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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.

Rick Pitino is Wrong About NCAA Justice

0 comments by 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 […]

Hoops in New England: The University of Maine

0 comments by 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 […]

BATON ROUGE, LA – NOVEMBER 28: Head coach Les Miles of the LSU Tigers celebrates after defeating the Texas A&M Aggies 19-7 at Tiger Stadium on November 28, 2015 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

LSU doesn’t land a No. 1 class, but results matter more

0 comments by on 2/4/2016

By any standard, LSU’s National Signing Day was a mixed bag. Sure, the Tigers landed five-star corner Kristian Fulton, but that was just the cherry on top of a loaded defensive-back class at a position which already was a relative strength on the depth chart. Elsewhere, LSU lost out on key four-star linebacker Erick Fowler […]

Kentucky has a depth problem, and the echoes of 2014 linger

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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 […]

Texas head coach Charlie Strong celebrates with the Golden Hat after defeating Oklahoma, 24-17, at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas on Saturday, Oct. 10, 2015. (Brandon Wade/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/TNS via Getty Images)

Charlie Strong, Texas Make A Big Splash With National Signing Day Blitz

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You don’t change the paradigm of a program on National Signing Day alone. Winning games between the lines, claiming titles, changing a team’s culture — that’s the stuff which remakes the program, or in Texas’s case, restores it. However, bringing in big-time talent is almost always the first step toward achieving the above goals. Texas […]

Providence needs to look in the mirror after losing to DePaul

0 comments by 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, […]

West Virginia beats Iowa State, but continues to live on the margins

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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 […]

24 hours of craziness define life in the Big 12… and college hoops in 2016

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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 […]

South Carolina braces for the defining stretch of its season

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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 […]

Winners and losers at the Senior Bowl: buying and selling NFL draft stocks

0 comments by on 2/2/2016

With the Senior Bowl wrapping up in Mobile last weekend, several players took advantage of their last opportunity to impress before the NFL Combine. Some of these players improved their draft stocks tremendously. However, on the other end of the spectrum, some had such a poor week that their draft standings plummeted. Here are the […]

LSU basketball, part 2: It’s about more than Ben Simmons

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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 […]

College basketball doesn’t matter before March? It matters before February

0 comments by 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 […]

If you wanted a big revelation from Saturday, you didn’t get it

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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, […]

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