Special Valentine’s Day Edition of Forde’s Minutes

If you are a loyal reader of the Final Four Blog, you probably already know that we are big fans of “The Minutes” by Pat Forde at ESPN. Every week he’s got 40 things to remark about in the world of college basketball, plus some slight pop culture references, and always a plea for Ashley Judd. This week, of course, was a Valentine’s special that included some thoughts on the power couples of college basketball over the years. There’s also some comments on bad basketball breakups and some dysfunctional relationships as well. You have to check it out if you get some free time before the five o’clock bell rings today.

Pat Forde has us at the Final Four Blog thinking: What are the great college hoops relationships right now? Are there any nice couples out there? It seems more likely that you’d find great couples back a few years when players weren’t one-and-done all the time. There’s never any chance for a Bobby Hurley-Christian Laettner relationship to blossom.

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Permalink - Posted in General on February 15, 2008 - Post a comment

Team Rankings: Valentines Day Edition

As you are probably well aware, today is Valentine’s Day, and as such, the Final Four Blog is going to give you loyal readers a special Valentine’s Day ranking system, one that is full of love and romance. But how do you make a rankings system for college basketball teams based on feelings? Offensive rebounds! Well, there’s really no sense to it except that “rebound” doubles as a relationship term. Therefore I think that offensive rebounding is perhaps the most sentimental basketball statistic… so here are the best teams in the nation at grabbing the offensive boards (basically compiled through the stats at BasketballProspectus.com, combined with our own secret recipe).

MOST ROMANTIC TEAMS (OFFENSIVE REBOUNDS)
Valentines Day Edition (February 14, 2008)

1. Stanford
2. Brigham Young
3. UCLA
4. Texas A&M
5. Utah
6. North Carolina
7. Memphis
8. Wichita St.
9. San Diego St.
10. Davidson
11. Pacific
12. Albany
13. Indiana
14. Wisconsin
15. Virginia

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Permalink - Posted in General on February 14, 2008 - Post a comment

Perdue: Best in the Big Ten?

There are a number of teams that you might mention in the top tier of the Big Ten, including, probably Michigan State, Wisconsin, Ohio State and Indiana. However, you might want to throw in Perdue as well. The Boilermakers just got done handing the No. 10 Michigan State Spartans a 60-54 defeat the other day, They are now at 11-1 in conference play. Where did the Boilermakers come from? Check out the most recent post game wrap up to get the gist of the team. You’ll have a lot of catching up to do if you haven’t been following the Boilermakers all season long.

The rap on the Boilermakers is basically this: They are 20-5 overall, and they’ve been playing some very good basketball lately, as their conference record indicates. They’ve won 10 straight as of their Michigan State victory. The main guy on the offensive side of the ball is probably swing man Robbie Hummel who gets all over the stats box every night. Right now the Coaches Poll has Perdue ranked at No. 23 and the AP has then at 19, but if they can survive until Monday without a loss, they will probably get even lower numbers next week.

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Permalink - Posted in General on February 13, 2008 - Post a comment

Georgetown Wins on Free Throws vs. Nova

If you are a fan of college basketball, you probably were well aware that Georgetown and Villanova played last night. You might have even made the effort to get tickets to see the game at the Verizon Center, the Hoyas’ home court. Unfortunately for all in attendance and all those fans who watched from home, the game ended in controversy and not in a last-second heroic play or an overtime that seemed to be the only way to end such a close game. Nova and G’town battled for the whole game, with Nova making a nice comeback at the end, but on the final play a foul was called, giving the Hoyas two free buckets from the line with just a couple of ticks left on the clock. Although the play was technically a foul, many people who saw the game were frustrated by the refs calling such a seemingly minor infraction at such a critical time in the game.

Georgetown won the game 55-53, but fans of both teams are unhappy with the finish. Villanova fans wanted the players to decide the game, and Georgetown fans, though they appreciate the victory, do not like the fact that is seems tainted by questionable officiating. Let’s hope when these two teams meet again, we get an exciting game, sans controversy.

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Permalink - Posted in General on February 12, 2008 - Post a comment

LSU’s John Brady Fired

Louisiana State University’s head coach has been fired. John Brady, who was in the middle of a struggling season as head coach of the LSU Tigers, was dismissed from his duties. In his place is an assistant, Butch Pierre, who will be the interim head coach, presumably for the remainder of the regular season of play. Brady had enjoyed 10 mostly successful years in Baton Rouge with the Tigers, netting a record of 192-139 over the course of time with the team. He got his Tigers to the NCAA Tournament and even the Final Four back in 2006. However, the past two seasons were a not up to par for the Tigers, and Brady was floundering in a tough SEC schedule this year.

This kind of a firing has to make you wonder. Do you think it is better to get rid of a coach mid-way through a season if you know he’s finished, or do you think it’s better to hang on with him until the end of the season is through? Do you think it is better for the players to get to know a new coach and his system as soon as possible, or do you think that further confounds the problem? We wish coach Brady well in his future endeavors.

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Permalink - Posted in General on February 11, 2008 - Post a comment

Pittsburgh Finishes off West Virginia With Buzzer-Beating Three

Pittsburgh has provided what will probably be recalled as the first of many last-second, game-winning long-bombs in the 2007-’08 college basketball season. Although this is hardly March, and the tournaments are a long ways away, when you were watching the Pittsburgh-West Virginia game last night, you had to get a little bit pumped for the NCAA Tournament, right? These were two Big East teams trying to get to the top of a very large pack of good, tournament-hopeful Big East teams. It was the middle of the so-called “Rivalry Week,” and there was a certain amount of urgency in the air. Check out the highlight video at ESPN.com.

The Final Four Blog is officially declaring “It’s on!” As the buzzer rang and the game winner swished through the net, the official start of Madness has begun at this blog. You can call it February Madness if you want. It would be crazy to name something that title anyways, right? But that’s the point! You’ve got to start thinking crazy to get crazy, and the Pittsburgh-WVU game as started the process over here on our curve of the blogosphere. We need something to get excited about now that the Super Bowl is done.

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Permalink - Posted in General on February 8, 2008 - Post a comment

No. 2 Duke Beats No. 3 UNC

The Duke Blue Devils broke their three-game losing streak to the North Carolina Tar Heels last night with a solid 89-78 win in Chapel Hill. Although North Carolina was without several of their key players, including starting point guard Ty Lawson, the win is still quite significant, and gives the Blue Devils frontrunner status (there’s a term that’s getting thrown around a lot these days) in the Tobacco Road rivalry. Duke lead the whole second half, never allowing the Tar Heels to get too close, frustrating them on offense and defense.

Before the season started, it was thought that Duke, which had an uncharacteristically bad season last year, would struggle in the ACC against teams with larger, more traditional post players. However, Coach K has Duke spreading the floor, allowing his team to use their speed and superior wing play to defeat teams no matter their size. Still, there are a lot of teams that might be able to turn the tables on Duke, and one has to wonder what the game would have been like if the Heels were at full strength.

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Permalink - Posted in General on February 7, 2008 - Post a comment

Bob Knight Photo Retrospective a Study in Intensity

There were few college basketball coaches in the past couple of decades- few coaches in all of American sports, for that matter- as intense as Bob Knight. He was fiery on and off the court, famous for his emotional outbursts, profanity-laced halftime chew-outs, and even for his occasional foray into physical abuse, be it slapping a player mid-game or throwing a folding chair out onto the court to protest a bad call. But beyond all of the bad publicity and the media’s desire to cover anything and everything the guy did and said, Knight was an incredible coach with a resume that’s the envy of almost any hoops coach in history.

You can view a cool photo retrospective on Coach Knight at SoprtsIllustrated.com. Highly recommended. The photos are mainly the ones you’ll always see when you’re looking at an article about Knight (him screaming, him screaming with his face brighter red than usual, him looking like he just got done screaming….). We college basketball bloggers will miss Bob Knight and all the color and character that he brought to the game. Who needs another Coach K, who’s the same as Roy Williams, who’s the same as Rick Patino? Give me guy with personality, even if that personality is mean. We here at the Final Four Blog will miss you, Bob Knight.

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Permalink - Posted in General on February 6, 2008 - Post a comment

Bob Knight Retires Mid-Season

Bob Knight has retired from coaching. It’s odd for any coach of a major basketball program to retire at a time like this- in the middle of a brutal conference schedule, with only a few weeks left of regular season play- but what makes it even more noteworthy is that it’s Bob Knight, one of the most famous coaches in college basketball today. Knight is the career leader in coaching wins, has won three national championships, and led the last undefeated D-1 college basketball team, the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers. Coach Knight was known for his famous tirades, his temper, his volatility, but also for his extraordinary coaching ability, his knack for getting the most out of each player, and thus the whole team. As mean as he was, Knight will be regarded as one of the game’s best coaches of all time. The numbers speak for themselves.

Check out the Bob Knight run-down at CBSsportsline.com. While Knight is famous for that 1976 team that went undefeated and won the national championship, he also went 31-1 the year before, a testament to the fact that this guy has always been good. His success was no accident. His most famous moments were probably with Indiana, but in the beginning of his head coaching career he was with Army- not known for its hoops prowess. He coached at Texas Tech for six and a half seasons, earning an overall record of 138-91. He is 67 years old, and reports indicate that he was just too tired to go on, and didn’t find coaching fun anymore. He passes the reigns of the Red Raiders season on to his son, Pat Knight, a former assistant with the team.

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Permalink - Posted in General on February 5, 2008 - Post a comment

AP Top 25 Poll Rankings (Jan. 28)

Some of the new polls are out, so make sure to see if your team has moved up, moved out, or just joined the 25-best club in any of the nation’s most well-respected polls. The AP is probably the one that matters the most, but as of this blog’s publication the latest AP posting has not come out yet. Memphis remained the No. 1 team in the nation in the USA Today/ESPN Poll, as well as most other polls. Kansas, Duke, UNC, UCLA, Georgetown and Tennessee all pretty much stayed pat from their rankings last week in the top 10. There were some significant moves in the middle and back of the poll, though. Both Mississippi and Mississippi State, two SEC teams, were kicked out of the ESPN Poll. Notre Dame and UConn, two Big East teams, made the jump to rankdom this time around. Rhode Island and Perdue received the most votes to join the list of the teams that are outside of the 25.

As the conference schedules continue, there should be a few more shakeups at the top of the rankings. The Duke Blue Devils and North Carolina Tar Heels are going to play this week, so one of those teams is going to have a big win, the other will have a loss to consider (though if they play to overtime or something- a likely scenario- the loser will probably not see too much of a negative affect on their rankings).

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Permalink - Posted in General on February 4, 2008 - Post a comment


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