Weekend Rewind

An exciting round of Bracket Busters with an ESPN2 marathon on Saturday. Rick Majerus was featured on the spotlight game of Southern Illinois at Butler and how appropriate since both teams are big on basketball fundamentals. Is Chris Lowry the next Bill Self? A number of teams helped themselves (especially the ones with road wins), the biggest one perhaps Appalachian State, no longer just a stop along the ...Trail :-)

One more reason not to have your son on your team if you are the basketball coach of a high profile "bcs" program: D U I (Mike Anderson of Missouri). Also a good reason not to give your son the same name :-) And let's not forget the "daughter" comments, even from Jim Rome (The Jungle) when Tubby's son played on his team.

What do blind resumes of teams do? They expose the limits of RPI, SOS and win/loss records as exclusive evaluation tools.

The Lasme show! This player made a splash in his freshman year when UMass was quasi-relevant in the grand scheme of things, but after UMass/Lappas continued to struggle, Lasme fell off the radar. But no more! He's back on the spotlight with three triple-doubles so far.

Never too early for senior night. Arizona's Shakur and Radenovic played their last home game last night. More on Arizona later on.

Ben Howland is a REBEL! At least that's what the card he was holding said.

17 is the magic number this season. Keep this number in mind when filling your brackets in March

What's this new trend with coaches mixing it up with players? First it was John Beilein (who also had an incident at a Pitt airport last summer) vs Pat Ewing, this time it is Kevin Stallings vs Joakim Noah. Funny that the players behaved more like mature adults in both situations!

Media Segment

Only Phil Martelli could do this: He (mistakenly) mentioned matter of factly that Bob Dylan is dead. This on his weekly Hawk Talk coaches show airing nationally on CSTV.

Fake basketball analysts: Please stop using the 20-win rule of thumb to decide if a team is in or out. Crossing 20 doesn't work anymore. Who did you play, when, where and how well? That's what matters. Lining up a dozen of cupcakes (or more since everyone can host an exempt tourney at their home court nowadays) in the out of conference schedule can even give a team who may not make the NIT 20 wins. So please stop saying "they need 20 wins". Stop! Stop! Stop! :-)

ESPN was trying to advertise a Duke Lacrosse game without actually mentioning the words "Duke" and "Lacrosse" together. I wonder why...

While this is not an "E!" blog, (and no I don't have any pictures of a shaved head Britney) one would have to try hard not to avoid noticing what Brett Musburger was wearing during the NASCAR promos. Was that a blend of Nascar-GQ with Golf-TV?