The off-season sometimes provides you with slim pickins - and when that happens, ain’t nothing you can do by ride that bomb all the way to the ground. Plus, real life has made strong demands on us today, so a-blogrollin’ we will go.

Today’s theme music - the exact opposite of how we feel these days as nuptials draw near:

Jarrett Carter may be our new favorite blogger, with two worthy posts at two worthy blogs - first, five reasons to keep the best D1 HBCU conference tournament in the Cackolack. We agree with him on all points, though we are saddened that the ACC Tournament won’t be in Greensboro, its rightful location. Atlanta is for bad traffic, gun crime, Tech fans, and SEC affairs - the ACC has no business dragging itself to such depths.

In worthy post #2, Carter asks if Gary Williams wants out of Maryland. Based on the offseason he’s had, as thoughtfully collected by the boys at DBR, who could blame him for wanting to get out with his reputation intact?

This is a bit old, but so is recruiting obsession - Mike DeCourcy breaks down the five spring signings that actually matter over at the SN. That one of said five impact players signed with Fresno Freakin’ State says all that is necessary about the current importance of the spring signing period.

In further evidence that as statistics increase, the result equals one, Yet Another Basketball Blog attempts to quantify coaching success based on recruiting and tournament play. Coach K underperforms! Tom Izzo does better than expected! Northwestern sucks! Oliver Purnell can’t beat competition with five breathing players! Surprises all around! (We kid. It’s a good piece that gives evidence to the conventional wisdom. But don’t expect a revelation.) (HT: RTC.)

Finally, while totally unrelated to college basketball, we love when two worlds collide - Above the Law, the preeminent blog in legal snark, links to Clay Travis, he of the CBS Spin on Sports column, as he gives law school selection advice. We link to this without comment, other than to say that given that Messr. Travis has abandoned the law to become a full-time sports writer, UVA Law should retroactively grant him admission.

Theme music for this morning’s quick post, as we prepare for another ill-advised road trip:

THE STORY EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT
More Schools That Couldn’t Fake Academic Achievement
Buzz around the interwebs continues to center on the APR ratings released yesterday. Rush the Court broke down the numbers in much greater detail than us, with some interesting findings:

1) Davidson had the best overall APR (a perfect 1000) amongst hoops programs, while Carolina had the highest amongst BCS programs. There is a safety school joke in here somewhere, but damned if we can find it.

2) The total list of teams suffering scholarship losses: Kansas State, Purdue, Seton Hall, South Carolina, Tennessee, and New Mexico State take a hit of one scholly apiece, while Southern Cal and UAB will lose two apiece for their historic incompetence.

3) The ACC and the Big East had the highest conference APR averages. If that isn’t evidence of the worthiness of the APR as a measure of academic success, we’re not sure what is. (That, or Big Ten programs are even worse at finding decent educations for their players than we already suspect.)

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Fitting news for the day that we licked the stamp on the final exam of our academic career: the NCAA ratted out the college basketball programs with the same approach to academics as us. Forty-six Division I basketball programs failed to achieve a passing APR score 925 (because that’s a passing score that makes sense, no matter what the scale).

Many are only subject to a “public notice” penalty, which from all we can tell is somewhere between a few days in the stockades and the online equivalent of a wagging finger. Stephen Colbert approves.

But for a dozen or so schools, including a handful of teams from this year’s NCAA tournament, headlined by Tennessee, their low APR score means they will lose scholarships. The Vols will lose one free ride, which is convenient since they just booted two scholarship players from the team. No word on the other offenders. (We meant the other schools, but you didn’t know for a second there, did ya? Go Vols!)

Proudly, none of the institutions we have attended landed on the big list of fail - but for those that did, we offer the following as a public service announcement:

Sans Annie Liebowitz.

THE STORY EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT
Recruiting - Even More Strangers with Candy-esque

Late last week, Michael Avery, a guard from Encino, CA, committed to play for Billy Gillespie at Kentucky. A good late-signing season get for the Wildcats? We’ll know when Avery starts playing college ball … in 2012. Sure, he doesn’t know where he is going to high school, or how to drive, or where (or what) the clitoris is, but dammit all, he is proud to be a Wildcat!

Every child has to take a step towards adulthood at some point, and perhaps Avery truly is ahead of peers in this regard. In that case, he’s doing a nice job of following Miley Cyrus’ lead - build up expectations amongst a fan base, then bring them crashing to the ground when you act like the budding adult that you are. We’ll see if the analogy holds when he backs out of his verbal in three years and goes to UCLA.

TWO STORIES THAT INTERESTED US FOR NO GOOD REASON
Character Problems + Fuzzy Math = Profit?

We searched for “addition by subtraction” images, hoping others had better luck than us visualizing the concept. Dane Cook was the closest we could get, though we admit that without the all-important knife through the torso, leaving a vastly improved romantic comedy or HBO special in its wake, it’s not quite apropos. (Though we roundly enjoy Cook’s evil twin on Heroes.)

Douchy sign of the apocalypse? Sexually immature? Why not both?

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The theme song for today’s coaching moves - only the finest slice of awful ’70s rock, reintroduced to us through the beauty that is Rock Band.

The big coaching story, of course, is where there was no change at all: Bill Self rebuffed his alma mater to stay at Kansas. We stated our policy on this earlier this week, so we say to Self that he had no wrong choices, and that if his heart told him to stay in Lawrence … well, then he must know something about Lawrence that we don’t. But, you know, championships are the best love like hunger is the best sauce. Rating: Chalky.

The biggest change, however, saw Trent Johnson leave a pretty damn good gig at Stanford to take over at LSU. We assume that Trent saw the Lopez twins head for the NBA, remembered he was at a school famous for its chemists and not its ballers, and took the all-expense paid trip to “Recruit Whomever the Hell You Want”-town. (We also don’t know what this says about the relative strengths of the conferences involved - is he leaving the ultra-competitive Pac-10 for calmer hoops waters, or does he view the SEC as a greater challenge?) Regardless of the reasoning, a strong move by an LSU program that has looked rudderless since making the Final Four in 2006 - kind of like it did for the fifteen years before that, too. Rating: ESS-EEE-SEE! ESS-EEE-SEE! WOOOOO BAYOU BENGALS WOOOOOO!

Because nothing says “opportunity” like “dump your new girlfriend for your ex-wife”, Mike Montgomery denied any interest in the new Stanford opening. Probably not a tough decision, given that Cal had literally just backed the Brinks truck up to his doorstep to sign him as the new coach of the Bears. While we understand angst over Cal’s decision to fire longtime coach Ben Braun, we can’t say we disagree with it. Home of hippies that it may be, Berkeley is the state flagship, and hates to lose ground to its little brother in Los Angeles in any category. You want to win big time ball? You hire big time coach. And Ben Braun seems like a nice guy, but not a big time coach. Rating: Golden.

Apparently learning a lesson from his own playing career, UMass coach Travis Ford turned down the opportunity to become a small fish in the Big East Pond at Providence to stay in Amherst. We know that the Friars were a founding member of the Big East, but the times seem to have passed them by, and we can’t help thinking time has come for relegation. That said … it was a Big East coaching opportunity. Ford reportedly passed up an interview with LSU as well, for a team that made the NIT finals. We’re going to work on the assumption that he knows something that we do not - either that his job is oddly secure at UMass, or he has a better grasp on his own Peter Principle than anyone we’ve studied. Rating: Feisty like an undersized point guard.

Recognizing that our Hoyas are the exception that proves the rule, it is never a good thing when you are having to poach from the Ivy League for your new head coach. It is worse when you are hiring an Ivy League assistant. But when you are the New Jersey Institute of Technology, oh ye of your 0-29 record - well, you take what you can get, even if that means hiring an assistant from Columbia as your new coach. So welcome, John Engles! And, for once we mean this with no risk of jinx - you can’t POSSIBLY have a worse year than the last guy. Rating: There can be only one - and the Highlanders would take even that.

0-29 is the new pink.

Shouldn’t … be … this … winded …

Odd news coming out of Starkville today - Ben Hansbrough, the sophomore guard for the Bulldogs and younger brother of Carolina star Psycho T, announced he will transfer away from Mississippi State at the end of this semester.

What, pray tell, would convince a young man to leave a big conference (O: ESS-EEE-SEE!) program when a) he was a starter who averaged double digits in points, and b) his team not only made the tournament, but won a game this year? Apparently, we’re talking about practice:

In an interview with the Clarion-Ledger Tuesday, Hansbrough said the lack of a dedicated practice facility influenced his decision.

“That has a lot to do with it right there, just that simple stuff right there,” he said. “As simple as that may sound, that’s a huge thing.”

We understand that some other schools have much better practice facilities, Ben … not to mention that an NBA salary can buy a pretty sweet gym for you as a Christmas gift. But we think we know the real reason Ben is leaving - he’s prepared to join his brother in Hollywood to create the best brother act in show biz since the Stallone brothers warmed all of our hearts with their meathead antics.

In a few short years …

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - In response to demands from coaches and fans of college basketball, as well as rising rancor from media coverage of the sport, the NCAA promised that it would make changes to the way in which college basketball chooses its national champion starting in 2009.

“We didn’t want to throw away seventy years of tradition on a whim, but tension against the tournament-style format has been building for years,” said NCAA President Myles Brand on Monday morning after a three-hour meeting with university presidents. “Ultimately, we think that it is time that college basketball came into agreement with our other major revenue sport so that the fans can finally be satisfied with end-of-season matchups that are both satisfying and will conclusively determine the best team in the sport.”

The new Poll of Objective and Observable Percentages (POOP) system*, designed by ACC Commissioner and BCS President John Swofford and a team of trained monkeys, is based on the successful Bowl Championship Series used in Division I-A football. Teams will be rated on a weekly basis, starting Jan. 1 of each year / season. The rankings will take into account three factors: the team’s rank in the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI), the team’s rank in the ESPN/USA Today Coaches’ Poll, and the team’s average rating across eight computer-based ranking systems. Each of these three sources will be treated equally, and the average of the three values will constitute the team’s straight POOP score.

“Our hope is that by using POOP to determine who plays for the national championship, rather than the current haphazard system of the NCAA tournament, we’ll be able to restore some normalcy to the proceedings,” said Swofford. “I mean, the whole March Madness name is a double-edged sword, ya know?”
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Now with more Buckeye flavor!

THE GAME EVERYONE SOMEONE? IS TALKING ABOUT

So Much for the Repeat
Ohio State 81, Ole Miss 69
UMass 78, Florida 66

We can’t even pretend to be excited about the NIT. Such excitement, however, is what we are paid to do (and by “paid”, we mean “spared from Orson’s mighty whip”), so some quick takeaway thoughts from the games:

1) No rematch between OSU and Florida - which as we covered last week, would have mattered just as much as Roy Williams playing Kansas again, since approximately the same number of players were around for each of the previous rounds of those battles.

2) We really respect the fans that turn out of the NIT games, making the trip to MSG for the finals. While we were at Georgetown, the Hoyas were stuck in NIT purgatory for a few years - and we’ll be damned if we didn’t tune those teams out as soon as Selection Sunday came and passed. We’re impressed by the fans whose loyalty extends beyond disappointment and follows their team straight into the mouth of oblivion.

3) Hahahahaha - SEC iz Da suckz!! (Really? No. But it’s fun to say, no?)

4) For reasons we cannot begin to explain, we think UMass will beat tOSU tomorrow night.

AND NOW, ONTO MORE FUN TOPICS

Not So Much with the Pillaging, Fellas …

What happens in Mexico apparently must stay in Mexico, until diplomats intervene or charges are cleared. Two Portland State players were hauled into a Mexican jail after one beat the snot out of a fellow American tourist while the other fled the scene. We enjoy this - two American college students are involved in battery against a fellow American college student, but because they do it at a Mexican resort, they will get to be a punchline for years months some indeterminate time.

Just to confirm, young high school recruits when you sign on to play with a team, do not attempt to emulate their mascot. Fellow PSU players now stand on notice that raping and pillaging are strongly discouraged. Centenary players … well, same rule, but don’t feel like you have to tuck the shirts in.

Hardy har har, funny men
The boys at PTI decided to open yesterday’s show with a patently obvious April Fool’s prank. The joke wasn’t terribly funny - sure, tug at our heartstrings - but we appreciated the effort all the same for the unintentional comedy. (Don’t sue, Simmons!)

Further, it confirmed out belief that you could come up with a topic off the top of your head, hand it to Tony and Mike, and the exact same debate would occur regardless: Factual description, Wilbon defends “his boys”, Tony sounds old, Wilbon makes half-informed point that sounds fully-informed because he’s Mike Wilbon, Tony makes crass remark and/or does penguin dance. Why, yes, as a matter of fact, we aren’t sure why we watch this everyday still either!

Carousel - a term tossed around to describe movement in the coaching labor market, but why? Upon further review, it’s oddly accurate - constantly in motion until some pimpled, power hungry AD teenager throws off the gears, needlessly detailed, exciting to kids and their parents while alternatively boring and creepy to everyone else. Properly cited, we’ll pick up the nomme d’art and talk about the school’s who lack the courtesy to save their coaching news for next week when we have nothing else to write about.

After bolting Iowa for the calmer … plateaus? … of New Mexico, Steve Alford was rewarded Monday with a three-year extension with the Lobos, putting him under contract through 2016. All of this for one season of work that got the Lobos to 24-9 and a first round loss in the NIT. When notified of the extension, Charlie Weis nodded his head with approval. Combined with Herb Sendek’s desert revival at Arizona State after leaving the boobirds in Raleigh, one has to think there is something to the whole “life is easier in the Southwest” theory, even amongst the coaching ranks. Outlook: Sunny, even with those killer cacti.

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Sure, it’s not quite the same as the first weekend. But the 2nd weekend of the tournament is where even more drama happens, in many respects - can Davidson actually pull a Mason? Which #1 seed will bite the dust in a most unsavory fashion? And when will it get warm enough for girls to wear skirts and flipflops? (Not that we’re watching, honey.) For these reasons and more, we humbly log in to our MMOD account and bring you our live thoughts as the games progress.

7:10: Let’s get this started. The first pair of games: (7) West Virginia vs. (3) Xavier in the West, and (1) UNC vs. (4) Washington St. in the East. The West game tips off now, with the East game starting in about 20 minutes.

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To help us prepare for the upcoming tournament weekend, we’re borrowing a tradition from the mothership. Here are our buys and sells for each of the regions for this weekend’s games.

EAST REGION

Buys

Butler - We were at work on Sunday night, so when we let out a Sheila Broflovski-esque “What what what???” when we saw the Bulldogs as a #7 seed, it scared a good number of people. Then we reviewed their schedule, and we understood why - their most impressive non-conference road win is a tossup between Virginia Tech and Southern Illinois. Toss that in with the fact that they are playing another talent mid-major (South Alabama) in essentially a road game (Birmingham), and this should be a loser. But the Bulldogs have one thing that you can’t buy in the tournament, and that’s defense. They held opponents under 60 points in more than half their games this year, and nine times under 50 points. Also, their three losses are by a total of twelve points. The old adage in betting is “don’t fall for the low hanging fruit”, and I think that taking South Alabama (or, for that matter, the unfortunately-placed #2 seed Tennessee) is a little too good to be true; RPI and schedule be damned, Butler isn’t a #7 seed. Bulldogs in my Sweet 16.

Sells

Wazzu - We aren’t in the business of muckraking around here … oh, wait, that’s EXACTLY what we’re in the business of. (Sorry.) Tony Bennett is either the next coming of John Wooden, or he found a killer outline for “Beating NCAA Recruiting Rules 101″, because we have no explanation for how he’s winning in Pullman. Regardless, his team seemed to lose steam as the year went on. Yes, all of their losses were in the Pac-10 - and yes, early in the year, they beat a couple of tournament teams soundly. But we’ve watched these guys, and they seem to be held together with duct tape and shoe polish. Enter Winthrop, a regular tournament participant with a win last year under their belts. We smell an upset.

SOUTH REGION

Buys

Pittsburgh - We’re already on the record as fearing Pitt, but let’s run through the numbers - undefeated until Christmas, including a win over Duke at MSG (known in Devil circles as “Cameron North”). Ravaged by injuries, they finished the regular season 11-9 with both tough losses (by 18 at Marquette) and plucky wins (by 9 over Georgetown). For the most part, they are healthy and playing together again … and showed off by winning the Big East. All this plus a favorable bracket has us thinking they will face Memphis next week. We can’t tell, however, whether we should be nervous or worried that we agree with Bob Knight about Pitt.

Sells

Miami (FL) - ACC bias w000000t! Um … yeah, about that … Miami, we’d like to congratulate you on your invitation to the tournament. Would you have made it, with the exact same squad, if you were in Conference USA instead of the ACC? Not a chance in the world. So enjoy the spotlight and the check, and kindly let St. Mary’s face off against Texas.

MIDWEST REGION

Buys

Clemson - OK, so maybe there is some ACC bias going on here. But as we wrote yesterday, Clemson has a quality squad that has both won and lost very close and tough games against superior competition this year, and has generally owned lesser competition minus a few hiccups. The first round shouldn’t pose much problem for them, but we also think they match up well against Vandy in the second round. As we’ve said before - someone must stop the monster that is Shan Foster, and if it’s not Clemson, don’t think for a second that it will be Kansas.

Sells

USC - We want to believe in Tim Floyd’s squad. (We’re really not sure why - in football season, we hate the sons of Troy with a white-hot heat and wish plagues upon Los Angeles and all of Pete Carroll’s beautiful angels.) We do. We’ve come around on O.J. Mayo and think he might actually be aight. But this team is streaky like taco night boxers, and they are playing against the best player in the country. Even with K-State’s pupu platter on the floor beside Beasley, we like the Wildcats.

WEST REGION

Buys

Duke - You know why? Because we said so. Risky bet? More than you might think - especially if West Virginia, another lanky, defense-oriented, long-shooting team gets to face them on Saturday. But dammit, we’re fans, and we’re gonna pimp our team this weekend because, barring UCLA getting lost on their way to the team buses, we’re pretty sure we won’t be able to do it next weekend.

Sells

Purdue - This was a tough pick for us, because we pretty much see chalk in this region. But of all the “high” seeds, Purdue looks to us to be the most vulnerable. No consistent scoring option, no impressive true road wins out of the Big Ten, and their opponent is an emotionally charged Baylor team. Sure, Baylor has a “just happy to be here” feel to them. But we’re on record as thinking that both of these conferences stink, so we’re going to hope that karma sides with the Bears.

Before we can move onto the games happening this week, it’s worthwhile to recap the action that happened over the weekend. No formal weekend digest format to this … just thoughts as they occur:

ACC: Clemson is the definition of a conference middle child - for many a year, they were the weak runt of conference basketball, unable to get over the hump against Big Brother, mocked and beaten up by their only-slightly-bigger-but-with-massive-chips-on-their-shoulders cousins. (Clemson has only made it to the Sweet Sixteen three times; every other “original 8″ ACC team has at least seven. Even Virginia.) And ever since FSU, daU, VPI, and BC joined the conference - well, no one seems to give poor ol’ Clemson any mind anymore. So (with no bias whatsoever) we cheered heartily for them against Carolina … and once again, Clemson came up short. One of these days, boys … one of these days. They got a #5 seed anyway, which feels right - the team is fast and solid, and may notch #4 into the school’s sacred scrolls.

Big East: Familiarity may breed contempt, but even taking that into consideration, we don’t know any Georgetown fans that expected the Hoyas to win against Pitt on Saturday night. Pitt is a dangerously good team, and Georgetown is a dangerously flawed team. Goddammit.

Big Ten: Don’t care. No, seriously. Don’t care. Wisconsin is the most boring “good” basketball team we’ve ever watched.

Big XII: See Big East. (Except the basketball is OK - its just that the results didn’t matter for anything, including seeding.)

Pac-10: In all seriousness, it was good to see the three good teams in the conference (UCLA, USC, and Stanford) play up to potential for a few days straight. (We don’t care what the committee says - Wazzu has no real talent, ‘Zona has talent but no teamwork, and U of O … has hippies?)

SEC: In journalism school, this would be called “burying the lead” - needless to say, this was the most interesting tournament of the weekend, what with tornadoes and upsets and the OIN-BE-LAVIN.

We loved the upstart Bulldogs winning the tournament. We love them doing it by winning three games in two days after the Georgia Dome got attacked by Tulsa. We really loved that they won it on the home floor of their in-state (if out-of-conference) rival. But we cannot STAND that they didn’t take a bid from one of the other middlin’ teams in the SEC. No one can convince us that UK shouldn’t have lost their bid to UGA.

Ain’t no fun like unearned fun.

THE GAME EVERYONE TALKED ABOUT (SORT OF)

A ‘W’ is a ‘W’, I Guess
#3 UCLA 81, California 80

UCLA has started to make a living out of standing on 17 and hoping their dealer busts. Which is, of course, nice work if you can get, and if you can avoid falling behind on your account and living in a piss-filled backalley with rats, meth-addicts, and CSI: extras. It helps when the casino has stacked the deck in your favor.

In case you didn’t see one of the umpteen replays over the weekend, it went down like this: Cal inbounds the ball with a 80-79 lead with 20 seconds to go. Ryan Anderson receives the pass. Josh Shipp knocks the ball out of his hands, and knocks Anderson to the ground. No foul called. Ball given to UCLA despite last touching Shipp. On the inbounds, Shipp hits a circus shot (admittedly impressive) from behind the hoop to put the Bruins ahead. Too bad that’s illegal. But the refs don’t call it, and UCLA escapes, again, thanks to o-fishy-aiding.

Of course, as our father might say, never let the truth get in the way of a good story. And for truthiness-style analysis of the waning minutes of that game, we turn to the only source we think we can trust: a pissed-off, emo-fueled Ukklah fan:

That there video, by the way, contains all the Duke-UNC content you’ll find in this post. We summarized our feelings about that game pretty well here.

TWO ULTIMATELY MEANINGLESS WINS WE ENJOYED ANYWAY

Cue up Yakity Sax, Brian
#11 Georgetown 55, #12 Louisville

If the “lol fundamentals woot!!!1!!” crowd loves anything as much as the Princeton offense, it’s Rick Pitino, so I’m sure they were all pleased by the game in D.C. this weekend. Louisville? 56% from the charity stripe. GU? 17 turnovers, most of the “what the fuck were you thinking???” variety. We said judgment should be reserved on either team until after this game, and after watching all of it we can say with confidence that while both of these teams are good, neither is great by any stretch. Well-coached? Sure. Talented? In part. Fatally flawed? Oh, fuck yes.

That said … hey, Big East regular season championship! Suck that, Syracuse.

Virginia is for Upsets
William & Mary 56, Virginia Commonwealth 54

Hey, nice to see little brother get a win! Good on ya, little man! [rubs Williamsburg’s head while entire city squirms and bitches about how they were here first] They hate it when we do that.

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THE GAME EVERYONE TALKED ABOUT (SORT OF)

Too Good to Mock? Nah!
#16 Vanderbilt 86, Mississippi St. 85 (OT)

[shuffles through note cards] Say, did you hear the one about the NERDS from Nashville? [more shuffling as chorus of boos starts] I’m sure I’ve got SOMETHING in here … [ducks bottles thrown at stage] Hey, give me a break, like YOU expected f’in Vanderbilt to be the lead story twice in as many weeks?!

Tough to make fun after they played some fine ass basketball in Nashville last night. 50%-plus shooting from the Bulldogs wasn’t enough, even though the visitors held leads in the waning seconds of both regulation and overtime. The difference, as usual, was 3-point shooting and free throws; Vandy nailed 40% of their shots from long distance (MSU = 21%) and sank every last free throw while the Bulldogs missed 13 out of 28.

Vandy swingman Shan Foster was a machine, but it didn’t look that way at the start. After missing his first six shots from behind the arc, Foster would make the next nine - including the shots that would extend and later win the game. Foster scored nearly as many points (42) as the rest of the team combined (44) - not surprising if you consider that his fellow castaways shot 27% without him. If you can guard Foster, it’s game-set-match. Unfortunately, only one team has shown they can do that so far this year …

TWO OTHER STORIES, JUST FOR KICKS

You Can’t Spell “FUCK!” Without UF
#4 Tennessee 89, Florida 86

… so prepare for our Vanderbilt overlords, because the sound you heard coming out of Gainesville last night was the angry packing of NIT-bound bags by the only team that could stop Shan Foster consistently. That, or it was the sound of UF undergrads consoling themselves with hot coitus. Ah, college: where cheap beer and attractive, available women can soothe any pain. (It’s moments like these we’re glad our father knows the URL for this site. Hi, Dad!)

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THE GAME EVERYONE TALKED ABOUT (SORT OF)

Hoya Saxa, Bitches
#10 Georgetown 70, #21 Marquette 68 (OT)

In back rooms and dark robes across the land, Jesuits with steepled hands nodded with approval at this matchup even as it showcased all that is good and bad with college basketball. The good - exciting play down the stretch, star power with Roy Hibbert, and a loud presence by the fans from “the good land.” The bad - Georgetown throwing the game away (literally) with 20 turnovers, Marquette countering with pisspoor shooting, and Tom Crean chugging Diet Pepsi on the sideline. Because just that’s weird, dude.

Future lawya Jonathan Wallace led the way for the Hoyas with his usual combination of scrappy defense, clutch shooting, and boneheaded turnovers that kept the game close. John Thompson III displayed the proper attitude towards the game and the Big East regular season after the game by saying they Hoyas “will count their money when [the season] is done.”

That kind of quote, of course, gives us all the excuse we need to post this ridiculous video.

TWO WINS THAT SHOULD SCARE THE BEJESUS OUT OF COACHES AND FANS

History, Talent, Refs Overwhelm Pack
#6 Duke 87, N.C. State 86

For the first 35 minutes, N.C. State did everything necessary to beat the more talented Floorslappers - fought for high percentage shots (resulting in 54% shooting), created open looks from outside (7-13 from 3-point range), nailed their free throws (22-23 to that point), and took advantage of good luck (16 points off 8 Duke turnovers).

And then, the wheels fell off for the Wolfpack (again). Yup - nothing but hard play and sharp shooting by Duke and bad luck for State down the stretch determined this outcome ….

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