A sports blog by and for Midwest Sports Fans
By the time you read this, the Super Bowl will be over, and the sports world will finally be able to turn more of its attention to college hoops.
A terrific Kansas-Missouri game on Saturday night provided a springboard into “Rivalry Week,” which features a number of intriguing matchups.
Before that tips off though, here are this week’s power rankings.
It sounds a bit odd to say this, but last week was relatively tame in the college hoops world since “only” nine teams in the Top 25 lost. Even so, there are no new teams in this week’s edition of my power rankings, just some jostling of positions.
Saturday was arguably the best day of college basketball so far this season, as a pair of Top Five sqauds squared off, the top-ranked team went down, and a buzzer-beater ended a lengthy home winning streak just to name a few of the notable happenings.
And as usual, that led to plenty of shakeups in this week’s Top 25.
It’s hard to believe that Selection Sunday is now less than two months away, and the bubble watch will soon be in full effect. In the meantime, there continues to be a lot of movement thanks to the general inability of teams to win away from home.
With that in mind, here are this week’s risers and fallers.
In episode #18 of The Bottoms Line College Basketball Podcast, host Andy Bottoms is once again joined by Rob Dauster and Troy Machir of Ballin’ Is a Habit to discuss all the latest news and events in college basketball.
After yet another week where nearly half of the Top 25 suffered at least one loss, the exercise of putting together my latest power rankings has proven to be challenging once again.
The middle of the list has proven to be a complete mess, but since road wins have been so tough to come by, there are some teams that actually stayed put or even moved up despite losing.
Things can change quickly at this stage of the season. At least that’s the explanation I’m using for the performances of a few of my “stock up” teams from last week.
The ACC now has 13 losses, Cal got dumptrucked by Missouri, Long Beach State lost immediately following their signature win, and Memphis went 1-2 in Maui just to name a few.
The possibility also exists that I am the kiss of death, so to fans of this week’s “stock up” teams, consider yourselves warned.
As usual, the Maui Invitational features the best top-to-bottom field of any preseason tournament, and there have been a number of exciting games leading up to Wednesday night’s final between #6 Duke and #14 Kansas, which can be seen at 10:00 EST on ESPN.
While the college basketball season began in earnest over the weekend, there weren’t too many marquee games on the schedule, and the sport was forced to compete with college and pro football. That won’t be the case when ESPN’s fourth tip-off marathon begins. The event features 19 men’s games spanning roughly 25 hours, starting at 12:00 Tuesday morning.
I’m too old to stay up for the whole thing, but for those of you wishing to check it out, I can offer you two things: 1) a link to the complete schedule of the games and commentators and 2) my thoughts and predictions for each contest.
In episode #7 of The Bottoms Line College Hoops Talk Podcast, host Andy Bottoms is joined once again Rob Dauster and Troy Machir of Ballin’ Is a Habit to discuss all the latest news and events in college basketball and continue their conference previews.
Among the topics discussed in this episode: news items on the Kansas suspensions and Pe’Shon Howard’s injury at Maryland, plus a great deal of talk about the biggest, baddest conference in the land: the Big East.
Yesterday at Grantland, New York Times Magazine editor Chris Sullentrop took readers to Kansas City to explain why the NBA doesn’t want Kansas City and why Kansas City doesn’t want the NBA, despite building the 19,000-seat Sprint Center to lure a pro basketball team.
The article includes this footnote:
Though as a Kansan, I am trying to be mean to Missouri, even though I went to journalism school there. In Kansas City, collegiate rooting affiliations are bound by blood and soil, not matriculation. I root for the Tigers in journalism and for the Jayhawks in everything else.
I don’t understand. This approach to rooting affiliations is contrary to everything I know, understand, and believe about college sports fandom.
Photo credit: Nick Krug via LJWorld.com
Blood? Perhaps Suellentrop has inherited chromosomes from KU grads, but his blood spent four years in Columbia, Missouri. Why defer to ancestry? Would you root for your parents’ high school against your own? Soil? Living on the Kansas side of the border requires or compels one to be a Jayhawks fan? What about K-State? What about Wichita State? The Suellentrop family tax dollars found their way to Manhattan and Wichita as surely as they did Lawrence.
From birth until age 18, I was as big an Indiana Hoosiers fan as any of my peers. My dad graduated from IU and dressed me in cream and crimson during my formative years. The two of us spent several evenings each season in the balcony at Assembly Hall and many more watching promising Indiana recruits such as Greg Graham and Alan Henderson play high school ball.
from the UE bookstore
On my nineteenth birthday, I moved into the Hughes Hall dormitory on the campus of the University of Evansville. I was no longer an Indiana Hoosiers fan. I was an Evansville Purple Aces fan. It wasn’t an easy adjustment. Like Indiana, Evansville has five national championship banners hanging in its basketball arena, but UE’s banners are for the Division II titles the Aces won between 1959 and 1971. Unlike Indiana, Evansville hangs banners for NIT appearances. Indiana, for all its faults on the gridiron, plays football in the Big Ten. Evansville eliminated its football program during my junior year. Indiana has won 7 NCAA men’s soccer championships and 6 NCAA men’s swimming championships. Evansville hasn’t won any of either.
But Evansville was my school. It’s where I spent four of the most important years of my life; where I first encountered the Internet; where I won intramural championships in floor hockey, kickball, and C-league basketball; and where I met my wife. I take pride in knowing that I graduated from the same college as Jerry Sloan, Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock, and True Blood‘s Rutina Wesley. (Rutina Wesley was in my voice class. She is a much better singer than I.)
I identify with the University of Evansville. It’s a part of me. Therefore I cheer with “pep and vim” for the Aces. That’s how being a college sports fan works, right? You cheer for your school.
In 1996 Evansville and Indiana met at Madison Square Garden in the semi-finals of the Preseason NIT. Evansville led for much of the second half but lost the game on an Andrae Patterson buzzer beater. I was crushed. No part of me felt good for Indiana. In that moment, I loathed every one of my friends who was enrolled at IU-Bloomington. I wanted nothing to do with any of them. That’s how being a college sports fan works, right?
After Evansville I went to Divinity School at Vanderbilt, and Vandy took the number-two slot on my college-sports-rooting-affiliation list. Since beginning my post-secondary education, Evansville has made only one NCAA Tournament appearance (in 1999 they lost to Kansas in a first-round 6-11 matchup; I was there) and Vanderbilt has played in only one bowl game (they beat Boston College in the 2008 Music City Bowl). Between them, Evansville and Vanderbilt have won exactly one NCAA Division I championship: Vandy, women’s bowling, 2005.
But it doesn’t matter, because they’re my schools.
I have an Ace Purple bobblehead on my desk. I look forward to evenings when I can watch Evansville’s basketball team play on ESPN3.com or Vanderbilt’s baseball team play on regular ESPN. I was proud when the Purple Aces beat Hofstra in this year’s CIT and won’t pass up this opportunity to remind you that Evansville beat Butler at Hinkle last season. And in 2005 I watched Vandy take down Maryland Eastern Shore for that women’s bowling title. (It was on ESPN2.)
I still follow Indiana basketball, and I hope that Indiana will soon reclaim its place as a top ten college hoops program. But Indiana isn’t my school. And Kansas isn’t Chris Suellentrop’s school. I don’t care if the Jayhawks have a bigger trophy case or better fans or a richer tradition than their rivals to the east.
If you are a Mizzou grad, the Tigers are your team. Embrace them. Complain about the fifth down game. Reminisce about the Steve Stipanovich days. Look forward to Blaine Gabbert’s NFL career and wonder aloud if Chase Daniel will ever get a chance to be a starter.
Having said that, I now give you the worst hit song that Brian Wilson ever wrote:
Schools can be eliminated or demoted due to rivalries with schools higher on the list. For example, I have cousins who graduated from Drake and Illinois State, two of Evansville’s Missouri Valley Conference peers. So Drake and Illinois State are off my list, at least during MVC play.
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Josh Tinley is the author of Kneeling in the End Zone: Spiritual Lessons From the World of Sports. Follow him at twitter.com/joshtinley or send him an e-mail.
Update: Predictions are in (sort of) below.
Well, one of the teams in the Southwest Regional Final was expected to be here. The other team? Not so much. Heck, the other team wasn’t even expected to be in the Tournament!
But that doesn’t matter now. VCU has shaka’d the world and compelled us all to rethink whether or not the committee was smart to put them in the field of 68.
Sunday afternoon, the second day of Elite 8 games will tip off with #1 seed Kansas against #11 seed VCU. The Jayhawks were sensational in the Sweet 16, but you underestimate the Rams and coach Shaka Smart at your own risk.
Before tonight’s Sweet 16 game, players from Kansas and Richmond got into a little bit of an altercation in the tunnel before the game.
Nothing serious happened beyond some jawing, but it definitely carried over into the game. Despite Kansas running out to an early win, the game was chippy throughout.
Since it’s a slow early session of games, here is the video in case you didn’t see it:
Kansas entered the NCAA Tournament ranked #2 in the the national polls after winning their fifth Big 12 Tournament in the last six years, and much like previous years they became a favorite to win the Big Dance.
The Jayhawks make it back to the Sweet 16 after being upset by Northern Iowa in the second round in 2010. Kansas has what some would consider the easiest path the the Final Four considering the 10, 11, and 12 seeds are the teams still left in their bracket.
The 12 seed, Richmond, has returned to the Sweet 16 for the first time since 1998, defeating Vanderbilt and Morehead State to get there. The Spiders have won 16 of their last 18 games with the only loses coming against Temple and Xavier, who both made the NCAA Tournament.
Last night, immediately after the brackets were announced, I went about the process of running through my bracket picking system to figure out my official one-and-only bracket. Now that this is out of the way, I can step back a bit from trying to analyze what I think will happen and take a look at what I hope will happen – independent of if it is what I predicted.
One of the most entertaining activities to engage in with a fresh, new bracket is to see all the possible matchups that could reasonably (or unreasonably) materialize. In this post, I run down 10 matchups that I really hope to see happen, and encourage you to share yours as well.
