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I know we could've used a Providence loss, but it always makes me laugh to see the bluebirds lose. I've been laughing a lot the past 6 weeks. They deserve to be a bubble team.

It's times like this that I'm thankful DirecTV doesn't provide the Pac-12 Network so I can get some sleep instead of being tempted to watch some God-awful hoops.

The Big XII puts stats and messages in the ad space in front of the scorer's table in Kansas City about their league's dominance. The Big Ten/BTN spends its touranment time telling everyone how great NYC is for the league, rather than promoting the teams, while also putting down their 4th place team and emphasizing why they aren't deserving of an NCAA spot. Sigh.

Updated: NIT Automatic Qualifiers (lost in conference tournaments) Canisius – MAAC (RPI 122) Fla Gulf Coast – Atlantic Sun (RPI 170) N Kentucky – Horizon (RPI 112) Northeastern – Colonial (RPI 60) Rider – MAAC (RPI 68) UNC Asheville – Big South (RPI 129) Wagner – Northeast (RPI 108) Potential NIT Automatic Qualifiers (still playing in conf tournaments) Bethune-Cookman – MEAC Buffalo – MAC Hampton – MEAC Harvard – Ivy Louisiana – Sun Belt Mid Tenn St – Conf USA Montana – Big Sky New Mexico St – WAC Nicholls – Southland Penn – Ivy Savannah St – MEAC SE Louisiana – Southland UC Davis – Big West Vermont – America East Arkansas-PB – SWAC ?? (they finished 2nd to Grambling, but Grambling is not eligible for postseason play, so I'm not sure if APB becomes a potential NIT qualifier or if the SWAC just loses its potential slot)

So a 68-team alphabetical roll call being read in some sort of monotone? Sounds like scintillating TV. ... Michigan, Michigan State, Montana, Murray State [ pause for effect ] NEBRASKA [ pause for cheering ] Nevada ...

After watching this game, there's little surprise why Pitt only beat Delaware St by 6. If ND wins this by less than 20, they should automatically be eliminated from the bubble. How did Pitt get this horrible this fast? They're worse than DePaul or Rutgers by a lot.

Depends -- how many Quad 1 wins does Waterford have so far?

Just finished Part 3 - he should've made it into a book. So many great stories. I haven't watched highlights from that 90-91 team for a long time - my goodness. That team was unbelievably good. We had it pretty good around here sports-wise in the early 90s. Wish I would've appreciated it a bit more at the time. And I think Cliff Scales is one of the most underrated NU players of all-time. To keep that group in line as the point guard and with Nee in his ear 24/7 probably deserves some sort of lifetime achievement award.

Not that I'm giving up on NCAA berth, but thought I'd collect a list of NIT automatic qualifiers here (teams that won or tied for regular season championships but lost in conference tournaments & won't receive at-large NCAA berths or are on NCAA bubble). If we make the NIT we'll be a #1 or #2 seed, which means we'd likely play one of these types of teams in the opening round, as a lot of them likely be #7 or #8 seeds in each region. Again, not giving up - more of a curiosity as to who will be in the NIT field & who could be coming to PBA, since we haven't hosted an NIT game in a decade. NIT Automatic Qualifiers (lost in conference tournaments) Canisius – MAAC (RPI 125) Fla Gulf Coast – Atlantic Sun (RPI 167) N Kentucky – Horizon (RPI 114) Rider – MAAC (RPI 65) UNC Asheville – Big South (RPI 121) Potential NIT Automatic Qualifiers (still playing in conf tournaments) Bethune-Cookman – MEAC Bucknell – Patriot Buffalo – MAC Charleston – Colonial Hampton – MEAC Harvard – Ivy Louisiana – Sun Belt Mid Tenn St – Conf USA Montana – Big Sky New Mexico St – WAC Nicholls – Southland Northeastern – Colonial Penn – Ivy S Dakota St – Summit Savannah St – MEAC SE Louisiana – Southland UC Davis – Big West UNC Greensboro – Southern Vermont – America East Wagner – Northeast Arkansas-PB – SWAC ?? (they finished 2nd to Grambling, but Grambling is not eligible for postseason play, so I'm not sure if APB becomes a potential NIT qualifier or if the SWAC just loses its potential slot)

And the truly sad part about this is the NCAA is basically encouraging teams to not schedule the bottom feeders of D-1 and schedule D-2 instead by punishing you for even playing those teams. Those low-end D-1 schools need those paychecks to even have an athletic program. Heck, UNO is in this spot now. So the NCAA allows these teams - almost encourages it - to jump to D-1 with the carrot of the NCAA Tournament. But by using RPI, it makes it far less likely that big schools will schedule them going forward, killing the low-end D-1 schools' athletic budgets, which are already hurting. Time to rely on a new metric or series of metrics. RPI was great in the days of needing pencil and paper to figure it out, because it's so simple. It's outdated. When you can't even figure out how to give a team a penalty for scheduling a D-2 team in your metric, it's a bad metric.

Vagggggg-neeeeeeer just tossed in a turnaround 3 from the baseline at the shot clock buzzer. It's UM's tournament and the rest of us are just along for the ride. I noticed MSU fans were borrowing our Wag-ner chant yesterday. Didn't help.

So far, so good - Mich up 5 at halftime. Blecch. Cheering for UM makes me feel gross. They're really playing great basketball right now though.

Well, he may have said it. Even though I don't speak bluejay, I've been drinking like a bluejay hanging out in the Century Link end zone with his back to the court today, so those two factors may cancel each other out and he could've said it.

Joking. Very, very clearly joking.

Rasmussen on at halftime of Cincy-WSU game: How does FBI investigation affect things? - We'll pay no attention to the investigation. That's outside of our jurisdiction. Someone else has to decide those things, player eligibility, coach eligibility etc, and only then would we let it affect the selections/seedings. Notre Dame? Returning injured player helps? -- Every year we deal with player availability, losing players to injury or getting a player back from injury late. ND is interesting because of how good Colson is. Will be an interesting discussion. How long does bracketing take? -- Don't spend a lot of time on bracketing. Work more on seeding teams 1 through 68 correctly and then making slight changes to avoid conference rematches, etc. Minimal time on bracketing, maybe an hour. What about Nebraska? -- They're in, no question. (Sorry I just may have dreamed or mis-heard that last one. In my defense, I don't speak bluejay.)

The selection committee has always given more emphasis to wins over high ranked teams than docked a team for bad losses, so PSU fits that bill better than we do. And that makes sense - upsets make the NCAA Tournament what it is, so they want teams that have proven they can rise up and beat better teams occasionally, rather than a steady team that does what it's supposed to do. But if PSU can't somehow prove Watkins is healthy in the next week, there's no way the committee can take them. Plus there's the little issue that we kicked the crap out of them a week ago. Had to laugh during end of Purdue-PSU game yesterday - Rafferty was going on about how PSU probably still deserves a bid, Chambers is such a great coach, blah, blah, blah. Then Nantz says, uhhh, you do realize Nebraska finished 13-5 in the league to PSU's 9-9 and just beat them and was the #4 seed here? Rafferty tried to laugh it off, but it just shows how little a lot of the national guys actually know when they're spouting off. Rafferty has some great stories and has created a fun persona, but if it isn't the Big East, he has no clue. Listening to him do Big Ten games this year has been utterly painful. Unlike guys like Rafferty, just have to hope the guys on the committee really dig deep, haven't made up their minds about the quality of the Big Ten ahead of time, and aren't just giving the numbers a cursory glance, but I'm not confident in that.

Ha - I was also in the ticket line and was handed a box of donuts - Good times. I also remember a few days after he was hired, he made the team run through campus for a workout, so just so all the students would notice and could see them - new sheriff in town, etc.

Wow - Part 1 was awesome - looks like these will be can't miss stories for any Husker hoops fan.

On those same lines, why did the B1G allow the teams that played the first game of the session (11 and 5:30 games) have an hour plus of shoot-around time, whereas the teams that played the second game of the session (1:30 and 8) only receive the 25 minutes between games? Shouldn't all teams playing that day receive the same amount of time on the floor? Rather than giving the teams that were fortunate enough to draw the early game that extra warm-up time, they could've given the teams that had the byes the time between sessions to be on the floor for an hour. (They'd have to share the floor, but I'd bet the coaches would be OK with it, just to get some shoot-around time at a realistic hour.) So in other words, MSU & Neb could've had time on the floor at 9:30-10:30 Thursday and then the two teams playing Thursday could warm up for 25 minutes before their 11 am game. And OSU & Pur could've had shoot around time from 4-5 Thursday. Just seems odd that the first two teams in the session are given an hour plus of warm-up time and the other two teams in the session get only 25 minutes. And maybe it ended up having no effect on shooting percentages, etc. Again, it's not why we lost, just seems odd.

Not an excuse, as we were nowhere near good enough yesterday, but the six teams that had byes and played teams that already had played a game on the MSG floor went 3-3 outright and 0-6 against the spread. All but NU were pretty significant favorites as well. Thursday Mich –9 (L) vs Iowa Ind -6 (L) vs Rutg Friday MSU -12 (L) vs Wisc Neb +5 (L) vs Mich OSU -5.5 (L) vs PSU Pur -15.5 (L) vs Rutg I know NU was offered an 8 am EST shoot-around slot Friday and turned it down, understandably so when you'd have to sit around for 6+ hours afterward waiting for tip time. (And understandably so when that would be 7 a.m. Central time, which likely means a 5:30 am CST wake up call.) So maybe the B1G needs to figure out how to give the teams with byes some practice time at a realistic hour in the arena a day or two before they play. Certainly wouldn't be easy, but there has to be a way to do it. And I don't know what has been done in the past at other sites, or whether MSG presented specific problems with getting teams in for a practice session.

I'm spending the next 8 days rooting like crazy for one team - the FBI. If they can just hurry things along, rise from their underdog status, and take down several other bubble teams - and a few blue bloods along the way - we'll be dancing .... maybe even as a #5 or #6 seed.

This is where I'm at - today was an anomaly. The way we played late in the year, we're definitely NCAA worthy, but I don't think the bid is coming. Hopefully I'm very surprised next Sunday. Just disappointed we had our chance to take care of it ourselves in NYC, but instead left it in the hands of someone else now. The only good thing is having this much time off gives the committee plenty of time to forget about this game and look at our season more as a whole. It's just unfortunate our resume isn't a little stronger - like one missed shot by Kansas stronger.

Indiana fan: Rutgers has too much of a home court advantage in NYC. Let's move this thing back to a neutral site -- Indianapolis!

Joe Lunardi's Magic 8-Ball says.... "I'll take that as a yes!"

Early line has Mich St -10.5 vs Wisky tomorrow. Don't see an NU-Mich line yet, but I'd imagine UM will be favored by 3.5 to 5 pts.