Hoopraker

The Hoosiers and Buckeyes will take short bus rides from their friendly confines this weekend and venture into two basketball snake pits. Mid-majors in name and recruiting ratings only, Southern Illinois and Butler enter Saturday’s games as programs built on the exotic notion of taking good, but not spectacular high school basketball players and coaching them into regular members of the top twenty-five and teams Goliath loathes, but often sees in the brackets of March. (more…)

big ten basketball | No Comments »

A scarlet record against the ACC pinned to his lapel, Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delaney (North Carolina B.A. ‘70 and J.D. ‘73), can resume shuffling paper as he scrambles to assemble a credible television network. In year nine of ESPN’s ACC/Big Ten Challenge, conspiracy theories of scheduling, phantom officiating and the Commissioner’s allegiance now reign on deaf ears. Early in December, athletes and talent often trump coaching and player development, and evident from this past week, the Big 10, while replete with great coaches, is developing. (more…)

big ten basketball | No Comments »

Another year and another chance for the Big 10 to do some public relations by getting a few good wins against the media’s favorite conference. To date the Big 10/ACC Challenge, while far from an accurate measure of conference value, has done little to rebut the aforementioned prejudice towards Tobacco Road basketball. But with a fresh slate of matchups the Big 10 hopes spring eternal. (more…)

big ten basketball | No Comments »

Thanksgiving in Illinois is the time of both slow-cooked fowl and the first official games of the high school basketball season. With the usual full platter of holiday tournaments, fans, bellies distended, put the first groans into many a bleacher. There were some lopsided games, but also enough solid matchups to fight through the tryptophan. It is also an appropriate juncture to highlight a few other Illinois basketball stories of the past months. (more…)

high school basketball | No Comments »

While Northwestern went two divisions beneath them to find a decisive, but meaningless win three other Big Ten teams moved quickly from preordained blowouts against turkeys into the cauldron of top twenty-five, NCAA tournament caliber basketball. The results were mixed and in some cases, bruising, but in return Illinois, Michigan State, and Ohio State received invaluable measures of how they stand at this early juncture and in some cases,what needs to change over the next five months if they aspire to the games of late March. (more…)

big ten basketball | No Comments »

Luxuriating in high-quality tournament basketball, there is much for the college basketball fan to be sanguine about these days of late March.  There is, however, one governor to the optimism. It is the continued dread of more displays of incompetence from the NCAA’s long-toothed, physically infirm, grossly overextended officiating corps. (more…)

big ten basketball | 2 Comments »

Hoopraker tips its tattered Cincinnati Reds cap to Joe Nuxhall who passed away yesterday at the age of 79. Listening to Reds games called by Marty Brennaman and the ol’ lefthander rounding third and heading for home on the Big One, 700 WLW, defined many summer days for this Hoopraker.  Nuxie will be missed.  With that respect duly paid, on to some basketball observations from the first week of the season. (more…)

big ten basketball | No Comments »

The fruition of years spent by grown men frantically phoning teenagers, letters and more letters sent, countless winter nights in high school gyms, and, when necessary, strained jokes, feigned laughter and groveling to big brothers, AAU coaches and parents, behold, the latest additions to the future of the Big Ten Conference:

(more…)

big ten basketball | No Comments »