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Another season of college basketball in the New York City area is complete, and it’s another year of teams from leagues other than the Big East carrying the flag. Marist, who won the MAAC regular season crown outright for the first time in school history, got over the disappointment of not winning their conference tournament by winning at Oklahoma State in the MasterCard NIT. Hofstra, predicted by many as a team with a chance to be “this year’s George Mason”, wasn’t able to make the NCAA Tournament but they did notch their second straight postseason bid. After that,

- Amazingly, only one of the country's Top 50 scorers is left in the NCAA Tournament. Chris Lofton ranks 18th nationally in ppg at 20.6 per game. The next best scorers left are Tyler Hansbrough at 64th nationally (18.1 per game) and then Acie Law at 67th (17.9 per game).

- In rebounds its a little bit better, Greg Oden and Aaron Gray are tied at 16th nationally with 9.7 per game.

Best performance: Eric Maynor, VCU

Eric Maynor had reason to be nervous. After all, here he was playing in his first ever NCAA Tournament. He had just come off a brilliant performance against George Mason in the Colonial Athletic Conference title game, to earn his team only their second NCAA berth in 20 years. And who did they find themselves matched up with come Selection Sunday? The Duke Blue Devils.

Am I the only person watching the Drexel/Creighton game tonight that was confused about the emphasis on "bench decorum"? Each head coach, Bruiser Flint of Drexel and Dana Altman of Creighton, was T'd up in this BracketBusters game that the visiting Dragons eventually won 64-58. Altman's technical, in which he was called for being about six inches outside of the coaches box, brought back memories of Dean Smith getting a T for the same offense in the 1991 Final Four. Coach Altman said nothing to the official to warrant this call, just happened to do something that coaches throughout the nation have been doing for years. Drexel went on a run after this, and things seemed to be going well for the Dragons until Coach Flint found himself on the wrong side of the whistle when yelling at his player for a foolish reach-in foul. Jumping into the air and yelling at his guy wouldn't have been a problem (nor should it be) had an official not been right next ot Flint. Luckily for Drexel, they were able to hold on despite some horrific foul shooting (at one point they had missed five straight from the charity stripe).

Thoughts, thoughts, and more thoughts..

- Most people find this hard to believe.. but I don't really read ESPN.com's basketball coverage (or any other site's for that matter). Honestly, I rarely pay attention to what goes on over there unless a reader or a message board poster highlights something. Apparently they set up a Mock Selection Committee, which I only heard about after reading an email from a reader by the name of Travis Klein. Looks like a cute endeavor on ESPN's part.. but what's really the point of this? To highlight what we already know about the process.. that's its completely subjective, arbitrary, and biased? If that's the point, then I guess they succeeded. What's really odd about the whole thing is how it took into account some ridiculous occurrences like Memphis losing the CUSA and Evansville winning the MVC? Did they just roll a dice or throw darts? And why did only Mid-Major powers lose in their mock up (Butler, Memphis, SIU/Creighton) all fell? Hell, lets make believe Rutgers wins the Big East tournament! I guess even this "shake-up" biased towards the power-conferences.. apparently only mediocre mid-majors win their conference tournaments.. but mediocre power conferences teams (ie, Syracuse last year..) never make such runs.

If you want Duke/UNC talk.. go elsewhere.. this is a Tobacco free Dribble.

- The Pac-10's learned the key to getting more national recognition. Have your 2nd tier teams play joke non-conference schedules to build up the wins. Oregon's Non-Conference SOS: 254. Washington State's: 297. Southern California: 187. Out of the Top 50 RPI teams in the country, there's only 2 as bad or worse than those 3 Pac-10 schools. Clemson played the 204th best schedule, and Kansas State played the 198th.

- After starting 3-0 in conference play, Clemson looked like they weren't going to repeat last year's horrible collapse once the ACC schedule started. But then the Tigers lost 6 of 7 to drop below .500 in the ACC. A home win over FSU bounced them back to .500, and now they have winnable games at Wake and vs Maryland which should push them to a solid 7-5.