Winners and Losers from College Basketball's Tip-Off Marathon

He was 18 when MSU-UK tipped off.

If you stayed up for all 29 or so hours of ESPN's College Hoops Tip-Off Marathon (aka Starbucks and Red Bull's Christmahanukwanzakah), I have two things to say to you:

1) You are a sick, maladjusted, misanthropic person who will die alone unless you adopt 18 cats; and

b) I so wish I could match that stamina and lack of daytime gainful employment/small people waking up before dawn.

Some teams had a great time tipping it off at ungodly hours, while others played like they'd already had their warm milk and binky, merely needing their favorite blankets to nod off like a toddler.

Let's look back over the two days in which we were all contemplating doing rails of coke off a hooker's ass if it would keep us awake through the second half of West Virginia/Virginia Tech.
 
Check after the jump for some of those who absorbed should-be-illegal benefits and some who took must-be-pitied damage for even being in the vicinity of the Marathon.

2012 Bilas Invitational Tournament: East Region Rounds 1 and 2

If you're like me, you're seeking college basketball news to read and write about aside from the usual offseason slobbering over high school players. Sometimes, we have to invent that news ourselves. Spreading rumors about coaches on the hot seat is considered tacky and indecorous when we don't have the ear of any prominent athletic directors, though.

On a blog that went to the effort of seeding and bracketing a full tournament that trumpets itself as featuring "the real best 68 teams in the nation," it almost seems like something's missing if we don't actually play it through and see how the event would have unfolded. The only way I know of to do that involves our boys at WhatIf Sports.

WhatIf gives you options to match nearly every team in America against one another and decide how those games would have played out. Depth chart changes can even be made, reflecting such real-world events as Fab Melo's ineligibility for Syracuse.

The format for the Bilas Invitational was that each matchup would be simulated seven times, in effect making each game an NBA-style series. The first four were each under the "Use Home Court" option. Any beyond that used the "Neutral Court" option.

The results that will be posted are of the winning team's fourth win in that seven-game series. You can go simulate these games and you'll get highly different results, but these are what the simulator produced for me.

Go here to take a look at the full S-Curve, and the bracket is here. We'll start with the overall top seed, the Kentucky Wildcats, and their journey through the East Region.