• Season 9 SuperTicker presented by BLAPP
#TMM9
Having recently completed its 9th season, The Mid-Majority is a community chronicle of the smaller Division I college basketball conferences. Last year, the theme was Team. Six groups of five (plus a fantasy mid-major player) were engaged in friendly Amazing Race-style competition, criss-crossing Hoops Nation to provide awesome college basketball content. Season X (2013-14) will be our final one.

Recent Game Recaps

Epilogue, The Ninth: Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Memories

So We Meet Again

Rte. 139 - End of the Line

Hanging On

A Championship in Pictures

This Time of Year

Dotson Leads Ducks to the Sweet Sixteen

Grizzlies Overwhelmed by Orangemen

Empire

Challenge 11: Final Four Memories

By George, UConn is Dead

Butler and Us

Donning the Black and Gold

Challenge 10: Tourney Memories

The Madness of the Horizon League

The Rare Ivy League Conference Tournament

MAC Madness

Anything Can Happen in the MAAC

Challenge 9: Shock The Neighborhood

A Youthful Surprise

From Worst to First

Peers and Seers

Tag: Atlantic 10
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S5 March 22, 2009 MINNEAPOLIS -- You work in an office. It's a big office with hundreds of people. You all have hard jobs: everyone toils at their stations every day, struggling to put in efforts that will be recognized. When you get a pat on the back and a "good job," it always seems so fleeting... nobody remembers...
S5 March 21, 2009 MINNEAPOLIS -- Just so we're clear, we don't care about your brackets. We know you want to talk about who you "have," about how three of your eight website entries are totally and thoroughly busted, and how you'll never win that $84.50 in the office pool now. We don't want to hear about how you...
S5 March 18, 2009 INDIANAPOLIS -- The year 2006 wasn't really all that long ago. Sure, we're dealing with problems light years beyond those we faced back then, and anybody would trade in total world financial meltdown for another "bird flu" scare. But Nelly Furtado's "Loose" feels like it just came out yesterday, inn...
S5 March 16, 2009 Aside from reality show winners and one-hit wonders, nothing is forgotten quite as quickly as Championship Fortnight when the NCAA Tournament brackets are released. Some of the teams we've been following all season are destined for great and lasting glory, which will be fulfilled and certified once ...
S5 March 16, 2009 Bullet Points Stephen F. Austin punched Hoops Nation's final NCAA Tournament ticket Sunday afternoon, its first appearance ever. Championship Fortnight is over, and the national postseason is just ahead. Completed brackets and scores for all 23 TMM leagues are included below. Southland Texas...
S5 March 15, 2009 Bullet Points Seven championships were awarded on Saturday. Binghamton won its first-ever America East title; Morgan State is in the NCAA Tournament for the first time ever out of the MEAC. Temple repeated as Atlantic 14 champions; Akron is on the Big Bracket for the first time since 1986. Alabam...
S5 March 14, 2009 Bullet Points American won its second consecutive Patriot League championship, and is on to the NCAA Tournament once again. Dayton and Xavier, the two higher seeds, went down in the Atlantic 14 semifinals; this sets up an improbable 4/7 matchup between Temple and Duquesne. Other semifinal w...
S5 March 13, 2009 Bullet Points One championship to be decided this afternoon: that of the Patriot League, which has been winnowing down its field verrrry slowly since Tuesday, March 3rd. The Atlantic 14, MEAC, MAC, Big West, Southland, SWAC and WAC are down to final fours as the last weekend of Championship Fo...
S5 March 12, 2009 KATY, Tex. -- Quick programming note: we've run into some technical difficulties here in Texas, so that marathon chat we promised has to be postponed. Next week seems a better fit anyway, since there will be an actual 65-team bracket to talk about. We'll do a regular chat tomorrow from Cleveland at ...
S5 March 9, 2009 With our final weekly award of the season, we celebrate the work of a young Spider who used a two-game stretch to strike a little bit of arachnophobia into the hearts of Atlantic 14 opponents heading into the league's elimination event. Kevin Anderson of Richmond is our seventeenth, and final, Mid-M...
S5 March 9, 2009 HOT SPRINGS, Ark. -- Our year is a blur of quick-cut transitions: from total silence to Midnight Madness, pre-season to regular season, games outside conferences to games inside parentheses. Standings grids give way to brackets, and before you know it, campaigns are cut short in early elimination ro...
S5 March 8, 2009 With the end of the regular season today, all conference tournament brackets on our side of the Red Line have been finalized. After the jump, opening brackets for the second week of Championship Fortnight: the MEAC, SWAC, Mid-American, Big West, Atlantic 14, WAC and Southland. Atlantic 12 Begins We...
S5 March 5, 2009 Dayton at Xavier (Atlantic 14) Cintas Center - Cincinnati, OH 9:00 PM EST In a conference with a geographical footprint so big you can see it from space, tonight you can boil everything down to four letters: XU and UD. Or just X and D, if you think the University identifier isn't necessary. There...
S5 March 5, 2009 NASHVILLE -- You might recall that there was a marathon chat announced to be held Friday (tomorrow) from the Valley quarterfinals. Due to a number of factors, that's being postponed. Instead, we'll try for a 12-hour chat next Thursday, and do a regular chat at 3:00 EST tomorrow that will overlap wit...
S5 March 4, 2009 Saint Louis at Duquesne (Atlantic 14) A.J. Palumbo Center - Pittsburgh, PA 7:00 PM EST Last year's A-14 geosuperleague standings presented a big problem, you might remember: you had teams with high noncon content like Dayton and Rhode Island finding their .500 league records were good for one-way ...
S5 February 26, 2009 ATHENS, Ohio -- As was noted in this kind piece by the newspaper I spent my college career wishing I could work for, next week marks the beginning of what we're really here for, what this is really all about. The conference tourneys mark the third of the four seasons within a season in college baske...
S5 February 25, 2009 Dayton at Rhode Island (Atlantic 10) Ryan Center - Kingston, RI 7:00 PM EST While the titans of college basketball sportswriting are off drooling over Kansas, or boo-hooing over Pittsburgh, or whatever they do up there, they're missing out on the big fun of the high-stakes race at the top of the A...
S5 February 12, 2009 Temple vs. Saint Joseph's (Atlantic 10) The Palestra - Philadelphia, PA 7:00 PM EST It's super-exciting in the grand old Atlantic 14 this week, no? Those who tuned into ESPN Classic last night looking for a rerun of the Cheap Seats Superdogs/Superjocks episode were treated to a thrilling ballgame ...
S5 February 12, 2009 INDIANAPOLIS -- Well, here we are. Today is Mock Selection III, and I still have no idea what I did to deserve an invitation -- or why I've been listed as representing Basketball State all along. It's a real thrill, even though we've had to detour from our regularly scheduled travel and will be goin...
S5 February 9, 2009 BATON ROUGE -- When the ax started falling in the SEC last month with midseason firings, the thought around here was that it was kinda cute. Four such severances in four years seemed like another indication that the pressures of BCS basketball were getting to be more in line with those of the pros, ...
S5 February 5, 2009 PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- Let's get this out of the way first: when the first place team loses to the last place team, it's definitely not good for the league profile. And when the overwhelming preseason favorite takes one in the collective stomach from a team that long ago unanimously passed a team rule b...
S5 January 12, 2009 BOONE, N.C. -- I'm going to get into my grandpa rocking chair and tell you what's wrong with pop music. I'm sorry that you had to get this from a basketball writer, but that's just the way it worked out. Most music specifically released for public consumption is far too dependent on context and repu...
S5 December 19, 2008 GREENVILLE, S.C. -- Just a reminder that there's a chat today at 4 pm over at ESPN, so come on by. Mediocrity is a touchy subject around here, generally because the word mediocre shares the same Latin root as mid-major, which confuses people into thinking that basketball at our level is just, you kn...
S5 December 15, 2008 CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Let's get this out of the way first: the Atlantic 14 owned this weekend. Pwned it. The A-14 was in yr weekend, steelin yr basketballz. This conference put such a stamp on the last two days that the second weekend in December should be a three-day hoops holiday, by proclamation of...
S5 December 10, 2008 Dayton at Creighton Qwest Center - Omaha, NE 8:05 PM EST Even though they rarely play each other, Dayton and Creighton just go great together. Not only do they rhyme, they're both small schools in non-power conferences that have the kind of remarkable infrastructure, organization and long-term vis...
S5 December 9, 2008 LEXINGTON, Va. -- I think we can chalk up the weekend voting on the Ultimate Project contest an unqualified, unmitigated disaster. There were more complaints about the voting mechanism (clicking through either brought up a "please log in" screen or a full-screen ad to start your own poll) than actua...
S5 December 8, 2008 The Mid-Majority tries to keep it fresh, mix it up, to stay frisky and funky in a world full of stale coach-speak and paint-by-numbers analysis. But this time, it's impossible. For one of the very few times in this site's obscure history, we are recycling a subject line letter-for-letter. For the se...
S5 December 8, 2008 LOUISVILLE -- This week marks the one-month milepost of the 2008-09 season. Most of the action we've seen has consisted multi-team tournaments of questionable merit or importance, early league games, and power-conference teams beating the snot out of mid-majors. While we've made a lot of the signifi...
S5 December 4, 2008 The State of College Basketball is a ratings system that uses a lot of good basketball sense, per-game team performance ratings and degradation of older results to rank the teams from No. 1 to 344 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of the Final Four ...
S5 November 24, 2008 PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- For my money, the greatest movie about rock and roll music ever made is Stop Making Sense, the 1984 Talking Heads concert film directed by Jonathan Demme. The movie strikes a very personal note for me, because I take a 40 long jacket. Manufacturers don't tend to make that size, so...
S5 November 19, 2008 Charlotte at Appalachian State Holmes Center - Boone, NC 7:00 PM EST Tonight in the rarified air of Boone, two very good teams that were out in the cold when the Big Ball started this past March. Charlotte won 20 games and mounted a run to the semifinals of the Atlantic 14 conference, where it los...
S5 November 14, 2008 PEORIA, Ill. -- Remember back when you were a kid, it was a hot summer day out in your backyard... you had your 1980's NBA-style short-shorts on with no shirt, just hanging out in the grass your daddy just mowed fresh that morning. Not a care in the world. Then you got really thirsty, and you were t...
S4 March 25, 2008 Birmingham This month has its place in the weather calendar, a rock-solid role. March thaw helps keep April showers warm, and as long as everything happens in the right order, May flowers won't be DOA. March basketball, however, is as unpredictable as global warming. You don't know who's going to...
S4 March 16, 2008 Bullet Points The autobid picture is nearly complete, as seven champions were named on Saturday. Kent State and UMBC followed up their regular-season trophies with tourney rings, in the MAC and America East respectively. In a low-seed shocker, No. 7 Coppin State upset No. 1 Morgan State in the MEA...
S4 March 15, 2008 Bullet Points Bow down before the altar of American, poxy fules. The Eagles are going dancing out of the Patriot League for the first time in school history. Today will see the crowning glory in seven conferences. The America East, Atlantic 14, MAC, SWAC, MEAC, WAC and Big West will all have champi...
S4 March 14, 2008 Bullet Points No autobids given out on Thursday, but high seeds fell like falling things. Texas-Arlington showed No. 2 Lamar the door in the Southland quarterfinals. In the Atlantic 14, No. 6 Charlotte defeated No. 3 UMass, and there was a six-over-three in the SWAC, as Arkansas-Pine Bluff dumped A...
S4 March 13, 2008 It was a special number once, an emotional milestone, an achievement of a lifetime. Four years ago in this space, I attended exactly one hundred college basketball games in a single season and wrote something faintly humorous about each one. It was a journey that culminated in a loss. Because it alw...
S4 March 13, 2008 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-sta...
S4 March 13, 2008 Bullet Points Make way on the big bracket for two more mid-major champions: Mount Saint Mary's, surprise winners of the NEC out of a No. 4 seed, and Portland State, double-champions of the Big Sky. There were three exciting finishes in the Atlantic 14, with La Salle, Dayton and Charlotte pulling ou...
S4 March 12, 2008 Bullet Points Three more automatic bids were awarded last night. Full 100 percent congratulations to Butler, double-champions of the Horizon League, as well as Oral Roberts, three-time titlists of the Mid-Con cum Summit cum Badlands Conference. Western Kentucky is back in the Dance from the Sun B...
S4 March 10, 2008 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 l...
S4 March 9, 2008 With the end of the regular season today, all conference tournament brackets in the mid-major (and A-14) domain have been finalized. After the jump, opening brackets for this week's events: the MEAC, SWAC, Mid-American, Big West, Atlantic 14, WAC and Southland. Mid-Eastern Begins Tuesday in Raleig...
S4 March 7, 2008 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, gol...
S4 March 6, 2008   Xavier at Saint Joseph's (Atlantic 10) Alumni Memorial Fieldhouse - Philadelphia, PA 9:00 PM EST Xavier (25-4, 13-1) comes into tonight's G!O!T!N! on an 11-game win streak, has an RPI of six, and is the only team in the entire Atlantic 14 that could leave for a 10-day all-expenses-paid vac...
S4 March 5, 2008 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 ...
S4 March 4, 2008 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 t...
S4 March 3, 2008 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...
S4 February 29, 2008 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 ha...
S4 February 27, 2008 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 ta...
S4 February 25, 2008 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 wit...
S4 February 21, 2008 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 dea...
S4 February 18, 2008 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...
S4 February 12, 2008 The State of College Basketball is a brand-new ratings system that uses a lot of good basketball sense, per-game team performance ratings and degradation of older results to rank the teams from No. 1 to 341 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of the F...
S4 January 25, 2008 PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- I tried to make it simple, I tried to offer the sound-bite answer. I tried to simplify things on the far side of complexity, because 'tis a gift to be simple. But I attempted to shave with Occam's razor, but ended up having to wear a small piece of toilet paper, attached with spit...
S4 January 21, 2008 MORAGA, Ca. -- One of the most-asked question types I get is in regards to these datelines. Where am I? Where have I been? How many games am I up to? I know it's all pleasant small-talk, and folks are just trying to make conversation, but I've been meaning to put together a one-webpage answer to ans...
S4 January 17, 2008 DAVIS, Ca. -- We have a system here, we do a California trip every season and alternate between Southern (odd-numbered years) and Northern (even). We're going to go recover from the jet lag before charging into our annual West Coast Bias weekend, but we have some Easty bits to clean up. UNC-Ashevi...
S4 January 14, 2008 CHARLESTON, S.C. -- It's Monday, which means no cutesy-cutesy, no how-do-ya-do, no warm-up act jokes. Nearly every one of the 245 teams in Hoops Nation played over the weekend, and we're totally committed to mention at least two percent of those. It's all basketball today. Drake. No leading score...
S4 January 10, 2008 SPARTANBURG, S.C. -- I was going to start out today with a hilarious joke about squirrels and their nuts, but this came across the wires this morning. The Cincinnati Enquirer, a fine newspaper, ran this today: Xavier shuns mid-major award. Here's a taste for those who don't like clicking things: Ri...
S4 January 9, 2008   Rhode Island at Dayton (Atlantic 10) U. of Dayton Arena - Dayton, OH 7:00 PM EST If we've learned anything from college basketball, it's that November and December results can be intoxicating, bewildering, and occasionally ultimately maddening. There's no rollercoaster that quite matches t...
S4 January 8, 2008 PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- I want to share with you an idea I had this morning. I'll do anything necessary to make this possible, but I think that next November somebody should hold a Multi-Team Event just for relentlessly uptempo teams. The naming rights are open for purchase by any beverage manufacturer, ...
S4 January 4, 2008 SPRINGFIELD, Mo. -- I attended my first-ever Summit League game last night. Oh sure, I've been to plenty of Mid-Continent Conference games before, but things are different now. They've got a new name, new colors, and a new clip-art logo. Are their feelings of inadequacy solved? Hope so! Folks fro...
S4 December 31, 2007 MUNCIE, Ind. -- Well, here it is, the last Boubacar of 2007, coming at the beginning of the final broken week of the 2007-08 season. No Boubacar tomorrow, but there will be a few special treats posted here, including our annual New Year's essay. You'll want to stay tuned for that. For now, here are ...
S4 December 24, 2007 PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- As promised, we're going to crown our ARRRGH contest winner today and give out a free stuffed Bally. We were looking for the best mid-major ARRRGH moment, the worst instance of thwarted victory, the most crushing realization that the big guys have won again and that "Hoosiers" mom...
S4 December 21, 2007 NEW YORK -- A quick few words about mid-major upsets, followed by a lot of words about mid-major upsets. I go on the electronic sports talk radio some. The hosts usually don't know who I am, don't read this site or realize that "oh, you wrote that ESPN.com story?" I don't mind any of that. What I ...
S4 December 17, 2007 YOUNGSTOWN, Oh. -- It takes me so long to write these Boubacar intros, you can't even imagine. The pressure to write something clever and erudite is just... so immense. Usually takes about an hour just to have an idea, and that's after banging my forehead on the table until something figuraliterally...
S4 December 15, 2007 Thanks to the 168(!) people who played along with our second non-annual Mid-Majority Finals Week. That's so many people, they'd have to hold this class in one of those auditoriums where the professor doesn't know you from Samuel Haanpaa, where you have to spend five minutes of your six-minutes durin...
S4 December 14, 2007   Miami (Oh.) (MAC) at Wright State (Horizon) Ervin J. Nutter Center - Dayton, OH 7:00 PM EST As we ease back into post-exam hoops, that little bridge across the holidays towards conference season, we have two teams that won their respective leagues last year. Both teams play slow, bruising ...
S4 December 11, 2007 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 341 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of the F...
S4 December 10, 2007 PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- I was looking over the schedule, trying to find some games to go to this week. Maybe you were too. There's hardly anything going on out there in Hoops Nation this week. Virtual bupkis. Not enough nothing to cancel the G!O!T!N! for the week, but all across the land, the "athlete" p...
S4 December 4, 2007 PAWTUCKET, R.I. -- Less than a month into this, and the whole Boubacar concept is taking hold. I'm getting tons of e-mails describing players, plays, teams and performances as "Boubacar-worthy," "Boubacar material," "Boub-tastic." One even used the term -- I kid you not -- "Boubalicious." Surely, in...
S4 December 3, 2007 Philadelphia Lift up your downcast eyes, woman; there is a special place in heaven for you. O truck stop waitress, you sustainer of the long-distance voyageur, Cinderella of the service industry, underfoot guardian and caretaker of the linoleum empire... one day, when you finally fall from your wea...
S4 November 12, 2007   Appalachian State (Southern) at Charlotte (A-10) Halton Arena -- Charlotte, NC 7:30 PM EST Appalachian State's cagers will open their 2007-08 campaign tonight, and they do so on what some might refer to as "a mission." Sweet memories of San Juan wins in December 2006 (Virginia, Vanderbilt)...
S2 December 21, 2005 Game 110: Ohio 71, at Rhode Island 63 Saturday, December 10, 2005 Ryan Center - Kingston, RI If you skiied through high school English with yellow Cliff's Notes strapped to your feet, or if you received the bulk of your literary education on the can from "Don't Know Much About Books" books, you p...
S2 November 28, 2005 After a run of postseason magic, the Siena Saint (Bernard)s have been off the face of the earth in the last two years, something that's not a good idea when you have a notoriously impatient fanbase and a 15,000-seat soft-drink-branded arena to fill. So Rob Lanier out as coach, Fran McCaffery in.Toni...
S2 November 21, 2005 "Feast Week" is great and all, but there's too much poi and squid for my tastes. Instead, why don't you come on down to the Old Country Buffet of mid-major hoops?Scheduled league season is six weeks away, but the Miami Valley Conference is in full swing. Tonight we have two squads trying to find ou...
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