Midwest Breakdown

Almost a year since my last post, and I haven't watched nearly as much college basketball this season as I have in previous years, but Championship Week gave me the itch, so I'm going to try to keep this going throughout the tournament, then keep this going a bit better next year, or find a way to consolidate all my basketball writing into one place (in case you don't know, I have a Celtics/NBA blog called Rhymes With Hondo).

So, to that end, I'll be breaking down each of the four regions, one per day, for the next four days. I'm not necessarily going to go team-by-team or even game-by-game. I don't actually have a format in mind. I just want to rap a little bit about some of the stuff I've seen.

Might as well start in the Midwest region, home of the tournament's top overall seed, the Kansas Jayhawks:

* Kansas was my pick to win it all at the beginning of the year, and I'm standing firm. Frankly, I haven't been overwhelmed by what I've seen of the Jayhawks, but no team has really impressed me this year. I'll mention the other contenders' flaws when I write about them and their regions, but, in a bit of foreshadowing, I like the Jayhawks' veteran leadership. Not that Bill Self's club is terribly long in the tooth -- the Morris kids are sophomores and Xavier Henry is a freshman -- but it does have Sherron Collins, the person not named Mario Chalmers who is most responsible for Kansas' win in the 2008 national championship game. (Remember his steal/three combo that cut a seven-point lead to four with less than two minutes to go?) Collins gives Kansas a definitive place to go with the ball in crunch-time, and that sets them apart from other title contenders. Kentucky and Syracuse have shown recent chinks in the armor in that regard (more on that when I tackle their respective regions), and I'm not convinced that Duke's Jon Scheyer is the same caliber of player in terms of both scoring and creating for others. On the two-line, Ohio State's Evan Turner and West Virginia's Da'Sean Butler have proven over and over that they are as "go-to" as can be, but their respective supporting casts aren't as strong as Collins'.

* Not that the Jayhawks won't have plenty of competition on their way to Indianapolis. Many analysts feel that the selection committee didn't do the tourney's top team any favors by giving them the toughest draw of any of the top seeds. In addition to Ohio State, which some felt heading into Sunday would have had a chance at a #1 seed if the Big11Ten final was played earlier (a notion somewhat dispelled by the fact that the committee gave Duke the third overall seed and make Syracuse -- which had been in line for a #1 for months -- the fourth overall), the Midwest also has the tournament's top #3 seed (Georgetown), top #6 (Tennessee), and a #5, Michigan State, that was on everyone's short list of national title contenders at the start of the year.

* I think Georgetown is the team most likely to trip up the Jayhawks. The Hoyas had kind of an up-and-down year, caused at least in part by playing a conference schedule which included four road games at teams ranked in the top ten at the time. The Big East was loaded this year, and so every team played some degree of a killer schedule, but it doesn't get any tougher than a slate that included two games against both Syracuse and Villanova, plus road trips to West Virginia and Pittsburgh.

Georgetown entered the Big East tournament losers of four of their last six, then played their way to a 3 seed by beating South Florida, Syracuse, and Marquette, before losing at the horn to West Virginia in the championship game. There's something of an unwritten rule among bracketologists to be wary of a team whose low seed is a result of a late stretch of strong play. I'm choosing to ignore that in this case, because I feel Georgetown's ascension was a result not of hot shooting and the like, but a real transformation. Early in the Hoyas' victory over Syracuse in the Big East quarters, ESPN's announcing crew noted that coach John Thompson III was riding his guys more than usual, and he kept it up throughout the tournament. His charges responded, most notably point guard Chris Wright, who took charge of the offense in a way that reminded me of Derrick Rose at Memphis two years ago.

My favorite Wright play of the four games actually came after he made a stupid one; giving a foul in the final minute of the championship game with his team tied with West Virginia (he must have thought the Hoyas were behind). After the Mountaineers hit two free throws, Wright simply took the ball, powered past the very powerful Joe Mazzulla, and banked in an off-balance shot. Butler would break Georgetown's hearts on the next trip, Wright's was a new-found confidence, one we hadn't consistently seen and one his team desperately needed.

Not that he's alone in Hoya grey. Far from it. The marvelously-skilled Greg Monroe is the perfect big man for JT3's Princeton-inspired offense, and is garnering a lot of attention from pro scouts despite the fact that said system doesn't exactly showcase big guys doing the kind of things NBA types like to see out of post players. There are question marks surrounding Austin Freeman -- he's been good, but not as good as he had been, since he was diagnosed with diabetes at the beginning of the month -- but he's the kind of player who can put on a virtuoso scoring performance any time he steps on the floor. Depth is a concern, but with Jason Clark (42.6 percent) and Hollis Thompson (42.4 percent) knocking down threes and Julian Vaughn doing the dirty work inside, Georgetown has a rotation that should be able to compete with anyone.

* I'll have my game-by-game predictions up before the tip day of, but one trap I'm pretty sure I won't be falling into is picking Georgia Tech to win anything more than their first round matchup with Oklahoma State. I haven't seen enough of the Cowboys to say whether they have enough size to counter the Yellow Jackets' bigs or the pressure defense to take advantage of GT's shaky ballhandling, but Georgia Tech looked about as unimpressive as a team can look on its way to the ACC championship game. (I actually tweeted the following during their quarterfinal win over Maryland: "If it's possible to hurt your NCAA chances in a win over the #19 team, Georgia Tech just did it.") I kinda think the committee agrees with me a little bit, awarding the Jackets only a ten seed despite their run to the championship game. While I was occupied with the A-10 and SEC finals today during Tech's late run against Duke, their inability to protect the ball against the Terrapins (25 turnovers) and their struggle to beat a very underwhelming NC State team doesn't have me very high on their chances to advance past the first weekend.

* This region has a number of teams that are more or less one-man bands. As mentioned, Turner carries Ohio State, but not as much as Greivis Vasquez carries Maryland. And while Houston beat UTEP in the Conference USA championship game despite getting only 13 points from Aubrey Coleman, the Cougars belong to Coleman, the nation's scoring leader. It's going to be a lot of fun to watch those two go at it in the first round.

Along those same lines, the Midwest bracket is something of an artistic masterpiece by the committee. There's something about it that is symmetrical, yet perfectly diverse about it. Thoroughbreds in the top and bottom half of the bracket (Kansas and Ohio State). The hot, trendy pick to make the Final Four (Georgetown). The struggling power conference team (Michigan State), the slighted power conference team (Tennessee), and the gritty, grind-it-out mid-major (Northern Iowa). Multiple teams dependent on a single individual player. Two teams (UNLV and San Diego State) from a relatively obscure, but strong this year, conference (the four-bid Mountain West. And two or three teams (New Mexico State, Houston, and maybe San Diego State) whose victories in their conference tournaments cost Mississippi State, Virginia Tech, and Illinois their bids (since Utah State, UTEP, and UNLV got at-large invitations that the Aggies, Cougars, and possibly the Aztecs wouldn't otherwise have gotten).

There's a lot going on here, and there are a lot of teams I simply cannot comment on because I haven't seen them play. For now, it suffices to say I've got Kansas coming out of the region and ultimately winning the whole thing -- the latter by default, really.

Big East Day One

One day into the new, allegedly improved Big East tournament, and the expanded format is already hurting the conference.

Not because of Georgetown's somewhat surprising 64-59 loss to host St. John's; the Hoyas needed a deep run to make the NCAA tournament. (Alas, how far they have fallen since they beat Connecticut in Storrs to open conference play.) But Cincinnati's stunning 67-57 defeat at the hands of DePaul -- 0-18-in-the-Big-East-Depaul, hadn't-won-a-game-since-December-28-DePaul -- could very well cost the league at least one bid.

I think seven teams -- Louisville, Pittsburgh, Connecticut, Villanova, Marquette, Syracuse, and West Virginia -- could count on having locked up bids by virtue of their performance in the regular season. Two others -- Cincy and Providence -- had work to do. Both probably could not get in, as they were on course to play each other in Wednesday's second-round. But that matchup could have very well served as a play-in game for the field of 65.

The Bearcats almost certainly blew their chances by losing to the Blue Demons on Tuesday, and the Friars' prospects took a blow, too. Providence now cannot count on one Big East tournament win earning them a bid, since that win, if they get it, will come against lowly DePaul. They might very well have to beat Louisville, the regular season champs, in Thursday's quarterfinals, a tall order.

That's under the new five-day, 16-team system, which gives the top four teams a double bye into the quarterfinals. Under the old system, which also gave the top four teams byes into the quarters but left the bottom four teams out of the competition entirely, several of the Big East bubble teams would have had a better opportunity to make their case to the selection committee:

-Cincy would have matched up with West Virginia in the first round. A win over the Mountaineers might have been enough to push the Bearcats through.

-Providence would have faced Notre Dame, another team that has a shot at a berth. It's hard to describe this one as a play-in game since Notre Dame would not have locked up a bid with a win, but a PC victory would likely have guaranteed them entrance into the field of 65.

In a best-case scenario for the conference under the old system, then, Cincinnati would have beaten WVU and Notre Dame would have beaten Providence, and all three would have gotten in, securing an unprecedent ten bids for the league. (Sure, this assumes an awful lot -- specifically, that a 9-11 conference record would have been enough for Cincy and Notre Dame -- but if Arkansas can get in with a 7-9 regular season record over a ten-win Syracuse team a few years, back, I see no reason why a Big East team this year can't make the Dance with a conference record below .500.)

Now, the best-case scenario is eight teams, with Providence needing to sweat it out even if they beat DePaul on Wednesday.

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.

Opening Night in the Big East

The Georgetown-Connecticut game marked the opening of ESPN's Monday night Big East coverage, although not technically the beginning of the weekly tripleheaders dubbed these many years Big Monday. The Big East is incredibly deep this year, with eight teams currently ranked in the ESPN/USAToday poll and a ninth -- West Virginia -- just two spots out of it after dismantling previously unbeaten Ohio State in Columbus on Saturday. (The AP poll has seven Big East teams in the top 25, though Marquette and West Virginia are Nos. 26 and 27, respectively). It's just going to be a fantastic season, with ten tournament bids a real possibility.

ESPN's Andy Katz wrote a nice breakdown of the conference, and he makes the point that if the league wants to get ten teams in, it won't be enough for those ten to get to 8-10 by virtue of beating the bottom six teams in the league (likely to be Rutgers, South Florida, Seton Hall, Providence, St. John's, and DePaul) seven or eight times. They'll need at least a couple of wins against each other.

For similar reasons, these non-conference games that are wrapping up (with a few exceptions) this week take on an increased importance in a year where the conference is so stacked. Let's take a look at the ten realistic contenders for tournament bids from the Big East, and see what their non-conference slates look like. I'll take them in the same order Katz did.

Cincinnati: The Bearcats 60-45 loss at Memphis (after the Tigers dropped out of the Top 25 for the first time in a few years) hurts, particularly since fellow Big East foes Georgetown and Syracuse have already beaten last year's national runners-up. Losing to Xavier is nothing to be ashamed of, though dropping a game to Florida State hurts. Still, they have wins at UNLV and against Mississippi State and UAB, so they're in decent shape at 3-3 against potential tournament teams from major conferences.

Connecticut: The Huskies will be fine, provided that they don't make their listless performance against Georgetown a habit. Victories over Miami (FL) and Wisconsin on their way to winning Paradise Jam, along with a win over Gonzaga in Seattle gives them a nice non-conference slate. They can get some insurance, not that they'll need it, on February 7, when they host Michigan (and old foe John Beilein, the former head coach at West Virginia).

Georgetown: Beating Maryland and Memphis more than offsets losing to Tennessee in a very hard-fought game at the Old Spice Classic in November. Given that the Hoyas already have a huge conference road win, they're in fine shape. Like UConn, they have one more out-of-conference test, January 17 at Duke.

Louisville: The Cardinals have a couple of really troubling losses, to Western Kentucky and Minnesota. They rebounded a couple of days ago with a convincing win over UAB, but the Blazers are down to something like six scholarship players, so that victory doesn't look as good as it might have at the beginning of the year. They don't have any other good wins, but they do have two more opportunities to make life easier for them once their conference slate starts. They play UNLV on New Year's Eve at 6 p.m. Eastern, and given that Cincinnati has already beaten the Rebels this year, the Ville could very well have to win that one to avoid needing to be better than .500 in Big East play -- which is more doable for them than it is for others, since they have seven games against the league's bottom six and only get the league's true heavies -- Pittsburgh, UConn, and Georgetown -- once each. They've also got Kentucky on January 4, and although the Wildcats beat West Virginia earlier this year, UK might be the kind of team where a loss to them looks worse than a win over them looks good, if you get what I'm saying.

Marquette: The Golden Eagles have a couple of decent wins against Wisconsin and North Carolina State, a good loss against Tennessee, and then kind of a bad loss to Dayton. That's not really anything to be ashamed of, but Marquette is done in non-conference play, and they're right on the fringe of the top 25 right now. What's more, they finish up with a wicked schedule. Check out this five-game stretch to finish up Big East play: at Georgetown, vs. Connecticut, at Louisville, at Pittsburgh, vs. Syracuse. Brutal. Given the emphasis the selection committee seems to put on the way a team is playing heading into the tournament, Marquette may not have done enough out of conference to survive losing four out of five to end the season, followed by an early exit in the Big East tournament. They haven't made things impossible for themselves, but they are going to have to play awfully well to feel comfortable on Selection Sunday. That loss to Dayton could loom large.

Notre Dame: The Fighting Irish nipped Texas by a point in the Maui semis, lost to Carolina in the final, and slipped up against Ohio State in Indianapolis in Luke Harangody's first game back after missing two with pneumonia. They are fine barring a major collapse in conference play, though a win at UCLA on February 7would certainly help.

Pittsburgh: No one win really jumps out at you. They won at Florida State, but beating the Seminoles, even in Tallahassee, is hardly the kind of win a team hangs it hat on. They beat Texas Tech and Washington State on consecutive nights in November in New Jersey, but I just watched the Cougars play terribly in a loss to LSU, and the Red Raiders lost to Lamar earlier this year and got beat by 45 at Stanford their last time out. Still, they've taken care of business, and honestly should be good enough in the Big East that their non-conference schedule won't matter. Incidentally, they are not quite done with out of conference opponents, as they've oddly scheduled a home date with Robert Morris for February 2.

Syracuse: Losing to Cleveland State at the Carrier Dome wasn't good, but for the first time in a couple of years, the Orange have done quite a lot in the non-conference. Beating Florida and Kansas back-to-back in Kansas City to win the CBE Classic was big, and they added a big win at Memphis on December 20. These teams aren't the same squads that are responsible for the last three national championships (and one national runnerup-ship), but they are good wins over name teams away from home. Syracuse just needs to stay the course in the Big East to get a bid.

Villanova: No bad losses for the Wildcats, their lone blemish being a nine-point defeat at the hands of Texas, then ranked No. 6. No spectacular wins, either. Monday's 62-45 win over Temple looks good if you consider that the Owls beat Tennessee on December 13; it becomes less impressive when you realize that Temple then lost to Long Beach State, and had previously lost to Buffalo and Miami (OH). Katz says that a November 19 triumph over Niagara is 'Nova's most meaningful win, which isn't likely to get too many people that excited about the Wildcats. They're out of non-conference opportunities, but have climbed high enough in the polls that something like .500 in the Big East should get them there.

West Virginia: It would have been nice to beat Kentucky and Davidson, but the aforementioned trouncing of Ohio State in Columbus this weekend makes up for a lot of that. The Mountaineers have two games against each of Louisville and Pittsburgh, which is tough, but it cuts both ways: It can just as easily be seen as two extra opportunities for a big resume win as it can be seen as an extra two automatic losses in conference.

Have a good New Year, all.

Georgetown 74, Connecticut 63

I was expecting a bit better from this one.

Still, the night wasn't a complete bust, as I got my first real look at Georgetown's 6'9" freshman, Greg Monroe. What a player! He thoroughly outplayed his much bigger, much older, much more highly-touted counterpart on the Huskies, Hasheem Thabeet.

Monroe made his impact felt early, scoring or assisting on each of the Hoyas' first six baskets. Consider this sequence from the games opening minutes:

18:10 - Monroe threads a backdoor pass to Austin Freeman for the first two points of the game.
17:09 - After a UConn miss, offensive rebound, and turnover, Monroe hits Freeman backdoor again for a 4-0 lead. He didn't get an assist on this one, but he should have.
16:57 - Monroe rebounds Jeff Adrien's missed free throw.
16:21 - After a Hoya turnover and a Thabeet missed jam, Monroe find DaJuan Summers for a three and a 7-1 lead.
16:08 - Guarding UConn point guard A.J. Price on the perimeter, Monroe pokes the ball free, picks it up, takes it to the bucket...
16:05 - ...and makes the layup while being fouled by Price.
16:05 - Monroe misses the free throw. Hey, no one's perfect.
15:42 - Monroe fights around Thabeet and knocks away an entry pass from Stanley Robinson.
15:24 - Monroe assists on another triple by Summers. 12-1.
15:04 - Robinson misses a jumper. Monroe allows Summers to grab the rebound.
14:46 - Monroe drills a three-pointer from the top of the key off a pass from Summers, staking the Hoyas to a 15-1 lead.

So Monroe, playing his first Big East game, on the road against the undefeated second-ranked team in the country basically took over for three-and-a-half minutes. Granted, he didn't keep up that ridiculous pace, finishing with a rather modest line: 16 points, four rebounds, four assists, three steals. Three of those credited assists came in the first six minutes, as did two of the steals, and his rebound numbers are low because he picked up his third foul just 80 seconds into the second half and John Thompson III subbed him out for defense and in for offense for most of the next 12 minutes or so.

Because of Monroe's height, length, and smoothness, and the fact that he shoots with the same hand that Satan does, I suppose comparisons to the Los Angeles Lakers' Lamar Odom are inevitable. But that's who he reminded me of most, particularly when he drove across the lane and threw in a six-foot running hook off the glass over Thabeet. He is a great fit for Georgetown's Princeton-style offense, given that he can pass and hit the jumper, but he also can play with his back to the basket: In the first half, he caught the ball in the lane, threw a quick fake over his left shoulder, then went, without hesitation, to a little baby hook over Thabeet. He's playing center for the Hoyas this year, but at 6'10", he projects more as a four and it looks like he could be mobile enough to play a little three, at least offensively.

I'm really excited to watch this guy for the rest of the year. ESPN has him at noon Eastern this Saturday, January 3, when the Hoyas take on third-ranked (soon to be second-ranked, if they beat Georgetown) Pittsburgh.