Mark Titus's Blog, page 2

Mark Titus’s Triangle NCAA All-Americans: Conference Players of the Year

Player of the year awards are tricky because they’re rarely chosen based on widely understood and agreed-upon criteria. Even MVP awards that are supposed to go to, you know, the most valuable player don’t always work out that way. (If they did, Adrian Peterson would have something like 47 NFL MVPs right now.) Some voters place an emphasis on stats, some place an emphasis on team success, some just automatically give it to the best player on the best team, and some try to send some sort of mes...

Titus’s Top 12 NCAA Power Rankings

I don’t want to mince words here: Ted Valentine is the single biggest problem in college basketball. When the committee of officials or whatever meets this summer to decide points of emphasis for next season, “Ted Valentine” needs to be at the top of that list. Somebody needs to do something about college basketball’s evil dictator. Hopefully that somebody is Patric Young, and that something is a right hook to the face. But I’d be fine with a lifetime ban, or at the very least 60 years in pri...

Mark Titus’s Triangle NCAA All-Stars: Best Dunkers

Eric Wallace was my teammate at Ohio State in 2008. Unless you’re a diehard Buckeyes fan, you probably have never heard of Wallace, and I’d bet that even a lot of OSU fans don’t remember him. But I do and I always will because he is without a doubt the best athlete I’ve ever played with, and he’s in a dead heat with Bill Walker for the best athlete I’ve ever shared a court with. There were several times that season when coach Thad Matta would stop practice and let everyone collect themselves...

Titus’s Top 12 NCAA Power Rankings

Boston College’s upset of Syracuse got me thinking — has there ever been an instance of visiting fans rushing another school’s home court? I’d argue that every BC fan in the Carrier Dome last Wednesday had a right to run onto the court and celebrate. The Eagles are terrible and they just lost a longtime member of the program to ALS. Beating the 25-0, unanimous no. 1 team in the country is a huge achievement for them. Even die-hard curmudgeonly sports columnists would agree that BC’s win was w...

Mark Titus’s Triangle NCAA All-Stars: The ‘Captain Planet’ Team

Even casual basketball fans know that the sport has quickly become a global game. Twenty-two years ago, the Dream Team could’ve played blindfolded and still won an Olympic gold medal, mostly because I’m pretty sure half the teams in the field were put together a week before the Olympics and consisted of guys who only wanted to play so they could meet Jordan, Magic, and Bird. Now the game has exploded to all corners of the globe, and international talent has made its mark on NCAA basketball. C...

Titus’s Top 12 NCAA Power Rankings

Nebraska beat Michigan State in East Lansing. Arizona State beat Arizona in double overtime. Virginia narrowly escaped Virginia Tech. Villanova needed double overtime to beat Providence. Kansas needed Andrew Wiggins to beat Texas Tech. Shabazz Napier went nuts on Memphis, and UConn beat the Tigers in overtime. Iowa vs. Indiana was postponed because Indiana is literally falling apart. North Carolina vs. Duke was postponed for the first time ever due to weather. Roy Williams won his 300th game...

Mark Titus’s Triangle NCAA All-Stars: The Lefties

As badly as I wanted to make this week’s Triangle All-Stars focus on the best players in college basketball who hit a 35-foot game winner at Pitt on Wednesday, Grantland insisted the list include more than one player. This was a bummer because I could easily pump out a few thousand words on Tyler Ennis, his humongous cojones, and his performance against Pitt. But you know what? The worst part is that I won’t be able to make next week’s category “The top players with multiple pairs of lips tat...

Titus’s Top 12 NCAA Power Rankings

I know you’re sick of the Marcus Smart story. I am too, so I’ll make this quick. First off, there are no good guys in this situation. Smart isn’t a hero for sticking up to an obnoxious fan, and Jeff Orr isn’t “just a normal fan who said something everybody says.” I’ll never understand what compels a person to personally attack an athlete, whether it’s something as foul as mocking a dead relative or something as relatively innocent as saying, “You suck.” I understand fans are trying to get ins...

Mark Titus’s Triangle NCAA All-Stars: The Best Spot-up Shooters

Earlier this week, Oakland’s Travis Bader broke J.J. Redick’s record for career 3-pointers made when he went 6-for-11 from downtown in a 22-point loss to Milwaukee. Bader deserves his reputation as a sniper, but he also has moments when he’s more of a shooter than a maker. He’s had 0-8, 0-9, and 0-10 games from beyond the arc, and he has attempted fewer than 10 threes in only six games this season. Nonetheless, any list of the best shooters in America is incomplete without Bader, if for no ot...

Titus’s Top 12 NCAA Power Rankings

This winter has been brutal all over the country; the Super Bowl was a dud on the field and during the commercial breaks; the Winter Olympics are shaping up to be a disaster; and CM Punk recently quit WWE. It’s a grim time for America. But just when it seems there’s nothing to look forward to, college basketball saves the day. We got a taste of March Madness in early February last week, as 16 of the Top 25 teams lost over a seven-day span (including half of the top 10). College basketball is...