Scoring from the Charity Stripe: A Sure Way to the Tourney?

In the game of basketball, sometimes there is no more important statistic than your free throw percentage. The way I look at it, free throws are basically a turnover with the possibility of points. They can swing a team’s fortune in very dramatic ways. Since the team on defense will either inbound the ball if the second free throw is made, or rebound it easily if it is missed (because they get the best two positions to grab the rebound) not making your free throws is essentially the same as giving the ball away. On the flip side, if you shoot a high percentage from the line you’re maximizing your possessions, scoring easily and racking up fouls on the other team, all with minimal effort. So free throws are important. That’s why we’re giving you this latest top ten ranking, based mostly off of the wonderful stats collected by BasketballProspectus.com, as well as some secret ingredients known only to the Final Four Blog.

COUPON CLIPPERS UNITE! (BEST FREE THROW SHOOTING TEAMS)
January 31, 2008

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Good News for Tennessee Fans, NCAA Athletes

The Tennessee Volunteers were able to survive a good fight put up by the Alabama Crimson Tide last night when they won on the road in Tuscaloosa 93-86. Chris Lofton, the Vols’ most distinguished player, led the way for Tennessee with 23 points. Alonzo Gee of Alabama had a game-high 27, though it was not enough to complete a comeback in the second half of the game. The Volunteers are currently the No. 7 team in the nation, and will likely keep their spot or move higher in the next AP Poll, depending on what the other top teams do as the week comes to a close. This was a great game to attend, a real SEC battle that anybody would have loved to have tickets for.

In other news, college athletes are going to get compensation for educational expenses that were not covered in a prior agreement with the NCAA. Overall, this should be a good thing for the athletes, who are trying to get things like health insurance and injury insurance. For players under the old agreement, compensation can be permitted if they can prove that they incurred expenses for which they should have received reimbursement.

To get NC AA basketball tickets, go to StubHub.com.

San Diego Toreros Take Down Kentucky, No. 21 Saint Mary’s

Saint Mary’s College of Moraga will, in all likelihood, be kicked out of the AP Top 25 Poll for the second time this season. Weeks ago the Gaels reached a No. 24 ranking, only to be stripped of their number prefix when they lost to Southern Illinois the week after they got their spot in the AP Poll. This time, the Gaels had a No. 21 ranking for less than 24 hours before they lost to the University of San Diego Toreros, 63-55.

Perhaps the fact that they get a ranking makes the Gaels play soft, or maybe it’s just that it makes their opponents try harder to beat them. Or, maybe San Diego is simply a dangerous team. Earlier in the season USD beat the winningest college basketball team of all time, the Kentucky Wildcats, and now they’ve ole!-ed a ranked team in the Gaels. The Toreros are 11-11 overall, 4-1 in conference play, but that’s good enough for third place in the WCC, where the unranked Gonzaga Bulldogs occupy the top spot. If the Toreros play well at home versus Gonzaga next month, they’ll be a sleeper pick to get to the NCAA Tournament via a WCC Tournament win. They WCC Tournament will be played at the Slim Gym, The Jenny Craig Pavilion at USD, where in 2003 the Toreros stunned the college basketball world with a win over Gonzaga (No. 5 at the time) in the WCC Championship.

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New Polls Out; Memphis Remains No. 1

The new AP and Coaches polls are out, as well as several other versions of the Top 25 rankings. Most all of the polls will have Memphis as the No. 1 team in the country, and then some other combination of Duke, Kansas, North Carolina, UCLA and Georgetown following right behind. Today’s blog is not about those teams, it’s about the teams that are just short of making the poll. Here are the AP Poll’s “Others Receiving Votes,” as a countdown.

TEAMS READY FOR A RANKING (“ALSO RECEIVING VOTES”)
January 28, 2008

1. Mississippi State 112
2. Connecticut 108
3. Arizona 102
4. Dayton 69
5. Notre Dame 63
6. USC 63
7. West Virginia 63
8. Louisville 40
9. Purdue 34
10. Oklahoma 28
11. Villanova 27
12. South Alabama 22
13. Clemson 20
14. Rhode Island 17
15. Gonzaga 17
16. Arizona State 16
17. Houston 9
18. Miami (FL) 7
19. UNLV 4
20. Saint Joseph’s 3
21. Virginia Commonwealth 1

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Good College Hoops Games to See This Weekend

There’s going to be a lot of great hoops games going on this weekend, so you had better hurry to secure your tickets. The best games of the weekend, as decided by the bloggers at the Final Four Blog, are as follows:

Saturday:

Notre Dame vs. Villanova
Gonzaga vs. Memphis
Nebraska vs. Kansas
Texas A&M vs. Oklahoma State
Mississippi State vs. Mississippi
Cal vs. Stanford
Texas Tech vs. Texas

Sunday:

Michigan vs. Michigan State
Duke vs. Maryland
Army vs. Navy

As you can see, there are plenty of rivalry basketball games this weekend, so you don’t have to have too much Super Bowl anxiety. We all agree that the best of the best is probably going to be Texas-Texas Tech, because of Knight and the regional feud thing. Tickets will be hard to come by.
To get NCAA basketball tickets, go to StubHub.com.

Top 10 Fastest Fast-Paced College Basketball Teams

College basketball is a quick game, and your team is going to have to be quick when it needs to be in order to survive the tournament. It’s no accident that the fastest teams in the nation, the teams with the highest tempo, or pace, are the teams that can score the most, and consequently, usually the teams that have the best record. Truly great NCAA hoops teams will be able to run and gun, score on the fast break off turnovers, as well as play good, fundamental half-court offense. These are the teams that the Final Four Blog has picked as the fastest of the fast. We basically used the raw tempo/pace data at Basketball Prospectus.com, combined with our own secret recipe. Enjoy.

Top 10 Fastest Fast-Paced College Basketball Teams
January 24, 2008

1. U-Mass
2. Pepperdine
3. North Carolina
4. UConn
5. Tennessee
6. Kansas St.
7. Vanderbilt
8. UTEP
9. Syracuse
10. Duke

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Sutton Denied No. 800 by Zags

The Gonzaga Bulldogs beat the San Francisco Dons the other night in Spokane, meaning that USF coach Eddie Sutton will have to wait just a little while longer to reach the 800th win of his coaching career. The game was a standard WCC event, with Gonzaga asserting its will over one of the other, lesser-known schools in the West Coast. USF lost 72-64, and the Zags improved to 15-4.

Clearly the story of the game was coach Eddie Sutton, who is trying to break through a barrier that’s a good, round number. Sutton will probably not surpass Bob Knight in career total wins, but Sutton will be in elite company when he reaches 800. He might have to wait until after the weekend, though, because the Dons will be playing the other tough team in the WCC, the St. Mary’s Gaels, on Saturday. The most likely scenario is that Sutton will get his 800th at home against regional rival Santa Clara on Monday of next week. Make sure to get tickets to that game.

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Oregon State Seeks Fresh Start

Oregon State has been making the college basketball headlines for all the wrong reasons lately. Their head coach, Jay John, was fired earlier in the week, and then the day afterwards the new interim head coach dismissed their starting center from the team for disciplinary reasons. If you follow Oregon State Beavers hoops, you know that the team has had some troubles of late. They are winless in the Pac-10 so far, and haven’t had much success in their conference with J.J. pacing the sidelines the past few years. There’s even a report that Oregon State played with only four players at one point on their Washington road trip this past weekend. Things weren’t going well, so it appears that they are trying to dump the old and work on the new. Hopefully it works out for this program, because Oregon State University is a great school with a lot of sports supporters who would love to see this team turn things around.

While the news coming from the program is not positive, you have to give Oregon State some slack. They have been playing in a very tough Pac-10, a conference that only seems to get fiercer as the years go on. They compete with Oregon for players, and sometimes they lose out. Hopefully their new coach or the next one that they hire can usher in a new era at Oregon State.

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Shakeup at the Top of the AP Poll!

If you’ve been following the AP and USA Today polls all season long, you probably discovered that they hadn’t been changing much. In fact, that’s the reason why we here at the Final Four Blog have made an effort to develop other rankings systems, thus allowing more teams a time at the top of a poll. North Carolina was hogging the top spot almost all season long, so things were getting boring. But that has changed now that UNC is no longer undefeated. The Tar Heels dropped to No. 5 in the AP Poll after they lost to unranked Maryland over the weekend.

Make sure to take a look at the latest polls, available at ESPN.com. Memphis appears to have the top spot in most of the polls, and at 17-0, they look like one of the most likely teams to go undefeated the whole way through the regular season. Kansas is also looking very good, winning most of their games easily no matter who they play. The Jayhawks are ranked second and also have an undefeated record, 18-0. Will Memphis last long as the nation’s No. 1? Or will they suffer the same fate as the Tar Heels?

You can find out by getting NCAA basketball tickets to see their home games by visiting StubHub.com.

ESPN’s Weekend Watch

If you’re wondering what tickets to get or what college basketball games to watch this weekend (when you’re not watching the NFL Conference Championship Games, that is) then you ought to check out the Weekend Watch, a feature at ESPN that does a great job of summarizing the biggest, most nationally important games in the country that are coming up this weekend. There are a handful of really exciting matchups this weekend, but the feature story is an ACC battle between two ranked teams, No. 23 Clemson and No. 5 Duke. If you don’t already have tickets to Cameron Indoor Stadium for that one, you should get them right away.

Of course there are other fine games to attend or watch on television. Te best of the rest includes: Kentucky at Florida, Notre Dame at Georgetown, Ohio State at Tennessee, Texas A&M at Kansas State, Kansas at Missouri, Arizona State at Stanford and Oregon at Washington State. Of the games just mentioned, the Final Four Blog would recommend you get to Kansas at Missouri. These two teams are natural rivals, and their games always seem to come down to the wire. Even though Kansas looks invincible, this game might prove otherwise.

To get NCAA basketball tickets, go to StubHub.com.

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