Daily Tourney Talk: Quick hitters

In case you missed the promos on ESPN, Bob Knight returns to the ESPN studios on Wednesday! Watch out! With Bilas out of the way (he is doing NCAA games for CBS), Knight will get more face time!

Is it me, or does Sean Miller, the Xavier coach, sound like his former associate, Herb Sendek on the phone? (No, he hasn't called me, but when he was talking to the ESPNers).

Congratulations to CSTV for making the splashy transition to CBS College Sports! Last night they had the debut of their own version of "Sportscenter for College sports", they call it "College Sports Tonight", with Greg Amsinger and Adam Zucker.

Speaking of CBS College Sports (aka CSTV), it is interesting that their college basketball team closely resembles the ESPN in their make-up: They have the Big East Coach guy (Digger Phelps vs Steve Lapas), the West Coast guy (Steve Lavin vs Sean Farnham), the Duke-vs-UNC guy (Hubert Davis vs Ja(y)son Williams, and the commanding point guard (Reece Davis vs Greg Amsinger). And they both have their Andy Katz, Andy Katz vs Brian Curtis. Wow, a five on five matchup!

And while we are on TV, be sure to check our on-going March Madness TV listings, starting with a summary of the three post season tournaments (NCAA, NIT, and CBI), and then following up with detailed daily listings. As always, be sure to always double-check with your local listings. All times mentioned here are Pacific time (unless otherwise indicated). This is a west coast bias blog, although we trash the west coast teams most of the time ;-)

And more on the TV topic, the NCAA first day press conferences will be launching on ESPN News on Wednesday. And speaking of ESPN News, in a couple of weeks they will be launching ESPNews-HD, with brand new shiny studios and more information (jam)-packed in the high def tv screen.

Money money money! Andy Katz said on this morning's "Cold Pizza" (okay, First Take) on ESPN2 that the NCAA is sugar-coating the play-in game with hard cash, as the winner of the game gets one full-share of the revenue, which would be about 1 million $200,000 or so. So now all the university administrators and bureaucrats will lobby for their teams to play in the opening round game, because let's face it, you have a much higher chance to win the opening round game, than beat the #1 or the #2 seed in the "actual" NCAA tourney :)


NBA Draft 2008 here we come!
NC State's prodigal freshman JJ Hickson will declare for the 2008 NBA Draft but not hire an agent. Some of the tv talking heads mentioned team chemistry issues, so perhaps it may not be as big of a loss. One of those "addition by subtraction" type of things?