Kentucky 90, Tennessee 72

Suffering from some law school grade-related blues, I needed something, late Tuesday night, to make myself feel better. So at just a few minutes before 3 a.m. on Wednesday, after finishing the next day's reading, I decided to re-watch Jodie Meeks' record-setting 54-point effort (highlights here; sorry for the advertisement at the beginning, but that's ESPN for you) in a win at Tennessee.

Some people drink away their troubles. I've done my fair share of that over the years, but alcohol has never made me feel as good as a transcendant performance on the hardwood.

Meeks hasn't really been on my radar, since he was hurt or inconsistent during his first two years in Lexington. Even in this, his breakout season (he was leading the SEC in scoring at 24.2 points per game heading into the matchup with Tennessee, and had already registered four 30-point efforts, including a 46-point outing against Appalachian State on December 20) I hadn't noticed him, since I hadn't seen the Wildcats play.

Now that he's set the single-game scoring record in UK's storied history, consider me officially on notice.

The Volunteers are hardly a defensive juggernaut, and the frenetic pace they favor gives opponents a relatively high number of possessions on which to score. According to the ESPN broadcast, Meeks is the sixth opposing player to set a career-high in scoring this year against the Vols. Still, according to ESPN's Pat Forde, Meeks' 54 were the most points by a BCS-conference player since 2000, when Arizona State's Eddie House hung 61 on California in a game that went to overtime.

Maybe it's because Forde invoked his name, but I couldn't help but notice the similarities in the offensive games of House and Meeks. I've often noticed the unique way House moves around and especially the way he gets into his shot; I think the best word to describe it is "bouncy," or, maybe, "springy." House doesn't step into his lethal jumper so much as he hops into it, coming to what is essentially a jump stop before going up. This allows him to square his body to the bucket relatively quickly and effectively, as he is taking off for his shot from a very stable base. Compare it to shooting off the dribble without a jump stop, where the shooter's feet are often unnaturally far apart for a jump shot. House does this even when he's moving without the ball; his last step when coming off a screen is a jump stop. This has the effect of making an already quick release even quicker, and defenders are often caught off-guard, making the shot hard to contest. Meeks shoots the same way.

Of course, there are differences between the two, and they all point in Meeks' favor. The first is size. Meeks is listed at 6'4", while House -- the NBA journeyman who is now a backup guard with the Boston Celtics -- is listed at 6'1". Yet Meeks is bigger without giving up quickness; in fact, off hand, I cannot think of any 6'4" players quicker or even as quick as Meeks, and he's quicker than many smaller men, both with the ball and without it (ESPN analyst Jimmy Dykes kept marveling at how hard he cuts). Meeks also has a more diverse offensive game than House, the three-point sniper who rarely does any damage inside the foul line. While Meeks has a very good jumper -- the school-record ten threes he hit Tuesday night attest to that -- he can also put it on the floor and get to the hoop. Finally, House is something of a liability defensively (though not for want of effort). Meeks, by contrast, is a good defender (his aforementioned size and quickness certainly play part here).

I still have a couple of Kevin Durant's Texas games on my Tivo, but neither those nor the 30-point half I watched Purdue's Glenn Robinson put up on Kansas many years ago compare to Meeks' dominance Tuesday night. Mr. Meeks, if you're reading this: Thanks for an enjoyable end to a rough day.

[Antonio Anderson keeping Memphis' Conference USA winning streak alive -- it's now at 45 games -- at the buzzer in Tulsa (link to highlights has introductory advertisement and sound) was a pretty tasty appetizer.]

Pittsburgh 70, Georgetown 54

I'm ack in DC for a few days and checked out this one with my cousin and a few friends. After Georgetown so thoroughly outplayed UConn in Storrs earlier in the week, I was expecting a better game than I got. If it weren't for DaJuan Summers hitting some very difficult shots -- he had 15 at halftime and finished with 22 -- it wouldn't have been much of a ballgame. As it was, the Panthers had it well in hand by the last several minutes. I was sitting right by the Pitt section -- those folks travel well. And they've been rewarded -- the Panthers are the nation's new number one team for the first time in history, after North Carolina's stunning loss to Boston College in Chapel Hill last night (so much for the undefeated season I had been predicting).

Sitting up in the 400 level -- "the Hill" as its known in the Verizon Center, a nod, of course, to Capitol Hill -- it was hard to appreciate just how dominant Pitt's DeJuan Blair was, so it was something of a surprise afterward to see his stat line of 20 points and 17 rebounds. His counterpart, Greg Monroe (who I raved about recently) had a decent game by the box score with 15 points and eight boards, but Blair thoroughly outplayed him. I don't want to say that Monroe needs to become more physical because I think his future is on the wing, but for Gerogetown's purposes, I'm sure they'd like him to bang a bit more.

Speaking of Monroe and Blair, after last Monday's performance against UConn, I was curious to see where Monroe ranked on the NBA draft sites, nbadraft.net and DraftExpress. Neither site had updated its mock draft since the game when I first checked, and neither site had Monroe listed.

I kept checking, and while I didn't find Monroe on nbadraft.net right away, I did find that Monroe had moved from off the board to number three overall on DraftExpress, while UConn's Hasheem Thabeet -- the 7'3" junior who Monroe badly outplayed -- had dropped a few spots, from (I think) five to eight. I can't tell if DraftExpress has updated its mock since Saturday, but Monroe is still at three and Thabeet is still at eight, with Blair at 20. I'll keep an eye on it to see if it moves further.

Over on nbadraft.net, and again, I don't know when the update occurred, Monroe is 20th, Thabeet's third, and Blair is 29th.

These rankings really don't mean anything, but I thought it was interesting to see Monroe debut so high on the DraftExpress board and to see him jump Thabeet.

You can catch Georgetown in action tonight at 7 p.m. Eastern at Notre Dame on ESPN. The Irish were surprise losers to St. John's on Saturday.

-I want to follow up on this post: Louisville lost at home to UNLV before squeaking by Kentucky on Edgar Sosa's bomb (video in link). I still think Louisville could be in a lot of trouble, but it would be even worse without a single respectable non-conference win. Sosa might've saved the Cardinals season with that shot. Anyway, the 'ville opens conference play on Wednesday at South Florida, then enters their toughest five-game stretch of conference play: at Villanova, home vs. Notre Dame, home vs. Pittsburgh, at Rutgers, at Syracuse. This just seems like a volatile group and a bad start could really be curtains for them.