Daily Bubble Talk (Midnight Madness edition)

Automatic NCAA bids: Penn, Belmont, Davidson, Winthrop and Eastern Kentucky

Automatic NIT bids: Austin Peay, East Tennessee State

Valley of Darkness: The coaches of Indiana State and Evansville have just resigned, just hours after they lost in the MVC tourney.

Marquette just beat Pitt without McNeal (out for the game) and Dominique James (injured during the game)

Great win for NC State's women's team and coach Kay Yow in her continuing battle with cancer

ESPN's Midnight Madness projected the field of 65, chosing 12 teams out of a field of 23 bubble teams.


Who helped themselves?

Kansas State beating Oklahoma

Florida State with Toney Douglas back made a furious comeback behind a 45er from Al Thornton and won at Miami in overtime

Arkansas got a nice win @ Vandy

Villanova beat Syracuse at home

Iowa outgrinded Illinois

Texas Tech winning at Iowa State


Who hurt themselves?

Oklahoma State losing at Baylor, without Boggan and despite 40+ from JamesON Curry

Illinois losing at Iowa

Georgia losing at home to Tennessee

Michigan fumbled the game, a microcosm of their season. The winds of change are blowing across the land (Utah, New Mexico, MVC, very recently), will another NIT trip be enough to keep Tommy "Dookie" Amaker at Ann Arbor?


Who stayed the course?

Xavier winning at LaSalle

Notre Dame winning at Rutgers

Purdue, West Virginia, Ole Miss, Drexel, San Diego State and DePaul winning as they were expected to.


Game Notes

Bill Self should have taken the free throws on AJ Abrams. Instead he insisted on the correct call and instead of two free throws, AJ Abramas scored a three-pointed on them. Sometimes being right is ...wrong

Ben Howland is going to break all of Pete Gillen's timeout records. He used four of them in the first half at Washington

If you are an upcoming Top 20 recruit and you watched the top games in each conference where do you want to play after watching Texas at Kansas, UCLA at Washington State and Wisconsin at Ohio State? Where do you think the next Kevin Durant is likely to go if he had to chose from those six?

Check the last February edition of Sports Illustrated for a three-page story on North Carolina's offense. The story by Grant Wahl (sp?) has two pages of text, one picture and a small Xs and Os diagram.

This time of the year the cliche is to say that "freshmen become sophomores". Well, in the case of Texas, after so many highly-contested multiple overtime games, the freshmen have become "redshirt sophomores" :-) Overtime games are a good teaching tool

Good luck Dick Vitale getting into the Hall of Fame after those Hooters commercials<. There is a segment of basketball purists who do not vote Vitale in the Hall of Fame because they consider him a circus act that takes the spotlight away from the game. The Hooters ad will only cement that perception and perhaps get a few voters on the fence join them...


Media Segment

ESPN's Cold Pizza mistakenly presented highlights from the CIAA tourney and said they were high-school teams. No Cold Pizza, they are a Division 2 college teams!

ESPN News had a segment with CBS Sportsline personality Greg Doyel who took a few parting shots at some of the ESPN analysts