Virginia Tech, you are awesome with capital V baby!!!

It's awesome baby! It's unbelievable baby! Virginia Tech has beaten the Dookies! Oh the joy! The jubilation! A fair and square win, with the Dookies fumbling and crumbling like a house of cards at the end of the game. It's unbelievable! Thank you Seth Greenberg for a great victory against the most overhyped team in the history of team sports!

I am surprised Vitale did not cry because his Dookies lost :-)

Kentucky Midnight Madness live on ESPN3.com now!

Kentucky's 2010-2011 Midnight Madness is live right now at ESPN3.com. ESPN3 is what was ESPN360.com and it is usually included for free by your internet service provider (eg AT&T, Comcast, etc). If you just tuned in and you see the "Please Stand By. This event will resume shortly" message it means they are on a commercial break, and ESPN3 is not showing the commercials. You are not missing any action. There is nothing wrong with your computer. Just wait for the commercial to end and the Midnight Madness netcast will resume :)

Also of interest, the ESPNU College Hoops podcast has a new episode with Doug Gottlieb and Andy Katz.

Wowie, it feels like yesterday that the Evil Empire of the Dookies stole yet another championship!

Mark your calendars: Midnight Madness on Friday October 15 on ESPNU

Where did all the time go? That is a very good question! Already the traditional college basketball season preview magazines are in the bookstores! And Midnight Madness is just around the corner, Friday October 15, 2010! ESPNU and ESPNU-HD (where available) are planning a four hour extravaganza, with Andy Katz, Lefty, and more of the usual suspects! If ESPNU is not available in your area, check ESPN3.com (formerly ESPN360). Currently their schedule does not have anything planned for Midnight Madness but you never know!

Kentucky and Calipari break NBA Draft first-round record

Uber-salesman John Calipari has managed to put Kentucky in the NBA Draft history book by having five of his players getting drafted in the first round of the NBA Draft in 2010. This breaks the record of four players in the first-round of a particular draft held by UConn, North Carolina and the despicable lowlifes (Dookies) ;-)

Daniel Orton sealed the deal at #29. This is of course a bittersweet moment for the Kentucky fans - imagine what type of a super-team they would have had in 2010-2011 if these five stayed! No chance of a Dookie repeat!

Oklahoma is Pacific coast beach-front now

It looks like the "suits" running the conferences have gone completely mad. Now the Pac-10 appears to want to assimilate every team east of New York. Nothing says Pacific Coast Conference like Oklahoma and Lubbock, Texas. Sorry son, you won't play at Pauly Pavilion this year - you get Lubbock instead. And you don't even get Bob Knight there!

The news of a 16-team mega Pac-10 conference are making the rounds on the internets and this is just insane. It looks like the Big 12 teams have given up on beating Kansas so they are all trying to bolt out for other conferences.

On the plus side, it could make for some interesting "culture wars" match-ups, Berkeley vs Stillwater, Eugene vs Lubbock, Palo Alto vs Norman.

Surely, this is all about the student-athletes, this is not professional sports. Not professional sports when it comes to paying the student-athletes without whom there wouldn't be NCAA sports. But everybody else seems to get paid and paid well - from the work of the student-athletes.

Farewell Coach Wooden

At the age of 99, John Wooden has passed away. ESPN has a lot of stories covering the life of Coach Wooden. Words are really not enough, never enough to describe his impact in the lives of many people, on and off the court. His words and his work will remain with us for the many centuries to come.

Big news: Every NCAA tourney game on TV!

You no longer have to beg, borrow or steal bandwidth and other people's laptops if you want to watch every single NCAA game! As part of the new TV deal, every single game will be on TV! This is because CBS is now joined by Turner Networks, and they plan to show every game live. ESPN would obviously have been a great candidate as well, since they have more channels and they specialize in college hoops, unlike the Turner Network which speacializes in the NBA and reruns ;-)

The deal runs from 2011 to 2014, and in addition to CBS, games will be shown on TBS, TNT, and TruTV (formerly CourtTV).

The shocker in this is that going forward (after 2016), yikes (!), the Final Four will be alternating between CBS and TBS. What the fuck is the right reaction here!

The games will continue to be available via online streaming as well!

ESPN tried to get the TV rights but unfortunately it did not win. Having the tourney on the ESPN family would have probably been better. Fans already know where to find ESPN, ESPN2, and many have access to either ESPU, ESPN Classic or ESPN News. Plus they could show games on ABC for a national TV audience. And if they needed more channels, they could put some games on the Disney Channel!

This means college hoops fans will need to make adjustments to their current cable, satellite and DVR plans if they want to watch everything. More on that as the details and scheduling becomes more clear!

Perhaps because of this deal, TBS/TNT may try to add some regular season or conference championship basketball games, so they can "warm up" before the actual tourney!

68 teams is a sensible expansion to the field

It's a good thing common sense still exists. It looks like the 96-team crazy-talk was shut off, and now the talk is a 68-team tournament. This is great news. Now one thing that they have to make sure is that the opening round should only include bubble teams. It's not fair to send all the smaller conference automatic bids to the opening round!

And I am not the only one who wants this! Dana O'Neill has a long writeup about this very topic at ESPN.com. And Dana makes a great point - it would get the TV networks higher ratings if they have bubble-teams in the opening round, instead of small low-major schools that the majority of sports fans are not familiar with.

Lunardi is super-excited, he won't have to have a 96-team field to bracketologize for half a year :-)

Vitale tried to comment on this, but the most interesting thing he said is that complaining he paid $25 for a haircut :)

One of the coaches that would have probably been covered by the 68 one too many times is Seth Greenberg of Virginia Tech. Meanwhile, Jim Boeheim wants more - I guess he wants to play Vermont every year :-)

Obvious Scheyer foul screwed up by zebras costs Butler their championship

Once again, the zebras hand the dirty dookies another win. In what was a 100% obvious Scheyer foul, the zebras took two points away from Butler and a free throw by Gordon Howard, and those three points the zebras stole from Butler were what they needed to win the championship!

Yet another stolen victory by the Ratzilla! Booooooo!

Nooooooooo! Coach Satanefski can't win it! all!!

Nooooooooooooo! Duke and Coach Satanefski cannot win the championship! Butler MUST win! And we all know the NCAA, the zebras, and CBS establishment are going to do everything in their power to get the Dookies the win ;-) And how can you beat them, they foul a million times per possession (that's their "tough defense") but it rarely gets called! Nooooooooooooooo!

Congratulations to the Butler Bulldogs once again!

This is a-we-some with capital A as Ricardo Vitali says on ESPN! Congratulations Butler Bulldogs for beating Izzo State and making it to the NCAA Tournament Championship Final! Mid-majors of the world unite and take-over! Yeeeeha!!!! :-)

Regardless of who wins game #2, we are 100% behind Butler winning the championship! This would be ultra-cool!!!

Does Calipari need his own Larry Shyatt? (a seasoned and grizzled deputy?)

It is no secret that Calipari is not exactly at his best at making in-game adjustments. And this has cost him some high-profile games in the NCAA tournament, including the NCAA Championship itself. So perhaps it may be time for Calipari to seriously consider getting a seasoned and grizzled former head-coach or career-assistant as his deputy, to fill-in the gaps and take some game pressure off.

This is by no means an admission of defeat - a number of Hall of Famers have done this. Calhoun with Blaney, Boeheim with Bernie Fine, and such. And if it wasn't for Larry Schyatt could "Billy the Kid" win back-to-back national championships? Probably not!

And there's more! Roy Williams has both Steve Robinson and Larry Bird look-a-like as assistants. And Dean Smith in an informal advisory role.

Needless to say, Coach K has the most high profile veteran assistant of all. I'm sure you all know who. If you are not sure who, just look at the team's logo/mascot ;-)