
January Madness: Seeding the Top 68 College Basketball Players
LSU’s Ben Simmons would be the runaway No. 1 if March Madness seeded the top 68 players instead of teams.

LSU’s Ben Simmons would be the runaway No. 1 if March Madness seeded the top 68 players instead of teams.

College football subjected viewers to six blowouts New Year’s Day—and once again zero games between the two conferences that play head and shoulders above the others.

The SEC battered four Bowl opponents, going 4-1 with an average score of 39-18 to return to the dominance of the past decade, leaving the Pac-12 as the only other conference with a chance to catch the SEC by the end of bowl season

Newly created Value Add 3.0 Basketball now creates the equivalent of a Sagarin Projection Rating for all 4000 basketball players to enable quick projections on final scores in light of basketball players being injured or returning. DonBest updates injury status on all teams here.

The Patriots wanted to kick the ball south to have the wind at their back the entire period. To do that, Matthew Slater had to simply point south and say, “We want to go that way,” and at that point the Jets would have most likely chosen to receive the ball and would have had to battle the wind while going right to left on your TV screen.

A glance at the top 50 basketball players according to www.valueaddbasketball.com shows the typical trend—the best NBA prospects are sophomores and freshman, but the best college players are seniors.

Fox Sports gamble on the Big Ten Network and the basketball-only Big East continues to score victories over the ESPN-dominated SEC and ACC.

The new Value Add Basketball rankings give two dozen Big East players high marks, and the top service used by coaches shows the conference surging near the top just two years after Fox Sports made it a lynch pin in it’s challenge to ESPN.

The top-ranked Value Add player in the country signed with USC six months after USA Today splashed a picture of USC Song Girls welcoming coach Andy Enfield as their new head basketball coach accompanied by these words: “Andy Enfield’s model wife, Amanda Marcum was there. As were the USC Song Girls. If ever there was a single image that could help USC recruit star high school basketball players, this is it.”

Duke and Oregon are about 20 points better than opening day opponents Siena and Jackson State according to www.kenpom.com, but they are the two teams that could be hurt by up to 10 points a game by injuries. The table below shows the 50 best players on the bench for opening day, and how many points they are typically worth to their team based on www.valueaddbasketball.com.

The NCAA tournament ends in four months and 21 days. The regular season starts now.

Four All-Americans give the Big Ten the toughest All-Conference team, led by Melo Trimble who hopes to lead Maryland to a Big Ten and national title. Most of the talent is concentrated in the 10 preseason All-Conference teams listed below, but All-Americans Fred VanVleet and Ron Baker of Wichita State lead the “best of the rest” from the other 23 conferences.

Breitbart Sports recently named its first preseason All-American team, with Kris Dunn of Providence the runaway Player of the Year.

Breitbart Sports releases Value Add projections today to a college basketball backdrop of an over-the-top sex scandal at Louisville, the NCAA banning gambling sites from advertising, and Chris Mullins preparing to coach his first St. John’s game after losing his

Steve Spurrier’s first words to me were: “Well, I know the boys at Clemson are shaking in their boots after watching that display!” Everyone within earshot burst out laughing, imagining the Duke defense, that had just lost 49-28 to the University of Virginia, against No. 7 Clemson the next week.

The American Athletic Conference champion should compete in the playoffs. Cincinnati entered Thursday’s game as the 6th best team in the American Athletic Conference. They missed their starting quarterback and beat a Miami team that entered as 6th in the ACC. In a fair match of conferences, Cincinnati won 34-23.

The CBS emblem during SEC games includes the words, “The Best Conference.” But the SEC lacks the edge crucial in final decision on college playoff invites. Early last year the SEC ranked a touchdown better than every conference and talk

Unless West Virginia suffers a major upset to Maryland, the Big 12 likely stays in 1st place (+11 above average) until season finales. Few meaningful inter-conference games remain for the Pac-12 and SEC (tied in 2nd at +10). The ACC (+8) and Big Ten (+7) could move up or down from 4th and 5th with many big games, and the American Athletic (+0, 6th) could surge if East Carolina and Central Florida can pull upsets of Power 5 teams.

Perfect days for the Pac-12 and Big 12 hinged on the game between the flagship universities of the two biggest states in the nation, and Cal’s Darius White deflected a Texas extra point for a 45-44 win.

Notre Dame-Georgia Tech and BYU-UCLA highlight this Saturday’s college football action.

USC tries to wrest the Victory Bell from UCLA two months from now. But both teams finding themselves ranked in the top 10 compels fan dreams of a matchup of undefeated squads adding drama to a game already bursting with history and meaning.

Donald Trump promoted the New Jersey Generals 30 years before running for president, Adrian Wojnarowski wrote the New York Times bestseller The Miracle of St. Anthony about the school with two big-time prospects, Hoboken boasts claims to the first baseball game, and New Brunswick hosted the first college football game between the College of New Jersey (Princeton) and Rutgers in 1869.

Band manager Ian Faith informs the members of Spinal Tap, “The Boston gig has been cancelled.” Singer David St. Hubbins asks, “What?” “Yeah,” Faith explains, “I wouldn’t worry about it though, it’s not a big college town.”

This weekend’s “A” grades went to the Mid-American and American Athletic Conferences, while Conference USA and the SEC struggled.

Conference USA surged to just three points below the FBS average (-3, 6th of 10), while the Pac-12 plummeted (+3). If they really rank that good and bad respectively, CUSA could sneak out a 7-6 record this week and the Pac-12’s Oregon could lose at Michigan State.