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It took a while, but the newly-formed College Basketball Invitational released its Bracket at about 11 p.m. Sunday.
The Huskies are the No. 1 seed in the West Regional and will host Valparaiso of the Horizon League at 6 p.m. Wednesday. As the No. 1 seed in their region, the Huskies would remain at home should they win Wednesday. They would play the winner of Tuesday’s Houston vs. Nevada game.
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Providence, RI (Sports Network) - Providence College has fired men's head basketball coach Tim Welsh on the heels of the school's third losing season in the past four years.
The Friars were 15-16 this past season, Welsh's 10th at the helm. Providence earned just two NCAA Tournament appearances and won exactly one Big East Tournament game during his tenure.
“I appreciate all the hard work and dedication that Tim has put into this program over the last 10 years,” said athletic director Bob Driscoll. “He represented the college with dignity and class. However, I felt that it was in the best interest of the program and Providence College to make a change in leadership.”
Welsh was named the 13th head coach of the Providence program on April 2, 1998. He led the Friars to an overall mark of 160-143 with a 72-92 record in Big East regular-season play. The team was just 1-9 in Big East Tournament action, including a loss to West Virginia in the first round of this year's tourney.

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North Sioux City, SD, March 16, 2008 –(PR.com)– Prizes include 6 VizioTM LCD TVs for Perfect Bracket, Sony Digital Camera, and more.
Dakota PC Warehouse, a retailer of computing and consumer electronics products, is inviting all college basketball fans to participate in a new, free, online tournament pool called Mad Brackets. Mad Brackets is hosted by DakotaPCWarehouse.com and sponsored by K2 Mounts Inc. and in this contest entrants will match their basketball prognostication skills against other self-proclaimed “bracketologists” in competition for thousands of dollars in prizes.
Mad Brackets is open to individuals as well as groups and entry is free. Prizes will be awarded to the winners who accumulate the most points simply by selecting the winning teams in the upcoming men’s college basketball tournament beginning on March 20, 2008. First prize is a 32-inch Vizio LCD TV. Second prize is a Sony digital camera, and third prize is a Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse.
In addition, DakotaPCWarehouse.com and K2 Mounts are offering a special grand prize to any person who records a perfect score by correctly selecting all the winning teams in every round of the tournament. Mad Brackets also contains a special twist whereby prizes can be awarded after every round of the tournament. For each tournament round in which an individual maintains a perfect score, the contestant will win an additional and progressively larger Vizio LCD TV. For example, a perfect score in the first round wins a 20-inch Vizio LCD TV while a perfect score in the both the first and second rounds will earn a 20-inch and a 32-inch Vizio LCD TV. The prize package for a perfect score through all six rounds of the tournament will include six Vizio LCD TVs featuring screen sizes of 20, 32, 37, 42, 47, and 52-inches, respectively, plus wall mounting brackets from K2 Mounts.

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The ABC television show Lost is back on the air, and no sooner does the SEC Basketball tournament gets turned upside down.
For those of you who follow the show, you know that the island that the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 landed on is haunted, magical, cursed or blessed. Crazy things happen, including the first two and a half seasons of the show featuring flashbacks of the lives of the castaways and what life was like prior to the plane crash.
Somewhere toward the end of Season three, the show began showing us flash forwards of life for the castaways once they get off the island. As a viewer, you find yourself wondering, "Is that a flash back or forward?” You also don't know who survives or who dies on the island. You are constantly shocked and can't wait to tune in for the next episode.
This brings us to the SEC tournament. I'm not sure if the Georgia Dome is haunted, or magical, cursed or blessed, but something has gone terribly wrong in the SEC. Here's the rundown on today's conference championship game:
Back to back National Champs, and winners of the last three SEC tournaments, the Florida Gators got bounced in the first round and won't make the NCAA tournament (first team to miss the dance after winning the whole thing since the "Danny and the Miracles" Kansas team won it in 1987 and missed the tourney in 1988).

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The call for change this March seemingly extends to the basketball arena as well as the political one.
The state’s two marquee college programs, Georgia and Georgia Tech, are on failure’s brink. Barring miracle conference tournament runs this week, both will miss the postseason.
The disappointment could mistakenly cost two coaches their jobs.
Straw polls show Georgia basketball coach Dennis Felton is as done as Mike Huckabee. And a vocal part of the Georgia Tech faithful say Paul Hewitt has used up all the political capital he earned with the 2004 Final Four run.
Fans should be upset with the teams’ performances. But neither coach deserves to be fired. Not yet anyway.
Felton inherited Jim Harrick’s mess, reason enough to give him more than five years. Then he lost the recruit who might have changed the program’s fortunes, Louis Williams, to the NBA. Several other top players are gone because of disciplinary reasons.
Felton and Hewitt hear the fan rumblings. Felton even has a prepared defense: Questioned about his job security following a loss in Saturday’s regular-season finale, he fell back on the difficulties of rebuilding after an NCAA probation and compared his performance to those done by coaches at schools in similar circumstances, like Baylor, St. Johns and St. Bonaventure.

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ATLANTA — Steven Hill made one basket the entire game. It might knock Tennessee out of a No. 1 seed in the NCAAs.
Hill hit a turnaround jumper with 5.3 seconds remaining for his only points and Arkansas knocked off fourth-ranked Tennessee 92-91 Saturday in the semifinals of the Southeastern Conference tournament, a serious blow to the Volunteers’ chances of claiming a top spot in one of the NCAA brackets.
“Wherever we’re seeded,” coach Bruce Pearl said defiantly, “we’ll go play.”
The Razorbacks (22-10) surely locked up an NCAA bid and advanced to face Georgia, which won twice Saturday, in today’s championship game. Tennessee (29-4) claimed its first regular-season title in 41 years, then fell short of pulling off a double in the storm-plagued tournament.
The game was played before an estimated crowd of 2,000 at Georgia Tech’s Alexander Memorial Coliseum, where the final two days of the tournament were moved after a tornado ripped through the Georgia Dome during the quarterfinals Friday night.
The teams went back-and-forth the entire game, the last five of 17 lead changes coming in the final three minutes. JuJuan Smith dumped in a layup with 23 seconds left to put Tennessee ahead 91-90, and the Vols called a 30-second timeout to set up their defense.

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As promised, here’s today’s screed about the state of Oregon State men’s basketball, and why the new coach can lead the Beavers out of the morass of the past 18 seasons, only two of which haven’t ended with a losing record, and every one of which has ended on a disappointing note.
(Some of these thoughts have been interspersed in different blogs here over the past several weeks. The objective today is to consolidate and (hopefully) provide a concise analysis of the pickle the Beavers are in in the wake of their just-completed train wreck of a season.)
First, I’ll agree with athletic director Bob De Carolis that while rebuilding the program is a hard job, OSU men’s hoops isn’t the dead-end, coaching-graveyard undertaking many detractors — including, to my surprise, numerous Beaver Disbelievers who should have more faith in their alma mater’s positives — make it out to be.
To wit (I love bullet points. Succinct, to the point, and no effort wasted on oft-cumbersome transition paragraphs):
* OSU is a Pacific-10 Conference, Bowl-Championship Series school. On Sunday, check out how many NCAA bids these six BCS conferences receive. Better yet, wait two weeks and see how many BCS-conference teams have advanced to the Sweet 16.

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The pressure of leading American to the NCAA Tournament for the first time was getting to the team’s best player, who woke up in cold sweats all week.
“I would have the same dream over and over,” Garrison Carr said. “And as much as I would try to not think about it, I would still wake up in the middle of the night sweating, with time running down and it being a close game … But we were still able to win it.”
The dream became reality Friday, when the Eagles (21-11) won the Patriot League title with a 52-46 victory over Colgate in Washington. It’s American’s first trip to the Big Dance since the school joined Division I in 1967. Said Carr: “I’m just extremely excited for the program.”
To the strains of “Don’t Stop Believin’” in an intimate and noisy Bender Arena awash with red, white and blue, Carr scored 17 points and was named tournament MVP. Brian Gilmore (11 points) wrestled away a key steal in the final 20 seconds for the Eagles, whose only previous berth in an NCAA Tournament came as a Division II school in 1960.
Since joining the Patriot League in 2001, American lost the championship games from 2002-04.

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The Dodgers and the San Diego Padres play a historic two-game series in Beijing, the Lakers and the Houston Rockets meet in a matchup of new-look NBA Western Conference elite and dozens of college basketball teams continue the buzzer-beating winnowing process to claim conference tournament championships across the land.
Yet the most-anticipated and eagerly watched piece of sports programming this weekend will be a recitation of 65 names, setting off a frenzy of Internet hits and media over-analysis that won’t be seen again until next month’s NFL draft.
(If the Dodgers and the Padres truly wanted to stage an exhibition of our national pastime in Beijing, they would wear blazers, sit behind studio desks and get very worked up reading long lists of names.)
Selection Sunday is upon us, with CBS announcing the seedings and the brackets that will dominate our lives for the next three weeks. The network’s selection show will air at 3 p.m. Sunday, followed by two hours of “bracket breakdown” analysis.
After the announcement, ESPN will counter with two hours of “ESPNU Bracketology” beginning at 4 p.m. and featuring Bob Knight among its usual cast of studio analysts. Knight switching over to the enemy side — as Digger Phelps spelled it out for him on Wednesday, Knight is now a member of the “m-e-d-i-a” — has sparked a lot of speculation about what the future holds for this experiment. The online betting site bodog.com is offering odds on whether Knight curses on the set during his tournament run.

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All the ingredients are there: pressure, drama, rivalry, intensity and possibly even revenge.
From the top-seeded Lady Griz squad looking to avenge last year’s disappointing postseason, to the thorn in their side – Portland State – to tough heavyweights Montana State and Idaho State. Storylines abound, and the pot is ready to be stirred.
Starting tonight, the stirring will begin, as the Big Sky Women’s Basketball Championship gets underway at 5:30 p.m. in Dahlberg Arena.
Thursday through Saturday the tournament heap will be sorted out with a bid to the NCAA Tournament on the line.
No. 3 Montana State will begin the action against No. 6 Northern Arizona, and 30 minutes later, No. 4 Portland State faces off against No. 5 Northern Colorado. Friday, No. 2 Idaho State takes on the highest remaining seed and Montana will play against the lowest remaining seed. The winners will meet in the championship game Saturday at 5 p.m.
The Lady Griz will be defending their home floor just like they did last season. Despite a recent regular-season finale road loss at Portland State, Montana enters the tournament as the No. 1 seed.
“We’re excited and really proud,” UM head coach Robin Selvig said. “It’s a heck of an accomplishment to win the regular-season title, and we’re excited to bring this thing back in front of the fans here in Missoula.”

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