Dribblings 2/10/2005 (Rivalry Week Edition)

Firstly, a big "yo" to all Philadelphia Inquirer readers who scoped Janet Paskin's piece instead of the sports-section leader about Donovan McNabb's vomit. Welcome to TMM, here's the first page. Despite both what The Official Wife Of The Mid-Majority™ says and Herculean efforts by the gentlemanly John Costello, I don't photograph well at all. Onward...

Mid-American: Miami (Oh.) 54, Ball State 52 (story) - Last night's G!O!T!N! was indeed the Game Of The Night, that muddy slog between Duke and North Carolina notwithstanding. Because the game was not televised (all the trucks were apparently in Durham), a rebound tip-in off a halfcourt heave by Miami's (15-5, 10-2 MAC) Nathan Peavy as time expired could not be reviewed at the scorer's table. The Nest went nuts, and this amusing headline might be the work of an embedded BSU grad at CSTV.

Ball State coach Tim Buckley reviewed the camcorder recordings and told the press conference that the call was a joke. "The ball's in his hands, the light is on, the horn's off. I've seen the tape, I saw the game. That's what happened." When I e-mailed my sources at both schools to see what really happened, they stuck to party lines. Understandably so.

UPDATE: Thanks to intrepid reader Charles, Zapruder-style footage has been located. There was a second shooter!

Colonial: Hofstra 95, James Madison 88 (3OT) (story) - I love it when folks e-mail me after great games they've seen. Jerry from Hofstra was so excited after this game that he fired off a nine-paragraph communique that promised all the epic splendor of Casey At The Bat. Orrr, maybe not. "If I had a dime for every layup or dunk the teams missed, I'd have at least two dollars," he writes. "It was no thing of beauty, but it grew into something pretty unforgettable. We were half-hoping the game would end and half-hoping it would hit five OTs, like the FIU game a few weeks ago, so that we could get on the wire." Ummm... will getting on the Dribblings do?

Shootaround!

America East: Sure, Vermont (18-3, 13-0 AE) kicks major butt - they were 82-55 winners over the pushovers from Stony Brook last night, to run their winning streak to 15 games. But how about that other streaky team, the Boston University Terriers (17-5, 11-2 AE, 6 straight wins)? No household names or rock stars, they just do it with defense. Last night, they won at Maryland-Baltimore County by 10. On Saturday, the Cat(amount)s and Terriers will go all back-alley in front of a sold-out crowd at the sparkly new Agganis Arena (which wasn't quite finished when I visited).

Colonial: In what will eventually be logged as 100 Game Project Game #55 (how tough, when they replay the Monarchs of the league, Old Dominion, a team they've already beaten. ODU (22-3, 12-1 CAA) readied itself for the revenge mission by snacking on Delaware last night, 56-49.

Mid-American: Last month at about this time, it was the East division that was a mess, now it's all flippy-floppy. There are four teams in the West that are within a half-game of each-other ( Western Michigan, Bowling Green, Ball State and Toledo), and none are playing with particular conviction right now. On the East side, Kent State (15-6, 8-4 MAC) claimed second place and is two games behind the aforementioned Miami luckyboys by winning a tough roadie at Akron 57-54. That was a thriller too.

Missouri Valley: We mentioned Southeast Missouri's success in the OVC (a/k/a "The Other Valley") yesterday, might as well give equal time to their 90-degree compass-point friends at Southwest. SWooMO - er, SMS - won their sixth straight to go to 7-6 in conference. The Bears are now just a stone's throw from the four-seed position, which would mean they'd get to skip the first day of Arch Madness, wear their white jerseys in the 4-5 game, and get a shot at 1 ( Wichita State?) if they survive.

Game! Of! The! Night!

In the Sun Belt tonight, we have a battle of division leaders. Those are always fun, right? Western Kentucky (16-5, 6-3 SBC) of the East is on a four-game tear, and have injected energy into a Topper Nation whose strength had been flagging after a rough early Sun Belt stretch. (Does Big Red ever say "wait 'till next year?" No!) Tonight, they host a surprising Denver Pioneer team (14-7, 8-1 SBC) that is led by a fearless li'l Billups at point and two bruising big men (Yemi Nicholson, Antonio Porch) who get a lot of double-doubles, sometimes even in the same game. Eight o'clock Eastern is tip time, and you can listen along on Big Red Radio.

USA Today profiles the "Zen master" of the backdoor cut, Pete Carril, and the four coaches who are carrying the Princeton system into the 21st Century.

Philly's Big Five is great, and a big reason the rivalries stayed hot during the dark ages that were the Nineties was the fact that three of its teams moved into the same conference (the Atlantic 10). Less known-about is the bitter hatred between Charleston, South Carolina's College Of Charleston and The Citadel, who will tip off for the 75th time tonight. The two probably wouldn't play each other at all if they weren't both in the Southern Conference - you have to throw out the record book because the Bulldogs and Cougars would probably just use it to smack each other. CofC and The Citadel hate each other so much that they fight over long-ago results. Jeff Hartsell of the Post and Courier provides a historical primer on the SoCon's greatest rivalry.

We don't mention Conference USA a lot around here, they're a couple steps north of The Mid-Majority. Very few people care about it (this includes local media), except for ESPN - but they've got a contract to cover it. A large part of the reason why the league is so dreary (and about to get drearier after their expansion plans are realized) is because its cobbling together of seemingly random schools results in a lack of good, ancient rivalries. Al Myatt of Bonesville.Net (an East Carolina digital publication) looks at the reasons why hatred is so important in hoops, and explores the issue with an old friend, Pirates coach Bill Herrion.

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