The NCAA is entering new levels of ridiculous mismanagement. The Associated Press reports that the NCAA might reconsider giving new scholarship student-athletes a $2,000 stipend, though it would have to allow players who have already signed letters of intent to receive the extra cash while banning those who sign later.

Ohio State superstar Jared Sullinger is still hurting from recurring back spasms, and coach Thad Matta didn’t want to say when Sullinger will be back in the lineup for the Buckeyes, according to a CBS Sports.com wire report. But Sullinger answered that question Wednesday night when the Buckeyes beat down USC Upstate 82-58 and Sullinger played 24 minutes and got 12 points and 10 rebounds.

Nobody will face criminal charges in the Xavier/Cincinnati brawl, the Associated Press reports. Joe Deters, a Hamilton County, Ohio, prosecutor, looked into the matter, deciding not to pursue charges against anyone. One of the factors was Xavier center Kenny Frease’s satisfaction with an apology from Cincinnati’s Yancy Gates, who decked Frease in the head during the debacle.

Seton Hall will gain some more depth this weekend with the return of freshman Brandon Mobley, who had been out with a dislocated shoulder and torn labrum since the summer, according to the Associated Press.

Don’t skip your court appearances. Nothing good can happen. Just ask Kansas’ Ben McLemore. The freshman is under arrest after skipping a Dec. 6 court appearance for a citation related to underage alcohol possession, according to a CBS Sports.com wire report.

Also on the list of bad behavior is taunting fans by grabbing your crotch. New Mexico State sophomore Christian Kabongo did that, and now he’s suspended, writes Diamond Leung for ESPN.com’s “College Basketball Nation” blog.

Syracuse still has Melo — Fab Melo that is. If you thought I was talking about Carmelo Anthony, well, I kinda was. The NBA star who led the Cuse to a championship is convinced that Melo 2.0 and the rest of the crew have the talent to win another championship for the first time since 2003.

I’m not gonna lie — I love the fan experience. And if you tell me that a team in California’s tradition is to throw tortillas when a victory is in hand, I find it amusing. I mean, a flying tortilla — presumably uncooked soft tortilla — won’t hurt anyone. Except when your team is only up two and the officials consider giving the home crowd a technical. Yep, that’s how UC-Santa Barbara’s 65-61 win against San Diego went down, writes Diamond Leung for ESPN.com. When the fans started tossing tortillas, the officials considered tossing out a T. They opted to go with a public announcement that any more thrown items would produce two free throws for the Toreros. The fans settled down, and the Gauchos won.

One of the best rivalries in all of sports — not just college basketball — was taking place just a couple of minutes from where I sit writing this. The Crosstown Shootout is something that not many people outside of Cincinnati fully understand.

The best way I can describe it is to make a small correlation to the Civil War. We’ve all heard stories about brothers fighting brothers over their differing beliefs.

That is the case in Cincinnati. I can think of more than a few examples of families that have both die-hard University of Cincinnati supporters and die-hard Xavier University supporters.

Admittedly, many of these allegiances start out as sibling rivalries — “My brother likes UC, so I’ll root for XU.” — but as time wears on, those allegiances stick.

Full disclosure: I am a lifelong UC fan. Every year around this time, I question my friendship with those who support Xavier University. That’s how intense the rivalry is.

Seriously, I don’t want to talk to Xavier fans for a few weeks at least.

But, bearing my fanhood in mind, my parents and I spent a lot of money on an education to train me to be an objective journalist, so that’s where these ramblings will come from tonight.

There is any number of examples that I could start with to explain the history of this rivalry, but I think the best way to understand how heated this game has been over the years is to look to the 1994 Shootout that featured the infamous (non) handshake between Cincinnati coach Bob Huggins and Xavier coach Pete Gillen.

From the Chicago Tribune:

They went at it from a distance, then punctuated a frenzied night when Huggins refused to shake Gillen’s hand.

“I’m not phony,” Huggins said. “If their bench is going to yell things at me during the game, that’s their business. I’m not going to shake hands and pretend everything is all right.”

The 10,121 fans got the idea something was wrong at halftime. Huggins and Gillen were yelling back toward the court as they headed for the locker rooms.

It got worse in the second half. At one point, the two coaches appeared to be yelling at each other from their benches. Finally, there was the handshake snub.

Fast forward 15 years, and not much has changed except for the players’ and coaches’ names.

Coming into this year’s Shootout, UC and XU’s seasons couldn’t have been going in more opposite directions. The No. 8-ranked Musketeers were undefeated, pulling off Tebow-esque victories on two occasions (Vanderbilt, Purdue), keeping their star, Tu Holloway, in the forefront of National Player of the Year debates. Cincinnati came into the season ranked as high as 20^th in national polls, only to lose twice unceremoniously, once to Presbyterian and again a week later to Marshall.

A Shootout that many pegged prior to the season as having the possibility of being one of the best in recent memory was on the verge of floating into obscurity.

Enter Andy Furman, a Cincinnati sports talk mainstay.

Furman had Cincinnati guard Sean Kilpatrick on his radio show on Thursday night and frankly, he baited Kilpatrick into putting some gas on the Shootout flame.

Furman: “Are you better than Tu Holloway?”

Kilpatrick: “I’ll let the fans decide…”

Furman: “I need to know. No one’s listening. Just between you and me.”

Kilpatrick: “Yes I am.”

Furman: “Would Tu Holloway start for UC?”

Kilpatrick: “Would he, with the players we have now? I would say no.”

Kilpatrick has played well in his sophomore season at UC, averaging 15 points per game, but there have to be only a handful of people in the country that think Kilpatrick is better than Holloway and most of them are related to SK.

The entire point of Furman’s line of questioning was to provoke Kilpatrick to say something that would get people talking about the Shootout. Mission accomplished. But what did you expect Kilpatrick to say? That Holloway’s better than him? That Holloway would start on the Bearcats’ team? If he were to say that, his comments would be spun to allege that Holloway is better than one of his teammates, that Kilpatrick doesn’t have the confidence in one of his guys to play better than Holloway. It’s just not plausible to expect Kilpatrick to say anything other than what he did.

However, Furman got what he wanted. People from Xavier took it as disrespect from a player who hasn’t earned; people from UC liked Kilpatrick’s confidence in himself and his teammates.

Those are some of the ingredients for a good Shootout, no doubt about it.

Come Saturday, Xavier was well on its way to serving up a beatdown, something many UC fans would admit, deep down, that they thought was a possibility.

And that’s fine. It happens. Last year, Cincinnati ran Xavier out of the gym, winning by 20. Xavier was primed to do the same to UC last week.

As Mike Krzyzewski said two weeks ago after his Duke Blue Devils were blown out by Ohio State,”I’ve had my butt kicked before, and we’ve kicked some butt. Tonight my butt is sore.”

The true test is not whether or not you’re kicking butt, or receiving the butt kicking, but how you deal with it.

As the seconds ticked down and the Xavier soundman cued up Jay-Z’s “Run This Town,” things got ugly quickly.

Xavier’s All-American hopeful Tu Holloway taunted the Cincinnati bench, saying “this is my city.”

Cincinnati’s Ge’Lawn Guyn didn’t want to hear any of that, and as he went to put his hand in Holloway’s face to shut him up, XU’s Dez Wells shoved Guyn to the ground. Before Guyn made it to the floor, Cincinnati’s bench was on the floor — and all hell was breaking loose.

Most infamously, the Bearcats’ senior forward Yancy Gates walked into the fray, sought out Xavier’s 7-foot center, Kenny Frease, and caught him with a sucker punch to the left eye.

Other punches were thrown. UC’s Octavius Ellis and Ge’Lawn Guyn threw some; Cheikh Mbodj tried to kick Frease while he was on the ground. Xavier’s Mark Lyons and Laden Amos got into the punching spirit as well.

It all happened so fast that the officials were forced to call the game with 9.4 seconds remaining on the clock. Nothing worthwhile was going to come from playing out the last few seconds. But what came next was just as destructive as the brawl.

Cincinnati, who under head coach Mick Cronin, had worked for five years to lose the label of “Huggs’ Thugs,” was back in the national spotlight for the wrong reasons. And although both teams were at fault, Xavier seemed to get out of the fracas with the least amount of damage to its reputation.

Some will point to the fact that Xavier’s players were provoking Cincinnati with trash talk, but anyone who’s played a game of 21 with their buddies in the backyard knows that smack talk is part of basketball.

If you dish it out when you’re winning, you better be able to take it when you’re losing.

Xavier got into the locker room looking none the worse for the altercation. Then head coach Chris Mack made the fatal error of letting Holloway and Lyons address the media minutes after the brawl that had already gone viral on the Internet.

 ”That’s what you’re going to see from Xavier and Cincinnati,” Holloway said. “We got disrespected a little bit before the game, guys calling us out. We’re a tougher team. We’re grown men over here. We got a whole bunch of gangstas in the locker room, not thugs but tough guys on the court. We went out there and zipped ‘em up at the end of the game.”

To be fair, Holloway’s post-game comments were misconstrued by many and by most accounts, were subject to a generational divide. Holloway was not calling he and his teammates “gangstas” in the “Scarface” sense. He simply meant that they were a tough team that can stand up to the rigors of an intracity rivalry.

However, with the sports media being made up mostly of older, white men, the comments were seen as inappropriate.

So with the respect that Cincinnati lost during the brawl, Xavier lost just as much with their reaction to it.

Media-types praised UC coach Mick Cronin for his emotional and seemingly sincere postgame comments.

“There is no excuse for that in basketball,” Cronin said. “You’ve got to learn how to win on one side, you’ve got to learn how to lose on the other side. All these kids all need to realize they are here to get an education.

“If my players don’t act the right way, they will never play another game at Cincinnati. Right now, I just told my guys, ‘I will meet with my AD and my president and I’m going to decide who is on the team going forward.’ I’ve never been this embarrassed. I’m hoping [UC] President [Gregory] Williams doesn’t ask me to resign after that.

“I made everybody take their jersey off — and they will not put it on again until they have a full understanding of where they go to school and what the university stands for and how lucky they are to even be there, let alone have a scholarship, because there’s a whole lot of kids that can’t pay for college and don’t get to go to school.”

That’s just a small snippet of what Cronin said, and he was applauded nationally for his words. The following day, when the University of Cincinnati administration announced the suspensions — six games for Gates, Mbodj and Ellis; one for Guyn — the same media blasted Cronin for not living up to his words.

Again, in fairness, what did they expect? The decision to suspend the players was made by the president of the university and his board, not Cronin.

Cronin still holds the option to keep his players out more games if he feels they are not ready to represent the University of Cincinnati.

Overall, Cincinnati has seemed to come out as the better side in the handling the aftermath.

Across town, Xavier was being blasted for their lack of public relations savvy. Xavier laid out its suspensions — four games for Wells and Amos; two for Lyons and one for Holloway — but still was dealing with the perception that came from Holloway’s actions and words following the fight. To make matters worse, Sean Miller, now the coach at Arizona, told the Arizona Daily Star that the fight didn’t surprise him. Even worse, he was proud of the guys he recruited, including Holloway and Lyons, who still play on the Musketeer team for their actions.

“Happens every game. I’m proud of those guys, I really am,” Miller said of Xavier, his former team. “I would fully expect there to be a fight.”

“If Cincinnati tries to do what they did (Saturday) they’re going to get a fight,” Miller said after UA beat Clemson on Saturday. “So I’m proud of those guys.

“They have a chance to win it all,” Miller said. “It’s just such a great story. I’m really proud of those guys and I watch them any time that I can. No one’s going to bully those guys.”

Not a good look for Xavier, but really, who cares what Sean Miller has to say? He’s as much a part of this as Bob Huggins. That’s to say he’s no part of it at all.

These are Cronin’s and Mack’s teams, respectively, and both of the teams’ actions are a representation of the coaches in charge now, not ones from the past.

It would appear that both teams, in their own ways, are trying to move forward from the low point of a great rivalry. Both universities have said that they will have the players involved do work in the community and talk to young people about their actions and why they were wrong.

Some are calling for an end to the game all together, and it’s a strong possibility. There are even prosecutors looking into the fight to see if there are criminal cases to be tried.

The bottom line of all of this is that there is enough blame to go around; no one person is solely at fault. Regardless of who started the fight, what happened during it and what the fallout was, both teams and universities have been damaged by what took place on Saturday.

And while it appears as if both sides are taking the right action to put the fight behind them, the fact remains that the city of Cincinnati is the one that came out of the Crosstown Punchout with a black eye.

I’m sure others have said it, but I remember ESPN’s Buster Olney once remarking that when you’re in the media, you become a fan of the game instead of a particular team. It’s very true, and part of that is being a fan of the people involved in the game. This is a people business in every respect, and those who succeed the most in this industry, no matter what capacity they are in, know how to deal with people.

To that end, I give you Ken Dempsey, the associate head coach at New Hampshire. Tuesday is an important day for him.

Dempsey recently shared on the National Coaches’ Diary Series on College Chalktalk that he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. On Tuesday, he goes for surgery to address it, and will take an undetermined leave of absence from the basketball team. He is not the first and won’t be the last college coach to have to deal with this dreaded disease, but fortunately the outlook is good and there’s some personal significance.

We all have people who have helped us get where we are. Dempsey has helped many people in that respect in 25 years of coaching at several Division I schools, but it isn’t just players who have benefited from knowing him. I have no better friend in basketball than Ken Dempsey.

When I was an undergraduate at Northeastern, Dempsey joined the basketball staff when Dave Leitao took over as the head coach my freshman year. Dempsey was the first coach I met, and after a badly failed attempt to walk on to the team, he didn’t forget me. I would see him around the gym (back then, Cabot Gym was not only where the team practiced, but also the student recreational facility), especially if I was playing basketball before the team came to practice. He sensed that I liked the game, and encouraged me to join them as a manager. I would stop by the office and have conversations with him and Darryl Hilliard, also an assistant there at the time, and the relationship grew from there.

The next year, I became a manager. My experience in doing that was tremendous for a lot of reasons, from being so close to the game that I love to traveling to places I had never been to understanding what goes into a team’s season. There is not enough space to share how much that helped me to get where I am today, and that’s before I mention some of the things external to my role as a manager. Dempsey gave me access to recruiting reports so I could see what they looked like and start having a feel for the next college stars, and introduced me to Bob Gibbons when he visited Northeastern one time. This was back when there weren’t nearly as many people covering recruiting as there are now, as the Internet was still in its infancy in terms of its effects on athletic media.

That was only the beginning. When Dempsey left Northeastern just before I graduated, we made sure to stay in touch, and have done that. After some time away from the northeast, he’s been back for several years now. Interestingly, I covered what proved to be his last game as an assistant coach at UMKC before coming to New Hampshire – a tough loss in the then-Mid-Continent Conference (now the Summit League) Tournament in Tulsa.

Dempsey is optimistic that his leave from the team will be on the order of weeks. He is well-connected and has been in contact with some people who have dealt with this to learn from their experiences, and has had great support from everyone in Durham. And as he goes in for surgery on Tuesday to start the battle against prostate cancer, I know I am one of many people who is praying for a positive result at the end of all of this.

We go coast to coast with other news from the college basketball nation

• About that brawl: Cincinnati and Xavier each suspended four players for their roles in the well-chronicled brawl at the end of Saturday’s meeting between the two teams. Cincinnati suspended Yancy Gates, Cheikh Mbodj and Octavius Ellis for six games each and Ge’Lawn Guyn for one game, while Xavier suspended Dez Wells and Landen Amos for four games each, Mark Lyons for two and Tu Holloway for one.
• Indiana scored a dramatic win over Kentucky with a buzzer-beater on Saturday. It’s the biggest win for the Hoosiers under Tom Crean.
• Murray State knocked off Memphis on Sunday night, which improves the Racers to 10-0. But what has unfortunately received a little more buzz from that game than how good the Racers look is Memphis’ public address announcer announcing John Calipari as the Tigers’ head coach, which was greeted with a round of boos.
• It’s a light week of game action, and Monday night was no exception as the most notable game was probably Oregon’s 79-70 win over Portland State.

Games to watch on Tuesday

• Wisconsin at Milwaukee, 8 pm EST
• Belmont at Middle Tennessee, 8 pm EST

Saturday:

• Kentucky at Indiana
• Ohio State at Kansas
• Long Beach State at North Carolina
• Washington vs. Duke at Madison Square Garden
• Cincinnati at Xavier
• Oklahoma State vs. Pittsburgh at Madison Square Garden
• UNLV at Wisconsin
• Creighton at Saint Joseph’s
• Michigan State at Gonzaga
• Akron at Cleveland State
• Milwaukee at Northern Iowa
• Clemson at Arizona
• Villanova at Temple
• Miami at West Virginia

Sunday:

• Murray State at Memphis
• Iona at Marshall
• Norfolk State at Virginia Tech

We go coast to coast with other news from the college basketball nation

• Before we even get to the games today, there’s intrigue building in Cincinnati with the Bearcats’ Sean Kilpatrick calling out Xavier’s Tu Holloway, writes Myron Medcalf for ESPN’s “College Basketball Nation” blog. Kipatrck told a radio host that Holloway isn’t good enough to start for the Bearcats, which seems laughable considering Holloway is averaging 17.7 ppg, 4.2 rpg and 4.7 apg for one of the top teams in the country. But there you have it. That should make the Skyline Chili Crosstown Shootout extra spicy today.
• Northern Arizona is in the market for a new coach already after Mike Adras resigned unexpectedly Dec. 9, according to the Associated Press. The Lumberjacks are off to a rough start at 2-7, with no Division I wins yet. However, in his previous nine seasons as Northern Arizona’s coach, Adras had only two losing seasons for a 133-131 record at the school.
• Marquette will play without one of its biggest defensive presences after center Chris Otule injured his left ACL in the Golden Eagles’ win against Washington Dec. 8, according to Fox Sports’ Andrew Wagner. Otule has been averaging 5.0 ppg, 4.4 rpg and 1.6 blocks in just less than 18 minutes per game.
• Arizona State won’t get its top recruit this season after the NCAA Eligibility Center ruled Jahii Carson academically ineligible for 2011-12, according to an Associated Press report.
• You also won’t see Washington’s Scott Suggs this season. The senior guard broke his foot in October and had hoped to be ready to go by late December, but coach Lorenzo Romar announced that Suggs will redshirt this season, according to the Associated Press.
• Staying in the Pac-12, UCLA has dismissed embattled junior forward Reeves Nelson, according to the Associated Press. Coach Ben Howland had already suspended Nelson twice this season for conduct detrimental to the team before making the decisions to kick him off the team.
• The last thing we want to report is more molestation charges, but here we go again. ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” reported that two former basketball players are accusing Amateur Athletic Union president Robert “Bobby” Dodd of molesting them more than 20 years ago. The AAU gets plenty of criticism already, but nothing of this caliber. The AAU said that Dodd has colon cancer and will not be returning to his post, according to a CBS Sports report.

These interconference events are great hooks for college basketball fans trying to get out of the malaise of colder weather and bad local football teams. ESPN dreams up match ups that force some teams (cough, cough, Cincinnati) to play at least one decent team before they get into the rough and tumble life of conference play.

This year, the Challenge expanded from its normal eight-team, two-night format to include 24 teams in 12 games over the span of three nights.

Another change included the venues where the games were held. Since 2007, the first year of the Challenge, the event was held on two neutral courts with two games taking place each night a la a conference tournament setting. This year, there were no neutral sites as the SEC hosted eight of the games, and the Big East held home court in the other four.

Taking place on Dec. 1, 2 and 3, many of these big boys from the BCS conferences have been honing their skills while feasting on inferior mid-major competitioin. The SEC-Big East Challenge is designed to snap the players into midseason form, putting them up against competition that they might regularly see in the NCAA or NIT tournaments at the end of the year.

Coming into the week, both conferences had five teams ranked in the AP Top 25, with Marquette being the only team ranked to not take part in the Challenge.

The folks who draw up the schedule did a pretty good job of giving us some solid games, not the least of which was a Top-10 match up between Florida and Syracuse.

The Cuse, which has been mired in a season during which everyone wants to talk about their now-former assistant coach Bernie Fine, has been going about their business pretty impressively, winning their first seven games by an average margin of 26 points.

Of course, the Orange wouldn’t have an easy go about it when No. 10 Florda came calling at the Carrier Dome on Dec. 2. Neither team was able to pull away in the first half with a lead never growing larger than six.

The Gators’ calling card has been the long-range jumper, hitting 43 percent of their three-pointers, but Florida could only manage 3-of-12 in the first half.

Behind solid games from Brandon Triche’s 20 points and Scoop Jardine’s 16 points and seven assists, Syracuse claimed their eighth win of the year 72-68, although the game was an afterthought as coach Jim Boeheim continued to face questions about his former assistant.

The other highly touted matchup was between Louisville and Vanderbilt. Vandy put the Cardinals in a couple bad spots throughout the night. First, with 8:45 remaining, Louisville found themselves down nine points, but then went on a 13-4 run to tie the game at 47 with just over two minutes left in regulation.

Louisville had a good look to win as Peyton Siva dropped a pass off to freshman Chane Behanan who missed a layup as time expired.

The Commodores jumped out to another lead – this time by five points – in overtime. But the Cards, in front of their home crowd, were able to get back into the game on the back of some stellar play from Siva and Kyle Kuric, who hit a three with just under a minute remaining to give the Cards a one-point lead.

Tied at 60 with under 10 seconds remaining, Siva drove and decided to take the shot himself, making the game-winning layup with 1.4 seconds left on the clock. Louisville won 62-60 in OT.

Other games of note were Georgetown’s impressive 57-55 win over No. 12 Alabama. Hollis Thompson hit a long three with 1.8 seconds remaining to give the Hoyas their sixth win of the season. Cincinnati finally showed that they do have a decent team, going on the road to beat Georgia in Athens, 57-51. Seton Hall beat Auburn 81, 59; UConn beat Arkansas 75-62; and Pittsburgh beat Tennessee 61-56.

The Big East won eight of the 12 games, winning the Challenge for the second time. Over the five-year span of the Challenge, the Big East leads the series 2-1-2.

More often than not, those cupcakes turn out to give some of the more talented squads from conferences such as the Big East a run for their money, even knocking off a few of them along the way.

The Big East has had its fair share of losses in the early going as some of the teams we picked to be contenders for the conference championships are dealing with some early season growing pains.

Preseason No. 22 Cincinnati, which has been criticized for having too easy of a nonconference schedule, has lost a pair of games in their first five; once to Presbyterian and the other to Marshall in overtime on Friday night.

Pittsburgh, thought by many to not only be near the top of the Big East but also have a fighter’s chance at the national championship, dropped an early season game to Long Beach State. West Virginia lost to Kent State during ESPNs 24-hour marathon of hoops. And even defending national champions Connecticut fell to Central Florida in the Battles 4 Atlantis tournament in the Bahamas.

In each instance, you’re sure to find a hard-core fan that will play Chicken Little and claim the sky is falling, pointing out everything that went wrong in the (enter your team’s November collapse here) game.

We’ve heard it over the past few seasons about how the gap between the majors and mid-majors is closing, and each year it seems we see more and more instances of that belief becoming fact with these so-called upsets.

One thing Big East fans need to grasp ahold of is this: it’s only November. Things will (or at least should) get better.

You’ll hear announcers calling the games on ESPN and CBS talking in clichés about teams being completely different now than they will be in February or March and even though it is a cliché, it’s true.

That’s how sayings become clichés, they turn into assumed truths. So while maybe your Big East team has dropped an early season game that was supposed to be a snoozer, don’t it deter you from an expectations you might have had before the season began.

These teams, especially some of those who are incorporating some new talent into their rotation need some time to gel. With each passing game comes more experience.

Now, if you’re dropping games to Presbyterian and Kent State in January, then there should be some cause for alarm.

Last Year:

26-9 overall, 11-7 Big East (T-6th)

Coach:

Mick Cronin (6th season, 87-77)

Projected starting five:

G: Cashmere Wright, Jr.
G: Dion Dixon, Jr.
G: Sean Kilpatrick, So.
F: Justin Jackson, So.
C: Yancy Gates, Sr.

Important departures:

Rashad Bishop 8.4 ppg, 3.5 rpg, 1.7 apg
Ibrahima Thomas 5.7 ppg, 5.3 rpg

Inside the numbers:

66 percent scoring returning
64 percent rebounding returning

Additions:

F: Shaquille Thomas, 6’6”, 165 – Rivals #81
F: Jermaine Sanders 6’4”, 205 – Rivals #131
G: Jeremiah Davis, 6’3”, 195 – ESPNU Pos. #43

Schedule:

Toughest nonconference game: 12/10 at (15) Xavier
Toughest in-conference stretch: 1/18 – 1/23 at (4) Connecticut, at West Virginia, at (5) Syracuse

Prediction:

5th in BE; 25+ wins; Second weekend of NCAA Tournament

What to expect:

A lot of how the Bearcats do this year is dependent on Yancy Gates and his “want-to.” Gates has been hit-or-miss in his time in Cincinnati, playing up to his potential at the end of last season, which has given Bearcat fans the hope that he will continue his upward trend. However, Gates’ midseason dismissal for lack of effort looms in the back of the minds of Cincinnati fans.

Returning four starters from last year should help the Bearcats continue their trend of regaining national prominence. Sean Kilpatrick has a lot of expectations to fulfill this year. The sophomore is touted as UC’s microwave, giving Cincinnati an outside threat to balance Gates on the inside.

Coach Mick Cronin has handled predicament well over the past six years at the helm. Taking some hits along the way, the Cincinnati native has once again brought the Bearcats into the preseason rankings with the belief that 22nd is the lowest they will be ranked all year. A solid starting five and a talented young bench should help the Bearcats build on their second-round dismissal from the NCAA Tournament a year ago.

Next: Connecticut Huskies

Back to Big East preview

For the second consecutive weekend, big losses were rampant throughout the basketball nation. Connecticut’s loss to South Florida gives the Huskies 14 losses, meaning that they would need to become the first at-large team with 15 losses to make the NCAA Tournament unless they find a way to win the Big East tournament this week. Cincinnati finds itself in the same boat after losing its third straight game and fifth in six tries.

In the Big Ten, Illinois paralleled the Bearcats’ poor finish with its third straight defeat Sunday, a 72-57 loss in Champaign to Wisconsin. Illinois has a more compelling case for an at-large bid than Cincinnati does thanks to three wins against the RPI top 25. However, the Illini have 13 losses and an RPI of 73. Illinois will get another crack at the Badgers in the quarterfinals of the Big Ten Tournament, and the Illini might need to win that game to avoid getting bounced off the bubble.

Besides the bubble teams, several others lost big games that affect their seeding in the latest version of the Mock Tournament.

• Kansas State drops to a No. 3 seed after inexplicably losing at home in overtime to Iowa State, ranked No. 113 in the RPI.
• Villanova also drops to the No. 3 line after losing at home in overtime. However, these Wildcats shouldn’t be as ashamed to lose because West Virginia is finishing the season strongly.
• Vanderbilt also suffered a home loss — to South Carolina — and falls to the No. 6 line.

Here are the latest brackets and links to previous projections.

• Mock Tournament 5.0
• Mock Tournament 4.0
• Mock Tournament 3.0
• Mock Tournament 2.0
• Mock Tournament 1.0

Teams in bold have won an automatic bid.

It seems coach Quentin Hillman, in his fourth year at the Big East school, was observing men’s practice his first year at Syracuse. “I looked up saw that (national championship) banner and thought about (Boeheim’s) years of winning and felt this was the way to go,” Hillman said. “I decided the 2-3 would be our main defense.” Hillman found early on that he has a friend and confidant in Boeheim. “Coach Boeheim has been great helping me with it. He has watched our practices, made suggestions and we both discuss it regularly.”

The women employ the zone in the same manner as then men. The guards and wings contest three-pointers and other perimeter shots. Seton Hall’s fine junior guard Ebonie Williams struggled through a two-point night on one for eight shooting. Williams was frustrated trying to get a decent look anywhere on the perimeter. Inside players like 6-2 Nicole Micheal and 6-4 Kayla Alexander clog the lane and use their length to break up passes in the paint.

The victory at the Hall left Syracuse at 13-1, the lone loss an OT setback at the hands of Georgetown. Life in the Big East conference for the women, as the men, is a succession of challenges and tough teams. Syracuse, with that patented 2-3, is certainly one of them.

Other Notes

• A little confidence goes a long way. Last week Fairleigh Dickinson rallied from 22 down with 12 minutes to play to earn an 88-85 victory over Sacred Heart. A few nights later Bryant got out to a 10-1 lead over the Knights. FDU interim coach Greg Vetrone called time out and saw a team unsure of what lie ahead. The Knights regrouped en route to a 66-50 victory over the Bulldogs.
  Three nights later FDU defeated Central Connecticut State 83-74 , behind Sean Baptiste’s 26 points, to run their conference record to 3-1. FDU ended 2009 with a 1-12 record. The Knights took advantage of a three-game conference swing at home and are very much in the thick of the NEC race.

  “We have a new coach, a new system and new point guard,” Vetrone said. “Some of the teams we played early we were not ready to face. I said it would take time but (the momentum) is definitely coming.”

  Mike Scott scored 16 against Bryant. The junior point guard has been on fire for FDU. In the Sacred Heart and Bryant games, Scott had a combined 18 assists and zero (no misprint) turnovers in 70 minutes.

• Bryant, in their second year of Division I, is in the Northeast Conference but not eligible for post season play. Tim O’Shea’s group has had a murderous schedule. Included were Boston College, Providence, St.John’s, Indiana and an improved Army club. There were two Ivies as well which happened to be Harvard and Cornell. Following the FDU game Bryant was 0-15. To make matters worse, leading scorer (14.5 PPG) Cecil Gresham, a senior swingman, was lost for the year with an injury in late December.
• There is an interesting doubleheader at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday. Cincinnati visits St. John’s and Fordham meets Dayton at the “World’s Most Famous Arena.”  Cincinnati faces another team in dire need of a conference win. The Bearcats faced Seton Hall at the Prudential Center and the Pirates took an 83-76 decision. Seton Hall earned their first win after losses in conference to West Virginia (overtime), Syracuse and at UConn.

  St. John’s is also 0-3 and in a must-win situation after having lost a tough one at Georgetown, a home collapse down the stretch to Providence and another road game to Louisville. Highly-touted freshman Lance Stephenson will make his MSG debut in a Bearcat uniform.

  Dayton survived a tough OT victory over Duquesne on Saturday and faces Fordham under interim coach Jared Grasso. The Flyers are the Atlantic 10 Conference favorites in the view of many experts. A pair of forwards, junior Chris Wright and senior Marcus Johnson, have been key players for Brian Gregory’s club.

• Seton Hall sharpshooter Jeremy Hazell had 33 points against Cincinnati, his fifth 30-point scoring game this season.
• The difference, from a tempo-free approach for St. John’s thus far:

              W-L	   OFF EFF	DEF EFF
  Overall	   10-5	     100	  93
  Big East    0-3	      90	  106

  The efficiency is the points per possession multiplied by 100. Offensively, the Red Storm overall average 1.00 points per possession on offense. The defense, at .93 is sound. In the Big East those numbers are reversed. The Storm is struggling overall on offense and a bit generous on defense.

  A reason for the defensive slip, beside better talent in the Big east, is the turnover rate. Overall the Storm are forcing opponents into a 20 percent TO rate – that is, one-fifth of the opposition possessions are turnovers. In the Big East that rate on the defensive end is 16 percent. In conference, St. John’s has found it more difficult to force opponents to turn the ball over.

No one expected Friar guard Jeff Xavier to play on Monday night.  Less than 48 hours earlier, his eye was swelled shut after a freak play when he drove to the basket and caught part of Marquette forward Joseph Fulce.  Xavier was on the ground face-down and kicking, which is never a good sign.  How bad was it?

“I thought my eyeball came out for a second.  I thought I was holding my eyeball,” the senior guard said.  “It hurt really bad, and I didn’t know what really happened.  I was kind of in a dazed mode.”

Although it looked like incidental contact, which is how Xavier felt when he got to see the play later, one person didn’t agree.  Xavier’s older brother, Jonathan, walked down from the stands, jumped in between two Friars on the bench and walked onto the court to talk to an official about the play.  Thankfully, the incident didn’t turn into anything remotely serious.

Xavier said he still felt a lot of pain on Sunday, but when he woke up on Monday morning, he knew he would play.  He was cleared later in the day and started the game, and received a huge ovation from the Friar faithful when announced as a starter.  Again, no one expected this.

“I never would have guessed that he would have been able to play tonight for one minute,” said head coach Keno Davis.  “From everything that we had heard yesterday, it was going to be Thursday was doubtful.”

Xavier didn’t have a big game, but there’s no question his presence alone lifted the team.  More importantly, for the second straight game, the Friar offense had a different look and better results.  This time, it led to a victory, as the Friars knocked off Cincinnati 72-50.

For a lot of non-conference play, Providence lived and died by the three-point shot.  They settled for those shots all too often early in a possession, not even working the ball to get a shot in the flow of the offense.  The ball almost never went inside-out.  On occasion, a few players would slash and make things happen, but there was never any consistency to it.

On Saturday, there was clearly an emphasis on getting the ball inside.  That should be just about any team’s plan against Marquette, a team with three terrific perimeter starters but a question mark inside.  The Friars would drive and even make entry passes inside, and they scored 32 of 45 first-half points in the paint for a five-point lead, and kept that going in the second half to build a 13-point lead.  They lost the game largely because of key turnovers down the stretch and an inability to keep their momentum.

Against Cincinnati, the same emphasis on going inside was there.  More often, it came from dribble penetration, and they made several excellent interior passes.  They kept attacking, and when it was all said and done they scored 50 of their 72 points in the paint.  Cincinnati had just 24 in the paint.

In fact, there was a point in the second half where the Friars seemed to be reverting to their old form of settling for three-pointers.  Not surprisingly, it didn’t work for them, and Cincinnati was able to stay within striking distance.  Then Randall Hanke came into the game and became a force inside.

Hanke scored 15 points on 7-7 shooting, as the Friars kept finding him inside and on the break a couple of times.  The senior big man knows how to finish, as he’s converted nearly 68 percent of his shots over his career, so it’s clear that getting the ball to him might be a good idea.

He wasn’t alone.  Jonathan Kale scored 14 points on 5-6 shooting, all but one coming right near the basket.  The emotional leader of the Friars, he’s not a guy they count on for scoring, but if he gets the ball in close, he’s capable of scoring.

Notice a pattern here?  Get the ball inside, and good things can happen.

“I think what we’ve found is that we’ve got an ability to score in different ways and win a ballgame in different ways,” said Davis.  “We can shoot the three, we can rebound, we can go inside, we can drive, we can penetrate.”

Going inside can work for their athletic wings as well.  It’s been well-established that Weyinmi Efejuku, who’s playing with a heavy heart after the recent passing of his father, is more than athletic enough to score on slashes, and Brian McKenzie and emerging Marshon Brooks can do so as well.  If they establish themselves that way, it can only help open up opportunities to shoot it from long range.

The last two games have shown that the Friars can be effective and even win when they get the ball inside to try to score.  As much as it helped to have Xavier back in the lineup after what happened two days earlier, the bigger development is the offensive change.  They got a boost Monday from Xavier’s return, but the new offensive emphasis will boost them as long as they keep that up.