The Brink Of Madness

The big news in college basketball this past week had nothing to do with anything that happened on the court.

Nope. It was the breaking news that the scandal of paying for players seems to have infested some of the highest profile programs and coaches.

Who knows how this is going to play out or what the impact is going to be on the careers and legacies of some of the biggest names the sports has ever known. If even half of what seems to have happened actually has, it's not going to be good for them.

TigerBlog has heard from a lot of people about the looming scandals, and they all seem to have the same initial response: They are reveling in the fact that these powerhouses are suddenly on shaky ground.

This isn't Princeton coaches or anything. This is just friends of his, college basketball fans, most Ivy League or mid-major fans.

After that, there is also other common ground in the responses he's gotten. Nobody that TB has talked to about it - and they're all sports fans - none of them are the least bit shocked by any of this.

If anything, there's a shrug that suggests an attitude that of "yeah, of course this was happening; what else you got?"

That, too, is a very sad commentary about the state of big-time college basketball.

As for TigerBlog, he's still on the Purdue bandwagon, and he's glad that the Boilermakers haven't been mentioned in any of the reports he's seen.

Anyway, all he can say about the rest of the mess is simply to stay tuned.

Closer to home, there was Episode 20 of "Hard Cuts" yesterday. It's one of TB's favorite, with a sense of a Jadwin Gym game night.

You can see it HERE.

This will be the final weekend of Ivy League basketball's regular season. Hard as it may seem to believe, today is the last day of February, which leads to March, leaving the college basketball on the verge of Madness.

Princeton's men's team is on the road, heading to Brown Friday night and Yale Saturday night.

The Tigers defeated Dartmouth last Saturday on Senior Night, keeping the door open for a spot in the Ivy League tournament. Here's what Princeton needs:
* two wins
* two Columbia losses (to Harvard and Dartmouth)
* a Cornell loss to Harvard

As TB has said all year, he won't give up hope until the math says there is no way in.

Beyond that, TB was happy to see that Amir Bell went over the 1,000-point mark for his career during his last game at Jadwin. Bell now has 1,002 career points.

Devin Cannady is currently 15th all-time at Princeton with 1,192 career points. Myles Stephens, like Cannady a junior, is closing in on 1,000 points, with 940 for his career.

The women are home this weekend as well, with a chance to win the Ivy League championship on the home court. Princeton is 10-2 in the league, one game up on Penn and two up on Yale and Harvard.

Regardless of what else happens, Princeton would win at least a share of the Ivy title AND the top seed in the Ivy tournament with one win it its last two games. Princeton would win the outright title with a pair of wins.

Penn can still be the top seed in the tournament and the outright Ivy champ, with two wins and two Princeton losses. Yale can grab the top seed in the tournament with two wins and two Princeton and Penn losses.

No matter what happens, the four teams in the Ivy tournament will be Princeton Penn, Harvard and Yale.

Beyond just playing for the Ivy League title, Saturday night will also be Senior Night, as well as National Girls and Women in Sports Day.

The Ivy tournament is next weekend.

There is a big incentive to be the top seed (or, for that matter, the fourth seed) on the women's side, since the game between No. 1 and No. 4 will be at 6 on Saturday the 10th. The No. 2 and No. 3 seeds play at 8:15.

Why is that big? It's because the final is the next day at 4. It might not seem like a lot, but those extra few hours will mean a lot on such a short turnaround.

The men's semifinals, by the way, are at 12:30 and 3, with the final Sunday the 11th at noon.

By that time, pretty much every other conference will have played its tournament. The selections for the men are the 11th; the women are the next night.

And then the NCAA tournaments will start.

They are mesmerizing events. They capture the sporting public the way few annual events can - even if TB's theory is that each successive round isn't as exciting as the one before it. The selections are great. The first rounds are great. It goes downhill from there.

Maybe that's because all of the big-time teams are usually the ones that are left by then. And in that respect, maybe this year will be different.

Will the news that broke last week change the way people look at March Madness?