We're about halfway through the conference season, and teams are beginning to sift into tiers of Final Four contention. Now is when talk of college basketball's individual honors starts to heat up, too. Some players who dominated last November have cooled off, while others have seen their stars rise. Interestingly, in each of the past five years (save when John Wall took the Rupp Award in 2010), one player each season has swept all six of the major Player of the Year honors: the Wooden, Naismith, Rupp, Robertson, AP and NABC. Last season, it was flashy BYU guard Jimmer Fredette who took home all the hardware. READ MORE

We hear a lot about the teams that play in power conferences like the Big East, Big 10 and the ACC. Stronger teams from the mid-major conferences often get overlooked—which is too bad as many of them would present strong competition given the opportunity. READ MORE

In the language of coaching, there's rarely a distinction given between a “good” and a “bad” loss. Listen to some post-game press conferences and the line is almost always the same: a loss is a loss, whether the difference was one point or 31. But anyone who's ever been a part of a team sport knows this is just bunk—if you've ever been on the receiving end of a real, honest-to-goodness beatdown, you know that it leaves a mark. Taking a licking inside the lines can make a team question whether it's actually capable of winning. Winning is often an act of mental fortitude, and one part of a coach's job is to convince his or her players that they—and only they—are going to be winners that day. Thirty-point trouncings make that job a lot tougher. READ MORE

The non-conference season is over for most of college basketball, and midterm grades are out. Figuratively speaking, a few teams aced the first half, some have made a habit of relying on extensions and a bunch demonstrated that, frankly, they're not all that bright. None of the preseason top four teams is undefeated, and four of the preseason top 15 teams aren’t even ranked (Memphis, Vanderbilt, Pittsburgh and Xavier). READ MORE

Each February, the ESPN mothership in Bristol, Conn., dictates one week in the college basketball season as “Rivalry Week." The games over that particular stretch of days contain some of the biggest and baddest conference match-ups in the nation. Typically, North Carolina against Duke in one featured game, Kentucky and Florida in another, perhaps Syracuse meeting Connecticut, too. But few of these games really ratchet things up to 11. You may see a cut chin or some yapping, but the stakes for really getting into it with a conference foe, especially late in the year when NCAA seeding and participation and jockeying for conference preeminence are at the forefront of everyone’s minds, are too high for the real hate to flow. READ MORE

Since 2006, when the NCAA relaxed the rules on programs participating in so-called “exempt” early-season tournaments, there's been a proliferation of made-for-TV preseason events. This year, it seems there’s been a supernova of them: large and small, exotic locales and more familiar ones. Organizers try to pack as many as a dozen games into a few days to maximize competition and, more importantly in their eyes, occupancy at the resorts and venues that host. READ MORE

The monolithic entity we call ‘Sports’ has had a rotten run of late. First, there was a month of non-stop coverage of what is consistently the most depressing and least enjoyable aspect of sports—owner-athlete financial bickering—when the NFL locked out. Then we had weeks of breaking coverage of the huge money grab and rivalry-busting of the major college football powerhouses and conferences. Then the NBA managed its own lockout (with attendant financial bickering). Then Tony La Russa and the Cardinals won the World Series, subjecting the rest of us to an entire post-and off-season of the oft-repeated fallacy that St. Louis is somehow a better America. And then we got to the mother of all stomach-churning awfulness, this still-unraveling Penn State sexual-abuse scandal. I guess if you were an MLS fan—those apparently do still exist—maybe the LA Galaxy’s pursuit of a title is compelling. I’m not sure. READ MORE

Another long college basketball season came to an end last night in perhaps the most unsatisfactory way imaginable. Connecticut head coach Jim Calhoun—one of the game’s least likeable and hardest to root for figures—walked off the floor in glory as Butler, everybody’s Cinderella, thoroughly humiliated itself in its biggest game. It’s impossible to sugarcoat just how bad the final was; it was without a doubt the poorest championship game in memory. READ MORE

It doesn’t take much to build a winning basketball program. Just wins and consistency and star players and loyalty and, oh right, lots and lots of wins. Big wins. Tournament wins. And yet, there are programs across the country that have done the winning part but still been thwarted on the way to lasting prominence by some unlucky combination of coaching attrition, failures in recruiting and/or the wrong bounce of the ball happening a few too many times. READ MORE

After four bustling days of NCAA tournament action, a few truths have become clear: the Big East Conference was every bit as overrated as it looked before the tournament began; the era wherein referees’ decisions were considered sacrosanct is over; and Virginia is for basketball lovers. READ MORE