0 comments by Matt Zemek on 2/9/2016
Monday night in Columbia, South Carolina, the Connecticut women’s basketball program entered its 22nd 1-versus-2 game. The Huskies’ record in their first 21 such encounters: 18-3. The 2016 edition of the Huskies didn’t exactly have an easy task in front of them in the attempt to push that record to 19-3. UConn faced an unbeaten […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
It’s true that in a 30-game regular season, single nights or weekend afternoons don’t fully determine postseason destinations. When experts say that “Game X is an elimination game” or “Game Y is a must-win,” it’s true that the weight of a season and all its hopes fall upon that one contest. However, such a perception […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
The Wisconsin Badgers could leave no doubt about their NCAA tournament credentials in the coming weeks. Greg Gard — filling in for his mentor, the esteemed Bo Ryan — will take a huge step toward locking up permanent status as UW’s head coach if he can win just one of four upcoming road games: at […]
Rick Pitino and Louisville made The American a much stronger league in 2014 compared to the current 2015 version. Sure, SMU leads the conference this season, but it achieved a lot more in the 2014 campaign. Why is 2015 SMU’s RPI at 18 while last season’s team carried an RPI of 53 into Selection Sunday? The answer becomes very obvious as you continue to read this piece… and no, it’s not about winning games, either.
0 comments by Allen Kenney on 2/8/2016
It comes up nearly every time a high-profile program runs seriously afoul of the NCAA’s Byzantine set of rules and regulations governing the multibillion-dollar college sports industrial complex. Scholarships get docked, postseason bans are implemented, and complaints start ringing out about such a hamfisted system of justice. Not surprisingly, college hoops legend Rick Pitino became […]
0 comments by Mike Abelson on 2/5/2016
This is the second part in a recurring series profiling college basketball programs in New England. The second stop is a place where basketball and winning have never been synonymous, but a new coach is working to change that. … When it comes to basketball, few programs own a more barren history than the University […]
0 comments by Ryan Palencer on 2/4/2016
Sure, John Calipari has never had a recruiting class ranked lower than second at Kentucky. It’s also true that whenever Calipari has struggled, he has usually been able to right the ship before it was too late. This dynamic was never more apparent than in 2014, when Calipari took an eighth-seeded team to the national championship […]
0 comments by Mike Abelson on 2/3/2016
Providence College lost to DePaul in Chicago on Tuesday night. Just let that fact sink in. This was the 11th-ranked team in the country losing to a program that hasn’t won more than 12 games in a season since 2007. What does that make Providence? Providence did lose the Big East’s leading scorer, Ben Bentil, […]
0 comments by Ryan Palencer
Following Tuesday night’s epic victory at Iowa State, West Virginia seems to be an enigma. It’s par for the course — not entirely in a bad way, to be sure, but volatility is never comfortable. That’s how diehard fans get ulcers. At least the aches and pains produced by the Mountaineers usually emerge in moments […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
The Texas Longhorns are going to be in the NCAA tournament, so they’re not a particularly weak team within the larger world of college basketball. Yet, the Horns started a 24-hour sequence in which the nuttiness of both the Big 12 and all of college basketball this season was perfectly encapsulated. Monday and Tuesday were […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
The date was January 13, 2016. The South Carolina Gamecocks had not lost a basketball game this season. At 15-0, they joined the SMU Mustangs as one of only two unbeaten teams in the country. SMU, being ineligible for the NCAA tournament, will unavoidably become a team which will miss the Dance after entering January […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 2/2/2016
To the casual American sports fan, Ben Simmons might indeed represent a ratings magnet for ESPN, thereby convincing the WorldWide Leader to broadcast a disproportionate amount of LSU basketball games this season. It’s been rather conspicuous over the past month: Not only do commentators reserve a ton of airtime for Simmons, but ESPN does as […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
Two coaches lost home games in this past weekend’s Big 12-SEC Challenge: One was the coach of a bad Auburn team, Bruce Pearl. He gets a pass, because he’s rebuilding a mess of a program. The other coach? Johnny Jones of LSU, who has a transformative talent on his roster but can’t seem to use […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 2/1/2016
The arrival of Monday marks the arrival of February. This brings us in touch with an annual in-season lamentation from college basketball diehards: The regular season doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves. It’s an argument that is hard to measure in terms of media focus, even more so when one realizes: A) how many […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
In the course of time, the Big 12-SEC Challenge could very easily become an event which reshapes several college basketball seasons. We could sit here in April and realize how much this midseason event — staged in the middle of the conference season — altered the trajectory of a crazy college basketball campaign. Right now, […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 1/29/2016
Steve Alford came to UCLA intent on reviving a program. The somewhat ironic truth about Alford is that he’s been good at authoring revivals in Los Angeles. The problem? Those revivals haven’t lasted long enough, and they haven’t occurred under circumstances favorable enough to lead UCLA to the Promised Land. Alford has been a magician […]
