Several teams get much-needed resume wins on Saturday

Saturday saw a few teams get a victory they needed to jump-start their NCAA Tournament resume. A few others suffered bad losses in games they needed, or missed opportunities, but we’re going to stick with the positive and focus on the teams that got big wins. It’s too early to declare a number of these teams locks after what they did on Saturday, but they are in a better place than they were to start the day.

Let’s start with Florida State, which annihilated North Carolina 90-57 in Tallahassee. The Seminoles had a so-so non-conference run, as they came into Saturday lacking a win against the top 50 in three tries. Beating the Tar Heels is a remedy for that, although they need to make it relevant come March by playing well the rest of ACC play.

Next, we go to Northwestern, a team for whom heartbreak has become a regular occurrence. The Wildcats have had chances to play their way into the NCAA Tournament for the first time in recent years, but haven’t been able to pull out the games they needed to. It looked like this year might be another case of that, too, although they did win the Charleston Classic over Seton Hall, a win that is looking better all the time. They won at mediocre Georgia Tech and lost to Baylor, which is hardly a bad loss. But then they lost at Creighton, got hammered at Ohio State and lost tough ones to Illinois and Michigan by a combined three points. And on Saturday, they knocked off Michigan State in Evanston for their best win of the season. Add that to the Seton Hall win and the Wildcats, who don’t have a bad loss and an RPI of 33 at the start of the week, are in a good place for the moment.

Then there is Oklahoma, a team thought to be rebuilding. But the Sooners knocked off Kansas State 82-73 for their second win against a top 50 team. The Sooners are now 1-3 in Big 12 play, so they have a good deal of work to do. But if they get to .500 in conference and win a game or two in the conference tournament, they may have done enough work by then to be in the discussion for an NCAA Tournament team.  It helps that they don’t have a bad loss.

Lastly, San Diego State knocked off UNLV in a thriller, 69-67. The Aztecs were actually in a reasonably good place before Saturday, but perhaps now they can be called an NCAA Tournament lock if they win the games they should the rest of the way. The Mountain West figured to be rebuilding this season, but that hasn’t been the case thus far as both of these teams look like they will be in the field of 68.

We go coast to coast with news from around the college basketball nation.

Pittsburgh lost at Marquette, 62-57, and is now 0-5 in the Big East for the second time in program history and first in 12 years. They have never started 0-6, but they play at Syracuse on Monday.

Connecticut freshman Ryan Boatright was suspended by the NCAA and did not play in the Huskies’ 67-53 win at Notre Dame. The NCAA is investigating more eligibility matters with the freshman guard.

Iowa handily took out Michigan 75-59, and continues to be something of a Jekyll and Hyde team.

Jarnell Stokes gave Tennessee a boost in his debut, but Kentucky prevailed in Knoxville 65-62. The thinking is that although it was a loss, Saturday’s game bodes well for the Volunteers.

The Ivy League has started the season a little differently this time around, and Penn has started off 2-0 with wins at Columbia and Cornell. Normally teams play their travel partners over two weeks, save for Penn and Princeton, before the Friday-Saturday weekends start.

No America East team will go undefeated in conference play this season, as Stony Brook had its six-game winning streak end at Boston University, who has won three in a row after losing six straight.

Clemson may already be at a key point early in the season

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. – It’s only two games into ACC play, but already Clemson may be nearing a key point in their season. A 59-57 loss at young Boston College on Thursday night makes the questions with this team a little more urgent.

Clemson hasn’t been able to put together a three-game winning streak all season thus far. They came into Chestnut Hill hoping to do that for the first time all season, and had their chances to do it. But in dropping this one, they lost a chance to have some real momentum in the midst of a home-heavy stretch. Three of the next four are at home as part of a stretch where they play five of seven in Littlejohn Coliseum, including the next game against Duke.

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Young Navy team is still trying to break through

WORCESTER, Mass. – Wednesday night’s game at Holy Cross looked all too familiar for Navy. A team that has not fared well in close games and came in with eight straight losses had another close call, but another one in the right-hand column as Holy Cross won 73-69.

“That’s the way it’s been. That’s the way all our games have been,” said head coach Ed DeChellis. “We have a chance to win with three or four minutes to go in the game and we just haven’t been able to do it.”

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Louisville’s struggles show they are a good, not great, team

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – When Louisville recently ascended all the way to number 4 in the polls, there was a general feeling that the Cardinals weren’t quite that good. The feeling was that they got there by default, as they kept winning while other teams that had been ahead of them lost, and not enough teams played well enough for voters to leapfrog them over the Cardinals. If it had not already become apparent that the feeling about this team was correct, Tuesday night’s 90-59 thumping at Providence surely drove that home.

The game wasn’t an absolute indicator of how good the team is, but the Cardinals’ fourth loss in five games – granted, not exactly coming against Division III teams – is concerning, although head coach Rick Pitino summed the game itself up quite succinctly: “We had one of those nights.”

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Boston University hopes to regain confidence with losing streak over

BOSTON – It was just a little over a month ago that Boston University looked like they were about to get untracked. The Terriers started the season with four straight losses, including a couple that were tough to take, but then won two of three in Rhode Island and knocked off local rival Boston College less than a week after that. Then they hit a wall in the form of a six-game losing streak that they snapped on Sunday, and now they are hopeful they can get back to where they were after the Boston College victory.

Not only did the Terriers start winning games over a month ago, but they looked ready to win more. They seemed to have adjusted to new head coach Joe Jones more by that time, for starters. It also looked like they had found a post scorer to complement the perimeter duo of D.J. Irving and Darryl Partin, something they desperately needed.

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Binghamton tries to stay positive amidst struggles

BOSTON – When you’re 0-15 on the season, you probably don’t have a lot of positives to draw upon in the name of keeping morale up. Binghamton head coach Mark Macon is trying to find them to keep his team going during what hasn’t been a memorable season that most recently saw his team drop a 68-49 decision at Boston University.

Macon found one positive to take from Sunday’s loss: his team had ten assists and just eight turnovers. It’s a small start, but the Bearcats have a long way to go from that.

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Theodore helps Seton Hall continue to top last season

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – It’s early January, but Seton Hall has already topped its win total from last season. With their 66-57 win at Providence on Saturday night, Seton Hall is now 14-2 overall and 3-1 in the Big East, and they have quickly improved to where they are en route to being an NCAA Tournament team in Kevin Willard’s second season at the helm.

The Pirates are not going to win a contest for the most experienced team in college basketball. They have just two seniors who play and no juniors on a roster that features seven freshmen. That means five of the seven regulars are underclassmen, and that means the seniors need to be leaders more than with many teams. They have been just that, but the Pirates had to go without one of them for a lot of the first half.

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Harvard continues to live dangerously in Ivy League opener

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Harvard improved to 13-2 on Saturday by winning the first Ivy League game of the season. While the bottom line is all positive, the Crimson also lived dangerously for a while, more so than the 16-point final margin of victory might lead one to believe. Saturday’s game is not an isolated event, and with the full remaining slate of Ivy League games not far away, that is a concern for this team.

The Crimson didn’t start slowly, but Dartmouth was able to hang around and then took a seven-point lead early in the second half as they won the first four minutes coming out of the locker room. With the Big Green still up by six, Harvard went on a 16-2 run to take over the game, and offensively-challenged Dartmouth never seriously challenged them the rest of the game.

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BCS hurts college sports, especially basketball

Last month, Boise State head football coach Chris Petersen talked to local reporters about the BCS. Mainly, he simply unleashed a lot of feelings that many of us have, and rightly so for a lot of reasons. Many of us understand that the BCS is hurting college sports, especially college basketball.

From the outset, the BCS was a joke as far as its place in college football is concerned. There is no national championship in the Football Bowl Subdivision; the winner of the BCS Championship Game is like the winner of the NIT Season Tip-Off or the Maui Invitational in basketball, not a national champion. (The Division I national champion will be either Sam Houston State or North Dakota State, who will play on Saturday.) The system is your basic old boy network applied to college football, as it’s designed to benefit the six conferences that were in on the whole deal all along. The Big East has been a laughingstock in football for a while now, yet it still gets its champion into a BCS bowl while more deserving teams – which often have included Petersen’s Broncos – are pushed back into less prestigious bowl games (and ones without nearly the same payout).

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Robert Morris’ win at Bryant couldn’t have gone better

SMITHFIELD, R.I. – Although it might seem obvious from the final score, simply watching Robert Morris’ 84-53 thumping of Bryant on Thursday went about as well as the coaching staff could have drawn it up. The Colonials won with defense and getting points from it, played a disciplined game and also look like a team continuing to develop the kind of depth that will give them a chance when the Northeast Conference Tournament rolls around.

“I was happy with a lot of it, for sure,” said head coach Andy Toole. “I was happy that we were able to keep some guys’ minutes in check, because when you go Thursday and Saturday, having a little bit of depth definitely helps.”

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Syracuse’s offensive improvement and depth make them tough to beat

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Syracuse’s offense has improved by leaps and bounds since early in the season. The Orange can always hang their hat on their defense, and that was the case early on when they had a good deal of difficulty at the offensive end. But now that the offense has come around, this team is much tougher to beat, and that was evident in their 87-73 win at Providence on Wednesday night.

Early on this season, the offense wasn’t pretty at times. While the Orange generally shot well, they had stretches where scoring in the halfcourt was difficult. They also turned the ball over a bit much at times, winning the NIT Season Tip-Off despite 21 turnovers in the final (although they forced 24 Stanford turnovers). But now the Orange average just over 11 turnovers per game, and had just eight on Wednesday night to go with 20 assists, which now gives them an assist-to-turnover ratio of better than 1.5 on the season.

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UMBC’s non-conference struggles don’t matter with conference-opening road win

DURHAM, N.H. – Part of the beauty of conference play in college basketball is that teams get a fresh start. A bad non-conference run with one loss after another doesn’t matter on the bottom line, although that can weigh on a team’s psyche and affect their play in conference games. One example of that is UMBC, a team that won one game in non-conference play but is tied atop America East after an 82-76 win at New Hampshire on Monday night.

The young Retrievers haven’t exactly had a memorable season thus far. They entered Monday night’s game with just one win on the season, back in December against winless Towson. Only three of their 11 losses had come by single digits. Their best holdover, Chris De La Rosa, left the team in late November. They came in surrendering almost 77 points per game and turning the ball over nearly 17 times per game. And the shooting numbers on offense were nothing to brag about, either.

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Young Rhode Island may be starting to grow up

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. – Rhode Island’s young players have no choice but to grow up. That was already true given that this team is dominated by youth. But with conference play in front of them, the young Rams look like they may be starting to do that, the latest evidence being their 78-72 victory at Boston College in double overtime on Monday.

It would have been easy to have inflated expectations for transfers Billy Baron and Andre Malone, with the idea that they would make an instant impact on this team’s fortunes as they became eligible. While that has happened with Baron, who had a big game on Monday, it’s not in his stats that it can be found. That’s not to say he hasn’t played well after having to shake some rust off early. But his value has come in what he does for the lineup and two other guards.

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Saint Joseph’s shows promise but can be better

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Saint Joseph’s has largely completed non-conference play, with only a Big 5 game against Penn remaining in less than three weeks. The Hawks are 10-4, with a few good wins, so considering where this team was the past two years it looks good. But in some sense, Saturday’s tough 74-69 loss at Harvard is indicative of the team: good, but still needing a good deal of work.

“We’re not good enough. Plain and simple,” said head coach Phil Martelli. “What we did wasn’t good enough. 9-16 from the foul line, two guys in double figures, it’s not good enough. I’ve been honest with this team, we’re inching up on being good, but we’re not there yet, and this is another indication that we’re not there yet.”

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Eagles’ outing a mixed bag against Harvard

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. – The first game after Christmas was decidedly a mixed bag for Boston College, more so than one might expect from simply looking at the scoreboard and seeing a 21-point loss. Now the underdog in the matchup with Harvard, the Eagles came in with three straight wins before the break and weren’t expected to win the game by virtually anyone outside of their locker room.

At times, the offense looked excellent. There were crisp passes to cutters, great movement without the ball, and some great reads of the defense that led to some easy baskets. There was a nice 14-3 lead early on, before reality set in and Harvard started getting stops. Even after that, there were times, particularly when Dennis Clifford was in the game and they were able to get him the ball, where the offense was a thing of beauty.

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Has Rhode Island hit rock bottom?

SOUTH KINGSTON, R.I. – The Rhode Island Rams are not in a good place right now. That might be obvious if you see their record, but that doesn’t tell the entire story. Watching their 80-61 loss to Providence last Friday gives an illustration of how far this team has to go with three non-conference games left. And as if that’s not enough, things went from bad to worse right after Christmas.

“It’s not easy. It’s challenging right now,” said a subdued head coach Jim Baron after the loss.

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Boston College gains confidence before the break

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. – Boston College has come back from the Christmas break in a better place than they were before it. In fact, it’s better than where they were over a week before their last game, as their 83-73 win over Sacred Heart last Wednesday was their third straight.

With a young team, confidence is big, and head coach Steve Donahue has been talking about that all along. He knew the wins would be hard to come by and keeping up confidence would be a battle. There was no question the players would get better, and Donahue has constantly said that the players are doing what he has asked of them and then some. There hasn’t been a complaint about the effort and work ethic, and that’s not to be underestimated.

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Florida Atlantic isn’t far away as Sun Belt play approaches

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – There was a consistent theme sounded after Florida Atlantic’s 63-51 loss at Harvard on Thursday night. The message: this team is not there yet, and mental toughness is the big key to getting there.

“We’re close, but we’re not there,” said head coach Mike Jarvis. “We were in a position win, like we’ve been many, many nights this year, but we just haven’t had the mental toughness to finish off. We’re not finishing what we start.”

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Stony Brook hopes more practice time helps

Stony Brook probably welcomed the relative break in the action they are coming up on the end of. Their loss at Rutgers in the MSG Holiday Festival is their only game in a 17-day stretch surrounding final exams and the holidays, giving them a time with a lot of practice and few games that will allow players to get better physically and the team to iron some things out. After their 66-51 loss at Boston College almost a week earlier, it was clear that this comes at a good time.

The lowlight of that day was in the final 12 minutes of the first half. After the Seawolves went up 11-6, they went the final 11:50 of the half without scoring as Boston College scored 22 unanswered points. While the second half was more of a normal frame, the Seawolves dug themselves too deep a hole to get out of.

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Sacred Heart coach tries to send a message in visit to Boston College

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. – With just one non-conference game left after Wednesday night’s game at Boston College, Dave Bike wanted to get a point across to his team and his best player. The long-time Sacred Heart mentor has a team with some offensive ability, and a few players in particular, but in the losing effort, they made a big rally without their best player on the floor.

In the first half of the Pioneers’ 83-73 loss, Gibson could hardly miss. He was 6-7 from the field, including 3-4 from long range, en route to 17 points. There was some buzz among those on press row about his shooting, especially since a couple of his three-pointers were not just barely behind the arc.

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