Yes, average reader, it is entirely too early for looking towards next year’s March Madness.  Honestly, who, at this point in the year, would spend time looking at next years college hoops season? Oh. Right.

What Joe made famous, Joe now delivers year round.  Let’s take a look at the ACC and SEC according to Lunardi.

Atlantic Coast Conference

North Carolina – 1 seed
Duke – 1 seed
Virginia Tech – 4 seed
Miami FL – 4 seed
Wake Forest – 7 seed
Clemson – 11 seed

What Joe doesn’t say here is who Duke will lose to in the second or third round.  Based on his early bracket however, it would be the Baylor/Georgetown winner (would the Earth implode if JT3 and Duke met in the second round?) or the survivor of the West Virginia/Gonzaga second round matchup (read: WVU).

Wouldn’t that be a beautiful site?

As always, North Carolina gets the early (pre-)season love, and Clemson deservedly gets a one-and-done spot.  The peculiar pick here is Wake at a 7.  Is Tim Duncan planning a comeback?  Maybe that’s why Dave Odom “retired.”

Oh, and I buy Miami-FL as a 4 seed about as often as I go to Homestead looking for a babysitter.

Southeastern Conference

Florida – 3 seed
Mississippi State – 6 seed
Kentucky – 6 seed
Mississippi – 8 seed
Tennessee – 9 seed
Alabama – 11 seed

Joe’s prognostications leave Felton’s SEC Tourney champion Bulldogs and Stallings depleted Commodores out of the field, which I’m not here to argue with.  No one expects much of Darrin Horn at Carolina this year, but leaving out the Razorbacks?  After a year under Pelphrey?  Joe, you’re letting us down.

After watching the last 2 SEC seasons, I’m also not convinced that we’ll see an even number of East and West teams in the dance.  And having veteran Tennessee squad as a 9 seed behind a Florida team it handled easily twice last season and behind a Kentucky squad full of question marks seems like a bit of a reach, based solely on returning players and high school/JUCO commitments.

I’ll take Carolina to make a late surge and get in the dance, and Andy Kennedy to coach his way out of it once again.  The SEC should look pretty similar this year with the exceptions of Vandy on the demise and Florida heading back towards the top.

Other than that, we’ll just have to wait and see.  (And keep reading Joe’s updates… right?)

[ESPN]

For all the good AD Mike Hamilton has done for the University of Tennessee athletics programs over the past few years, the news out of Knoxville today has got to be the most despicable. 

UT has long been lauded as the place where the greatest football fans in the world converge on Saturdays in the fall.  Now, for some reason, the Athletics Department wants to make it more difficult for students to get into the game?

It started 4 years back with the increased security (read: full body searches) at the student gates to keep out the criminals who liked to provide their own refreshments during the game.  It continued last year when UT banned smoking anywhere inside the stadium’s fences (yes, the outdoor stadium).  And now we’re gouging students to get into the game?

Starting this fall, UT students will be asked to pay for tickets to the football games.

UT students have been able to get into all regular-season sport contests, including football games, since the inception of the school.  Now they will be asked to pay a $90 football season ticket fee (on top of the mandatory $250 student activities fee assessed by the school), or $15 per game.

Come on, Mike.  You need that money that bad?

“The reason we didn’t (raise fees), frankly, is that a student fee affects every student on campus,” Hamilton said. “By actually charging for the football tickets, it’s a user-specific amount. Somebody can choose whether to purchase tickets or not. We hope that students will come and be a part of it and that they’ll buy all the tickets they have available to them.”

Hamilton also never bothered to take the input of those directly affected… the students.  An understandably perturbed student body president, John Rader, called it “lunacy.”

So maybe this fall, after UT cashes that mandatory check, and then asks for ninety more dollars to see the Orange and White play football, the students will open their wallets once more, for the tradition, pride and spectacle of it all.

Or maybe they won’t.  And if they don’t, I, for one, won’t blame them one bit.

You really dropped the ball this time, Mr. Hamilton.  You should be ashamed.

I know a few UCLA fans that will take offense to even the question being posed, but as we were watching the National Championship last night, it seems a realistic inquiry.  Some of Coach Summitt’s numbers over the years are just downright unbelievable. 

Let’s take a moment to make a comparative analysis:

Summitt has coached in all 26 Women’s NCAA Tournaments, making it to the Finals in 13 of them (HALF!) with a ridiculous 8-5 record.  (Oh, also, she has had Tennessee in every Sweet 16 ever played.)

While John Wooden’s string of 10 National Championships throughout the 60s and 70s are no doubt the marker by which everyone is measured (including 4 undefeated seasons), he coached in a time when 4 wins would take home the crown.  Not to mention that his best mark, the 30-0 seasons, don’t quite measure up to Summitt’s 1998 39-0 year (a wins record that still stands).

Wooden’s 10-0 record in championship games dwarfs Summitt’s, at the moment, but Wooden coached in only 16 of 29 possible tournaments–55%–while failing to make the field in the other years.

So if career dominance is the debate, with the parity that women’s college basketball has of late, bringing home 2 consecutive national titles and 8 of the past 20 (all with 40- or 64-team fields), the edge goes to Pat.

The most dominant coach of all time.

If you want to debate who is/was the better recruiter, that’ll take a whole new column.

(And no, Kentucky fan, 4 titles in 41 years does not qualify Rupp for the dominance debate.)