Tourney Central Extra - The Last Brackets
With the end of the regular season today, all conference tournament brackets on our side of the Red Line have been finalized. After the jump, opening brackets for the seven leagues starting up during the second week of Championship Fortnight: the MEAC, SWAC, Big West, Great West, Atlantic 14, WAC and Southland.

MMBOW #14 - Torrell Martin, Winthrop
When the Big South decreed that two of their postponed games would be made up during a week that they already had a pair scheduled, some Winthrop fans believed the fix was in. But any and all conspiracy theories melted away when a tall, athletic guard with soft hands stepped up, and led Winthrop to a convincing and resounding sweep of the killer four-game stretch.

Rags
October is for pumpkin pie, baseball playoffs, falling leaves. It also brings the first quivers of anticipation for the college basketball fan, as the first signs of winter approach. There, in the convenience stores and train station newsstands, nestled in amongst the copies of Sports Illustrated and FHM, are the preseason annuals.

The State Of The Other 22, Week 6
The State of College Basketball is a brand-new ratings system that uses a lot of good basketball sense, per-game team performance ratings and degradation of older results to rank the teams from No. 1 to 341 (here's the long-winded version). In its overall form, it retroactively picked three of the Final Four in a simulation of last season. This is a recording.

So Fresh, So Clean
A couple of weeks ago, the Official Wife Of The Mid-Majority and I were out a-walking hand-in-hand across the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. We paused to admire the blocky brick facade of the Palestra, and were able to step inside for a moment, finding it unlocked, unguarded, empty.