Matty O'Shea (see all posts from)

Texas upset then-No. 3 Kansas a week ago Monday (Feb 11) to set "the wheels in motion.'" On Saturday, No. 1 Memphis had to overcome a seven-point deficit in the final two minutes, escaping Birmingham with a 79-78 win over UAB. The very next day, then-No.2 Duke lost at Wake Forest, 86-73. When the dust cleared on Monday (Feb 18), Memphis remained the AP's No. 1 team (and its lone unbeaten) for the fifth consecutive week, as well as being an unanimous choice for the third straight week.

Tennessee, which was No. 4 in the poll the previous week, moved past Duke and Kansas into the No. 2 spot. Those events set up a No.1 versus No.2 showdown this Saturday, as Tennessee will visit Memphis. Also this weekend, it's another Bracket Buster Saturday, as a number of mid-majors will get an opportunity to "make their case" for inclusion in the upcoming "Big Dance." A check of the current schedule tells us that we are quickly approaching the 'madness.'

The first of the conference tourneys begin on March 4 with the Horizon League and over the following 13 days, 30 automatic bids will be handed out, as each one of the 31 conferences (save the Ivy League) will hold their postseason tournaments. The last of the conference tourneys will be played on March 16, as the ACC, SEC, Big 12 and Big 10 hold their respective championship games.

Even the Ivy League is offering us the promise of something new this year. It has been 20 years since a school other than Penn or Princeton represented the league in the NCAA tournament. However, that's almost sure to change this season. Princeton has followed last year's dreadful last-place finish in the league (2-12) by going 2-5 so far this season, while Penn (the defending champs which went 13-1 in league play last year) is just 4-3. Brown, whose head coach is the brother-in-law of Barack Obama, is 6-2 this year while Cornell is off to a perfect 8-0 start. It could be "deja vu all over again" for the Big Red, as it was Cornell which was the last school (other than Penn or Princeton) to represent the Ivy League in the "Big Dance" back in 1988.

"Selection Sunday" is March 16 and is now less than a month away. That Sunday will also bring us something new this year. While 65 schools will receive NCAA invitations and the NIT (which started in 1938, a year before the NCAA) will invite 32 more, there's a "new kid on the block" this year. The College Basketball Invitational will be a third tournament this March. It's staged by The Gazelle Group, which runs the 2K Sports College Hoop Classic that benefits Coaches vs. Cancer and the O'Reilly Auto Parts CBE Classic.

The CBI intends to compete with the NIT for teams that did not make the NCAA's field of 65. The teams will be invited along the same criteria used by the NCAA and NIT -- overall and conference records plus late-season play. Four geographic brackets will be balanced competitively. It will be a single-elimination tournament through the first two rounds and the semifinals, all played at campus sites. The Championship Series (not a championship game!) will be a best-of-three with the higher-seeded team playing at home in the first game and, if necessary, the third. The first round is scheduled for March 18-19. The Championship Series will be March 31, April 2 and April 4.

This means there will now be 113 Division I teams playing postseason basketball. Too many you say? There are well over 300 Division I schools participating in the 2007-08 season, so only a little over one-third of them will be competing in the postseason. Compare that to college football, which staged 32 bowls games this past season. That allowed 64 of the 119 Division I schools to participate in the postseason (53.8 percent). Here's just some of the schools that were left out of postseason play last year by both the NCAA and NIT.

Akron went 26-7 last year but when the Zips lost the MAC title game on a last-second "bank shot" by Miami-Ohio, no postseason invitation followed. Kent State, also of the MAC, finished 21-11 last year but also was left out of postseason play. By the way, Kent entered this season as one of just nine Division I programs to record 20-win seasons in each of the nine previous seasons. For the record, the Golden Flashes are 22-5 this season, as of Feb 19. Doesn't Kent deserve a postseason bid, somewhere?

Tulsa has a long history of postseason participation. The Golden Hurricane went to eight NCAAs and one NIT from 1994 through 2003 but then fell on hard times. However, Tulsa rebounded last year to go 20-11 but also found "no room at the inn." How about Bucknell? The Bison won 23 and 22 games respectively, including first-round NCAA victories in 2005 and 2006. However, when they lost in the Patriot League championship game to Holy Cross last year, the school's 22-9 record was not good enough for the NIT.

Shouldn't there be a spot in the postseason for a "feel-good" story? Bobby Cremins, six years removed from his last job at Georgia Tech, came out of retirement last year to lead the College of Charleston to a 22-11 record but after a loss in the Southern Conference championship game to Davidson, went uninvited by the NIT. In all, 12 Division I schools won 20 or more games in the 2006-07 season, yet sat out last year's postseason. The schools collective record was 258-121, a winning percentage of .681.

Wouldn't you rather see schools like this still playing basketball in late March, rather than some of those 6-6 college football teams we saw during last year's bowl season? I sure would and the CBI sounds like a great idea to me. However, I will admit that I have an ulterior motive as well. My favorite time of the year to handicap college hoops is the conference tournaments plus the NCAA and NIT. The CBI adds 16 more teams to the mix. One has to love that.

I'll return on Friday with a preview of a very busy college basketball Saturday, which features the No.1 versus No.2 showdown between Memphis and Tennessee plus a ton of Bracket Buster games.

> Don't miss Larry's Rivalry Game of the Month at Pregame Pros!