All you can eat Fridays!

Lorenzo Mata is the definition of "wrestlemania defense": Last night he blocked the head of an Arizona State player while trying to block his shot. I'll try to find/post a picture of that play. Speaking of the winless Iona State (oops Arizona State) FSN analysts Dan Belluomini and Barry Thompkins speculated that ASU may be next year's Washington State.

Philly rumors: Geno's is better! Ooops wrong rumor: Jay Wright to the 76ers? Dick Vitale pleaded for Jay Wright to stay in college baby!

One year after the story of J-Mac captured the hearts of people all around the world ESPN featured a story on the impact of the J-Mac story on the Connelys who have a three year old autistic child. Incidentally Terry Connelly (the father) played at Richmond when they upset Syracuse in the NCAAs a few years ago. Both parents are basketball coaches.

TV review of this week's episode of Seth Davis Generation Next at Recruiting Wars

Don't miss Kevin Durant as special correspondant on Jim Rome in Burning today. Details at my TV listings post below.

Scottie Pippen considering a comeback ?!?!?!

It's bad enough that athletes, coaches and sports fans in general have to deal with certain negative stereotypes from the non-sports-fan segment of society. Tim Hardaway's breakaway hatorade dunk doesn't help in bridging the gap...

Media-savvy John Calipari appeared yesterday on "Jim Rome is Burning". Calipari pointed out that he likes to have as many neutral games in his the non-conference schedule as possible, because the NCAA tourney is played on neutral courts most of the time, so true road games are not as helpful. But he also pointed out that last year's Regional Final was played at "Pauly Pavilion" (basically implying that even though Memphis was the #1 seed, the game was played just 5 hours away from the UCLA campus in Oakland, in an arena filled with UCLA fans). So perhaps a couple of hostile road games can help in situations like that? Calipari couldn't help but mention that Derrick Rose is coming next year!, and what a brief what-if segment if Amare Stoudamire and a couple of other NBA draft picks showed up on campus.


ACC segment

Memo to ACC Purists: For years you have been telling everyone that the ACC is the best conference top to bottom. Well, how come two Big East football schools are sitting on top of your elite basketball conference?????. Explain that please :-)

Coach K was caught by the ESPN cameras acting like Coach Krazy during the game at Boston College.

Coach K has a number of seminars for business/inudstry leaders on leadership and success. I imagine it may be hard to promote these seminars with a losing conference record. But I'm sure Coach Krazy is smart enough to re-market his seminars as "Handling Advertisity", "Understanding Defeat", "Winning by Losing" and "Losing with Dignity" :-)


Of Brackets and Men segment

Let's give the NIT some love! NITology.com> predicts the field of the NIT. This year the NIT will be even more difficult for the "bcs" teams to make. The number of teams has been reduced from 40 to 32 so it can have a more NCAA-like feel with balanced brackets and regional sites. A recent change giving the regular season conference winners an automatic NIT bid won't make the "bcs" teams happy either. Theoretically a maximum of 31 of the 32 bids could be automatic if the winners of every conference's regular season don't get an NCAA bid. In practice, the winners of the regular seasons of the six "bcs" are almost guaranteed to get an at-large bid, so that number is down to 25. Historically a large number of non-bcs regular season conference champions earn at large NCAA bids, so the number of automatic NIT bids will be much less than 25. So when you look at the NIT projection table at NITology.com, you can assume that at least the last four teams In will be left out because of automatic NIT bids.

TheBracketboard.com has a bracket-implications preview of the weekend action.

Beano Cook on ESPN News: Cap the number of bids per conference! Beano wants at most half of the teams of a conference to get NCAA bids (eg max 8 from the Big East, max 6 from the ACC, SEC, max 5 from the Pac-10, and the Valley of Darkness). While Beano's intentions are noble, such a move would inhibit the "free market" nature of the selection progress. With just 5 teams from the Pac-10, one of these would be left out: Arizona, or Oregon or Stanford. And how about the ACC? Only one of these teams would get a bid: Georgia Tech, Florida State, Clemson, Maryland, NC State. I'm no Dan Bonner (ACC homer), but that doesn't seem fair. Beano makes a good point that the smaller (conference) teams should be given a chance to play in the NCAAs, but you don't do that by capping conference bids, you do that by giving mid-major teams bids, just like they did last year with George Mason. It's no secret that the last few years the bias has been towards the "bcs" conferences. Beano also makes a good point on the opening round game which deprives one of the smaller schools from the real March Madness experience. I would have no problem if they reduced the field to 64. But it may be even more fun if they have a four game opening round bracket buster where the last four in face the last four out. Or if the NCAA is feeling bold, they can square off four "bcs" teams vs four "mid-major" teams. How about that?