Soft Pretzel Logic

I can't promise this will work all night, but we're going to try. Welcome to the Palestra's first game of the year, as Penn faces Drexel.

I'm fairly sure, looking at the crowd, that this is Drexel's home game. The Penn student section is even smaller than I expected it to be, while Drexel's is at least twice as big and goes all the way up to the last row behind the east basket.

I plan on blogging this game much the same way as I did last year's Penn-St. Joe's game. I won't be telling you about all the baskets, but will instead be focusing on the atmosphere -- the rollouts, creative chants, and so forth.

Off we go with our first game of the year...

Here are the starting lineups:

Drexel

G 0 Tramayne Hawthorne (junior)
G 3 Scott Rodgers (junior)
G 23 Jamie Harris (freshman)
F 25 Randy Oveneke (senior)
C 15 Frank Elegar (senior)

Penn

F 24 Jack Eggleston (freshman)
F 33 Cameron Lewis (junior)
G 5 Darren Smith (sophomore)
G 14 Michael Kach (senior)
G 21 Brian Grandieri (senior)

17:59 1st, 5-1 Drexel: I am fairly sure this is the last thing Glen Miller wanted. Here we are barely two minutes into the game and Brian Grandieri has two fouls already. Senior Aron Cohen comes in to replace him.

17:09 1st, 7-3 Drexel: Penn gets its first field goal of the game, a dunk by Cameron Lewis. They are counted as field goals, I guess

16:27 1st, 10-6 Drexel: An actual field goal, a three by Cohen that bounces on the rim three times before falling in. Rodgers responds with a three of his own.

15:46 1st, 10-6 Drexel: Media timeout, and Bruiser Flint has cursed at least twice in his first five seconds of talking. We have a rollout from Penn: "Drexel University Men's Basketball / You're D.U.M.B.," and a two-roll rollout from the Drexel fans at the same time: "THERE's NO DEBATE... / AT PENN"

I think Drexel wins that round, but if you want to really be creative you can say that Drexel is far closer to the presidency right now than Penn has been since 1828.

And there is, finally, what looks like a Penn student section. Some day, they might arrive before the game starts.

11:32 1st, 22-13 Drexel: Nothing much at the moment, but I wanted to relay something I saw before the game. Someone from (I believe) the Drexel athletic department was walking around near the press room with a trophy that had a Drexel pom-pom and a Penn pom-pom in the cup and what I suspected was a street sign sticking out of it.

Then I saw the other side of the thing, and that's indeed what it was. The sign said "33rd ST," meaning that this so-called "Battle of 33rd Street" apparently has more than just bragging rights to it.

You tell me which prize is more substantive...

7:26 1st, 32-17 Drexel: I will get to that scoreline later, but for the second time tonight both student sections unveil rollouts at the same time. First, from Penn: "You can't spell Flint without N-I-T." And from Drexel: "OATMEAL: NOT THE ONLY SOFT QUAKER PRODUCT"

The edge just barely goes to Penn, I think, in an attempt to credit Drexel's good shooting instead of knocking Penn's clearly inexperienced defense.

And in an attempt to keep things clean.

Halftime, 37-24 Drexel: Word around here is that Bruiser Flint had his team practice here yesterday, and it paid off in a big way in the first half. Drexel shot 42.9 percent from the field, including 6-of-12 from three-point range.

Tramayne Hawthorne leads all scorers with 16 points on 6-of-9 shooting, including 4-of-7 from three. Most of those looks were pretty open. Aron Cohen was Penn's leading scorer with six points on 2-of-4 shooting, all three-point attempts. But Penn did out-rebound Drexel, 23-18. The Quakers pulled down nine offensive rebounds and the Dragons grabbed four.

Also of interest: Glen Miller used 13 players in the first half. Flint used eight.

15:46 2nd, 41-29 Drexel: The rollout contest is over, and Drexel has won it, "DID BEN FRANKLIN POP HIS COLLAR TOO?"

I sure hope not. I can't really bear the thought of this country having been founded by a guy with a popped collar.

11:15 2nd, 44-34 Drexel: After Frank Elegar picks up his third foul, we get the media timeout. Bruiser comes back to the bench screaming, "We don't need no heroes!"

For the third time, we get both rollouts at the same time. Drexel: "STOP WASTING TOAST. FEED THE HOMELESS." Penn: "The NCAA Committee and a Real College / Two things that rejected you"

The Penn students chant,"You're all homeless!" and the Drexel students reply with a weak round of "Scoreboard..." and then do better with the old standard "Daddy's trust fund!"

Brendan Quinn of the Evening Bulletin, sitting next to me on press row, says Penn wins that round. "I usually go with the working-class cheers, but that was pretty good," he adds.

6:59 2nd, 47-41 Drexel: Penn uncorks one of the best rollouts I've seen that student section produce in years: "Do any of you even know what a trust fund is?"

Penn has scored on its last two possessions via backdoor passes to Brian Grandieri. Of all things. And for at least a minute or two, we have a game.

3:44 2nd, 47-41 Drexel: A reminder that it was 37-24 at the half.

1:28 2nd, 49-47 Drexel: Threes by Jack Eggleston and Aron Cohen have pulled Penn within two. Whoa.

1:08 2nd, 49-48 Drexel: Brian Grandieri drives to the basket and misses the shot, but draws Elegar's fourth foul. He makes the first free throw, but not the second. A big bullet dodged by the Dragons.

0:22 2nd, 52-49 Drexel: Freshman guard Gerald Colds hits an enormous three-pointer, pushing Drexel's lead to four. The DAC Pack explodes. At the other end, Brian Grandieri is fouled, misses the first three throw and makes the second.

End of regulation, 52-52: Good heavens. Mike Kach is fouled, makes the first free throw, misses the second, Brian Grandieri grabs the rebound and misses the putback, but Jack Eggleston grabs that rebound and ties the game.

3:40 OT, 57-53 Drexel: Frank Elegar throws down an emphatic slam and Penn misses at the other end. Penn has done a pretty good job of containing Elegar all night, but that was quite a reply.

2:09 OT, 60-57 Drexel: After two Brian Grandieri free throws tie the game, Colds hits another monster three to put Drexel back in front.

0:52 OT, 62-57 Drexel: You have to give the Penn kids some credit for actually trying to figure out what the Drexel students might come up with. Their last rollout: "This is your house? / Where do you sleep?"

Final: 67-59, Drexel: Drexel finally clamped down on defense and Penn ran out of gas. But a fun game nonetheless, one which was much closer than I expected.

And of course, Drexel beats Penn for the first time since 2003, and gets that trophy with the 33rd Street sign in in. Which is what really matters, right? Watching the Drexel fans celebrate, it sure seems that way.

After a 251-day summer hibernation, the Palestra reopens its doors tonight for its 81st season of college basketball.

There is little doubt that Villanova, Saint Joseph's and Temple are (in approximately that order) the three most significant programs in the region. And I say that knowing that Drexel is running neck and neck with Villanova in the readership survey, and that none of the other teams are close.

But the heart and soul of the game in this city resides in an Ivy League school's arena on 33rd Street, under the arched roof of a place whose claim to being "college basketball's most historic gym" is more than just hyperbole.

So while the Owls' game at No. 7 Tennessee tonight features the most glamorous of all the local teams, and while Villanova begins its season tonight at home on the Main Line, it seems appropriate to me that tonight's clash between Penn and Drexel should be at the top of the marquee.

After all, we haven't often seen a city rivalry game be a season opener, especially in recent years. No, Drexel isn't in the Big 5, but when the Big 5 Classic was played there was an unofficial rule that City Series games weren't supposed to be scheduled before the Classic's annual spot on the first Saturday in December.

Today's College HoopsCast is up, featuring the Inquirer's Mike Jensen. He's in Knoxville today to cover the Temple-Tennessee game, and you should definitely read his story on the last time these two teams played. Also be sure to read the Daily News' roundup-style preview of Penn, Drexel, Temple and Villanova.

Voting in the poll continues. Penn and La Salle made some moves but it's definitely a two-horse race now, between Villanova and Drexel.

Drexel 689
La Salle 138
Penn 134
Temple 34
Saint Joseph's 178
Villanova 745
Somebody else 35 (still all unspoken for)

If you're going to the Pavilion tonight, enjoy it. Let's see how much Corey Stokes and Corey Fisher play.

If you're going to the Palestra, look for me. I might liveblog it; I haven't decided yet.

And if you have ESPN360.com or a satellite dish that carries FSN South, you'll be able to see Temple-Tennessee.

Above all, enjoy the start of the season. We've been waiting long enough for this, haven't we?

It all starts tomorrow, finally. For today, we have a few things.

-- Today's College HoopsCast features Inquirer women's basketball writer Mel Greenberg, as well as an exclusive with ESPN.com bracketologist and St. Joe's radio analyst Joe Lunardi.

-- Elsewhere in the podcast universe, ESPN.com's Andy Glockner (a Penn alumnus) heeds our cry here on the blog and calls out Pat Forde for never having been to the Palestra.

And should Mr. Forde come across this blog, I will be glad to offer tips on where to eat and drink in the neighborhood, as he is known to be fond of that sort of thing.

-- Speaking of Forde and his neck of the woods, you take a guess as to what folks in Lexington, Ky., are feeling like today after Gardner-Webb knocked off Kentucky last night. Sounds from that story like they're doing their best impression of us here in Philadelphia.

-- The latest poll results, but remember voting continues through Saturday morning:

Drexel 644
La Salle 20
Penn 70
Temple 30
Saint Joseph's 144
Villanova 671
Somebody else 34 (and still, none of them say who their team is)

Be sure to check out today's headlines on the right side of the blog, including the Inquirer's Penn preview and a great piece on former Temple coach Wayne Hardin, who was in charge of the Owls the last time they were good.

And the football crunchy numbers, which I've just been too busy to work on until now:

24. Penn State -- home win against Purdue (32)
45. Rutgers -- road loss vs. Connecticut (11)
75. Delaware -- home win vs. James Madison (87)
110. Villanova -- road loss vs. Richmond (81)
132. Temple -- road loss vs. Ohio (112)
139. Delaware State road win vs. Winston-Salem State (190)
172. Lehigh -- road win vs. Colgate (159)
189. Lafayette -- home win vs. Bucknell (228)
199. Penn -- home win vs. Princeton (207)
242. La Salle -- road loss at Wagner (216)

Nothing much to see here this week, but I'm quite amused at how highly ranked Connecticut is even with one loss. Boise State is 28th and Hawai'i is 40th, and I would say both are better teams. The next four teams after UConn, by the way, are Auburn, USC, Virginia Tech and Michigan.

The Top Ten comparison:

If the AP could call the mayor's race within half an hour of the polls closing last night, I think we can safely say Penn has been knocked off its perch as the most-supported team here on the blog.

The current results:

Drexel 404
La Salle 10
Penn 53
Temple 28
Saint Joseph's 107
Villanova 467
Somebody else 7

But the poll will remain open until Saturday afternoon, so keep voting.

Today's College HoopsCast is up, featuring interviews with Drexel's Bruiser Flint and Penn's Glen Miller.

Which brings me to this comment posted by Fred:

JT:

Has it really gotten that bad with the Penn students that they dont turn out for the Princeton game?

I am amazed with the lack of interest in the Penn student body for anything related to athletics.

The FB crowds seem sparse (I think they "announced" 12K for the last home game). And now the interest level has been diminished for the big basketball game.

Are the students really that disinterested? Bored? Are there other more attractive options on campus?

Are students strapped for spending money? (I would think not)

Are marketing and promotional efforts not working?

I think this is quite disappointing, considering that Penn traditionally fields very good teams in both sports (recent football problems aside).

Wow.

I hope the Penn fans on here will chime in with their views on this but I will say a few things. First, as I said yesterday, Princeton being really bad makes a huge difference. The whole buzz around the game was that it was always for the Ivy League title, and that's gone.

For example, I was at the 2003 game and it was jammed to the rafters. That year, both teams were very good -- Penn had Ugonna Onyekwe et al., while Princeton had won the title in 2001 and tied for it a year earlier.

A year later, I believe the Palestra game was over Penn's spring break, which severely diminished the atmosphere. Then John Thompson III left, Joe Scott came in and down the Tigers went.

But I will also say this. Fred asks whether the promotional efforts aren't working. From my experiences on Penn's campus, I've rarely all that much promotion in the first place. Drexel hangs a banner over Market Street; Temple has the marquee on the Liacouras Center, though that is certainly in a prime location. But it's been a while since I've seen promotional material on Locust Walk.

Again, I want to hear from the Penn folks on this, but I get the impression that there isn't much of that in general.

And by the way, check out all those stories in the headline list on the right side of the blog. Today's offerings in both papers are very good, especially Ed Barkowitz's national college basketball preview in the Daily News.

Ryan asks:

What are the other high profile games this year at the Palestra besides the Chapel Hill game?

I assume Penn-Princeton, and a few Big 5 games could be considered marquee games since Temple and Nova play their big ones at the WC.

Duke makes a Philadelphia visit but that is certainly not at the Palestra.

Good question. I guess it depends a bit on what your definition of high profile or marquee is. I gave it some thought and came up with a top five. What do you think of this:

1. North Carolina-Penn -- having nothing whatsoever to do with the local team.

2. Villanova-St. Joe's -- for the atmosphere, rivalry, and everything we know and love about the Big 5.

3. Penn State-St. Joe's -- if the Nittany Lions are that good (and if they bring a few fans), this could be fun.

4. Temple-St. Joe's -- no, it's not always the most entertaining game, but both teams this year have players who can score a lot of points.

5. Virginia-Seton Hall if it happens -- it would be the last game of the Philly Classic and it would be the two marquee teams in the field.

Cornell-Penn if it doesn't -- which shows you how far the drop is after the above five. It just edges out St. Joe's-Drexel, largely because it could well be for the Ivy League title and there won't be another game in town this year with an NCAA Tournament berth genuinely on the line.

Penn-Princeton has lost so much of its luster at this point because of how far the Tigers have fallen in recent years. Penn has really struggled to sell the game out the last few seasons, and it's hard to build buzz around that game when there's nothing on the line and the student body thinks it has better things to do anyway.

What do you think?

Sorry it took me so long to get to this; I've been working on a couple of big projects all week. There's some good stuff in both papers today that I don't have time to link to but check the headlines feed at right.

34. Penn State (29) - home loss vs. Ohio State (2)
42. Rutgers (28) - home loss vs. West Virginia (5)
72. Delaware (98) - road win at Navy (78)
96. Villanova (111) - home win vs. Hofstra (102)
129. Temple (117) - off
140. Delaware State (146) - road win at South Carolina State (153)
151. Lehigh (161) - road win at Georgetown (231)
190. Lafayette (187) - road loss at Colgate (154)
201. Penn (186) - road loss vs. Brown (184)
242. La Salle (242) - home loss vs. Assumption (n/a)

What a huge win that was for Delaware. It's no coincidence that on yesterday's ESPN college football podcast, Mel Kiper pronounced Blue Hens quarterback Joe Flacco and stud running back Omar Cuff to be legit NFL prospects.

And the First State's other representative here got a shoutout from Mike Kern as the local team of the week in his column this past Monday.

Now for the Top 10 chart:

That's some difference between the computers and the humans. Who do you believe?

FD asks:

Does Saint Joe's really have the talent and experience this year to jump into the rankings?

If they beat Syracuse and Gonzaga, I think there's a decent chance. Ahmad Nivins is that good and opposing coaches will quickly see what the NBA scouts at the Pan Am Games trials saw over the symmer.

The Syracuse game is of particular importance, maybe more than it deserves. In part because it's against Syracuse, and any game against the Orange -- especially at the Carrier Dome -- gets a lot of attention from the national media.

(Yes, that's a euphemism for the many Syracuse grads at ESPN and elsewhere.)

And in part because if the Hawks win that game they get two national TV (also ESPN, naturally) games at Madison Square Garden. So that will be even more exposure for pol voters elsewhere in the country.

Jack tried to figure out the Philly Classic, and seemingly couldn't:

They could not have possibly made this tournament any more confusing. So the preliminary round games are meaningless in the scheme of the tournament? And are the Libery Bracket and Independence Bracket two rounds of competition rather than two separate brackets? I don't understand the terminology. Do they get it down to two teams (the winners of the 2:00 game and the 9:00 game Saturday) and then not play a final?

Basically, yes. I think to call it a "tournament" per se would not be correct. I don't know this for sure but I figure It's thought of as a "tournament" for counting how many games you play, and which ones are considered "exempt."

It's basically rigged. Each team gets a certain number of home games, then the knockout-ish games on the neutral court are set up to give us some kind of glamor game with just a little suspense beforehand. The Philly Classic's such game is Virginia-Seton Hall.

The best comparison is the Las Vegas Invitational, which is the event that got Kansas to play Florida last season. Both teams played a couple of meaningless games on their floors, then came to Vegas, beat another less-than-stellar team, and made us all think they actually had to work to get to the championship.

This year, the glamor teams in that event are North Carolina and Louisville. They aren't "officially" playing each other. But the idea is that they will.

NEW YORK -- It's pretty clear when you start talking to UConn coach Jim Calhoun that he's a New England guy. But the branches of the coaching tree that he's spawned come straight through Philadelphia.

Penn coach Glen Miller and Virginia coach Dave Leitao, whose Cavaliers will come to the Palestra next month (and whose star players, Sean Singletary, is a Philadephia native), both used to be assistants to Calhoun.

And while the Huskies didn't make it to the NCAA Tournament last season, Miller and Leitao did -- along two other former Calhoun assistants, George Washington's Karl Hobbs and Southern Connecticut State's Howie Dickerman.

Calhoun was happy to talk about them all when I asked him. He also spoke at length about scheduling games in the Big East, why football will keep the conference from shedding any of its teams, and the youth of this year's UConn squad.

Click here to listen.

Fred asks:

What are your sources saying over at Penn about the play calling in Triple OT?

From what I read down 6 from the 1/2 yard line, the coach calls a slow-developing halfback option resulting in an offensive lineman downfield before the ball was thrown.

Why in the world was that play called?

How about something a little more conventional and higher percentage?

Well, you do have to admit that Al Bagnoli ran the ball on the first three downs. And it shouldn't have come to fourth down in the first place -- you really do have to punch it in from there. Especially given that Penn's offensive line had basically moved Yale's entire defense backwards, rugby scrum-style, to get Bryan Walker a first-down scramble in the third quarter.

Having said that, the runs on that final weren't really straight up the middle, and I certainly would have run it again on fourth down.

But it is worth remembering that Nick Cisler caught that pass, and that the same play got Penn its only touchdown of regulation.

And while Al Bagnoli's offensive philosophy is valid cannon fodder for another day, I would like to take a look at whether that penalty should have even been called. You Temple fans, who at least have the benefit of replay, tell me what you think of the rules governing ineligible receivers...

I went online to the NCAA Football 2007 Rules and Interpretations book -- and it should not surprise you to hear that I just about crashed my computer downloading it. On page 106 (of 256, which is also no surprise) it says:

No originally ineligible receiver shall be or have been beyond the neutral zone until a legal forward pass that crosses the neutral zone has been thrown.

On page 49, the neutral zone is defined as:

The neutral zone is the space between the two lines of scrimmage extended to the sidelines and is the length of the ball. The neutral zone is established when the ball is ready for play and is resting on the ground with its long axis at right angles to the scrimmage line and parallel to the sidelines.

Back to page 106, where we not surprisingly find two exceptions to the ineligible receiver rule:

When, after the snap, a Team A ineligible receiver immediately charges and contacts an opponent at a point not more than one yard beyond the neutral zone and does not continue the contact more than three yards beyond the neutral zone.

and

When contact that has driven an opponent no more than three yards from the neutral zone is lost by a player who was ineligible at the snap, he must remain stationary at that spot until the pass is thrown.

I guess the ref would argue that any lineman who goes more three yards into the end zone is committing a neutral zone infraction. I didn't see any Penn linemen go nearly that far. I've talked to people who were even closer to the play than I was and they aren't sure.

So given the lack of hash marks in the end zone I have no idea how you enforce that penalty unless it's really flagrant.

Therefore, I will be polite and say I question the call. Feel free to tell me why the call was right, though.

Maybe that's why I'm neither a football ref nor an NCAA employee. But I think that's a good thing.

Fred asks some very good questions in a comment attached to the last post. It's a long comment, so I don't want to paste it here. But read it, then come back for my answer...

I definitely agree about the bad attendances at Franklin Field. It doesn't help in terms of creating buzz that they haven't won a league title since 2003, but that shouldn't be an excuse. And it certainly isn't an excuse for the many people who sleep in past the kickoff, throw their toast and go home.

I think part of it is that so many people focus on basketball first, and at this point, by some distance. Which is probably the case at most of the schools in the region, and that's to be expected given that our basketball teams are far more relevant on the national stage than football.

Having said that, I think Villanova football draws well enough -- an average of 9,520 fans per game, which is 76 percent of capacity. I have to think that goes up with Hofstra and Delaware as the last two home games.

Penn's average in two home games is 10,273, but having been at both of those I have a bit of a hard time believing it. And obviously, the percent capacity comparison doesn't work with Franklin Field.

I also think Temple is drawing better than it used to from its fan base. I phrase it that way because the Owls used to play big teams at home and get lots of visiting fans, and that doesn't even include what Penn State will bring next month. I was impressed by the turnout at the Navy game, though, and I will be very interested to see what the attendance at the Linc is this Saturday, though. I would hope it's big.

Anyway, your greater point of why bother doing this is also a good one, and I do have an answer for it. It goes back to 2003 when Villanova beat Temple at the Linc. It got me to thinking about exactly what the best football team in the region is.

Now that I have the blog, I figured that I could try to find some statistical way of answering the question and bridging that gap between the lower end of I-A and the upper end of I-AA. As Sagarin includes both divisions, I figured that would be a good thing to try. It obviously isn't perfect, and maybe I'll be able to find a different method for next season.

More after the jump, because this thing is getting long...

Having taken my lumps on Texas and Connecticut, and betting there's more to come, I'll gladly yield to the fans of those schools.

(Though having been in Dallas for the NCAA Tournament a year ago, there sure seemed to me to be a lot more interest in UT sports than other schools. Hopefully, I'll get there during football season some day.)

But I'm at least glad it stirred you all up. I feel like I'm only talking to tumbleweeds half the time.

Anyway, let's use my mea culpa as an excuse to look at today's headlines.

Speaking of big-time schools, Frank Fitzpatrick writes a truly outstanding story on the front page of today's Inquirer about the fundraising arms race in college sports.

Fitzpatrick has written about this stuff before and will surely do so again, and he really knows his stuff when it comes to this subject. So please read the story and feel free to comment on it here.

As for yesterday's games, pride of place has to go to -- believe it or not -- Temple. The Owls rallied from 17 points down in the fourth quarter to win at Akron, thanks to three fourth-quarter touchdown passes from Adam DiMichele. You Owls fans tell me whether that was more impressive than the fact that it's Temple's second win in a row.

Penn State was very impressive in its 38-7 win over Wisconsin, spurred on by a nice bit of motivation from JoePa. The win certainly moved the spotlight off the Austin Scott situation for a little while.

Rutgers also scored 38 points in beating Syracuse, with Ray Rice once again the center of attention. Before waxing nostalgic about winning a state high school championship at the Carrier Dome, Rice ran for 196 yards and three touchdowns.

Elsewhere in New York, Penn running back Joe Sandberg beat Rice's tally by a yard and a touchdown as Penn put up 59 points on Columbia.

(Fair warning, though: I have heard that the writer of that story isn't very good...)

In Massachusetts, Villanova took a very good UMass team to overtime, but the Minutemen were just too much after that.

And finally on the local scene, I would nominate Delaware's Omar Cuff as the best I-AA player in our region. I wanted to call him the best player in the region at any level, but if you include Penn State and Rutgers that isn't the case. It is if you only include Temple from I-A, though.

Cuff ran for 200 yards and three touchdowns and scored another from a screen pass yesterday. That's 24 of Delaware's 30-point total against Northeastern. Cuff's totals so far this season: 5.1 yards per carry, 20 touchdowns and an average of 123.3 rushing yards per game.

And one basketball story: Joe Juliano surveys St. Joe's at their first practice of the year.

After the jump, the national news.

... this thing you all are reading right now is a blog.

(A cheap way of getting hits, I realize, but I did all the production work on that video and I know a lot of you are Eagles fans.)

Anyway, there's a lot of good stuff in the local papers today. Start with Joe Juliano's On Local College Football notebook, which has details of Penn and Villanova's injury problems at quarterback.

Mike Kern's Thursday column leads with Missouri's trip to Oklahoma, which is the College GameDay roadshow this week even though the game isn't on any of the ESPNs, ABC, CBS, Versus (which has Cal-Oregon State) or even CSTV.

It's a national broadcast on Fox Sports Net, which has the Big 12 cable contract. So in theory it would be on Comcast SportsNet here, but because the game kicks off at 6 p.m. and the Flyers play at 7, I don't think we're getting the game at all. Such is life.

Given that I've taken a couple shots at Florida State on here, it's only fair that I highlight a Seminole who actually gets it right: sophomore Myron Rolle, a South Jersey native who attended the Hun School.

And Jeff McLane offers a midseason Penn State report card. No grade inflation here, believe me.

Nothing like having all hell break loose, is there?

This week, I've also listed who each team played this past weekend, how they fared, and what the opponent's current rank is.

I would like to chart each team's movement at the end of the season, just to see what it looks like. So that's one of the reasons for me to keep this up.

28. Penn State (48) - home win vs. Iowa (70)
39. Rutgers (38) - home loss vs. Cincinnati (11)
99. Delaware (89) - road loss vs. New Hampshire (110)
108. Villanova (113) - home win vs. William & Mary (148)
147. Lehigh (131) - road loss vs. Fordham (176)
141. Temple (151) - home win vs. Northern Illinois (130)
161. Delaware State (156) - home win vs. Bethune-Cookman (219)
164. Lafayette (167) - home win vs. Columbia (214)
185. Penn (181) - home win vs. Georgetown (227)
242. La Salle (242) - home loss vs. Iona (222)

Penn State makes the biggest jump, as well they should have. I'm surprised that Rutgers only fell one spot, but then again I'm genuinely shocked that Cincinnati is ranked that high. The Bearcats are higher than Boston College, South Carolina and Kentucky.

Temple also makes a big jump. It tells you a lot about just how good former Northern Illinois running back Garrett Wolfe was that the Huskies are ranked as low as they are this year.

(I bet the last of those three makes folks in southern Ohio quite happy. People I know who live there tell me they hate Kentucky because they consider that area theirs. UK has a big alumni base in Cincinnati, and and Wildcats games are broadcast there on the radio.)

Penn and Villanova get screwed by not having margin of victory factored into the system, though it says something about just how bad Georgetown is that Penn beat them and fell anyway.

(And yes, Georgetown is that bad.)

The worst loss of the week prize goes to Lehigh even if it was on the road. Let's see whether they're still higher-ranked than Lafayette come the end of the season.

After the jump, the Top 10 comparison...

Penn State.

Rutgers.

Temple.

Villanova.

Penn.

La Salle.

The Phillies. (If you thought the BCS was a tightrope...)

(Not to mention Florida, Oregon, Oklahoma, Texas and Clemson. And throw in West Virginia from Friday night.)

Ouch.

That should get a few clicks. I'm quite pleased to say that pageviews on this blog have skyrocketed since we built an automatic RSS feed headline aggregator on the front of Philly.com, so that when I write a blog post it shows up there without my having to do anything.

Anyway, rest assured that the headline doesn't refer to the Phillies, or even Penn State. But tomorrow we have Temple at Army, Villanova at No. 9-ranked (in the SportsNetwork I-AA poll) James Madison and Penn making the long bus trip to Dartmouth. it wouldn't surprise me if all three of them lose.

Heck, La Salle might have the best chance of winning, as they travel to Beaver Falls, Pa.-based Geneva College. The Division III-level Golden Tornadoes play in the Presidents' Athletic Conference.

As for the national scene, it's a shame we won't be getting Cal-Oregon on Channel 6, but at least we'll see Rutgers play a BCS-conference team. And Alabama-Florida State should be fun.

That is, if anyone isn't watching the Phillies...

So you've probably noticed by now that Philly.com launched its redesign over the weekend. It's been taking up a lot of my time, but now I have at least a few minutes to come back and see what this week's football stats are.

So let's have a look at the local scene...

21. Rutgers (32)
47. Penn State (40)
86. Delaware (93)
106. Villanova (107)
127. Lehigh (139)
161. Temple (166)
162. Lafayette (139)
175. Penn (165)
185. Delaware State (162)
242. La Salle (242)

The biggest jump of the week is Lehigh, though none of the teams did exceptionally well. Rutgers jumps 11 spots without playing, which probably says quite a bit about how weird a season this has been in college football.

I'm surprised Villanova didn't move higher after beating Penn, but it was a home win and margin doesn't count. It's noteworthy, though, that Villanova is ranked higher than Syracuse (110) even after the Orange won at Louisville. If that stays the case all year it would make an interesting rollout come basketball season.

Then again, the Cardinals are in Mike Kern's Fraud Five.

Penn State fell less than I thought it would, though they were a bit low to start with and Michigan (44) is pretty close to the Nittany Lions in the rankings. Lafayette falls the farthest after being upset at home by Princeton.

Now for the Top 10 comparison. I'm adding in the Harris poll this week because it counts for 1/3 of the BCS standings. Once the BCS standings start, I will swap Harris out for the BCS.

If ever there was a team whose computer stats seem inflated compared to the human eye, it seems to be Ohio State. The Buckeyes have played Youngstown State (82), Akron (83), Northwestern (99), and Washington (36). The first three of those are a lot higher than I expected, especially Northwestern, which lost at home to Duke.

But I think Penn State, Wisconsin and Michigan could all beat Ohio State pretty easily. Even after seeing the Nittany Lions struggle in Ann Arbor this past weekend.

Other than that, the big discrepancy seems to be whether Boston College or Rutgers deserves to be in the Top 10. Both teams have Philly ties, so if there are any fans out there of either school let me know what you think.

Here we go again. Last week's number is in parentheses for the local teams. I'm adding Rutgers this week because if State College counts geographically (not to mention Newark and Easton), Piscataway does too. Especially as alumni bases go.

Tell me what you think of this:

32. Rutgers (didn't track last week)
40. Penn State (13)
93. Delaware (77)
107. Villanova (105)
131. Lafayette (143)
139. Lehigh (168)
165. Penn (132)
166. Temple (188)
173. Delaware State (162)
242. La Salle (242)

Well, that's quite a big drop for Penn State. It says a lot about just who they've played (and so does ESPN.com's Pat Forde in this week's Forde Yard Dash, albeit with an actual sense of humor compared to me).

The Nittany Lions should rise again just by playing Michigan, even as bad as the Wolverines are, especially if Morelli and Co. head home from Ann Arbor with a win.

I expect Temple to keep rising, especially once they hit the MAC teams like Akron that do play good teams, and playing Penn State should help a bit too (especially with margin of win/loss not factored in).

If I had to guess, I'd say Temple ends up a shade higher than Villanova but below Delaware. Omar Cuff is going to carry the Blue Hens a very, very long way this year. Don't buy tickets for Chattanooga just yet, but if he keeps playing as well as he has a deep playoff run is not out of the question -- especially if Delaware gets a home game or two.

Villanova could surprise a few people, but they'd have to do something pretty special to stay in the top 125. Much of their current ranking comes from playing Maryland, and I suspect one or two CAA losses will have a pretty big impact on what the computer spits out.

Lehigh and Lafayette might rise a bit more, but I bet Penn doesn't end the season any higher than it was last week. The highest-ranked Ivy in Sagarin is Harvard at 141, and while I think Yale (currently (157) will be above the Crimson when the Elis come to Franklin Field next month, the rest of the Ivy League is ranked below Penn and gets to beat itself up for the rest of the fall.

And some people out there wonder why so few people care about it...

Anyway, here's this week's version of the Top 10 comparison:

Well, the computers and the humans have come closer this week. Sagarin matches at least one human poll in five of the ten slots this week, compared to only one last week.

I actually think the computers might be on to something with Boston College, though I agree with those out there who think it's a bit hard to actually pick 10 top teams in the country at the moment.

But I bet you and I had the same reaction to seeing Cincinnati at Sagarin's No. 7: What the...? (fill in as you like). Well, here's my best guess. The Bearcats' three wins are over Southeast Missouri State (189), Miami-Ohio (80), and Oregon State (13). So the latter two wins are clearly carrying Cincy above its human-voted weight, though the Bearcats did get some votes in this week's AP poll.

Miami-Ohio does have a win over a BCS conference team, even if it's doormat Minnesota, while Oregon opened up its season by beating Utah, which thumped UCLA in Salt Lake City this past Saturday, 44-6. I was convinced that was a typo when I first saw it Saturday evening.

I have a hard time thinking the Bearcats will be in the Top 10 next week though, as they play Marshall at home Saturday. No. 11 Alabama plays Georgia, and if the Crimson Tide go 4-0 I bet even those computers will shake a bit from the noise coming out of Tuscaloosa.

Fred asks:

Is Bagnoli on the hot seat?

The body of work is there over the 14 years.

But they have not won the league since 1993.

And the past two seasons, the team finished at 5-5, with losing league records.

What is the problem down there?

Well, it's 2003, but it's still a fair question. If this year's team doesn't win the league the graduating seniors would be the first in Al Bagnoli's tenure to not leave with a title.

Is Bagnoli on the hot seat per se? No. At least, not yet. The body of work is indeed there, and I think that has given Bagnoli the right to leave when he sees fit unless something goes really wrong.

I think there are three main reasons why Penn didn't win last night, and yes, I was at the game. First, and most importantly, a lot of people I talked to yesterday had no idea that Lafayette is ranked third in I-AA in both scoring defense and total defense. There's quite a few very good teams nationwide at I-AA, so to be that highly ranked is no small feat.

The Leopards have also tied for the league title each of the last three years, which is a pretty impressive streak for a team that was really bad not all that long ago.

Second, Joe Sandberg's first-half thigh injury was crucial. He's Penn's biggest offensive threat, able to get good yards on the ground and also execute screen pass plays very well. Penn called a lot of screens last night and it just isn't the same without him getting the ball.

But just look at Sandberg's rushing stats last night: 17 carries for an average of five yards each, while Kelms Amoo-Achampong carried 15 times for 1.6 yards apiece.

That does not, however, excuse what I thought was some questionable play calls by Bagnoli at times -- runs on third and long, passes on first down, and such. Not that you always go the other way, but in the context.

And I didn't agree at all with the intentional safety, even though Bagnoli's argument that the defense was doing well enough to not get run over on the last drive has some merit.

The third thing is the kicking game, and this is the thing I'm least worried about. Yes, Andrew Samson missed two kicks, though the first one was one of those where if they gave points for striking the upright he'd get the most possible. But he's a freshman and last night was his first ever college game. So I'm willing to cut him some slack.

Above all, I don't think Bagnoli has too much to worry about right now. I do think Villanova will beat Penn next weekend far more comfortably than they have the last few times, but that's a totally different level anyway.

I just stumbled across the Sagarin football ratings for the first time, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it includes all the I-A and I-AA teams. This lets us have a look at how the Delaware Valley's teams stack up against each other, at least by one measurement. But it's an important measurement, as it's one of the many used to calculate the BCS standings.

Sagarin has a very significant flaw, though: the score margin of a win/loss is not factored in at all. This is obviously very important in football, especially in the eyes of the voters who make the human-based polls. But Sagarin does give weight to games played at home versus away.

So here goes, and I'll include Penn State in this one even though they're obviously miles away from everyone else.

13. Penn State
77. Delaware
105. Villanova
132. Penn
143. Lafayette
162. Delaware State
168. Lehigh
188. Temple
242. La Salle

For better or worse, La Salle is ranked higher than only "243 ***UNRATED***."

If there are any other teams you think I should include, let me know. I'll try to do this each week, probably on Mondays from now on.

And as far as the national scale goes, here's how Sagarin's Top 10 compares to the AP and coaches' polls. Of note, the data does NOT include West Virginia's win at Maryland last night.

I'm not sure how much credence I put in Sagarin this early in the season -- it isn't very accurate early in the basketball season either, for that matter -- but is interesting just how different Sagarin is from the human polls.

The lack of score margin factor is obviously the biggest thing. It's the most obvious reason for West Virginia (22) and Florida (11) not being in the Sagarin Top 10. But I think it also says something about non-conference strength of schedule.

Maryland is the only non-Big East, BCS-conference team West Virginia is playing this year. So while the 31-14 scoreline won't matter, the fact that the game was in College park will, Florida's two wins so far have been blowouts of Western Kentucky (122) and Troy (90), both at home.

I would expect the Sagarin ratings to change quite dramatically in the weeks to come. If nothing else, I'll probably keep this feature going just to see how close it comes to the human rankings.

Yes, I should have done this earlier in the day, but I was the guy behind the camera for the Eagles video on Philly.com and I did the post-production (as such) as well.

Penn held its football media day yesterday. If Villanova's main storyline is its quarterback and Temple's is what Al Golden can do this year, the single biggest theme regarding the Quakers this season is the kicking game.

You might (or might not... or probably don't, to be honest) recall that Penn set a rather dubious mark last season by becoming the first team to ever lose three straight overtime games -- at Yale, at home to Brown and at Princeton. I covered the two road games for the Inquirer and believe me when I say that on any given kick, there was a pretty good chance of all heck breaking loose.

At Yale, Derek Zoch missed a 23-yarder in the second quarter. In the fourth, with the game tied 14-14, Bagnoli was so worried on a fourth-down play that he chose to go for it instead of having Zoch kick a 42-yarder into the wind. A bit of a hazardous kick? Yes, but wouldn't you take your chance with the points?

Does that change when I tell you that in the overtime, Zoch put one off the upright?

No surprise, then: Joe Juliano focuses on the kicking game in his story in today's Inquirer.

Mike Kern notes that it's been four years since Penn last won an Ivy League title. The Quakers' four conference losses last season were by a combined 11 points. That's less than a field goal three points a game. Or something like that.

At the I-A level (one rule of this blog: I will not call it the BCS Subdivision or whatever its name is), Dick Jerardi writes about Rutgers' renaissance under Greg Schiano, and also writes a useful info box. Meaningful college football in the Northeast Corridor is a pretty nice thing to have, isn't it?

Ray Parrillo profiles Conwell-Egan grad and West Virginia superstar Steve Slaton.

Shannon Ryan writes up Penn State tight end Andrew Quarless' suspension. In an update this afternoon, Ryan reports that Quarless could be out 3-4 weeks. The Nittany Lions also got a commitment from defensive end Jack Crawford.

Notre Dame DT Derrell Hand, a former West Catholic star, has been suspended three games for propositioning a prostitute and will miss the Penn State game. Just reporting the facts here, folks.

And finally, if you still want to read more, the Daily News' Ed Barkowitz compiles 50 -- yes, fifty -- things you should know about the college football season.

That should tide you over until tomorrow.

That didn't take long.

Well, okay, so the game was scoreless for the first 4:27, and Northwestern led only 1-0 after 22 minutes and change.

But after that, the deluge. The Wildcats scored nine more times before Penn got on the board, including an 8-0 halftime advantage, and that was basically that. The final score was 12-2, and Northwestern will play for its third straight national championship on Sunday.

So much for the buzz in the crowd, at least the part that wasn't rooting for Northwestern. And I have to say, there were far more people in the crowd of 6,428 rooting for Penn than I expected. It's certainly the first time in a long time I've seen a pep band at a non-basketball Final Four.

As I watched the demolition, I thought of the 1979 men's basketball Final Four, the last time a Penn team faced a Big Ten team at this stage of an NCAA Tournament. That Quakers team was really a Cinderella, even if it had a lot of respect nationally -- a 9-seed that ousted overwhelming favorites St. John's and North Carolina to make it to the big stage. In this tournament, Penn was the 4-seed, and beat the 13 and the 5-seeds to get here.

Still, the basketball game was 50-17 at halftime and 101-67 at the end. The opponent, Michigan State was led by some guy named Magic Johnson. You might have heard of him. Northwestern had Aly Josephs, who scored five goals, and Kristen Kjellman, whose hat trick gave her the all-time record for goals in the NCAA Tournament.

Now, as you might notice from looking at my headshot, I wasn't around that year. So, to find a better perspective, I turned to a guy who was in Salt Lake City that day, longtime Penn statistician Stu Suss.

He called the comparison "a little unfair to the basketball team."

"As ugly as it was in the first half, [the 1979 team] actually played well," Suss said. "They got all sorts of open shots, missed a bunch of layups. It wasn't as clear until around 10 minutes in that it was going to be a domination."

Interesting, then, that Northwestern only out-shot Penn 21-20, and that the teams were tied at 15 ground balls and eight draw controlls (faceoffs) apiece. But that's the difference between the top team in the country and the rest of the field.

Yet given Northwestern's fast rise to prominence in college lacrosse, Suss said Penn is capable of something similar.

"It's a tremendous accomplishment for a program that doesn't have a history and tradition to crack the Final Four," he said. "It doesn't appear to be a George Mason kind of thing where you say this is a one-shot deal and their moment in the sun has come and gone. You have some reason to believe this coaching staff has put together the foundation for a nationally competitive team for a while."

Despite that, there was a definite air of finality in the press conference room after the game. No matter what they told themselves before the game, you could tell that Penn's three leading seniors -- attack Chrissy Muller and defenders Karen Jann and Sarah Eastburn -- sensed the full force of the fact that their college careers were over.

"It is bittersweet," a quite emotional Muller said. "Walking in here, Karen said, 'Don't think about this game, think about everything we've done. "I'm just really sad to leave, and that it had to end this way."

"This was a fantastic experience for all of us, but especially us seniors," Eastburn said. "We came into this program our freshman year with [coach] Karin [Brower] instilling in us this belief that we could be here [and] we could win a national championship, and I think the four seniors truly believed that."

I would like to begin this post with the following premise: anything I write on this blog between now and the end of the summer, if not longer, is irrelevant compared to whatever the Phillies and Eagles do. One can easily argue that anything I ever write is irrelevant compared to those two teams, the Eagles in particular.

One can also argue, though I don't believe this at all, that fans of individual City Six schools don't care all that much about what the other city schools do. I happen to think that the best thing about the nature of this region's college sports teams is that their fan bases do all pay attention to the other teams to some extent.

Nonetheless, I'm ready to accept the notion that this post is about something that only a sliver of the people who read this blog care about, and I say that knowing that one of the things I really want to do with this blog is to write about stuff that doesn't get attention from the main media outlets in the region.

So you've probably figured out by now that the something in question is the Penn women's lacrosse team's 9-7 win over Maryland this afternoon that put the Quakers in the final four of the NCAA Tournament, which will take place at Franklin Field this coming Friday.

In the name of transparency, I will admit that lacrosse is a sport about which I know a few things, but not nearly as much as basketball and football. Nonetheless, I ask you to consider the following storylines, and I ask you do to so making the most honest effort you can to ignore the specific team involved:

-- The rather obvious one, that a Philadelphia college sports team is not only playing in the Final Four of its sport but is doing so on its home field.

-- The fact that said team beat arguably the most dominant team in the history of women's college lacrosse to get to the Final Four.

-- The fact that said team came back from a 4-0 deficit to go up 9-6, then gave up a goal with just over four minutes to play, prompting this writer to say out loud in the press box that he wondered whether we were about to see a classic Philadelphia sports collapse (to be polite), if we hadn't seen one already.

-- And finally, that the game-tying goal (at 5-5) and the subsequent goal (which gave Penn a lead it never relinquished) were scored not only by two of the team's top attackers, but by two Philadelphia-area natives.

If similar things had happened in basketball, or (heaven forbid, given the teams around here not named Penn State) football, it would be a huge deal. As it stands, given that the Phillies are losing 13-2 as I write this post, I find Penn's win today at least worth of attention on here.

"It makes it that much more important, more special" to be from this area, said senior attack Chrissy Muller, who is from Rydal, Pa., to be specific, attended Mount St. Joseph's Academy and scored the game-tying goal today. "I think Philadelphia is a great area for lacrosse and women's lacrosse, so I think to have it here, and the accessibility of Franklin Field for everyone to come, all the high schools, it just makes it a lot of fun."

Sophomore attack Becca Edwards, a native of Flourtown, Pa., and graduate of Springfield Township High whose first goal of the day gave Penn a 6-5 lead, concurred.

"Being from this area, it's nice that my high school team will be probably coming and that people who've supported you through it will be able to see you succeed in a big arena."

Then you have the angle of Penn playing Maryland specifically, a team which has 10 national championships to its name, including seven straight from 1995 to 2001. And as I can tell that this post is getting pretty long, I've saved the fun part of this angle for after the jump.

For the fans at Franklin Field who come here more than once weekend each year, a few names in the USA vs. the World distance medley relay probably sounded familiar.

Two former Penn runners competed in the event: 2004 graduate Sam Burley (left) ran the third (800-meter) leg for USA Red, and 2006 graduate Courtney Jaworski (right) ran the third leg for the All Stars.

After the race, they both spoke about what it meant to come back to the Penn Relays wearing different jerseys. Click on the photos above to watch the videos.

Penn's Laurie McDaniel takes the baton heading into the anchor leg of the 4x100-meter relay this morning.

At Penn, they know a few things about second-half collapses in games against Princeton. So as the Quakers women's lacrosse team watched a 13-7 lead get cut to 13-10 with 3:28 left tonight, I couldn't help wondering if a few of the Palestra's old ghosts had made their way over to Franklin Field for a few minutes. But a few things made this night different.

For one, it was a Wednesday, not a Tuesday as that famous February night in 1999 was. For another, whereas Matt Langel missed the shot that would have rendered meaningless the Tigers' comeback from 33-9 down at halftime to 50-49 up at the buzzer, Rachel Manson scored the insurance goal with 1:33 to play that helped Penn to a 14-10 win tonight.

That gave the Quakers at least a share of the Ivy League title and an automatic berth in the NCAA Tournament whose Final Four they'll host at Franklin Field next month.

Not that Penn's Becca Edwards and Chrissy Muller, who were the key players in the win, were aware of the history in Penn-Princeton games outside of their sport. And not that Quakers coach Karin Brower necessarily was either, even though she used to be a Princeton assistant.

But when the players were asked what was going through their minds when Princeton cut the lead to three goals, they both said they were still totally confident they'd win. Brower took what you might call a nervous deep breath before laughing.

"I knew that if we kept composed, we'd be fine," she said.

If, of course. But they did.

This game was a battle between two Top 15 teams, which is something you don't see all that often in Philadelphia no matter the sport. Penn is No. 3 and Princeton is No. 15 in the latest women's lacrosse coaches' poll, with only defending champion Northwestern and perennial power Maryland above the Quakers.

Penn has beaten three ranked teams this season -- No. 18 Yale, No. 12 Johns Hopkins and No. 10 Penn State -- and its only loss all year is to the Wildcats in Evanston. And Princeton has always been a powerhouse team in lacrosse in both genders, which has made the series against Penn a lot more lopsided than the basketball rivalry has been over time.

"To beat a program such as Princeton that is so steeped in tradition is a reward in itself," Brower said. "This is a game that I've wanted to win for eight years, and you feel like if you beat Princeton, you can compete with anybody."

While I don't expect women's lacrosse to generate much interest, having the Final Four in town at least makes all this worth sticking in the back of your minds if you're a college sports fan in the region.

It's certainly understandable that the players have making it back to their home field right up there at the top of their list of goals for the season.

"That's been our motivation since the day we stepped on the field in the fall," said Muller, a native of Rydal, Pa. "This is where we want to be."

Oddly enough, if Penn got one of the top four seeds in the 16-team tournament, it would have to leave Franklin Field even though it would be the home team for all of its games. Because of Penn's graduation, the first-round game would be at Rhodes Field, the bandbox-sized soccer facility sandwiched between the South Street bridge, the Schuylkill Expressway and the Amtrak tracks. But the second-round game would be at Franklin Field, as would all the others Penn plays.

Believe me, I'm still well aware of perceptions that this blog is weighted towards Penn in how it covers the area's teams. But there was a reporter from the Daily News at the game tonight, and there were probably a couple thousand people in the stands, which is way more than usually turn up for spring sports around here no matter who's playing.

And what happened tonight could actually end up being a pretty big deal next month if Penn actually makes it to the Final Four.

A couple weeks ago, Mike Jensen told me that Ibrahim Jaaber was the one guy on the floor for Penn who could really go toe-to-toe with the future NBA stars on the BCS teams the Quakers played.

At first, I must admit, I didn't see it. But over the last two or three weeks of the season, and into the NCAA Tournament, it became clear. And now, that status has been cemented.

It might seem improbable that Jaaber is the first Penn player to win Big 5 Player of the Year since Tony Price did it with the 1979 Quakers team that went to the Final Four. In fact, when I first saw that, I didn't really believe it. But I got out the Daily News Big 5-0 book, which had the list of all the Big 5 Players of the Year in the City Series' first 50 seasons, and there it was.

Jerome Allen was beaten twice, in 1994 by Temple's Eddie Jones and in 1995 by Villanova's Kerry Kittles. It's hard to argue with that Ugonna Onyekwe was also beaten twice, in 2002 by Lynn Greer and in 2003 by Jameer Nelson. It's probably harder to argue with that, as good as Onyekwe was and even though Penn won the Big 5 outright in 2002.

But in 2007, Jaaber's competition was really only teammate Mark Zoller and Villanova's Curtis Sumpter. So the voters of the Herb Good Basketball Club decided that the Geasey Trophy should move from the Big 5's 33rd Street office into the building next door, instead of to one of the other gyms in the region.

As an aside, I'm not one of the voters, if you're wondering, but that isn't the point.

If I had a vote -- and I don't mean this as disrespect to Ibby, who had a great Penn career -- I admit, at the time when the voting was conducted, I would have gone for one of the other two.

Sumpter was the star of the Big 5 champions, the player that the other teams respected the most... and yet, in the last month of the season, Scottie Reynolds was the star and the go-to guy, and the player who delivered the clutch shots.

I probably would have voted for Zoller, because he just did so much for Penn in terms of putting up numbers. 18.2 points and 7.5 rebounds per game, 87 assists, 55 steals and 12 blocks over the season. Plus the countless dives for loose balls, those big free throws against Temple, and being a guy who grew up watching Big 5 games and wanting to be a part of them.

But then I thought -- and talked to Mike just now -- and I thought about how much I watched Jaaber over the last few weeks of the season and saw that he really does have the kind of presence and ability to take over a game. Not always against Big 12-sized opponents, but against a lot of other ones. And against North Carolina, to borrow from Mike again, he was the guy for Penn that could play even with the other team.

So I thought about it this way: what happened when the players weren't on the floor, or at least weren't being effective? With Sumpter -- and it happened against Kentucky -- Scottie Reynolds stepped up more often than not. Yes, Sumpter made a difference when he scored a lot, but he had a lot of quiet games down the stretch, even if his scoring didn't drop too much.

Zoller got in foul trouble a lot, and Penn was definitely a different team without him on the floor. But the Quakers still went 13-1 in the Ivy League, and won that game against Brown on the last weekend after he had fouled out.

So it comes down to Jaaber, and this is where he has a very strong case. He averaged 36.9 minutes per game. That's 92.3 percent of the possible minutes he could have played, which is the 12th-highest percentage in the country according to Pomeroy.

Which means that we don't have a full idea of what Penn would have been like without its starting point guard on the floor. It also means, combined with his average of 2.2 fouls committed per game, that Jaaber was able to stay out of foul trouble, and thus be on the floor when his team needed him to direct traffic.

Add that to 15.9 points and 4.5 rebounds per game, plus 90 steals, 162 assists and 17 blocks (second-best on the team), and the picture becomes even more clear.

Ibrahim Jaaber didn't just win this year's Big 5 MVP award, he earned it. In a city which prizes its hard workers, that is high praise in and of itself.

The Penn student newspaper broke the news this morning that Ibrahim Jaaber has been named this year's Big 5 Player of the Year.

Jaaber is the first Penn player to win the Geasey Trophy since 1979.

I will have quite a bit more to say about this later today.

So with that in mind, I'm going to not pay attention to the fact that the Mets just took a 2-1 lead, even though the TV at the office is right in my natural line of sight, and write about the Portsmouth Invitational instead.

The tournament, which is comprised of the top senior players from across the country, featured a number of players either from Philadelphia-area schools or with Philadelphia area-roots.

Among the 64 players invited were:

-- Dustin Salisbery, Temple / Cherry, Bekaert & Holland (who played on what I think was the best roster in the tournament)
-- Ibrahim Jaaber, Penn / Tidewater Sealants
-- Christian Burns, Philadelphia U. / Portsmouth Sports Club
-- Jahsha Bluntt, Delaware State / Portsmouth Sports Club
-- Jason Cain, Virginia / Bartram High (Philadelphia) / Norfolk Sports Club
-- Russell Carter, Notre Dame / Paulsboro High (N.J.) / Holiday Inn-Portsmouth
-- Gary Neal, Towson / ex-La Salle / Beach Barton Ford
After the jump, the players' lines from the tournament.

Yes, I was shocked when Penn started the second half on a 21-6 run to take a 39-37 lead. But then Texas A&M made the kind of statement on offense that neither this Penn team nor any other I've ever seen could stop: two thunderous put-back slam dunks by Joseph Jones that gave A&M the lead for good, 41-39 with 10:31 remaining.

After that, it was the Aggies' defense and the best player on the floor, Acie Law IV. It started when Kevin Egee had to heave up a desperation shot as the shot clock expired with 8:50 left. It continued when Doninique Kirk nailed a brilliant driving layup with 4:52. Mark Zoller airballed a three at the other end, then Kirk put A&M up double digits on a kickout three with 4:08 left.

The coup de grace came with 3:07 to play, when Law crossed over Justin Reilly, banked in a driving layup of his own with three on the shot clock and restored the 10-point lead.

Law finished with a game-high 20. Penn's Mark Zoller had a respectable 19, of which 16 came in the second half. Ibrahim Jaaber scored 16, with 10 coming after halftime.

As has been the case in every game so far today, the better team won. I'm sure this makes Big Ten commissioner and Lord of the Selection Committee Jim Delany incredibly happy, but so far this NCAA Tournament has been really rather boring.

Then again, when the two most powerful people in the committee room are Delany and a guy who hires coaches to run the Princeton offense, this is surely the way it's supposed to be.

After the jump, individuals of note and, yes, some analysis from me.

We now know what games KYW will be broadcasting over the air, which is what I was waiting for to do a post listing all the first-round tip-off times. KYW's games are marked in italics:

Thursday

12:20 p.m.: 13. Davidson vs. 4. Maryland (Buffalo)
12:25 p.m.: 10. Texas Tech vs. 7. Boston College (Winston-Salem)
12:30 p.m.: 11. Louisville vs. 6. Stanford (Lexington)

2:40 p.m.: 14. Oral Roberts vs. 3. Washington State (Sacramento)
2:40 p.m.: 12. Old Dominion vs. 5. Butler (Buffalo)
2:45 p.m.: 15. Belmont vs. 2. Georgetown (Winston-Salem)
3:10 p.m: 14. Penn vs. 3. Texas A&M (Lexington)

5:00 p.m.: 11. George Washington vs. 6. Vanderbilt (Sacramento)

7:10 p.m.: 11. Virginia Commonwealth vs. 6. Duke (Buffalo)
7:10 p.m.: 16. Central Connecticut State vs. 1. Ohio State (Lexington)
7:20 p.m.: 9. Michigan State vs. 8. Marquette (Winston-Salem)
7:25 p.m.: 15. Weber State vs. 2. UCLA (Sacramento)

9:30 p.m.: 14. Wright State vs. 3. Pittsburgh (Buffalo)
9:30 p.m.: 9. Xavier vs. 8. Brigham Young (Lexington)
9:40 p.m.: 16. Eastern Kentucky vs. 1. North Carolina (Winston-Salem)
9:45 p.m.: 10. Gonzaga vs. 7. Indiana (Sacramento)

Friday

12:15 p.m.: 13. Albany vs. 4. Virginia (Columbus)
12:25 p.m.: 10. Georgia Tech vs. 7. UNLV (Chicago)
12:30 p.m.: 15. North Texas vs. 2. Memphis (New Orleans)

2:35 p.m.: 12. Long Beach State vs. 5. Tennessee (Columbus)
2:35 p.m.: 11. Winthrop vs. 6. Notre Dame (Spokane)
2:45 p.m.: 15. Texas A&M-Corpus Christi vs. 2. Wisconsin (Chicago)
2:50 p.m.: 10. Creighton vs. 7. Nevada (New Orleans)

4:55 p.m.: 14. Miami (Ohio) vs. 3. Oregon (Spokane)

7:10 p.m.: 16. Niagara vs. 1. Kansas (Chicago)
7:10 p.m.: 12. Illinois vs. 5. Virginia Tech (Columbus)
7:20 p.m.: 9. Purdue vs. 8. Arizona (New Orleans)
7:25 p.m.: 13. New Mexico State vs. 4. Texas (Winston Salem)

Note: KYW's website lists this time slot as "TBA." I have no inside info, but my guess is Niagara-Kansas.

9:30 p.m.: 9. Villanova vs. 8. Kentucky (Chicago)
9:30 p.m.: 13. Holy Cross vs. 4. Southern Illinois
9:40 p.m.: 16. Jackson State vs. 1. Florida
9:45 p.m.: 12. Arkansas vs. 5. Southern California

The only selection I don't like is UNLV-Georgia Tech over Albany-Virginia, but that happened because CSTV has the rights to broadcast Albany-Virginia (and GW-Vandy) to the entire country except for the home markets of the teams playing. At least it will be streamed online.

I have to say, though, if I had no interest in the Philadelphia teams, I wouldn't want to see Penn-A&M. A lot of people are pegging Oral Roberts-Washington State as an upset, Butler-Old Dominion is a better game, and Belmont-Georgetown has Georgetown in it.

We've hit a media timeout, which gives me the opportunity to note that Penn's Steve Danley is now blogging for the New York Times.

I am definitely going to have to find out how he got that gig.

I got to sit down with ESPN.com bracketologist and St. Joe's color analyst Joe Lunardi for a few minutes over dinner before the Saint Louis-UMass game. We talked about Villanova and Penn's potential seeds in the NCAA Tournament, Drexel's chances of making the field of 65, and this year's A-10 Tournament.

His latest field is here. Drexel is a 12 playing Virginia in Columbus; Villanova is a 9 playing Vanderbilt in Sacramento; and Penn is a 14 playing Memphis, also in Columbus.

You can listen to the interview by clicking here and downloading the file. My thanks to Joe for sparing a few minutes once again.

As an aside, just as I started to write this, Penn SID Mike Mahoney showed up and sat just behind me and a few seats over.

Pomeroy: 99 (94)
RPI: 84 (89)
Sagarin: 108 (116)

Record: 22-8 (13-1 conf.)

(As anpther aside, RPI is calculated using only Division I teams, so the win over Florida Gulf Coast doesn't count.)

-- Offensive efficiency: 52
-- Defensive efficiency: 84
-- Tempo: 113 (68.1 possessions per 40 minutes)

-- Effective FG %: 32
-- 3-point FG %: 92
-- 2-point FG %: 16
-- Ratio of threes to all field goal attempts: 252 (Worth paying attention to not because it's so low, but because Penn's dominance inside came mainly against smaller and less athletic Ivy League teams.)
-- Ratio of assists to field goals made: 21
-- Turnover % forced: 57
-- Free throw % given up: 277
-- Steal % forced: 22
-- Ratio of threes to all field goal attempts given up: 99

Mark Zoller

-- Effective FG %: 44

Steve Danley

-- Free throw rate: 15

Ibrahim Jaaber

-- Percentage of possible minutes played: 12
-- Steal %: 20

Jaaber, by the way, won Ivy League Player of the Year for the second year in a row today. He's the fifth player in league history to win the award in consecutive seasons, and the third from Penn -- the other two, not surprisingly, are Jerome Allen and Ugonna Onyekwe. It's also the third straight year a Penn player has won the award, with Tim Begley capturing it in 2005.

I'm not saying the game was over early, because it wasn't quite, but Penn had a 20-point lead with only 7:36 gone by on the clock. The Bulldogs (whose band deserves credit for making the trip from New Haven) didn't hit double figures until 10:12 remaining in the first half, by which time Penn had 31 points on the board.

Yale cut a 20-point halftime deficit to 14 after 1:20 of play in the second half, but Penn launched a 13-2 run over the next 4:40 to take a 25-point lead and leave no doubt whatsoever. The lead got as high as 31 and was at 27 when a media timeout came with 5:11 left in the game and the Penn band struck up Rock and Roll Part II, as most of the bands traditionally do when the game's out of reach. That doesn't normally come with so much time remaining, but tonight there wasn't much question.

Line of the day goes not to Ibrahim Jaaber, who had the honor of sitting atop the Palestra's east basket after the nets came down, but to fellow senior Mark Zoller for leaving no category unfilled in his box score line:

Zoller's 14 defensive rebounds were just short of half the team's total of 32. Penn's defense was also quite impressive, holding Yale to 35.3 percent from the field and 3-of-12 from three-point range. The Quakers pulled down 13 offensive boards to Yale's 15 on defense, and out-rebounded the Bulldogs as a whole by a whopping 45-22.

And it's a good thing that Penn got this over with early, because Quakers fans might have to take a while to save up enough money to get out to Spokane.

I promise I will try hard to force myself to get the Drexel Crunchy Numbers up tomorrow morning. It really needs to be done before the Northeastern game tips, and I might as well hold myself to my word by putting it up on here.

The photo of Ibrahim Jaaber inheriting the seat once held by Jerome Allen and (Penn's) Michael Jordan, among many others, was taken by Ron Cortes of the Inquirer.

Drexel was in the field yesterday, but Georgia Tech's win over North Carolina bumped the Dragons out and put the Yellow Jackets in their place. Drexel's now the first team out of the field, and I have a nasty feeling they're going to stay right on that line unless they get to the CAA final. A broken record, yes, but at least the Dragons control their own destiny and you can't ask for much more than that at this time of year.

Villanova's still an 8-seed, but this time faces Texas Tech and has to do so in Sacramento as part of the San Jose regional. Winner gets UCLA, which has a stronger and stronger case for being the top overall seed as other big teams lose.

Penn's still a 13 and still has to go to Spokane, but this time gets Nevada. Winner gets BC or Davidson, and it's also in the San Jose regional. So in theory, there's a possible Penn-'Nova game in the Sweet 16. But that's really stretching it, and that in and of itself might be an understatement.

Another day, another bracket, and this time Drexel's in the field. The Dragons will be helped a whole lot if Georgia Tech, Oklahoma State and Kansas State keep losing.

Drexel gets a 12-seed and gets shipped to Spokane to play BYU in the East Rutherford regional. Winner gets No. 5 Nevada or No. 12 Vermont.

I don't have time to do all the analysis, but it so happens that No. 13 Penn is sent to Spokane as well to play No. 4 UNLV. It's in the San Jose regional, so the Quakers might be out west for quite a while, but I guarantee you that if that happened, the happiest people on the planet would be the people right here in Inquirer and Daily News World Headquarters. Especially the people who control the bags of money that don't quite exist in the basement.

(The second-happiest people would be the writers in Vegas and Reno, it looks like.)

Winner of Penn-UNLV gets Duke or VCU. You can be sure everyone else out there would want Duke-UNLV, but Penn-Duke would be interesting. Definitely more interesting than last year's game. Not saying that Penn could pull it off (against Duke or UNLV), but I genuinely don't know which of those games would be easier.

Villanova is still an 8-seed, and still paired with Stanford in Winston-Salem in the East Rutherford regional. And if 'Nova won that and upset Carolina, they could end up meeting Drexel in the Sweet 16. At the Meadowlands. If only it was at the Palestra.

Just saying. Now, back to the mines.

I was lucky to spend tonight watching the premiere of The Palestra: Cathedral of Basketball, a movie about the famed arena that was written and produced by former Penn women's player Mikaelyn Austin.

Among the famous folks in attendance were four of the City Six coaches (Glen Miller, Fran Dunphy, Bruiser Flint and John Giannini), a bunch of former players, Dan Baker, Drexel AD Eric Zillmer, St. Joe's AD Don DiJulia and lots of other people who call the Palestra a second home.

The movie is just over an hour's worth of interviews with people who played and coached there, including Dunphy, Phil Martelli, Chuck Daly and Bill Raftery -- and I'm not sure those few do the whole thing justice. There's also a huge amount of archival footage of old Big 5 games (and of fans in the stands, which is also rather interesting to see if you weren't alive at the time the footage was shot).

For a lot of the people there, though, it was about memories. Count Bruiser as being very much among that group.

"There's nothing like being a player ... there's nothing like running out there, being a part of those doubleheaders, hearing your name called in a packed building," he said.

Now that he's a coach, Flint has the task of trying to teach his players just what playing in the Palestra is all about. He said it doesn't take much.

"Their first game they play in the building and they go against one of the other Philadelphia teams, they realize it's different from most games," he said.

The man who calls Flint's games on the radio, Dan Baker, knows plenty about the Big 5 -- he was its executive secretary from 1981 to 1996. He (and quite a few others) see the movie as a way of teaching people about the history of the building, and of Philadelphia college basketball.

"I thought it was a great film, capturing the essence of the best college basketball arena in the country," he said. "I hope that it gives them some sense of what we had here and can still have, to a degree -- and when two Big 5 teams play at the Palestra, I think we do have it."

It shouldn't surprise anyone to hear that there was a big Penn delegation there. It included Scott Kegler, Corky Calhoun, Vince Curran (who I have a feeling I'll be hearing from just for mentioning him on here), and Perry Bromwell. Bromwell is in a rather unique position, as he's now a Penn assistant after having played for the Quakers from 1982 to 1987.

"I think from a playing standpoint, you have a different kind of adrenaline to win and some pregame jitters and things like that," he said. But as a coach, he admitted that "sometimes, I'm trying to scream out reminders to the team on the court knowing that they really can't hear it."

Bromwell's boss, Glen Miller, came to Penn from Brown, and Miller's roots are in New England. But if you Penn fans out there had any doubts left -- which I suspect disappeared right around the time Mark Zoller went up to shoot that three in the closing seconds against Temple -- I got the impression that Miller really does get it.

"It brought goosebumps to my body," Miller said of the movie. "The Palestra's such a great place to coach, and to have the opportunity to be the head coach at the University of Pennsylvania -- when you think of guys like Chuck Daly who've come through here, and Rollie Massimino as an assistant, it's just a privilege to coach here."

Miller played in the Palestra in an NCAA Tournament while at Northeastern, but he said that he's really gotten to know the place and what it means this season.

"I don't think a lot of current players, younger coaches outside of the Philadelphia area know enough about the Palestra," he said. "Just having the experience of coaching here this year, it's far exceeded my my knowledge of the Palestra, having come here with Brown for seven years."

Of course, it's no surprise to hear that Miller's predecessor, Fran Dunphy, has a lot to say on the subject.

"I think that just some of the characteristics of the building and some of the nuances of the building were fantastic to watch," he said.

I asked him whether or not the Big 5 has changed since his playing days at La Salle.

"It's changed, but there's still -- like the other night when we played Penn at the Palestra, when we played St. Joe's at the Palestra, that's exactly what it used to be all the time," he said. "It was crazy, the games were hard-fought, sometimes they were really close and other times they just were a hammering of sorts. But always, when you get out of there, it's always the same feeling -- you've just gone through a phenomenal experience."

Another guy with quite eloquent views of the Palestra is Dick "Hoops" Weiss, the former Philadelphia Daily News writer now with the New York Daily News. He is interviewed quite a bit in the movie, and was on hand for the premiere last night.

"For those of us who grew up in it, I think it really captured the essence of our childhood, and I think it really allowed people to experience a little bit of what we experienced," Weiss said. "I don't think you can tell people about it unless they were there, I don't know if they ever realized how special it was."

Yes, Weiss is a journalist, but this movie seemed to touch him rather personally.

"When I looked at the film, I could recognize so many people that I knew growing up, so many guys that played here, that you just knew," he said. The Palestra "was the center of the basketball universe, at least on the East Coast."

Weiss, being among the truly top college hoops writers in the country, pretty well gets to go wherever he wants. But the Palestra is still among his top venues, up there with Allen Fieldhouse and Cameron Indoor stadium.

"I like the fact that coaches still feel the need to make a pilgrimage here," he said.

One such coach was Texas' Rick Barnes, who took the Longhorns to the Palestra for a practice before their game against Villanova last month.

"There's that huge picture of Wilt Chamberlain there with the two basketballs -- [Barnes] had [Kevin] Durant pose with the same wingspan just so that he could have a feel for that."

Weiss also praised the fans who come to the Palestra.

"I was in Columbus yesterday at Value City Arena, and it might as well be a rock concert because everything has to be visual every second of the day," he said. "Even though the Palestra had its incredible noise and incredible traditions, I think there was a reverence when the game started for the game itself."

The last word goes to Austin, who's been working on the movie for a few years now. I confess that I've known her since her playing days at Penn, and I've been following the production process since the very beginning. I sort of can't believe that it's actually done now, but I can only imagine the number of hours Austin put into it.

"It's like having your kid, seeing him grow up and drop-kicking him through the goalposts of life all at once," she said. "When I started this thing, it was like this [small], and it became so much more."

The people who turned out to honor her last night can certainly attest to that.

Ooh boy, Bracketology has gone daily for the rest of the season.

Villanova's an 8-seed, and gets Stanford again in Winston Salem as part of the East Rutherford regional. The winner gets North Carolina, and all I can say is if that game comes to pass watch out for those traveling calls.

Penn gets up to a 13-seed, and on the S-curve (Insider subscription required) is the lowest of them. Nevada is the top 4-seed, and though they're really, really good you still have to prefer the Wolf Pack to some of the other teams the Quakers could get. Including another 4-seed, the very athletic Virginia Tech Hokies.

Drexel jumps up to being the first team out. Joe Lunardi writes in his column that "few teams will be discussed quite as much as Drexel these next two weeks." Get to that game against VCU, and win it, and that discussion will be even longer.

A note about the blog this week. I have actual job work to do for the rest of the week, so there won't be any more Newwstand posts for a while. The Philly.com college sports headlines will still be in the right rail here on the blog, and there's a pretty good list of other media outlets in the links list. I figure you all can do it yourselves from there. I also think I might hold Crunchy Numbers until Wednesday of next week so that I can do a seaon-recapping edition that will include Penn's last regular-season game at Princeton.

I'll be writing about mock brackets and other stuff that comes to mind, but the Newsstand compilations really take a while, so I hope you won't mind that.

Now, back to the show.

As much as I'm at the Palestra tonight to watch Temple-St. Joe's, the biggest reason why I wanted to come to the game was to talk to the Bracketologist himself, Joe Lunardi.

In addition to writing the single most important column anywhere on ESPN.com (with apologies to his editor, Andy Glockner, whose Drive to 65 is also worth reading if you follow a multiple-bid conference), Lunardi is the color analyst for Hawks games on the radio.

And he reads this blog, which is even cooler.

So I made sure to get to the Palestra early enough to talk to Lunardi about the local teams and their chances of making it to the Big Dance. Excerpts of my interview with him are after the jump.

The basketball gods have had us dance around it for the last few weeks, and here it is: No. 14 Penn vs. No. 3 Georgetown in Winston-Salem as part of the St. Louis regional. I've written already about how good and how efficient Georgetown is, so no need to repeat it. Suffice to say that for as much fun as it would be for Penn fans to go against John Thompson III again, there's no way the Quakers are winning this matchup.

It also shows just how badly Penn needs to win out. Joe Lunardi writes that the Hoyas could move up to a 2-seed if they keep winning, but if they do, one of Kansas, Ohio State, Texas A&M and (most likely) Pittsburgh would fall a notch. As good as Georgetown is, those other teams would be even harder to beat. The other 3-seeds are Memphis, Washington State and Southern Illinois, which wouldn't be too much easier.

The 4-seeds, however, are Boston College, Nevada, Butler and Air Force. BC would probably do unto Penn as it did in 2005 (i.e., win by 20 on athleticism alone), but Penn could take the other three teams.

To give you a more statistical idea, Southern Illinois' actual RPI number (as opposed to rank) is 0.6476. Air Force's is 0.6258, Nevada's is 0.6177, BC's is 0.6072 and Butler's is .6065. That is a huge difference.

The winner would get either Sean Singletary's Virginia or Winthrop, who Dick Jerardi says will win their first-round game no matter who it plays.

Villanova stays at an 8-seed against No. 9 Maryland in New Orleans. That would be quite a scene on Bourbon Street. It would also be a game Villanova should win, because I doubt the high-speed Terrapins (13th-highest tempo in Division I) would be able to deal with the Wildcats' defense.

But Maryland's defense is very good -- the fourth-most efficient in the country, in fact. So this would probably be a pretty low-scoring game, something with which the Wildcats are more than experienced enough to handle. The winner would get No. 1 Florida, giving Villanova a shot at revenge against the team that knocked them out last season.

Drexel falls from being the ninth team out of the field to being the tenth team out, which is not a pleasant thought. Their need to get to the finals of the CAA Tournament goes up each day as other bubble teams win.

Bracketology has gone to Mondays and Wednesdays in the run-in to the end of the regular season, so there's new fodder to chew over today.

Drexel's still out, and I don't see a full rundown so I can't tell you whether they're still ninth out or whether they've fallen lower. Penn's in as a 14 with an interesting matchup against Southern Illinois in Columbus within the San Antonio regional. The Salukis are 23-5 and ranked 31st in Pomeroy, and their worst loss is at No. 88 Evansville.

Now, having said that, although SIU is 29th in defensive efficiency, they're 265th in steal percentage and 221st in three-point percentage given up. They're also 124th in offensive efficiency at a tempo of 60.2 possessions per game, which is both far slower and far less efficient than Penn (64th in the latter). They are also -- and this is huge -- 321st in free throw rate given up.

I'm not saying Penn could win this game, but if the Quakers get stuck with a 14 this wouldn't be the worst matchup. The other 3-seeds are Memphis (very athletic, as usual, which always kills Penn), Washington State (flat out really good), and Georgetown. I can't help thinking that Hoyas coach John Thompson III would want no part of a matchup with a team that he was 3-5 against while at Princeton.

The winner of Penn-SIU gets No. 6 Duke or No. 11 Oklahoma State, teams with which Penn fans should be quite familiar.

Villanova got the dreaded 8-seed against Texas Tech in Sacramento as part of the San Jose regional. That's a very winnable game for the Wildcats, as the Red Raiders are 166th in defensive efficiency, 241st in offensive rebounding percentage given up, 154th in 3-point percentage given up and 256th in 2-point percentage given up. It would also be a ton of fun to see Jay Wright coach against Bobby Knight.

The other 9-seeds, by the way, are Arizona, Notre Dame and Alabama. As Villanova played the latter of those two in the regular season, those matchups aren't possible, and Arizona would be questionable because the teams played each other in the second round last year.

The winner of 'Nova-Texas Tech games gets No. 1 UCLA. That game would surely be low-scoring, but I bet the Wildcats could give the Bruins a real serious run.

I'll write that post about why 'Nova is so much more deserving to be in the tournament than Syracuse later.

This week's bracket dovetails nicely with a story in this morning's Inquirer that I forgot to mention: why the A-10 is almost surely a one-bid conference this season, with Xavier having the only shot at an at-large slot.

It so happens that the Musketeers get the auto bid in this week's field. If you care enough, they have an 11-seed in the East (Meadowlands) regional and a game against Arizona in Lexington.

As for the local delegation, Villanova gets the dreaded 8-seed and a date with Stanford in Chicago as part of the Midwest (St. Louis) regional. Joe Lunardi really likes the Wildcats, writing that "this is the week Villanova turns its RPI into gold." A win over Georgetown on Saturday would move them even higher.

A game against the Cardinal shouldn't be too much of a challenge for the Wildcats, as Stanford is 163rd nationally in offensive efficiency, 178th in 3-point percentage and 174th in 2-point percentage. But they're good on defense: Though they're 86th in defensive efficiency, they're also 57th in 3-point defense and 30th in 2-point defense.

The winner of that game gets Wisconsin. The Badgers are really (really) good, but 'Nova-Wisconsin would be an outstanding game. It would play to Villanova's preferred style, too, because Wisconsin is 285th in Division I in the ratio of threes to all field goal attempts.

Penn is back in the field as a 14-seed and has to head out to Sacramento to play Washington State, also in the St. Louis regional. Any 3-seed would be a huge challenge for the Quakers, but the Cougars are fourth-best in the country in the ratio of assists to field goals allowed, which is one of the focal points of Penn's offense. Overall, Wazzu is 12th in defensive efficiency and 21st in effective field goal percentage allowed, but only 86th in offensive efficiency -- nine spots lower than Penn.

I'm rather surprised by what Lunardi did to Drexel this week. Not because the Dragons are excluded, but because they fell from being the fourth team out to being the first team in the "considered" category, which translates to being the ninth team out. If you have an ESPN.com Insider subscription, click here to read the full Rundown. I thought that the Hofstra win would move Drexel closer to being in the field, but apparently it hasn't. And Joe certainly knows what he's doing, so I have to take his word for it.

I wasn't really planning to write any more stuff about last night's Penn-Princeton game, because it's just not all that big a deal anymore -- even if it led the sportscasts on local TV last night.

But then the coaches and players opened their mouths after the game. So that idea got run over by the snowplow that might have gone down my street at some point though I haven't got any evidence of it.

(A warning that this post is kind of long, but I think it says something about the importance of coaching in college basketball. I split the post to take up less space on the page, but I hope you read the whole thing.)

Whether you care about Princeton or not, I'd like you to consider the following from Tigers coach Joe Scott. He said the following in his press conference, responding to a question about what his goals are for the rest of the season now that his team is 1-6 in the Ivy League:

“Our goals are the same every game. I just told our guys, we're building a program where our guys know why and how, why we play the way we play, how we play, and we make ourselves play that way every single game. When you do that, when you become successful, you know why and how. You keep doing it over and over again. It's called habits.

“That's what we're building. There's no time frame on, you know, when those things are going to occur. It's not about the end result. We're building something. It's about us getting to that point. It's about developing young guys who are willing to do that and do it all the time. So that's what our goal is, get better at what we do. Know what we do, get better at what we do and be crazed about getting better at what we do, and let's get as many guys that we can doing it at the same time.

“That's our goal. So I'm very happy with the effort of our team and how our effort paid. I'm unhappy that the ball doesn't go in the hoop, but I know we compete. We just have to get better at the things we need to do to make the end result different, and I think that's a learning process. And our younger guys are learning it and we'll get better at it, I know that.”

A lot of that refers to the famous Princeton offense, with its rigid system of ball movement, backdoor cuts and three-pointers. But if the head coach of the team you root for said what Scott said -- no matter what team that is -- wouldn't you be pretty concerned?

Man, I'm writing way too much Penn-related stuff. Someone from one of the other schools please email me and give me something else to write about.

Thing is, though, there was something in this morning's Penn student paper that just begs to be ridiculed. For yet another year, the Daily Pennsylvanian and Daily Princetonian exchanged dueling trash talk columns penned by the sections' top sports editors.

They are sort of funny, in a very Ivy League holier-than-thou way. But by just about any reasonable Philly standard, they are about as weak as you can get for trash talk.

For starters, both sides start out by conceding that the other one's better. At Penn, Andrew Scurria tries to help Princeton out of its apparent self-loathing by offering to "extend to you a friendly hand." Later, in writing about the Tigers' 1-5 record in Ivy League play, he says, "we hate to see you doing this to yourselves."

At Princeton, the triple-byline of Karl Micka-Foos, Ashley Wolf and Trent Magruder write in their first sentence that "you guys are probably gonna beat us tonight."

(And in so doing, they lost the battle over which side has the better writing skills. Which I would have never expected from Princeton.)

"We lost to Dartmouth Saturday night," they write. "Yeah, that Dartmouth."

What the hell kind of a rivalry is this, playing nice with each other?

I might as well just admit it: Kyle Whelliston has one of the coolest jobs in college basketball. He travels all over the country going to nothing but mid-major schools, and writes about them for ESPN.com and his own website, midmajority.com.

For his 75th game of the season, Whelliston was at Harvard-Penn on Saturday night at the Palestra. He would hunt me down and hit me with something for saying that he was quite sought after by many of the other media in the house, so I'll spare that. But he was gracious enough to talk to me for a few minutes about Philadelphia's two players in mid-majordom, Penn and Drexel.

"I think Penn is going to win the league pretty easily," he said. "I think Yale is up there based on luck."

(He said this before Yale lost at Cornell, also on Saturday, putting Penn back in first place in the Ivy League.)

Whelliston also covered the Delaware-Drexel game, and was a bit concerned by what he saw from the Dragons.

"They've sort of lapsed back into having trouble shooting the ball," he said of Drexel."They couldn't really take care of Delaware the way they should have. They have some problems with their offense that are going to be exploited over the next month, month and a half."

Whelliston went to Drexel for grad school, so I wasn't at all surprised to hear that he was at the DAC. But don't you think for a second that he's biased towards anyone. He likes all the mid-majors just the same, except Gonzaga, which isn't one anymore anyway.

(Or is it? Stay tuned.)

Whelliston does maintain a soft spot for Philadelphia, though. The first game of his now-famous 100-game first season was at the DAC, and the second was because that's where the whole Mid-Majority thing got started two years ago.

But what to make of that conference in which half the Philly teams participate, the A-10? Whelliston excludes it because of what he calls on his blog "high-major manifest destiny" (scroll down a long ways, but it's there).

Given that above post was written back in December, and that the the A-10 is not having the best of seasons (Phil Martelli's opinions notwithstanding), I decided to ask his opinion of the conference now. It hasn't changed.

"You've got to pick a side, and I've always said that it's sort of a half-and-half league," he said. "You've got these city teams and you've got these country teams, and the conference itself is very upwardly mobile and trying to grow a lot. Then you have St. Bonaventure and places like that. So I haven't really been covering it."

By the way, the real reason why Whelliston was in town Saturday had nothing to do with the basketball. He was actually here to see Simon Kirke, the famous drummer for Bad Company, play with the Penn band.

"That rock show was so awesome," Whelliston said of the halftime performance. "I actually flew up here a day early so I could attend that rock show."

Dana Pennett O'Neil of the Daily News is doing a live chat about college hoops right now. Go talk to her.

Well, we knew this was coming: Villanova's the only team in Joe Lunardi's field of 65 this week. Drexel's the fourth team out and Penn's nowhere to be seen, because the 3-1 Quakers are two games in the win column behind 5-1Yale.

(Have some pity for the Bulldogs, by the way, because they get the play-in game against neighbors Central Connecticut State for the right to face Florida.)

Anyway, Villanova gets what Penn got last week: Air Force. The Wildcats are a 12 and rising -- Lunardi admits that they are an 11 on the S-Curve that he uses to make his seeds. The Falcons, meanwhile, are a 5-seed and falling in a hurry after losing at San Diego State last night.

But in some interesting ways, this is a pretty even matchup. Villanova is 18th and Air Force 19th in Pomeroy, and both teams boast Top 70 offensive and defensive efficiencies. Villanova is 66th in offense and 55 in defense, while Air Force is No. 2 in offense and 49th in defense.

The Falcons shoot extremely well, which could give the Wildcats problems. Air Force is sixth in 2-point FG percentage and third in 3-point FG percentage. But the Falcons are 185th in 2-point defense and 221st in the ratio of threes to all field goals given up, so Villanova could have a reasonable chance to put up some points.

Having said that, Villanova's 271st in 3-point percentage given up and 319 in the percentage of threes to all field goals given up.

The most significant difference between the teams, though, is the tempo. Villanova averages 67.7 possessions per game, while Air Force (which runs the Princeton offense) is 330th in Division I with 59.4 possessions per game.

And one other positive thing for Villanova about the matchup: It would take place in Buffalo as part of the East (Meadowlands) regional, so the fans wouldn't have to travel too far. The winner would get the winner of Kentucky vs. Davidson.

This week, Penn and Villanova are in, and Drexel is the fifth team out. Yes, I'm late with this, but as you might imagine Crunchy Numbers took me a long time and I wanted to get that over with.

The 13-seed Quakers get a cross-country trip to Spokane to face Air Force in the East (Meadowlands) Regional. The Falcons are a lofty 20th in Pomeroy, but Joe Lunardi writes (Insider subscription required) that Air Force is teetering in its seed because of a recent loss at BYU.

Nonetheless, Air Force's offense is astonishingly effective. Second in offensive efficiency, first in effective field goal percentage, ninth in turnover percentage, fifth in 3-point percentage, third in 2-point percentage, seventh in free throw percentage and 14th in ratio of assists to field goals made.

But there's a caveat to all this, and Penn fans already know it -- the Falcons play the Princeton offense. In fact, current Princeton head coach Joe Scott was Air Force's head coach when the program rose to prominence a few years ago. I would have to think that, despite the Falcons' lofty stats, Penn would like nothing more than to play a team that runs an offense that it knows as well as the ghosts in the Palestra's rafters.

Air Force plays at a slow tempo -- 59.3 possessions per 40 minutes, which ranks 332nd out of 336 teams in Division I. Again, the result of the Princeton offense, but Penn averages 10 more possessions per game. Of course it's folly to assume this matchup will actually happen, but it strikes me as reasonably favorable towards Penn compared to the other 4 seeds: Nevada, Oklahoma State and Butler. The winner of that game gets the winner of Kentucky-West Virginia.

Villanova is one of the last four teams in and gets a 12-seed and a matchup in Buffalo against Virginia Tech as part of the South (San Antonio) Regional. The Hokies are good, but Villanova's three spots higher in Pomeroy and plays defense plenty well enough to have a more-than-reasonable shot at winning that game. Having said that, this week's bracket came out before the Hokies lost at home to N.C. State last night, so Virginia Tech certainly wouldn't be a 5 if the thing came out this morning.

The other 5-seeds are Kentucky, Texas and Indiana. Texas would be out of the question because they played the Wildcats in the regular season. But Kentucky and Indiana are both ranked higher in Pomeroy than the Wildcats, at 13th and 9th respectively. Kentucky plays outstanding defense (no surprise there) and is far better at scoring two-point shots than threes, which plays into Villanova's hands. It would be low-scoring and hard-fought, and I like Villanova's chances in a game like that.

Indiana's also very good defensively and is ranked 51st in three-ponint shooting, so that matchup would be more difficult than Kentucky. But I'm not sure whether I really believe in Indiana at the moment, and Jay Wright beat Kelvin Sampson's Oklahoma last year at the Pavilion.

Virginia Tech could well end up with a 5-seed anyway, especially with a good run in the ACC Tournament. So maybe Lunardi's matchup isn't out of the question after all. But the most important thing is that a 12-seed always beats a 5, and if you're a fan of karma Villanova's in good shape indeed.

Finally, Drexel. Mike Jensen made the point on this week's College HoopsCast that Drexel might well be fighting Villanova for one of the last at-large bids. If both teams keep winning I think they both make it. But it always bears repeating that saying you have to get it done and actually doing it aren't the same thing. For what it's worth, Virginia Commonwealth's an 11-seed this week, but got a bit of a bump from the 12-seed Lunardi says its stats should merit.

Great story by Mike Kern in this morning's Daily News about how the Ivy League is once again thinking about having a post-season conference tournament in basketball to determine the winner of its automatic bid. The athletic directors of the eight Ivy schools will meet tomorrow to discuss this and whatever else sports-related is on their minds.

No one asked me (yet), but I'm against it. I am now and I have been for a while and I am pretty sure I will be for a long time. And not just for the Ivy League.

Simply put, I don't think any conference should give its automatic bid to its tournament champion. The best team in each conference deserves the automatic bid, and that team is the one with the best record in regular season conference play. That means every conference from the ACC to the Big East to the Patriot League to the Sun Belt. Easy enough.

It's especially true for the non-BCS conferences, though. If you have a team that's better-than-good but maybe not good enough to be sure of an at-large bid, you want that team in the Tournament. That team has a better chance at a high seed and thus a chance to win a game and deliver the conference a big bag of cash. I'm thinking of Bucknell in the Patriot League over the last two years. The Bison got a 9-seed in last year's tournament but a team that had knocked it off would have been a 16-seed.

Air Force in the Mountain West and Nevada in the WAC are other good examples of very good teams in one-bid conferences where the other teams have trailed well behind in recent years.

Now I'm sure the BCS conference teams, especially those in the ACC and Big East, would complain loudly about how that would devalue their tradition-laden, big-money, national-TV-for-every-game tournaments. But even if it's close to impossible for the worst team in those conferences to knock off four teams in four days because the top teams are so good, it's not completely impossible. And I'm sure those conferences would hate nothing more than if that happened in a (relative) off year when they weren't guaranteed five or six bids each.

Remember, it wasn't so long ago that the Big Ten and Pac-10 didn't have conference tournaments, and they didn't really suffer for it. If anything, their regular seasons were more valuable, and those lasted four months instead of four days. Ivy League regular-season games have more value in them than regular-season games in any other conference because of the lack of a tournament.

It might be a speck of dust on the national conscience relative to the major conferences, but Penn-Princeton has a far bigger effect on the Tournament field (most years, at least) than Rutgers-Seton Hall or Northwestern-Minnesota.

Heck, Duke-Carolina doesn't really affect the tournament field either most years, because both teams are probably going to go (unless Matt Doherty is coaching Carolina). People watch that game because it's a great rivalry and the teams are really good, but they don't watch because a Tournament berth is on the line.

Penn AD Steve Bilsky makes a lot of very good points about scheduling an Ivy tournament around classes, midterms, and other logistical problems. But that's not the real reason to scrap the idea. Same goes for figuring out where to hold the thing. The real reason to not have a tournament is that it makes the other teams in the conference have teams and programs that are good enough to genuinely merit winning the title and going to the NCAA Tournament. As Bilsky said in the paper, Penn and Princeton have done the work and been rewarded, and the other teams have not:

"If, over the last 40 years, we'd won 10 [titles], Princeton won 10 and every other team split the other 20, so everyone had a taste of it, I don't think we'd be having this discussion. I kind of sense that [some believe] the only way to break this roadblock is to do something different. I don't think that's a reason to do it at all."

Say what you will about the Ivy League not changing much over time, but on this count I think they've got it right.

It's going to be light on posting for a while because I have to work on Philly.com's coverage of the death of Barbaro. But I need to get out there that I got it wrong in my post on the "traitor" rollout last week. I talked to Jason Ginsburg, the head of Penn's Red and Blue Crew, and he said that the rollout in question was indeed aimed at Fran Dunphy, not those of his former players who where rooting for Temple. He said he wanted to play off the Miller beer "man law" theme, but that it wasn't intended to be anything other than a joke.

I said I'd post if I was wrong in my theory, and I was, so there you have it.

Here's an interesting stat from last night's Penn-St. Joe's game that wasn't in the box score: both teams recorded 67 possessions. You might remember that in last week's Crunchy Numbers, I noted that Penn averaged 69.8 possessions per game and St. Joe's averaged 62.2 possessions per game (or, to be truer to the definition, per 40 minutes).

The halfway point between those two numbers is 66. I thought watching the game that Penn was playing at a pace slower than what it usually does, which turned out to be the case. But the Quakers were able to get St. Joe's to at least play somewhat faster than normal.

By the way, the formula for computing the number of possessions in the game is this: Field goal attempts minus offensive rebounds plus turnovers plus 0.475 times the number of free throw attempts.

It makes sense, in that a second-chance basket comes on the same possession as the first shot, and a possession with no shot resulted in a turnover. As for the 0.475, I understand that a bunch of people researched it for a while and settled on that number. I'm certainly not going to bother arguing.

Last night, I was courtside at the Palestra to bring you live commentary of the Big 5 Hall of Fame Game between Penn and Saint Joseph's. After the jump, you'll find my running commentary of the scene at a sold-out Palestra as the night unfolded. It wasn't so much a play-by-play, though there was definitely some of that. Instead, it was more about the atmosphere, like the rollouts and the chants the student sections come up with.

Greetings from courtside at the Palestra, where warmups are underway for tonight's Penn-St. Joe's Big 5 Hall of Fame Game.

Those of you who attend St. Joe's games regularly, especially their games at the Palestra, know that their students usually arrive a good few hours before tipoff. I wanted to interview the very first student Hawks fans to arrive, so I got to the Palestra a few minutes after 4 p.m.

There weren't any around yet. I was stunned.

Finally, at 4:48 p.m., the first St. Joe's student fan, Matt Wilson (right), arrived. He helps organize the student section, distributing the red-and-white pom-poms that you see sitting on the bleachers before most of the students arrive.

"It’s a Big 5 tradition," he said of Hawks fans arriving early. "We love to come here and show up in big numbers and make sure we’re represented by our school. We have a lot of pride for our basketball team."

Wilson also wasn't afraid to talk a little trash about Penn fans, who are famous for not showing up in large numbers until right before tip-off -- if that.

"We take a lot of pride because the game’s on [their] campus and they can’t even show up before we do," he said. "We’re not far away, but at least we can show up early and help our team out before the game even starts."

A few minutes after that, three more St. Joe's students arrived. One of them, David (leftmost of the three at left -- he didn't want to give his last name), said that there's a very practical reason for getting to games so early.

"We need to because we know everyone else is coming behind us," he said. "It’s more out of necessity than anything else."

David added that he thinks the players feed off the energy the fans generate by getting to games early.

"It’s important for us because the players see that we’re here early and they see that we care, that we’re here to support them," he said. "If they see a whole section full of Penn fans and no St. Joe’s fans, they can’t feel good about that."

At 5:02 p.m., the first Penn student fans -- a group of three -- arrived. By that time, I counted 13 St. Joe's students who had come in by the main entrance (the one on the side of the tennis courts). Which wasn't nearly the kind of margin that I was expecting, and I've talked to a few other people here who were similarly surprised.

David Anderson (in the middle in the photo at right) chose to spoke for the first Penn arrivals. He called it a "very big deal" that he and his friends were arriving so early.

"We made sure we talked about when the first fans would be here," he said. "We talked about it with our friends and made sure that we were going to be here before they were."

Anderson is well aware of his fellow Penn fans' reputation for arriving late -- and the taunts that have often resulted from the St. Joe's fans in years past.

"We thought that it was important that Penn had a good crowd here first, because in the past, they’ve shown up like two minutes before tipoff," he said. "Last year was pretty embarrassing and we don’t want that to happen again."

With that mission accomplished, I headed inside, because I was getting pretty cold. In the lobby, I ran into the St. Joe's student who had all the rollouts, Dan McDevitt (at left with rollouts in hand). So of course I had to talk to him, and try to pry some information out of him on what the rollouts said.

"This year we really just kept with the traditional St. Joe’s ones that we usually do, and we played off the Fran Dunphy leaving for Temple aspect," he said.

But he admitted that not having Dunphy on the Penn bench would make this night rather unusual.

"It’s weird because I like Fran Dunphy," McDevitt said. "He’s a good guy, he’s a real nice guy. We did a rollout last year when he hit the [300] mark for wins. We were at the Temple game and it was weird to see him behind the Temple bench."

McDevitt was carrying five rollouts. I'll let you know what they say as the night, shall we say, unfolds.

Since there are no games being played locally next Wednesday, here's something to do. At 7 p.m. at the Barnes and Noble on Rittenhouse Square, Penn Band assistant director Kushol Gupta will hold a discussion and book signing for the new book Images of America: The University of Pennsylvania Band. It's another in that series of historical books on life in Pennsylvania with the sepia-toned covers and black-and-beige trim that you've surely seen at bookstores all over the region.

I skimmed through it while in the store today, and it has a lot of interesting pictures. Those of you with an interest in Penn football, especially in its old heyday, will probably like the book quite a bit.

(Yes, I know there aren't many of you out there, but it's sort of like sending a canary into a mine to see if there's anything worth going in there for.)

I've been thinking all morning about that "traitor" rollout at last night's Temple-Penn game that the papers referred to this morning. For those of you who weren't there, it read:

"Man Law: Don't be a traitor.
Miller... Good call."

(UPDATE: Thanks to Inquirer photographer Ron Cortes, who found a picture of the rollout among the many he took that didn't make it into this slideshow. The security guard is blocking the word "Man.")

Both Jim Salisbury and Rich Hofmann interpreted it as being aimed at Dunphy, with Hofmann doing so in a more direct manner. I disagree.

Between the story in yesterday's Daily News and other people I've talked to, I'm pretty sure that message was aimed at the former Penn players who were rooting for Temple last night. I was planning on writing about this anyway, but given the rollout stuff, I figured that would be a good place to start.

I wanted to try to get into a bit more depth about what was going on with the former Penn players, so I turned to Quakers radio analyst Vince Curran. Vince wouldn't name the players in question, though he did say that there were more than a few. And of course he knows them, because he knows just about everyone who ever put on a Penn jersey in Dunphy's tenure.

Curran said that he feels the whole thing has been overblown somewhat. His reaction and the rest of the story after the jump.

If you're a Temple fan, you likely trudged home in a stunned silence, your spirits having fallen into the ground and beneath the tracks on the El and the Broad Street line.

If you're a Penn fan, the joy likely carried you home on the winter breeze, floating up Locust Walk and into the air from the top of the bridge over 38th Street.

What an astonishing night of basketball this was, Penn edging out Temple on three Mark Zoller free throws with 1.4 seconds remaining for a 76-74 victory. It was somehow fitting that Zoller would be the man to stand at the line, forced to deliver the win by himself with the entire arena's eyes squarely focused on him. For it is Zoller who has the deepest ties to the Big 5 of any Penn player, as a St. Joe's prep grad who grew up watching these games from the stands.

Before the game, and in its early minutes, the man with the most wins in Penn basketball history was showered with kindness. There were three standing ovations: when he walked out onto the floor before the game, when he was introduced during the starting lineups, and when a rollout was unfurled which read, "Thank you, Fran Dunphy: 17 years, 310 wins, 10 Ivy titles."

But from there, as Dunphy and Big 5 tradition demanded, it was all about basketball.

It was Zoller who said a few days ago that facing Fran Dunphy would be like "playing your father." So of course, it was Zoller who followed a path blazed by men ranging from Oedipus Rex to Luke Skywalker. No, he didn't literally kill Dunphy; he simply delivered another crushing Temple loss to go with five others this month.

For Penn, it was a character-building win unlike almost any other the current crop of players have experienced, rivaled only by the 18-point comeback to beat Princeton in 2005. It is well established at this point that under Dunphy, Penn lost a number of games in the final few minutes, and often in ways that defied probability, if not belief. This time, though, the tables were turned.

Above all, the 6,103 fans -- not to mention the media and the staffs of both schools -- were treated to a night that reminded all of us what the Big 5 is at its best. This was pulsating, emotional basketball played by two teams and coached by two coaches that knew each other inside and out. It thrust the City Series back into a local spotlight that often refuses to give college basketball the time of day, and gave everyone a night to remember for a long, long time.

The best news of the day is that this week's Bracketology has arrived, which means I can actually analyze something instead of just posting stories all day.

Joe Lunardi apparently has a nasty headache from having spent so much time breaking down the ACC, but the rest of us should be in a good mood because Villanova, Penn and Drexel are all in this week's field. Joe, I'll give you some Advil or something at the Big 5 Hall of Fame dinner tomorrow night if your headache hasn't cleared yet.

As I started scrolling through the bracket, the first thing I saw was that Notre Dame was in the field. This made me immediately demand to my computer monitor that Villanova be included too, lest something get thrown in the trash can. They are, and Wildcats should be pretty happy what they see.

Lunardi has 'Nova as a 9-seed against Tennessee in Winston-Salem. There'll be a lot of Volunteers fans in the house for that one, because it's only about 4 1/2 hours from Knoxville, but the winner gets a glamor game against North Carolina. Yep, that team which knocked Villanova out two years ago in the Sweet 16 thanks to what may or may not have been a traveling call on Allan Ray. But the winner of that pod goes to East Rutherford, N.J., and what a scene that would be if 'Nova pulled off the upset.

The Volunteers have a very good guard in Chris Lofton and the nation's coolest coach in Bruce Pearl. I'm already salivating over the prospect of Pearl in his blindingly orange blazer squaring off with Jay Wright's finely-tailored four-piece. But as for the game itself, the Volunteers are a full 18 places behind Villanova in the Pomeroy ratings and are 189th in effective field goal percentage. They're worse at defending two-point shots than three-point shots, which should suit Villanova's ffrontcourt just fine. Tennessee's offensive efficiency is 53rd in the country, but Villanova's is 30th. So that should be a very good game.

Penn gets a 13-seed in frigid Buffalo against Clemson. The Tigers are impressing a lot of people with their 18-2 record, and they're 24th in defensive efficiency, but that's a bit deceiving. Clemson's defense is 205th in 2-point FG percentage given up and 119th in 3-point percentage given up. We all know Penn can score a lot of points. And because Clemson hasn't been to the NCAA Tournament since 1998, the Quakers will have an experience advantage on the big stage. Plus, you have to like Penn's odds against any team nicknamed Tigers.

The winner of that game gets the winner of a game that is a mid-major fan's dream: No. 5 Nevada against No. 12 VCU, the first-place in the CAA right now and thus projected to take the CAA's automatic bid. Both those teams are very good, but not outstanding -- 64 and 66 in Pomeroy. Penn's at 90, but given how they did against Drexel, they won't be afraid of either of those teams.

Drexel is a wonderful example of just how good the CAA is this year. Though the Dragons have two losses in conference, they get a higher seed than VCU -- an 11, against No. 6 Boston College in Columbus. Which is somewhat funny, because two years ago Penn played BC in Cleveland. The winner gets Marquette or Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, the projected winners of the Southland. In part because of a win over Kent State, the Islanders have a decent Pomeroy of 104.

But Marquette is very, very good: 29th in Pomeroy and the 13th-best defensive efficiency in the country. Then again, Drexel is 22nd in defensive efficiency. In other words, that could be a tight, physical, low-scoring game -- and any Philly team has plenty of experience with those.

I think that's it from me for the day. See you at the Palestra tonight.

I just got a note from the Penn athletic department that there are around 3,000 tickets still left for tomorrow night's Penn-Temple game.

That, folks, is a lot. Up to you whether you do anything about it, of course, but... that is definitely a lot of tickets.

I tried to warn you. Honestly. I knew this game would be close and just about nothing that happened last night surprised me. That includes Darnell Harris. Okay, maybe I didn't think he'd shoot that well in the first half, but it shouldn't be news to anyone that he can hit threes if left open.

I've had good things to say about Rodney Green on here and on the podcast already, but last night was the first time I got to see him in person and I like him even more now. Yeah, he's skinny, but I guarantee you that outside of the La Salle student section, no one in the A-10 is going to treat him as a freshman. Well, the league office might if it gives him the Rookie of the Year award.

The Explorers had another good night on the offensive glass, pulling down 14 offensive boards compared to 21 defensive boards for Penn. That's a 40 percent offensive rebounding rate. Interestingly, La Salle got five offensive rebounds in the first half and nine in the second half, even though it played better in the first half than the second. But as the guy sitting behind me said last night, in order to get offensive rebounds you have to miss shots, and the Explorers didn't do that as much in the first half as they did in the second.

If you're a Penn fan, you have to be pleased at how seniors Mark Zoller and Ibrahim Jaaber stepped up in the second half. Both scored 16 points after intermission, with Jaaber adding two steals and seven assists and Zoller pulling down seven rebounds.

Their biggest contributions, though, came in the final minute and change. After Zoller's two free tthrows with 1:03 remaining, the St. Joe's Prep grad stole a pass from Kimmani Barrett that was intended for Mike St. John. I am fairly sure that the above photo is of that play, as Zoller had to corral the loose ball after knocking it away.

After Zoller got over the halfcourt line, Penn coach Glen Miller called timeout. On the ensuing play, the Quakers ran the shot clock down to five seconds, at which point Jaaber hit a runner in the lane that pushed Penn's lead to five points with 11 seconds remaining. That, ladies and gentlemen, is leadership.

I guess in the end one thing did surprise me. This was the second time this season that Penn has played a Big 5 game that became an offensive shootout instead of a defensive slugfest. And it's not just a Penn thing. The average score of this season's Big 5 games has been 83.8 points for the winners and 72.8 points for the losers. The lowest scoring game was Villanova's 64-51 win at La Salle, which is much more what we're used to.

This is something I'll keep an eye on for the rest of the season. Granted, a big part of the low-scoring nature of Big 5 games is that teams miss a lot of shots, even if the number of attempts isn't that low.

Nonetheless, I can't help thinking that it wasn't so long ago that the Big 5's game of the year ended 53-52, and that everyone thought it was a classic.

Photo by Barbara L. Johnston of the Inquirer. You can see a slideshow of her shots from the game here.

(EDIT: It was Kimmani Barrett who threw the errant pass, not Kenny Tribbett, who plays for Drexel. Thanks to this guy for the correction)

One more post before I go to sleep -- and, just so you know, things will come rather late on Fridays because Friday and Saturday are my two days off the Philly.com desk each week. So until I pull together Newsstand and my reflections on the Penn-La Salle game, I only have this to say:

Do not ever assume anything about Big 5 games. Before, during, and occasionally even after them. Many, many times tonight I heard Penn and La Salle fans acting like the game was over. This one took 39 minutes and 53 seconds to truly be resolved, and if you've watched this stuff long enough you know full well how much more likely a close game is than a blowout.

Even if both teams top 90 points, which makes less sense than just about anything else that happened tonight.

Before I start, I am honored to be able to say I've hit the Blinq-Attytood exacta. Not bad for the first week.

So let's see if Joe Lunardi still reads me after I give my thoughts on his Bracketology column for the week, because he paints a pretty bleak picture for the local teams. Granted, it came out before the Villanova-Notre Dame game, but the Wildcats aren't in this week's bracket. Beating the Irish should do the trick at least for now. Beating Texas will do even more. Yeah, 'Nova could lose a ton of games the rest of the way, but I have a hard time believing that will happen.

The two City Six representatives this week are Penn and Drexel. The Dragons get an at-large bid, as Lunardi projects that Virginia Commonwealth will win the CAA. But Drexel gets a higher seed -- a 10, compared to VCU's 12 -- which shows the power of those wins against Villanova and Syracuse, though Lunardi claims that the Dragons actually belong at an 11-seed on his S-Curve.

The matchup is against No. 7 Marquette in Chicago as part of the Midwest (St. Louis) regional. I'd certainly take that game if I was a Drexel fan, as the Golden Eagles' offense ranks below 150 in a whopping nine categories. Given the Dragons' strong defense, that's a very winnable matchup. From there, it's either No. 2 Kansas or No. 15 Cal State-Fullerton... and we all know Kansas' recent history in the tournament, right?

Across Market Street, the news is pretty bleak for No. 13 Penn -- a game against high-flying No. 4 Virginia Tech in Buffalo as part of the West (San Jose) regional. It's bad enough to have to deal with the miserable weather in upstate New York in March. The real problem will be dealing with the Hokies' defense, which is ranked in the top 65 in eight categories.

If Penn pulls that one out, they'd face the winner of a 5-12 game between Notre Dame and Massachussetts. Given the teams' current form (and UMass' big men), I'd give the Quakers a better chance against the Irish than the Minutemen -- but I'd give UMass a very good chance of advancing.

Not that I expect to be frequently quoting 18th-century philosophers, but I still remember quite well reading John Locke's famous treatise for which this post is named in a political science class. And there are plenty of stranger cultural references out there on blogs within walking distance of Philly.com's offices.

Tomorrow, I will roll out the first full-featured Crunchy Numbers post. It will include the Pomeroy, Sagarin and RPI ratings for each of the City Six, and any other stats about the teams I find interesting.

Now, I have a lot of friends around college basketball who make a huge deal out of stats and drawing conclusions from them. I agree that some of them are very good things to know. Offensive and defensive efficiency, tempo and ratio of three-pointers to field goals come to mind right away.

But stats aren't everything to me. I still think there's such a thing as clutch, and that a small, cramped gym with raucous students can get in a player's head and make him miss a shot he'd make in a 20,000-seat arena with skyboxes and a few jumbotrons.

I believe that a great player will step up when his team is faltering late on the road and hit a big shot to silence the home crowd, no matter what his usual offensive efficiency is. Randy Foye did it against Penn last season after the Quakers mounted a huge second-half run to cut 'Nova's lead from 21 points to four. With just over a minute to play, Foye pulled a crossover dribble and nailed a 13-foot jumper without flinching in the least. That's something that I don't think a page of stats can accurately represent.

Here's another example. La Salle's best RPI win this season is against No. 234 Texas Pan-American. But I'm impressed that the Explorers' last five losses have been by two, six, three, eight and two points. So while Penn should rightly be favored to beat the Explorers tomorrow night, I wouldn't go assuming that it will be all that easy.

I'm sure everyone I know west of the Schuylkill will call me an idiot for saying that, but it took a while for the Quakers to get going Friday night against a Cornell team only four spots higher in the Pomeroy rankings than La Salle.

At least college basketball hasn't yet become like baseball, where entire franchise organizations run themselves off numbers instead of what you see with your own eyes. I mean, I appreciate a guy with a high OPS as much as anyone, but I love the fact that Phillies GM Pat Gillick flies all over the place to see players the team is scouting in person. Buster Olney wrote a great piece on his ESPN.com blog about Gillick today, and how he's creating a lineup of "players who score high in intangibles among scouts."

I think you can see how that translates to college basketball. Though it will feed the hype machine even more, Kevin Durant is a great example. He got tons of praise from the ESPN2 crew last night not just for his 37 points, but for how and when they came. Fighting in traffic for a putback layup. Moving across the court off the ball to fire a jumper straight in off an inbounds pass. A three to tie the game at 91 with 1:01 to go in the second overtime, and a layup-and-one to give Texas the lead with 12 seconds to play in the third OT.

That's the stuff that defines a great college player to me.

Photo of Randy Foye driving against BC's Sean Marshall in the 2006 NCAA Tournament taken by Yong Kim of the Daily News.

One of the many blogs I read each day is the D.C. Sports Bog by Dan Steinberg. I read it in part because I've met the author before and in part because it's a well-written and quite funny take on sports in the next metropolitan area over the Mason-Dixon Line from here.

Well, I was pretty taken aback just now when I read the headline "Washington Post: The CAA Does Not Exist." Apparently, in the Post's weekly bracket projection that came out this past Saturday, no CAA team was included. As in, there wasn't even one given an automatic bid.

But there was one caveat. Steinberg couldn't confirm that this actually happened. I can: it's right here.

I must politely disagree with that bracket. Okay, maybe not quite politely, but I'll try. First of all, I suspect the CAA will indeed get its automatic bid. But there's little doubt in my mind that the CAA should be a multiple-bid conference this year. How can you deny that to a conference with the following characteristics:

-- Four teams in the Pomeroy Top 100 (Old Dominion, Virginia Commonwealth, George Mason and Drexel, in that order);

-- Five teams in the RPI Top 100 (Drexel, Hofstra, VCU, ODU and Mason, in that order);

-- Five teams in the Sagarin Top 100 (VCU, Drexel, ODU, Hofstra and Mason, in that order);

-- And five teams in the top 100 in the non-conference strength of schedule rankings (Northeastern, Drexel, George Mason, UNC-Wilmington and Hofstra, in that order). By contrast, there are only two such teams in the Big East, one each in the ACC and Big Ten and three in the SEC.

On this week's College HoopsCast, Mike Jensen asserted that it's "quite possible" that the CAA could get three bids this year. I also think the CAA is quite strong -- maybe not three bids strong, but certainly two.

Oh, and that Post article calls Villanova a "typical middling Big East team" and seeds it as a 12, and seeds Penn as a 16 in what is "not the finest year for the Ivy."

I feel like I'm going to run out of space if I try to counter those assertions, so I'll let you see for yourself why I see things differently.

Credit where it's due: Inquirer photographer Charles Fox took the picture of Drexel coach Bruiser Flint giving an opinion to the refs during the Hofstra game last week.

I just got back from the St. Joe's-Temple game. Though the crowd was relatively sparse (and quiet, too), three faces in the crowd stood out: Brian Grandieri and Mark Zoller of Penn, and Curtis Sumpter of Villanova.

Zoller and Grandieri are Philly-area natives and have been following the Big 5 their entire lives, so it wasn't too surprising to see them. But I was impressed that Sumpter came, given how busy 'Nova's been and the fact that he's not from the Philadelphia area. It's nice to see that he appreciates the tradition.