June, you're basically screwed. There's no fairness in that, and it's a mentality that's seeping into Our Game.
San Francisco at Pacific 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 record that Gonzaga (currently 24-14 against the Zags' 12-11) because of a stretch in the 1950's that yielded 11 consecutive bracket victories as well as one of the greatest players in basketball history. There were regular appearances in the 1970's during the years Bob Gaillard coached there, but the Dons haven't been back since 1998 and haven't won an NCAA game since 1979. Last year, once-proud USF temporarily hired Eddie Sutton so he could reach a meaningless milestone. Pacific is less than a half-decade removed from a run of two straight Round of 32 appearances, which could have easily been three if not for a double-overtime loss to Boston College in 2006 marked with some odd calls. Bob Thomason, who's led the team for two decades and has earned Big West Coach of the Year honors five times, lost a key senior core and dealt with a sexual assault investigation into four players that ripped apart the roster.IT couldn't have come at a worse time, as the program was bak on the upswing, following up a 12-win NCAA followup with a strong 21-10 campaign in 2007-08. What's left of the Big West's Tigers has done quite well in spite of the circumstances, with a 3-3 record including a nice eight-point win at Nevada during Feast Week. There are no double-figure scorers on the team, but there are a number of young midsize players who can hit high-percentage shots -- and the defense has been solid, allowing 64.3 ppg. USF, on the other hand, came close against USC but still boasts a 6-3 nonconference mark. USD hasn't won more than 17 in one season for the past decade, but 18 is a realistic goal for new coach Rex Walters if junior Dion Lowhorn (21.2 ppg, 7.2 rpg) keeps producing and the young guards like Kwame Vaughn keep developing. Tune in to see two mid-level teams in their respective conferences who stand to be much better in 2009-10. Get in on the ground floor. 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 actual votes, and the number of those went from three to 10 back down to one the few times I checked in on the tally. A poll that continually resets itself isn't really a poll, it's more like the type of sham election you'd see in an island dictatorship. The moral is that free web polls suck. Next time, I'll spend the 10 minutes necessary to program one myself. So to decide this, we're going to take a page from the Hugh Hefner playbook. By the time you reach grad school, you've learned that the voting for Playmate of the Year is open to all Playboy readers, but in the end the ballots are thrown out and the boss makes the final decision. I hate to bring a popularity contest for sweaty basketball-playing men anywhere near that context, but that's what we're faced with today. The Ultimate Project for 2008 is...
Last year at this time, we prominently mentioned the Redhawks' 6-5 forward's general under-the-radarness. As a senior, that's not so much the case anymore. The Harper Woods, Mich. native leads Miami in scoring (18.3 ppg) and is No. 4 among Mid-American Conference players. He also paces the team in blocks (1.3), and has honed a 3-point stroke that is lethal from any point on the new reconfigured arc. He's gone from 36.3 percent from downtown in 2007-08 to a staggering 46.9 percent this year. About Mr. Bramos' stellar week: with a tough come-from-ahead loss against Xavier in the rear-view, the Redhawks continued a mini-Atlantic 14 tour by descending on Big Bro-Love Township for a Wednesday date with the Temple Owls. In a workmanlike 68-52 victory, Miami's top scorer shoveled in 26 points on 10-for-21 shooting, including six 3's. Three days later, in Miami's home opener against Northwestern State, Bramos made up for a slow 3-for-11 shooting start by scoring 23 after the break, including six rapid-fire long bombs to finish with eight -- a tie for third on the school's all time single-game performance chart. He ended the 94-66 win with 31 points, and the week with an even 50 percent shooting mark. There's something about this guy heating up about a month into the season. Last year he followed up his MMBOW week with eight more 20+ point performances and a strong finish, despite missing five games, including the Redhawks' season-ending CBI loss, to injury. If he can remain healthy all season, and keep up his hot shooting and increasingly effective physical play, that'll be bad news for the rest of the MAC. In the meantime, a couple of home contests against Horizon League squads Milwaukee and Valpo await. Congratulations, Mr. Bramos, you're the Mid-Majority Baller of the Week.
Fairleigh Dickinson at Monmouth (Northeast) 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 Horse-Men broke onto the national scene briefly by holding Illinois close for a half before falling by 12 in their first-round matchup. A year later, Monmouth had won its second title in three years, and earned the NEC its first NCAA win since 1983 with a convincing 71-49 play-in performance versus Hampton. The 2006 title game between these two teams, a 49-48 Monmouth upset, was one of the lost classics of that season's Championship Week. These days, both are Not Even Close to their prior glory. Since FDU's 20-win season and one-point near-miss in 2005-06, the program hasn't found anything to work with in a massive rebuilding project, dropping to 14 and then eight wins. This year's bunch offers no seniors and a six-junior core that's suffered through a lot of losing, with nobody held over from the good years. The fortunes of the 2008-09 team look to be no better than the last, as it's winless in six games and averaging one of the widest scoring margins in the country: 54.7 point for and 81.5 against. Junior guard Sean Baptiste is the leading scorer with 11.5 ppg, but he's only shooting 31 percent from the floor. Monmouth would also be winless if not for a Nov. 29 visit from college basketball's version of the mulligan, New Jersey Tech. The 1-8 Hawks won 19 games in 2005-06, the same number as they did the next two seasons combined, and look to broach that mark again with a cold-shooting squad that manages just 40.1 percent floor shooting and 59.3 points per contest. But as Monmouth prepares to move out of cozy Boylan and into a new facility next year, 6-8 freshman Travis Taylor may help lead the team back to its old perch atop the NEC. He's averaging 11.3 ppg (62.5 percent) and 6.1 boards -- this league has been won by teams highlighting a single dynamic big guy in the past, and Taylor could be one of those players. 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 significant increase in our success against the big boys (from 11 percent to 14 percent), the power structure has generally held fast. Twelve of the 31 Division I conferences currently own positive records in non-conference play, mostly because that's where you can find the teams that can afford to "buy" teams to come into their buildings and take whoopins. The Big Six major leagues can be found in the top seven in this category, led by the Big East with a 93-20 (.823) mark against others. The Mountain West is at No. 6 with a 46-18 record, good for .719 -- just ahead of the Pac 10 (.667). I usually bring this up when folks ask me what I mean about the MWC being a "money league." Conference USA, a somewhat less successful money league, has won 55.7 percent of its games, just behind the Missouri Valley (.591), which pioneered and perfected the art of smart scheduling -- teams in the Valley don't get bought, and don't take on games that are too easy or too hard. The Atlantic 14, consistently getting better with its scheduling, is at .531 (51-45), and the out-of-whack WAC is just above water at 26-25. That's 11 leagues, so which could the other be? Prepare to be shocked, surprised and perhaps a little appalled.
Albany at Siena 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 short but potent Division I history -- the capital city clash in upstate New York, between two packs of dogs, the Saint (Bernard)s and the Great Danes. Fans of the Scoobies fondly recall that Nov. 23, 2004 86-65 sandblasting, but Siena has clearly had the better of this series. Since this became a yearly marquee event during the 2001-02 season, Siena has generally dominated by winning six of the seven meetings. The last three games, however, have been decided by a total of 13 points. Fran McCaffery's Saints squad may be coming off a NCAA Round of 32 appearance and is one of those TMM watchlist teams, but is still reeling from an 0-3 run in last weekend's Old Spice Clasic down in Orlando. As in its slow start last season, Siena has been plagued with sloppy play and terrible outside shooting -- the Saints' foul shooting has disappeared, and the team is shooting just 60 percent from the line. It's not all bad news, though -- 6-8 sophomore Ryan Rossiter has stepped up in a big way, scoring 11 ppg, shooting 64 percent and grabbing eight boards per contest while the Big Three has slumped. Albany fell to .500 last season and wasn't considered to be much of a factor with an extremely young team, but the Danes have compiled a nice little five-game win streak coming into the Siena game. Prolific blogger Will Brown's bunch swept D-I newbie Bryant, beat a quarter of the Ivy League (Penn and Columbia), and nipped an improved Central Connecticut State team by one. The Scoobie perimeter defense has been impressive so far, allowing only 27.1 percent of 3's to fall, and Albany's next generation is beginning to assert itself. Look out for Tim Ambrose, a sophomore guard who's on his way to doubling his scoring output from 2007-08, and fellow underclass backcourter Anthony Raffa, who's averaging 11.7 ppg as a freshman. 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 field has been narrowed to three very large and under-developed finalists, and you can vote on your favorite via the "free web poll" below. Finalists were chosen for their uniqueness and the forcefulness of their defenders' arguments. "C. Colton" would like to introduce the story of redshirt junior Adam Thomas of Cal State Fullerton, who weighs in at 7-2 and 230 lbs. 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 in a simulation of 2006-07, did okay as a predictor last season, and enters 2008-09 ready for more. For our purposes here, it gives the world's only hype-free, non-voting, computer poll of teams in the lower 22 and a half (we include the A-14) conferences. This is the full chart, and this is a recording. 1. Evansville (Missouri Valley), 120.473, 4-1 (0-0) The Purple Aces may be taking steps towards respectability, but kings of the freaking world? That's what you get with a small result set that's overly reliant on who you've played. Marty Simmons' Aces have knocked off two non-Division I teams (which don't count in any halfway-decent rating system), beat Austin Peay and Buffalo, but the reason why they're here for now -- as well as high in the standard strength of schedule and RPI ratings -- is due to the fact that they travelled to Butler last Saturday and managed not to get the snot beat out of them. This is important because...
Saint Mary's at Kent State 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 on their own court by eight, and by the time Hoops Nation woke up Sunday morning, the mid-major landscape was fundamentally altered. Kent would later steal the national ranking, and both would go on to the NCAA Tournament with strong seeds -- Kent a nine, St. Mary's a 10. Both would be flushed from the event by wide margins. And now, both are back with strong return credentials. Because of ESPN's rules, they have to replay the matchup again out East, allowing us a snapshot preview of the relative strength of their current standing. Nearly all of the key players from the Feb. 23 game are back for this one -- Fisher, the reigning MAC player of the year who leads the team with 19 ppg and did this against Saint Louis last month, and Saint Mary's star Patty Mills, who played well for the Australian Olympic team over the summer and is keeping the momentum going. He's taking a lot of shots, but he's scoring 20.6 ppg. But don't forget that the one who kept the Gaels in that particular ballgame was not Mills, but Diamon Simpson. Lost in the BracketBusting hype was that the 6-7 non-Australian (he's from Hayward, CA) was the stat-stuffing star, registering a 24-point, 15-rebound performance. So far this season, he's notched a pair of dub-dubs and could likely have another one tonight if he can take advantage of Kent's very young front line. If that happens, it'll be up to Fisher and Chris Singletary (14.8 ppg, 45.7 percent shooting) to fill it up from the outside. 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 reason it's taken so long can be fully blamed on Alabama A&M, which did not play a game against a Division I opponent until Tuesday. The numbers are crunching right now as I write this, I have no idea what it's going to look like. When we ran the overall formula on the 2006-07 regular season, we ended up with three of the Final Quartet in the top four, with Georgetown close by in seventh position. The 2007-08 real-time version was slightly less successful, placing dead-duck Duke at No. 3 (mostly because of home wins) and killing Memphis by placing the Tigers 21st. Kansas, national champion of everything, was in that lucky No. 7 slot. But the thing that I was getting mail about all summer was Drake at No. 2. There is no question that you can't predict a Ty Rogers 3 at the buzzer in overtime, and we'll never know how much damage the Bulldogs could have done in that crazy Tampa subregional pod. On my PlayStation back at home, I won the theoretical Drake-UCLA Sweet 16 game two times out of three. I'm sure Keno Davis would have substituted in fresh legs every couple of minutes too.
Winthrop at Virginia Military Institute (Big South) If you follow the Big South as much as we do, or as much as Big South fans do, this series has been the most entertaining and intriguing in the conference. If you don't, here are the sides involved: Winthrop, dominant squad in the league for the past decade, built on defense. VMI... well, in the past three years "VMI" has become a verb, adverb and adjective meaning "to score a ton of points." If you didn't know that, you're on the wrong site. Some of the battles between the two have been legendary. Consider the conference championship game of 2007, when the Keydets came within three points of beating the Eagles on their own floor. There was the time two months earlier when Gregg Marshall beat Duggar Baucom at his own game, a 109-96 track meet that left the cadets in the stands at VMI exhausted just for watching. Or current HC Randy Peele's systematic destruction of VMI's high-possession system last season, an 85-41 walkover. Winthrop enters the regular season as champions (again), and does so with a very young team. The Eagles are 1-5 in the early going, and feature one of the least effective offenses in the country -- they're shooting just 37.4 percent over a six-game stretch that includes losses to Davidson, N.C. State, Akron and East Carolina. A scorer is emerging in Cameron Stanley, the Wake Forest transfer that was stuck on the end of the Demon Deacon bench but is scoring 11.7 ppg to lead the team. VMI (4-2), on the other hand, BEAT KENTUCKY. It's forgotten somewhat because Gardner-Webb beat them to it last year, but we'll be reminding you all season long. The Holmes twins (Travis and Chavis) have doubled up to make up the gap from departed national leading scorer Reggie Williams, and they're both averaging around 20 points each. This could be the year that Coach Baucom's master plan finally comes together -- not only are they once again the nation's fastest team (a blistering 90.1 possessions per ballgame) and scoring early and often, they're making big stops on the defensive end too. The Keydets' 22.5 turnovers forced a game is second nationally. Enjoy VMI basketball -- for the health and safety of the fans, sales of Coke and Mountain Dew will end after the first media timeout. 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 about them when it comes to college basketball at this level. I'm wondering if there's any nostalgia for the old place still present, or if it's been discarded in fans' memories the same way the directional indicator "Southwest" was. I have some pleasant recollections of the Hammons Center. It is, after all, where Jackie Stiles became the female Larry Bird as well as one of my trio fake women's basketball girlfriends (I'll spare you that particular three-part essay in the interest of not creeping you out). It's where former coach Barry Hinson personally introduced me to the student section and advised them to treat an outsider from the Four-Letter with kindness. I was always treated well there, even if the SID never remembered to put me on the pass list. It was also a place where the walkways were three feet wide, where the media interview area shared a thin wall with the locker room (there were no secrets after a Missouri State loss) and where the press room was in such an unexpected place (on the concourse next to the concession stand) that folks would stumble in looking for a toilet. It had the faded crackle of an old Missouri Valley arena, the kind you can still find at Indiana State, Illinois State or Southern Illinois.
Valparaiso at Cleveland State (Horizon League) 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 with two programs with old-school Sweet 16 experience (Valpo in 1998, Cleveland State in 1986), both hungering to get back to the Dance out of a mid-major league on the verge of great things. Valpo outgrew the Mid-Continent Conference two years ago, and put up decent numbers in its first Horizon go-round. The Crusaders had 22 wins, a top-100 RPI ranking, and a run in that CBI thing after losing an exciting 78-73 semi to -- guess who! -- these Vikings. They enter Year Two with 2-3 overall record, depressed greatly by an 0-3 trip to the islands, where they lost by 10 or less to San Diego, La Salle and Iona at the Paradise Jam. There are some definite bright spots -- a strong defense, and balanced scoring. Six players average at least 7.8 ppg, and you can expect balanced scoring from a young team with few outsized egos. Hey, worked for Butler. Cleveland State is generally considered to be the favorite to make the Dance for the first time since the Reagan era. Inside Cleveland State's 4-2 record so far are two losses to power-conference teams (Washington and Kansas State) and wins over everyone else, and they feature a strong three-senior core full of apostrophes: D'Aundray Brown, J'Nathan Bullock and Cedric Jackson (who will now be referred to in this space as C'edric). All three are averaging double-figures in scoring, and the Vikings proven to be one of the nation's leading expectorants. Opponents cough it up 19.4 times per game (13th in D-I) and 27 percent of possessions result in turnovers (11th). Is this the year? 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 work, the first batch of entries were either non-existent or weak. This is nothing against you, you've got to understand. You don't suck as a human being, but your ideas do. So I called out Hoops Nation on it last Wednesday, and things improved. Vastly. Your assignment was to come up with a Mid-Majority use for Drake U'u, the awesomely-named Hartford Hawk. This site has a history of matching players to contexts, and it was wonderful last year when complete strangers would call out "Boubacar!" to me at games last year. Boubacar Coly left Morgan State, so we needed another hero. 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 Mid-Majority Baller of the Week for 2008-09.
And that's exactly what this is... he's looking to turn his senior year into a convincing pro resume. Check out these numbers: Maynor is seventh in the nation with a 24.5 ppg scoring average, and leads all Colonial Athletic Association players with a 5.7 assist average. In six games, he's shooting 53 percent from the floor, and 41 percent from 3. And don't forget the 4.0 boards per game; he's looking to average four per game three seasons in a row. Not bad for a point guard. The 6-2 North Carolina native took a month to think over his early-entry status after his 17.9 ppg junior season, but VCU fans were overjoyed that he decided to stay an extra season. The 2008-09 CAA preseason player of the year will spend the next four months padding his highlight reel, and work on the paint-penetration skills that could take him from second-rounder to instant millionaire (and hopefully cut down on those turnovers). It's been great these last few years watching him mature from a shaky shooter as a freshman into a full-grown NBA-ready stud, and we're fortunate that the college ride isn't over quite yet. Congratulations, Eric Maynor, you're the MMBOW.
South Carolina-Upstate at Kennesaw State (Atlantic Sun) 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 the beginning of the season. Conference play began two weeks ago when the Big South moved its UNC Asheville-Liberty game up to be part of the ESPN College Hoops Tip-Off Marathon, but today marks the opening game of the Atlantic Sun slate. We here at the Mid-Majority definitely approve of early starts to conference season, for many leagues the only games that matter, because it's a break from guarantee games. Second-year D-I program USC Upstate has drawn an oh-fer because it's been collecting checks at places like Notre Dame, South Carolina and Georgia. So we don't really know anything about them yet, at least nothing we already knew. Like the fact that 7-2 German import Nick Schneiders has a future as a chef, because he makes good Spaldingburgers and Rock sandwiches. Despite the stiff competition, he's averaging 2.8 blocks per game. Upstate is just beginning its journey into D-I, and this chapter of the Atlantic Sun's story is still about giving a leg up to former D-II schools. Kennesaw State is nearly done with its indoctrination and will be fully eligible for any and all national postseason consideration in 2009-10. The Owls are preparing well, playing teams at their own level and hosting their own tournament (the 100 Club Classic), and go into A-Sun play with a 4-2 record and the nation's 13th-best 3-point shooting percentage (43.1 percent). The national champions at the Division II level in 2004, this program does a lot of things right, and shocked the league by leading the standings for a short time in 2005-06. They also have, for our admission fee, the funniest head coach in America, Tony Ingle. Occasionally when I talk to coaches down south, we trade our favorite Ingle-isms. Still my favorite: "Someone asked me the other day if I had an iPod... I thought they were making fun of my face. I said I've got a lot of diseases, but that ain't one of 'em." 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 trompe l'oeil. Watching Illinois State crush UC Santa Barbara by 28 yesterday, I wondered how much of what I was seeing was the emergence of a Redbird team (7-0) with increased intensity and scoring options that could challenge for the Valley title, and how much was the Gauchos playing their third in three days. (After all, they did play UNC suprisingly tough.) We're still trying to figure out what the exact value of a win over Auburn is, what it means to upset New Mexico. And Alabama A&M, for reasons entirely their own, haven't even played another Division I team yet (the season looks dire, as they've lost both games to D-II schools). December is one of the most fun months of our season, because it requires concentration and imagination, and the body of evidence grows every day as the results come in. The puzzle figures itself out, piece by piece, and we get to predict where the hundreds of pieces will land. Of course, a lot of people don't see it that way, and focus on other things (like holiday shopping, which I thought had all been turned over to e-robots by now). If they want college sports, they flip on a bowl game, and fall asleep. |
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63
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 |
109 |  |
26,514 |  |
season over |  |
119/887 (13.4%) |
 |
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 the San Antonio Spurs' strike-struck 1999 NBA title. Not in the least. Jeremiah Dominguez is our seventh Mid-Majority Baller of the Week of the 2008-09 season, and he definitely put in enough work to make up for the break.
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 generally unnoticed outside the New Haven metro area. Ladies and gentlemen, meet James Feldeine, our sixth Mid-Majority Baller of the Week.
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.
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 
Mr. Maynor spent his weekend in the premier vacation destination of Cancun, Mexico, but he was there to work. On what no less of a writer than 
