TBI's Conference Calling 2014-15 College Basketball Conference Previews (Part 2)

Back for more, eh? Expecting that the new guy over at BT Powerhouse, SB Nation's finest stop for all your Big Ten basketball needs, will mindlessly anoint his favorite conference as America's best?

If you expect that a guy who's glossed himself The Professor for the better part of a decade will do anything mindlessly, you obviously haven't passed through here much.

So let's check out Part 2 of TBI's conference rankings and see if the Big Ten does, in fact, reign supreme once more. (BTW, this is also post No. 100 in the sporadic history of this slightly-above-mediocre college basketball repository. So, yay me, I guess.)

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.

Conference Calling: Players to Watch for Championship Week (Part I)

Conference tournaments begin in the next few hours, with the Big South tipping off near Myrtle Beach and the Horizon League playing its openers tonight.

It's about to get real, kids.

In honor of those events starting, let's examine each league and find one player who can determine his team's fate as relates to an automatic NCAA Tournament bid. We'll hit the first 10 today, the next 10 on Thursday and finish up on Saturday, by which point most brackets should be close to set.

Tournaments will be presented in the order they begin after the jump.

Conference Calling: The Top 13

So, the 31 in 31 series has met its unfortunate demise. It was an ambitious project for a one-man operation, especially when said man has family and work obligations to contend with and no media monolith like ESPN or CBS behind him providing a paycheck.

If that paycheck came, it would seriously help defray the other stuff, so if anyone's willing to donate...ahem.

Since we didn't reach the upper echelon of the conference rankings, let me at least disclose where the top 13 leagues ranked in this season's TBI list...after this here jump.