The Arkansas TV snafu

I’ve received a few e-mails from fans complaining that last week’s game at Arkansas was not televised on Time Warner Cable, as had been the plan. And I was among the people who wanted to watch it, since I wasn’t there either. The main carrier of the game was CSS, which isn’t available on TWC, but the cable company had said it would pick it up and broadcast it on channel 165.

Instead what we saw was a blue screen, and the game was only available locally on Direct TV.

Well, we have an explanation from Time Warner on what happened. The following is a statement from Wendye Martin, the director of marketing for TWC, which was forwarded by USC’s athletic media relations office:

“Time Warner Cable experienced isolated technical difficulties on channel 165 during the USC vs. Arkansas men’s basketball game on Wed., Feb. 17th at 9pm.  Customers experiencing difficulties viewing the game were directed to channel 551 to the purchase the event on ESPN Full Court where it was also being aired.  All customers that purchased the game on channel 551 will not be charged.  Time Warner Cable apologizes for any inconvenience experienced by USC fans.”

Horn radio show

Just a quick note for those of you that like to tune in to the weekly Darrin Horn radio hour.

Because of the Kentucky game, it will be held Tuesday night, rather than the normal Thursday air date.

However, it will be at the same time, 7-8 p.m., at The Wild Wing in the Vista.

Avoiding the cellar

We’re now a little over two weeks away from the SEC tournament, and the picture for South Carolina is getting a bit clearer.

The Gamecocks are alone in fifth place, three games behind the teams ahead of them, and one ahead of Georgia. Everybody has four games to go. So barring some upsets, you can pencil the Gamecocks into the fifth or sixth seed in the East in the tourney.

The fifth seed from the East will play at 1 p.m. on Thursday, March 11, against the fourth seed from the West. The winner plays the top seed from the East (almost certainly Kentucky) at noon the following day.

The sixth seed from the East will play the final game on Thursday – scheduled for 9:45 p.m. (For those of us covering the team, we can be forgiven for throwing objectivity away on this one and rooting for the Gamecocks to not finish sixth.)

Obviously, it’s sort of sad that we’re sitting here talking about what USC has to do to avoid finishing last, one year after tying for the division title. But it is what it is.

South Carolina’s remaining schedule: at Kentucky, vs. Mississippi State, vs. Alabama, at Vanderbilt.

Georgia’s remaining schedule: at Vanderbilt, vs. Florida, vs. Kentucky, at LSU.

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A note on the NIT

As we move from the NCAA tournament bubble watch to the NIT bubble watch, I think it’s important to clarify something.

There’s a misconception out there that you have to have a winning record to make the NIT. In fact, there is no rule precluding the NIT from selecting a team with a .500 record or worse.

Here’s a link to the NIT’s selecting rules and procedures.  It’s mostly a long list of the selection procedures, but the key part is in the opening, which states the committee “shall select the best available teams to fill the NIT field.”

Now having said all that, it’s still not assured that South Carolina (14-11 entering Saturday’s game against Tennessee) will make it. Then again, it’s not assured the Gamecocks won’t make the NCAA tournament – they could win out in the regular season, or they could win the SEC tournament.

Failing that, however, the Gamecocks still need a few wins to make sure they make the 32-team NIT field. Remember, the NIT is obligated to take the regular-season winner of any conference that doesn’t win its league tournament.  (For instance, if Coastal Carolina, currently the leader in the Big South, doesn’t win the league tournament, it’s ensured an NIT bid.)

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Horn: Success was this close

Just got done with Darrin Horn’s media session to preview the Arkansas game. The highlights:

- The coach repeated a bit of his position on winning road games, and also said his team, currently 5-5 in the SEC, was close to being 7-3. Here’s his quote in full:

“Everybody keeps wanting to separate one game from another, road from home. Again it’s league play. You want to try to get as many as you can in the left-hand column at any point. The fact of the matter, as we told our team on Monday, is we’re legitimately three, maybe four possessions, away from being 7-3 in this league, if you just take the Florida and Georgia games, where we’re not talking about a lot of ifs ands or buts.

“Florida, if one shot doesn’t go down we win the game. And Georgia, we get just a couple stops or make just one of those good looks we got on Saturday, and even with not faring as well as we wanted to as far as consistency in the last five minutes, still got a great shot to finish that game off and win it. When you consider that that’s the case, I think we’re in good shape.”

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No more bubble watch?

The loss at Georgia has seemingly made South Carolina disappear from the NCAA tournament radar screen. Jerry Palm of CBSSports.com and CollegeRPI.com doesn’t even list USC among its at-large possibilities. It sort of reminds me of last year’s SEC tournament loss to Mississippi State, when the Gamecocks went from the bubble to completely out of the discussion after 40 minutes of action.

But this time, the regular season isn’t over.  It’s still in the hands of the Gamecocks, and not the committee. They’re 5-5 in the league, and have to play near-perfect until here on out, but hey, you never know.

So until the point we can officially say the Gamecocks have to win the SEC tournament to make it (and that could happen as early as this week), we’ll still post our bubble needle. Hey, we’re not letting out massive graphics budget go to waste.

The key numbers: 14-10 overall record, 5-5 in the SEC. RPI rank of 71, strength of schedule rank of 36.

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Pearl on last year’s USC team

More from today’s SEC teleconference, this time from Bruce Pearl.

The Tennessee coach, when asked about the possible expansion of the NCAA tournament to 96 teams, said he was in favor of it and cited South Carolina last year as an example.

“How can a team that won 10 games in the league and shared the division crown be left out?” Pearl said. “Well the reason is because they weren’t, by the way the thing was picked, they weren’t one of the top at-large teams. Well that’s not fair, for the kind of year they had. It’s not that they were treated unfairly, by the numbers they were just out. But there’s no way a team like that should miss the tournament.”

This continues a trend where it seems most coaches – and suits at the NCAA and the TV networks – favor expansion, while almost all media and fans (except, perhaps, of teams like the Gamecocks last year) are against it.

Downey outruns the Fox

Georgia coach Mark Fox on Monday revealed something interesting about the waning moments of Saturday’s game against South Carolina.

Fox, his team leading by three with about 30 seconds left, had ordered his players to foul Gamecock star Devan Downey, rather than let him shoot. Downey still got off two shots – a layup then a 3 – though each missed and the Bulldogs won.

“That’s how fast he is. We couldn’t even catch him to foul him,” Fox said. “He’s a terrific player. It’s one thing to get 30 points a game, but when the other team knows you get 30 points a game and they gear their defense to stop him and he still gets 30 points, that’s a terrific tribute to him.”

There was more discussion of Downey’s sore ankle on the SEC coaches teleconference. Florida coach Billy Donovan mentioned seeing Downey in a brace last week, and felt there was a difference in his play, but it was still enough to beat his team.

“I didn’t think he was as aggressive in Columbia. But when I say non-aggressive I thought he did a terrific job of incorporating the other guys in the game,” Donovan said.

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Viewing for Saturday

If you’re snowed in, and just want to spend all day watching basketball, here’s a viewer guide. But from a bubble watcher’s perspective.

For South Carolina, the most important thing is to win its 4 p.m. game at Georgia. If it does, it stays alive for now. If it doesn’t, well the road just got a lot tougher.

Here’s a list of other games to watch, divided between bubble teams (whom USC needs to lose) and RPI helpers (teams USC has played:

BUBBLE GAMES
Noon: Cincinnati at Connecticut: Both teams are on the bubble, with U-Conn in worse shape right now. It’s a toss-up on who you’d want to win.
1 p.m.: Maryland at No. 8 Duke: The Terps are in right now, and if they win this one, they pretty much assure themselves a spot.
2 p.m.: Oklahoma at Oklahoma State: The home team is on the bubble, the visitors are NIT-bound barring a turnaround.
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Downey injury update

Devan Downey was once again wearing a walking boot on his left foot Friday, as he spoke to the media before leaving for Saturday’s game at Georgia. But it remained a precautionary measure as South Carolina’s star nurses a sore ankle.

“It’s all right. I’m gonna be all right,” he said.

D0wney said he’d “probably be about the same” as Wednesday night, when he described himself as less than 100 percent, but still scored 24 points in the win over Florida.

“Mark’s been doing a great job treating it a couple times a day,” Downey said of team athletic trainer Mark Rodger. “So I’m gonna be fine.”

Reserve forward Johndre Jefferson is also dealing with a sprained ankle, but he should be fine after being held out of Thursday’s practice. Both Downey and Jefferson were set to practice some Friday and be fine for Athens.

“They’re both as of now expected to play,” coach Darrin Horn said. “We expect them to play on Saturday.”

Downey played 34 minutes against Florida, a low for SEC play. But Horn said that had less to do with his injury than how Ramon Galloway and Brandis Raley-Ross were playing, which allowed Downey to get some rest. (There was also a sequence where Downey was supposed to return at the next dead ball, but play went on longer than normal.)

“Devan could play and would play 40 minutes a night, if we’d let him, whether he had two good legs or none,” Horn said.