College Basketball Tonight – March 19, 2017

Welcome to College Basketball Tonight! We are down to the Sweet 16 in the NCAA Tournament, and if the first round didn’t have what you want, the second round surely did. The results of the two rounds could not be more different.

First, we look at Sunday’s action, where two No. 2 seeds went down a day after the first No. 1 seed went down. Along the way, we look at how Villanova’s loss followed from seeding issues the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee had. The Wildcats lost to a good Wisconsin team that underachieved a bit in the regular season in part from injuries, but there are plenty of arguments to be had that they were seeded lower than they should have been.

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The Morning Dish – Sunday, March 12, 2017

This year’s NCAA Tournament is poised to have a number of great stories, including four schools making their first appearances ever (and a fifth in Northwestern almost certain to).

None will be better, though, than New Orleans. The Southland Conference regular season champion Privateers clinched their spot in the field with a 68-65 overtime victory over Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, and you can bet you’ll be hearing about UNO’s journey to get there for the next week, until it faces almost certainly a 1 or 2 seed (or maybe even a 16 seed) in its first game. … Continue Reading

The Morning Dish – Wednesday, February 8, 2017

A few days after Eastern Washington and Portland State played a three-overtime game that ended with two players scoring 45 points each and EWU finally winning 130-124, Alabama and South Carolina did their best to wrestle the mantle away for wildest game of the season.

On Tuesday, the Crimson Tide and Gamecocks played on, and on, and on. It took four overtimes, but Alabama finally earned a very nice road win, 90-86 over South Carolina. Again: in four overtimes.

In true SEC hoops fashion, the numbers for this one were a mix of amazing and bizarre. The Gamecocks’ Sindarius Thornwell scored 44 points and grabbed 21 rebounds, yet shot just 9-for-25 from the field. Thornwell didn’t need to convert a lot from the field to score 44 points, though, when he was hitting 25 of 33 from the free throw line, setting a new SEC record for foul shots made in a conference game-breaking a record formerly held by none other than Pistol Pete Maravich. … Continue Reading

The Morning Dish – Sunday, December 11, 2016

On the second Saturday in December, the stars were out across the country in college basketball.

A day that was anticipated for its matchups ended up being a showcase for some herculean individual efforts. Several players delivered huge, memorable performances that reminded us once again that the sport will never lack for talent to step up, no matter how many players leave early for the pros.
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The Morning Dish – Wednesday, November 30, 2016

With holiday tournaments past, college basketball hits a docile stretch, a relative lull in the schedule. One filled with guarantee games, light weeks while teams take final exams, made-for-TV games, and more guarantee games.

The TV networks try to inject some intrigue into this time with happenings like the ACC/Big Ten Challenge. And the event does have some excellent games, but the truth is the novelty of most of this event wore off long ago. Duke and Michigan State already play every few years in the not-so-modestly named Champions Classic, Indiana and Purdue face Notre Dame regularly in the Crossroads Classic. How many more games do these teams need to play against each other? Also: why should we buy the idea that Georgia Tech playing Penn State or Rutgers facing Miami (Fla.) is a big deal just because of their conference affiliations? … Continue Reading

2015-16 Big Ten Post-Mortem

The Big Ten had an enjoyable, entertaining, very nice 2015-16 basketball season, but enthusiasts of the conference can easily be forgiven if they were left with just a little bit of a dull taste at the end.

If one takes the larger view of the conference’s overall performance, the good should far outweigh the bad. The league had one of the very best players in all the country (Michigan State’s Denzel Valentine) and two more who were very close to that top layer (Indiana’s Yogi Ferrell and Iowa forward Jarrod Uthoff). It had five teams who were legitimate top 10-level good at one time or another, from mainstay Michigan State to surprising Iowa. … Continue Reading

The Morning Dish – Saturday, March 19, 2016

The first two full days of the 2016 NCAA Tournament weren’t like last year, when you couldn’t possibly have two more contrasting days in terms of results. But they did have a clear pattern develop, especially on Friday: for the most part, seeding doesn’t mean so much this year. The day also ended in dramatic fashion.

And with the way the regular season went, this shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s been that kind of year.

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The Morning Dish – Sunday, March 6, 2016

Two NCAA Tournament bids went out on Saturday night, one expected and one not necessarily expected at the beginning of the day. And for different reasons, you can’t blame either coach if they got a little emotional.

We start with the Ohio Valley Championship game, the one certainty when the day began. UT-Martin, who has never been to the NCAA Tournament, took on Austin Peay, the school that’s been there six times and has been among the signature programs in the conference for a long time. Head coach Dave Loos, who for a long time was also the athletic directory, turned 69 on Saturday and has been doing this for a long time. He is the winningest coach in Ohio Valley Conference history, having been at Austin Peay for 26 years; the conference’s other coaches have combined to be at their schools for 33 years. He’s seen a lot, and won a lot, but this one was clearly different for him.

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The Morning Dish – Monday, February 29, 2016

The 2015-16 season will go down as one where you didn’t want to be a highly-ranked team. Sunday was no different, capping a week in which only two teams in the AP top 10 did not lose. On the season, teams ranked in the AP top 10 have now lost a record 73 games in those positions in the poll. There is still one week to go, so that record will probably only grow.

Besides that, ESPN Stats and Info put out another great note later on Sunday, which is that every major conference team has at least four losses on the season. That means we will see just the third time since seeding began that all four No. 1 seeds in the NCAA Tournament have four or more losses, with 1990 and 2009 being the others.

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The Morning Dish – Monday, February 22, 2016

This weekend was just what California needed. Although Sunday was not the bigger game of the two for the Golden Bears, it was still important all the same, and their already strong NCAA Tournament candidacy got a big boost this weekend.

Washington State was within striking distance of the Golden Bears at the half, down just 40-31, but Cal blew open the game as the second half went on and routed the host Cougars 80-62. It capped off a sweep of the Washington schools on the road, and for a Cal team that had struggled on the road, this was just what they needed to take care of any remaining knocks on their resume.

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