Last item for today, the TV schedule for Friday's games
Fri March 9, 2007
Reader Segment (sort of)
Thank you Engin Atsur for leading the Wolfpack into an excellent victory over the dirty-deeds-done-dirt-cheap Dookies!. Thank you NC State! Thank you Sidney Lowe! Thank you bright red jacket! Thank you! Take that Dirty Dookies! What are you going to whine about this time Dirty-K? Oh this is so exciting :-) Meanwhile the Big 10 doesn't really help itself after three slugfests galore in the opening round as Michigan, Michigan State and Illinois barely beat inferior opponents but lose points on the qualitative aspect of their sub-50 game... Doug Gottlieb: "The Arizona Wildcats should change their name to the Dogs" (after their horrible performance against Oregon... Doug Gottlieb: "Air Force should still be in despite their loss to Wyoming"... Yet another instant classic between West Virginia and Louisville. Memo to Big East schedulers: these teams should play each other twice per year, not zero times!.
Tubby on being on the hot seat: On his own TV show Tubby mentioned that he is not affected by all the naysayers and criticism, and he went back to the examples of someone trying to feed his family, or people dealing with natural disasters being serious issues, not the criticism by demanding fans. Tubby: "the players recover a lot quicker than we do... we grown-ups tend to harbor a lot of malice and bad thoughts...". He was talking about recovering from a tough loss, but he could have easily been talking about all the critics :-)
Hope lives for these Bid Stealer Hopefuls: California, NC State, Miami, and Wyoming...
Pink Slip Madness St Bonaventure fires head coach Anthony Solomon. Now all the NY/NJ-area assistants and mid/low-major coaches will be looking for the Bonnies AD cell phone number... Apparently there is smoke and fire in the sudden Pokey Chapman resignation at LSU (women's basketball team).
Update 550pm/850pm ET: The 420 Bears have done it! The 420 Bears have done it! The 420 Bears have done it! This busts open the Pac-10 brackets, and at the same time a heavy cloud moves over UCLA's hopes for a #1 seed. Cal's Ubaka had another clutch performance with 29 points. Meanwhile the player of the year award anchored Afflalo to just 3 points. Ben Howland should have been T'ed a couple of occasions where he was inside the lines playing defense and he partially but inconsequently affected the game. The refs should really give him a warning. This is really embarassing for the UCLA coach to be acting like a Little League dad. The Ben Howland House of Cards is falling apart. Or may not. They only lost two back-to-back games. UCLA is not Kentucky after all... With 4 minutes to go, Sidney Lowe's 300 are still valiently fighting the Dirty Dookies. Lowe's bright red jacket must be lighting rooms with big-screen TVs... Instant update: Thank you Gavin Grant! NC State is up by 4 with 3 minutes left!
Update 5pm/8pm ET: The Cal Bears despite being so tired (insert Ozzy's song here), are giving UCLA all they can handle. Has Ben Howland burnt out his team? Has he overcoached him? Has he drained the lifeforce out of them like Coach Dirty-K does?
Update 430pm pacific/730pm eastern: Chicken or the egg? Lute Olson has been an outspoken critic of the conference tourney and his team has not done well in it... The fastest first 4 minutes in a game? It only took 4:35 of wall clock time to play the first 4:04 of game time of Arizona vs Oregon... The FSN reporter mentioned that Ernie Kent made a cellphone call after being told about the four teams sporting the new unis, but not the Nike Ducks. Speaking of the unis, this is the first major uniform overhaul since 1990... On top of that, Ernie Kent has found the secret to beating Washington State: you have a higher percentage if you hoist wild shots than if you go against the set Cougars defense... The new Nike unis are not doing so well, their record is 1-2 so far... Thank you NC State! They are currently ahead of the Dirty Dookies. Sidney Lowe's 300 are ready to pull the upset!!! Go Pack!... Keeping the dream alive: Morris Almond and Rice beat #2 seed UCF and move on to the C-USA semifinals. Miami upsets Maryland and moves on to face Boston College. This in turn makes the game a must win for Boston College, and open up the door for Florida State to go to the ACC final if they can beat Carolina. Let's not forget that FSU is an athletic team and Virginia Tech swept NC. However FSU does not have two big, athletic, talented, and mature guards like Jamon Gordon and Zabian Dowdell.
Over-valued: Notre Dame With Digger singing Notre Dame every time the camera turns on him, some people may have forgotten to actually look at the Domer's record. They won @Maryland, but that was before Maryland re-imagined themselves. Regardless a very good win. Then what? Their only other OOC win was a struggling Alabama team (at home), and other than a loss to Butler, the next best OOC team they played was a #199 RPI (Rider). Nice, very nice! Load up the cupcakes please... In the Big East they were mediocre on the road (with the exception of a win @Syracuse). Their best at home wins were Louisville (when they were struggling), Nova, West Virginia, Marquette and Providence. I am not sure this is an NCAA lock resume. I'm not saying they won't get in, but the resume is not particularly impressive. They played five conference games against teams that didn't make the Big East tourney (out of 16 conference games). I really don't like it when teams line up cupcakes at home and Notre Dame scheduled 9 of them. Sorry Domers, but as far as I am concerned you are in the bubble group, not the locks group :-)
Update 1pm pacific/4pm eastern: Continuing the trend of big leads but not closing the door from the two Pac-10 games last night, Georgetown owned Nova but then they let them back in... In the play-out game, Florida State squeaked by Clemson (thank you Al Thornton for the free throw). Florida State (which was left out last year) has been undervalued because people ignored the injury of Toney Douglas. Florida State should be in if they have a good showing against Carolina... Michigan tempts the selection cmte to leave them out by slug-festing a win over the mediocre (at best) Minnesota TimberGophers (yes, another 48-40 game in the Big Bore)...
The NCAA selection committee has stressed year over year the value of playing road/neutral games and playing a challenging schedule. They went out of their way to encourage this by adjusting the RPI to give more weight to road wins. And here is where Drexel is a poster-child for this. Aside from having one of the coolest nicknames and mascots (Dragons), they are 13-4 in road games this year. This is just road games, not road/neutral. In neutral games they are 1-1 (CAA conference tourney), although their loss was a semi-away game (played almost on VCU's campus). However, some of the road wins were Big 5+ games, which are more semi-away than road games. Regardless those wins are "very nice" as Borat would say, three Big 5+ wins (Drexel being the "+" in Big 5 since they are not officially in the Big 5, but they play them anyways). The three Big 5+ wins: Villanova, Temple and St Joe. The only Big 5 team they lost to was Penn (they didn't play La Salle). Other road wins of note: @Vermont, @Syracuse and @Creighton. Also "very nice". They split two overtime games with Hofstra (each winning on each others' home floor). They are 0-4 against ODU and VCU, but that's more of a reflection of how good ODU and VCU are. Why pick a team like Syracuse that sits at home and tries to eat 13 cupcakes (and can't even do that) instead of picking a team that actually played and won road/neutrals? Their 3-1 record in Big 5 games is also another indicator that this team would do well in a neutral tourney environment. ODU has a big win @Georgetown. Hofstra herself is not a bad team, but their record is not pretty enough for NCAA consideration (not that it helped them last year when they had a prettier record). On the plus side this will get Tom Pecora a more prominent role on CSTV's March Madness coverage. Why is that important? The CSTV karma! The CSTV karma got Seth Greenberg a great season this year after his stint as CSTV analyst! Also watch for CSTV karma rewards in the next two years for Gonzo (Seton Hall's Bobby Gonzalez) and Norm Roberts (St Johns). Okay where am I? I think I was trying to make a point or two. Oooh the Drexel Dragons. If they don't get in, and some wishy-washy flaky BCS team with 1-2 road wins gets in instead of them, then the NCAA selection cmte should not be taken seriously... Speaking of which, Billy Packer has promised that he will reveal some intriguing suggestion to the selection sunday on Selection Sunday, presumably when he and his caddy (Jim Nantz, fitting since he does a lot of golf tourneys) interview the selection cmte chair after the brackets are announced. Not sure if it will be groundbreaking suggestion or some silly pro-BCS silliness... Okay back to the Drexel Dragons, from a TV ratings perspective, think of how many new fans will tune in to see the cool Dragon mascot! The UAB Blazers won't be there this year... But seriously, this is (as others have said) a litmus test of how serious the NCAA suits are about playing a tough/challenging road schedule and winning some of them.
TV Listings
*** all times pacific; add +3 for eastern ***
* 9am, 11am, 6pm, ACC Round 1, Games 1, 2 and 4
* 9am, 11am, 4pm, 6pm, MAC quarterfinals
* 930am, 12pm, 4pm, Big 12 Round 1 games
* 10am, 1215pm, 430pm, 645pm, SEC Round 1 games
* 11am, 130pm, 5pm, 730pm, WAC quarterfinals
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