Monday Rewind

Newspaper alert! Every Tuesday, the multicolor fishwrap (Jim Rome's term for USA Today) has increased college basketball coverage and features, including a column by the one and only Dick Vitale. The stories usually appear at usatoday.com as well.

Shape of things to come for Texas A&M in the NCAAs? A Final Four caliber crew was officiating the Texas-TexasA&M game last night. Even though the game was played at College Station, A&M was called for a number of fouls, putting most of their players on the bench. If refs start calling all the wrestlemania fouls that Texas A&M and UCLA usually get away with, they will have an unpleasant March. After all, the game is basketball, not wrestling, not bodybuilding, not WWF, not pushing/shoving/bumping.

Jeff Ruland is officially the new Debbie Downer of college hoops. He blasted his players in public for celebrating their first win of the season.

We should really stop praising teams simply because they have 20+ wins. Twenty wins alone are not a good indicator. Who did you play, when and where? Take UConn and Syracuse, they stay at home and get 10-12 almost guaranteed out of conference wins. So they only need 8-10 conference/tourney wins and they automatically have a 20-win season. I suggest including an RPI/SOS rating next to a coach's winning record!. Now who wants to calculate it? :-)

Virginia is enjoying great success this year and don't look now but their five starters were recruited by... Pete Gillan!

Vitale Alert! Dick Vitale has switched his player of the year from Wisconsin's Alando Tucker to Texas's Kevin Durant. On a totally unrelated note the switch was made yesterday when he was doing a Texas game. Perfect timing baby ;-)

How the darlings have fallen!. George Mason went from everyone's favorite Cinderella to now being relegated to ESPN360 for its Bracket Busters game.

As if his past troubles were not enough, Todd Bozeman got in trouble in a restaurant by allegedly making physical contact with a waitress, after a team loss. Ouch!

You Decide: Doug Gottlieb has repeatedly made the point of critizing Roy Williams (both at Kansas and at North Carolina) for having a deep rotation and because of that his teams are not able to maintain a flow. He also claimed that he has lost some NCAA games because of this. Good point or not?

You know what the basketball polls remind me of? The Music Charts! Teams go up and down slowly and steadily, even if they play like a low-major (Alabama) or if they lose back to back games (Duke, Oregon). Also teams creep up when other teams/singles lose (fall down), even though they don't really deserve to go up... So let's call them The BillBoard Hot 25!.


Winningest Active Coaches
Let's recap so far. Two interesting battles are taking place, Coach K creeping up on the Silver Fox, and Jim Boeheim regaining lost ground on Jim Calhoun)
1. Bob Knight, 884 (42 season)
2. Silver Fox, (aka Lute Olson, not Olsen), 776 (34)
3. Coach AMEX ShoeChefSki K, 771 (32)
4. Jim Calhoun, 748 (35)
5. Jim Boeheim, 742 (31)


Media Segment

With football and the SuperBowl out of the way, watch for increased college basketball coverage on all the daily shows on ESPN, such as Cold Pizza, award winning PTI, Jim Rome, Quite Frankly, Outside the Lines, Around the Horn, ESPN News's The Hot List, and even Mike & Mike.

Props to CSTV's Crystal Ball. Even though ESPN has a lot more resources, a lot more analysts, and half a dozen channels, they have not been able to make a fun and versatile show like CSTV's Crystal Ball. It gets my unofficial award for Weekly College Basketball Show. Each new show debuts on Monday at 5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern, and repeats a few more times later on. It blends highlights, predictions of upcoming games, coach segments, spirited discucssions, chalk talk, campus visits with Brian Curtis, HBCU player of the week, in-studio guests, even simulated games via video game promos.

If you like blended movie trailers with basketball promos, you will love the new "Ghost Rider" movie promotion that blends in ESPN's college basketball coverage.

The National media (ESPN, FSN Sunday Night Hoops) gets frequently criticized for crawling with Dookies, from Jay Bilas, honorary Dookies Dick Vitale and Mike Patrick, Mike Gminski, Feinstein, Jay Williams, the interim Duke coach, etc, etc. However let's get the FSNs of SoCal some love for being UCLA homers, the most obnoxious one being Don MacLean who is also doing Bruins radio (which unlike TV, it is allowed to cheer for the home team). Other UCLA homers crawling on the SoCal FSNs: Jack Haley, Sean Farham. The only one of the UCLA alums that is not a total homer is the one and only Marques Johnson (which explains why he is the #1 basketball analyst on FSN).

Just after I finished praising Seth Davis for being a rising star in the basketball analyst world, he starts cheering for Duke like a Cameron Crazy on CSTV's Crystal Ball.

Stacy Delles Shuman (not the right spelling) is now the new Big Monday analyst with a fresh perspective on things. ESPN has gone with a men's/women's duo of Digger and Stacy, instead of having two sets of analysts for Big Mondays. Women's games are usually on ESPN2 on Big Monday.