This post has been edited for your safety.

[beep] Carolina. [beep] their [beeeeep] [beeep] right in the [beeeeep] ear. [beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep]. [beeeeep], that was one [beeeeep] [beeeeeep] game. Can’t [beeeeep] believe that Duke couldn’t score one [beeeeep] point in the last five minutes. Can’t [beeeeep] believe pretty much any [beeeeep] thing that happened during that [beep].

And I don’t want to hear a [beeeeep] thing ever again about Duke getting all the [beeeeep] calls. Those refs wouldn’t know their [beeeeep] from their [beeeeep] whistles.

Don’t [beeeeep] get me started about Tyler [beeeeep] Hansbrough, either. That [beeeeeeeeeeep] mouth-breathing [beeeeeeeeep] could [beeeeep] bring Mother Teresa back from the dead, and I would still want to [beeeeep] take out the back of his [beeeeep] knees with a [beeeeeeeeeeep] baseball bat.

[beep]. [beep] [beeeeep] [beep] [beep] [beep].

We love us some small conference basketball for approximately one billion reasons, but the short list looks something like this:

1) Defense (they play it);
2) 3-pointers (manna and nectar for small teams);
3) Funny looking white dudes (see (2));
4) Underrated trim (especially brainy and/or outwardly pious trim);
5) Curiosity towards students who actively sought schools without big time sports.

But when we’re honest with ourselves, we know the real reason we love these conferences – and, we suspect, the one reason that brings us all together in their support – are their ridiculous names. So as we enter conference tournament season and teams begin to make their official exit for the season, we want to take a moment to look back and remember the ridiculously funny teams we’ve enjoyed throughout the year. Today, we put up tombstones for two perennial favorites: The Liberty Flames and the Stetson Hatters.

Gentle … men? … you will be missed.

Mouthguard AND brand placement?

Well done, sir.

THE GAME EVERYONE TALKED ABOUT (SORT OF)

Timber …
#3 UCLA 77, #7 Stanford 67 (OT)

The bigger they are, the harder they … something something. This kind of loss should take the wind out of the sails of those damn treehuggers sleepin’ in that redwood. [listens to whispers backstage] Wait, that’s at Berkeley? Eh, one of them hippie schools in the Bay Area; pretty much the same place, aren’t they?

Utter collapse by the Cardinal, which will never cease being a really lame mascot. Double digit lead with five minutes to go? Meaningless – when the Bruins decide to switch it on, it’s ballgame. But it should scare the shit out of Ukkluh fans that it took 35 minutes for such a switch to occur. This is unquestionably the most talented team in the country, and we still think they are losing before the Final Four. Also, the golden ‘C’ on the jersey is remarkably stupid. Unless it’s to commemorate something historic. In which case it’s only whisper-behind-its-back stupid.

THE GAME YOU SHOULD HAVE WATCHED INSTEAD

There wasn’t one. UCLA-Stanford was the best game of the night on paper and on hardwood. Of course, there are some people whose cable/internet went out for twelve hours, so just for all of us you …. (not that we’re bitter):

Arena Finally Lives Up to Name; Immediately Closed
St. Joseph’s 71, #8 Xavier 68

Last night was the last home game in Alumni Memorial Fieldhouse for the Hawks (they’ll play in the Palestra next season while AMF gets renovated), and they scored a huge win over Xavier to set up a “loser gets the NIT, winner gets heartburn” matchup against Dayton on Saturday.

St. Joe’s won the game with teamwork (five players in double digits) and strong defense down the stretch – but not if you read the lead for the AP wire story afterwards. Noooo …. you know who won this game for the Hawks? Jameer Nelson – just by showing up. Has nothing to do with the fact that he’s the only person from St. Joe’s most sportswriters can name (save Dr. Jack, natch.)

FOUR TOURNAMENTS WORTH ONE LINE APIECE

Atlantic Sun – Mustache-tastic Lipscomb shaved by MTSU.

Northeast – Hehehe … Mount St. Mary’s … hahahahah … [wipes tears] … but seriously folks, we’re going to hell.

Missouri Valley – Thousands of teenage boys accept what we have long known: Shockers are surprisingly ineffective.

Big South – Top-seeded UNC-Asheville rolls to finals, but must face three time defending champs Winthrop. Don’t ever fuck with Winthrop.

Looking good, Billy Ray! Feeling good, Louis!

Sure, be a dick and focus on the good teams with possibilities. We like the teams we know are horrendously flawed and not really capable of winning anything but the flukiest of NCAA tournaments. Like Tina Fey and her mysterious scar, they are flawed beauties we’ll take, because the prettiest ones are a.) already overbooked, and b.) not answering our phone calls.

USC. The idiot savant squad who while brilliant will play the idiot part of the role in losses like their early season flukebomb they lost to Mercer. They also do the hyper-brilliant part of the equation, too:

Dramatic rap synth strings aside, he’s bad, and is Davon Jefferson. If the two stayed around for another year, USC would be an easy pick for preseason top 10 material next year. Since they will both pass up relatively unpaid labor for the piles of cash in the NBA, you’ll have to make do with the boom or bust dynamic of the USC team this year.

Mississippi State. They’re fun the same way watching a car wreck is: mangling defense stopping all forward momentum, causing everything to come to a screeching halt. They allow around 60 points a game, so if you’re pitting teams against each other in fantasy matchups and love low point totals, you’re already matching Wisconsin against them in your head.

Syracuse. Five starters averaging double digits in scoring, two freshman and two sophomores in the starting lineup, and Boeheim zone defense madness. Pure funsies just to watch for the potential.

Florida. Ditto for Florida, especially point guard Nick Calathes, who’s averaging 15.3 points a game and passing like Jason Williams would if Jason Williams were accurate and not baked off his ass on five pounds of primo chiba.

He jumps just like his pappy!

Did you hear that the Pitt Panthers were playing without two starters? Did you hear that this will be the case for the next two months? So can we drop it now and move on to the basketball?

Because that’s what Pitt is doing.

The Panthers defeated Georgetown 69-60 last night at the Oakland Zoo in the regular season’s lone matchup between these latter day rivals. The game pitted the Big East’s most dominant young big man against the conferences elder giant. Some speculated that the 6′7″ monster known as Cloverfield DeJuan Blair would lose some of his effectiveness against the ungodly tall Roy Hibbert, but that was not the case. The freakishly long-armed freshman scored 15, grabbed nine rebounds and ate half of a Toyota Yaris The points were nice, but it was the rebounding that put a more physical Pitt team (does that go without saying yet?) ahead of the favored Hoyas.

Nobody could get the Georgetown offense going in the second half and Ronald Ramon’s hot shooting (finally) carried the Panthers to the nine point edge. Pitt now stands at 15-2 despite the losses of Levance Fields and Mike Cook while Georgetown’s second loss will leave them searching for answers.

One guy who can’t help is Chris Wright, the talented freshman scorer is out indefinitely with a broken foot. Now I’m not going to pretend to know how Chris got hurt (or you know, look it up) but I’ll bet it has something to do with the fucking cobblestones on 35th Street. When those fuckers get wet they start claiming ankles like Lance Stephenson.

One of the men pictured above is responsible for the success of the Saint Louis Billikens basketball program and the other is a goofy looking talisman, but they both enjoy a good luck belly rub. Neither one of them is doing their job all that well.

Last night Sweet Saint Lou set a new benchmark for shitty offense that will remain on the books for the rest of Rick Majerus’s life. That’s right, two full years! The Billikens were in my own backyard for a matchup with the Colonials of GW in what will surely go down as the worst basketball played in the District since the halcyon days of Craig Esherick. The team managed to eek out 20 points in the whole fucking game.

The numbers were about what you’d expect, 5% 3-point shooting, 14.6% overall from the field, and one 18 minute scoring drought. Jesus Christ, I got bored just typing that, imagine if I’d actually sat through the entire two hours of action basketball utter crap. If I had I can guarantee you that I wouldn’t be back here writing about the game. They’d still be picking little pieces of my corpse off of the Metro train.

By the way, Saint Louis lost by 29.

Billikens Blitzed
Billiken Basketball Blog Is Dark

The college basketball landscape is a vast, vast countryside with rolling meadows, open plains, treacherous cliffs, and other various biomes ripe for hyperbole. 35seconds would like to help everyone explore this random land of wonderment by bringing to light some lesser known programs. Whether they have bracket-busting aspirations, interesting back stories, or just give good mascot, there’s always room for some mid-major lovin’.

Tennessee State University Tigers (5-9, 2-3)-RPI: 233, currently unranked

Notable wins: at Illinois, at Eastern Illinois, Morehead State

Notable losses: at Indiana, at Vanderbilt, Georgia Tech

Located in Nashville, Tennessee, TSU is most known for being the alma mater of Oprah and her vast, vast, VAST media empire. While the school isn’t well known for much else and isn’t embroiled in an African boarding school debacle, the Tigers fight it out in the Ohio Valley Conference hoping to at least be the best team from Tennessee in the OVC. They are currently last in this regard behind Tennesse-Martin, Tennessee Tech, and Austin Peay. Austin Peay the statesman was also rumored to be one hell of a baller in his time, but now deceased, the spread would likely be something like the senator laying two and a hook. Junior guard Bruce Price leads the Tigers with 20pts and 5 assists, but honestly the only reason we noticed these guys at all is because we get the Big Ten Network, the official home of the nonconference upset. Here’s hoping they catch some more lightning in a bottle so we have an ironic 15 seed to pull for.

Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks (12-1, 0-0)-RPI: 69, currently unranked

Notable Wins: at Oklahoma, at SMU, at NIU,

Notable Losses: at Texas Tech

Ok, let’s get the details out of the way because there’s a lot of awesome rolling around the campus of SFASU that it would be a disservice to this column to ignore any part of it. The Lumberjacks are living up to their sweet name this year by doing some nice RPI damage in their non-conference schedule and it looks to be between them and last year’s equally great Southland candidate, The Texas A&M Corpus Christi Islanders. They will depend on juniors Matt Kingsley and Josh Alexander, each averages around 16.5 points and 5 rebounds a night.

With that out of the way, let’s dig in to the outstanding B stories long before the guys at CBS get their hands on them. A brief background in Texas history, Austin hates Houston, and Sam Houston is logically Stephen Austin’s chief rival. The members of the Sawyers carry axe handles into football games to intimidate their opponents, and get their own section of the stadium to wield their festive bludgeoning instruments. The basketball team has their own brand of crazy, with a section devoted to Purple Haze, the rabid fans, the Jimi Hendrix song, and one of the nicknames for a festive party beverage. As far as notable alumni go, we have to defer to Joseph W. Kennedy, the co-discoverer of plutonium. Plutonium fucking rocks.

Hey there, everyone. Katie Ralston here of your local friendly Champaign-Urbana chapter of the Illini Bandwagon. I just wanted to remind everyone that we are still having weekly meetings at The White Horse at 6pm every Wednesday. Come on in and enjoy the $1.50 drafts and $5 pitchers of yummy spiced rum and Pepsi as we all get geared up for Karaoke at 9.

I know its been a rough year being a member of the Illini bandwagon and all, and sure, we suck some righteous ass right now, but that’s no reason to not support how much we don’t hate our sort of favorite team. Right? Right? Right. We all know there’s just so many reasons why the team is struggling this year, and all of it is completely not our fault. Its so hard to win at Illinois because we’re so awesome and the deck is stacked against us almost every night. We need to stick together like the temporary counsel of indigenous peoples that this school represent and show our love for the team or at least the color orange, which by the way is totally ridonk with practically everything.

Looking at the year so far, its not that much of a surprise to the loyal bandwagoner why we’re getting slapped around by the Penn States of the world. I mean, seriously, Penn State? Ewww. Its obvious that they had some help to get out of the House of Paign alive. The refs were clearly on their side the whole night. No matter how much my friends and I screamed our love for Stevey Holdren (so cute!) those losers wouldn’t give us any breaks. Good thing Coach Weber didn’t put him in, because he totally would have thrown some fucking elbows in their face just because. Our man’s got five fouls to give, and at least one of them is going to be a forearm to some unsuspecting phony major dumbass. Maybe they don’t teach “Not getting kicked in the teeth” at places like Tennessee State. Our school is so much smarter than that.  I wanted to punch them with brass knuckles covered in razor wire after that one.  Christ.

Why don’t these retarded visiting teams just realize how insanely good we are and just lie down? Its because they are all out to get us. Everyone has painted a target on the Illini’s back just because of all of the things that we do so much better than them, like accounting and stuff, but even that shit about how we invented the internet. Look it up, bitches. Its really just the conference doesn’t want us to completely take over. Its absolutely them, the networks, and the Jews. Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on out there, guys. you know they totally told that limp-wristed Eric Gordon to go to Indiana and paid Bill Self to go start his crazy church missionary crap out there in Kansas. Fuckers.

Anyway, be sure to come by this week when we plan on doing ass loads of shots with Dee Brown, he’s pretty much here every night.

Billy Gillespie is probably picking up ‘For Sale’ signs off of his front lawn at this hour. Louisville, struggling with its own problems right now, took the Wildcats to task in front of the hostile crowd at Rupp Arena that practially blue itself in disgust. The Cardinals were deep and fast with a defensive presence full of the double entendres. Senior forward Juan Palacios returned after being injured for 10 games, putting up 17 points with 6 rebounds and 4 assists. Right about now, Kentucky fans are probably inching very closely to the “Fire Coach” lever which, if you are not familiar with it, looks remarkably like Conan O’Brien’s “Walker, Texas Ranger” lever.

Louisville 89 – Kentucky 75

#16 Villanova walked into the Allstate Arena last night prepared to walk all over the suffering Blue Demons.  DePaul was not expected to stay with the Wildcats, but opened up an 18-8 lead out of spite.  Villanova never got closer than 5 points after that, and suffice to say, their coach was not pleased.  Techinical foul awarded to the Pinstriped One as his team start the Big East season with a weak road loss.  Depaul’s senior guard Draelon Burns scored 20 points as the Demons led by as much as 16 points midway through the second.  His performance earns him a fashionable new set of cement shoes and some nice fresh fish on his visit to Philly next Wednesday.

DePaul 84-Villanova 76