Articles

Week One Conference Tournament Schedules

ACC (March 8-11 in Atlanta)
Regular season champion: North Carolina
.pdf bracket

Last week CHN writer Jon Teitel unvelied part one of his CollegeHoops.net All-Conference selections, featuring the fourteen conferences that begain conference tournament play at that time. The final seventeen teams are here, with the Player of the Year in each league in italics. 

Florida State's Ian Miller knocked down a three-pointer with eight tenths of a second remaining to give the Seminoles a 63-60 win at Virginia, who will finish the regular season without a win over any of the top three teams in the ACC.

#12 Georgetown had three players finish in double figures while also frustrating #19 Notre Dame on the other end of the floor in a 59-41 win at the Verizon Center.

The current era of college sports means that fans have become used to conference foes meeting for the first time in a season in late February, as is the case with #18 Notre Dame (20-9, 12-4) visiting #8 Georgetown (21-6, 11-5) on Monday night. Both teams lost games in the tri-state area over the last five days with the Hoyas getting blown out at Seton Hall and Notre Dame losing at St. John's on Saturday, but these are still teams that can make noise in New York next week.

Although the conference table was mostly set back in January when we last updated the Consensus Conference Ranking, there have been some changes since. As you'll see below, the Mountain West dropped from 4th to 6th since January 3rd, while the Colonial and Ivy have jumped 2 spots.

We're going with a different setup for daily recaps in hopes of making the reading easier. One piece will focus on the game of the night (or day) and the top individual performances, and the other will touch on other key happenings and some quick hitters on other games.

With the time between now and Selection Sunday getting shorter, every opportunity for a team to bolster its resume takes on added importance. This is the situation that Texas (17-10, 7-7), coming off of a 90-78 loss at Oklahoma State, finds itself in as they host #14 Baylor (22-5, 9-5) in the second of two meetings this season. Baylor is looking to rebound themselves as they fell 57-56 at home to Kansas State, a loss that essentially shuts the door on the chance of winning the league as the Bears sit three games behind both Kansas and Missouri.

After a 15-2 run gave Louisville a 51-46 lead with 3:38 remaining it seemed as if the Cardinals were well on their way to an eighth straight win over #2 Syracuse. In a contest that featured some ugly offense, a five-point margin seemed to be near insurmountable despite the Orange's many talented players. However a Brandon Triche jumper just 18 seconds later would start a 6-0 run, which ended with a C.J. Fair bucket with 2:11 to go to give Syracuse the 52-51 win.

Despite the fact that the distance between first and second place is just two games with five to go many have conceded the regular season crown to #2 Syracuse (25-1, 12-1), and rightfully so as the Orange have been head and shoulders above the rest of the conference. The race to observe has involved the other three double-bye slots, and #18 Louisville (20-5, 8-4) is a player in that regard. That makes Monday's game at the KFC Yum! Center an important one, with the Cardinals also in position to use the win to bolster their resume from an NCAA tournament seeding standpoint.