National Bracket Day on Monday at noon EST (free online!)

Turner Sports will be working with the NCAA to produce a live show broadcast online for free at NCAA.com starting "Bracket Monday" March 14, 2011 at 12pm EASTERN (9am PACIFIC) that will talk about ...brackets and filling brackets and the whole madness about the madness.

Meanwhile, if you missed some of the ESPN action or you are away from your cable/satellite box, the ESPN YouTube channel has clips from the never-ending ESPN bracketology with Bilas, Digger, Dookie Dookitale, and friends.

There's also an interview with selection cmte chair Gene Smith at the ESPN College Basketball Nation blog.

I think we need more OPENNESS in the selection process. Just like the Courts write long-winded explanations on how they reached their decisions, the Selection Cmte should also justify in an open manner how they pick and seed the teams! Someone needs to file a FOIA? :)

Selection Cmte puts many slugfest teams in Pitt region

The NCAA Selection Cmte is getting a lot of yelling for the way they picked and seeded the last few at-large entries, but one thing they did right is they put a lot of the slugfest teams in the same sub-region, guaranteeing that seven of the eight brackets will have watchable games :) The slugfest sub-region includes Pitt, Wisonsin, Kansas State, Utah State and ODU :-)

The selection cmte, perhaps also "optimizing" for television ratings, has set up (intentionally or not) some interesting and potential "matchups with baggage" such as:


Actual Matchups
* Arizona vs Memphis (Josh Pastnor was a former Arizona player and assistant)
* UNLV vs Illinois (Lon Kruger used to coach Illinois)


Potential 2nd round (now 3rd round) matchups
* UCLA vs Florida (rematch of previous Final Fours)
* Duke vs Michigan
* West Virginia vs Kentucky
* Arizona vs Texas (they used to play every year during the Olson era)
* and ...two Big East matches (East, West regions)

Can Harrison Barnes Carmelo Carolina to the Title?

This is turning into quite a wild conference championship week! One question that arose today, after the Carolina vs Clemson game is this: Can Harrison Barnes lift North Carolina to the title the same way Carmelo Anthony did in 2003 for Syracuse? Just like Syracuse in 2003, Carolina has a limited rotation and has not been considered to be at the same level as the Kansas and Ohio States of this season. With his Jordanesque performance against Clemson, can Barnes take Carolina to the promise land?

But that's a big IF, considering how they fell behind to Miami/Clemson. Their chances of recovering from such a bad start are significantly lower when playing Final Four or Elite 8 caliber teams. Remember Kansas in 2008?

Championship week has probably spawned another dark horse favorite for the title, the UConn Huskies. Driven by a driven-to-prove-everyone-wrong-again Calhoun, the Huskies did the impossible, won five out of five and got the Big East title. If they have anything left in the tank (and they should since they are 20 year old kids, not middle-aged accountants)...

Villanova does not belong to the NCAA tournament

Nothing against the team or the coach or the program, but when you lose your last five games, and lose them the way they lost to #15 seed South Florida at MSG, you are simply NOT one of the best 37 or so at-large teams in the country. It's one thing to lose one or two games, but losing the last five is not the sign of a winning team! Sorry Wildcats, but it's NIT time!

2011 NCAA Tournament TV schedule: a mix of CBS, TBS, TNT and TruTV

Once upon a time (such as last year), almost all the NCAA tournament coverage (except for the opening round game and a couple of Pacific-time lunch time games) was through CBS. The plus was you didn't have to remember which channel to watch. The minus was that you only got one game at a time. The internets however saved the day in recent years, as the NCAA made those games available online for free!


Things change in 2011
But starting with the 2011 NCAA Tournament things are changing! On the plus side, every single game is going to be on TV, live and in its entirety. No more screaming at the CBS monkey for showing the wrong game. The negative with this is that the games are going to be on four different channels, CBS, and three cable channels, TBS, TNT and TruTV, which is the artist formerly known as CourtTV. Make sure you find those on your cable or satellite system and check to see if they have HD (high-definition) versions available.

The schedule of the games is also slightly getting adjusted so as to prevent multiple games ending at the same time. This of course is not easy to do, because some games take longer than others, and that's before we consider overtimes.


Changes in announcer teams and studio coverage
Another interesting development is that the announcement and studio teams are merging into a giant "dream team" of basketball broadcasters. On the plus side, we are getting the one and only Charles Barkley in the studio, so we finally have someone who speaks his mind :)

TBS/TNT will also contribute one of the eight announcement teams, with Steve Kerr and Marv "I was wearing ex-girlfriend clothes before it was trendy" Albert. This means one of the eight traditional CBS duos is going to be left out. With Dick Enberg retiring, and Jay Bilas already having a gig at ESPN, Jay Bilas is indeed the odd man out.

Reggie Miller will also be joining in the Kevin Harlan and Dan Bonner duo, which is a big plus. The Ferengi ambassador to Earth was very pleased!

Sadly, still no Marques Johnson, so we have to suffer through games with idiots like Bob Wenzel and the more boring than watching-paint-dry boring duo of Ion Eagle and Jim Spanarkel.


Internet still free
The other good news is that the games will continue to be available for free online, and with computers and broadband getting cheaper infrastructure-wise, we should expect/hope that each year things will be better than previous online years.


TV schedule information around the net
* NCAA.com
* scribd.com with nice graphics showing the blocks of time with games
* Wikipedia
* philly.com

Carolina walk-ons beat Duke 3-0, and so do the scholarship players!

CBS has just showed its first prime-time regular season game on the television and that game was Duke visiting North Carolina. The game was very watchable, and it started the way it ended, with Carolina on top!

And what a way to win the game and the regular season championship. The Carolina walk-ons beat the Duke starting line-up 3-0! That was more than two minutes of game-time, not some random three-pointer fluke! The house of cards of Coach Rat has been exposed to a prime-time audience!

Other than Nolan Smith and Seth Curry, the rest of the Duke line-up is basically over-hyped over-rated spoiled brats. And it showed tonight. Big-time! Sure, Kylie or Katie or K-whatever his name is Irving is gone, but Duke is not the only team that lost important players during the season.


The importance of a true point-guard
If you needed any further evidence that a solid point-guard is of uttermost importance to a team, just look at the Carolina Tar-Heels the last two years - check the games with Larry Drew and check the games with Kendall Marshall. Conventional wisdom, and perhaps because of Dad's NBA career, had Larry Drew as the next big thing at Carolina point-guard. Instead, he won't even be a Q-Thomas, since he left mid-season. Marshall is indeed an interesting case. Unlike the last two championship point-guards (Everybody-Loves-Raymond and Ty Lawson), Marshall is not a beep-beeper, but more of a think-first, pass-first type of a point guard. This is a rather rare thing to see from a true freshman that didn't even run the team at the start of the season. Having top-caliber talent around can certainly make a point-guard even better.

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.