Earlier this week St. Joseph’s announced its men’s basketball opponents, although no times or dates were released. Two things are worth noting for Quaker fans. First off, as you might remember from this DP article, all of the Hawks 2008-09 home games will be played at the Palestra. So there’s a good chance college basketball’s cathedral will be home to multiple games a day come winter.

But more importantly, a familiar foe of Penn will be visiting the Palesta twice this year. Cornell, yes the very same defending-Ivy League champions, will face St. Joe’s at the Palestra. I’d personally be surprised if Penn coach Glen Miller isn’t in attendance scouting the Big Red, assuming of course Penn doesn’t have a game of its own that day.

So as for you Penn fans, are you going to try to watch the Big Red in the Palestra before they take on the Quakers? I wonder when was the last time a non-Big 5 team visited the Palestra during the regular season to play two different teams. I’m sure it’s happened before.

NB: I found this news from former DP writer Jonnathan Tannenwald’s college sports blog, Soft Pretzel Logic. I strongly suggest you check it out since it’s clearly the best professional blog about college sports in the Philly region.

Not too much to report out there in Ivy basketball country, but on Thursday Dick “Hoops” Weiss, writing for the New York Daily News, had a few Ivy points of interests in his “Hoops on Hoops” blog.

First, as stated in a brief in Friday’s DP, John Gallagher has been hired as an assistant coach to Glen Miller. But in addition to reporting on that, Weiss says that the Quakers are interested in Larry Loughery, a former St. Joseph’s Prep player who recently transferred to Academy of the New Church in Bryn Athyn.

Update:  Loughery is coming to Penn

He also notes that Columbia hosted a Sports Ethics Symposium, but put Weiss and fellow NY Daily news columnist Pat Plunkett on the wait list despite sending out publicity emails. I wonder how that event compared to the one Columbia hosted a few years back called “A Culture of Losing.”

The last Ivy note is about Cornell coach Steve Donahue. There was a lot of talk about Brown’s coach Craig Robinson leaving, and in the end he did go to Oregon State. But Donahue has also gotten some coaching buzz after leading the Big Red to their first Ivy title since 1988. While not reporting any rumors, Weiss himself believes Bucknell might be a good fit for Donahue because it offers scholarships and Cornell has yet to expand its financial aid like some of the other Ivy schools have.

For a team with seven sophomores and freshmen and no seniors in the 10-man rotation, Villanova will look a bit different in the next couple of years.

The Wildcats had been as busy as any other college team last week. On Wednesday, Villanova lost one of the biggest recruits of the year to Memphis in Tyreke Evans.

This came days after Villanova landed a big transfer in Duke freshman Taylor King, and then two days later lost freshman guard Malcolm Grant to Miami.

In 9.7 minutes per game, the 6-foot-6 forward averaged 5.5 points and 2.0 rebounds for the Blue Devils. For the Wildcats, Grant averaged a similar 12.7 minutes per game and 5.6 points, but started four times and shot 47 percent from beyond the arc.

Grant played a significant role in the beginning of the season for Villanova, but gradually he fell out of favor with Jay Wright. After dropping 22 points in a 64-63 win over Pitt, Grant played zero minutes in the NCAA Tournament (against Clemson, Siena and Kansas), and one in the two games in the Big East Tournament.

After a season that lasts five months, players are, needless to say, exhausted. Still, college basketball teams have already started up workouts and semi-practices to get ready for the 2008-09 season.

Saint Joseph’s men’s coach Phil Martelli has a lighter, more unconventional approach.

“What we’ve been doing for the last two-and-a-half to three weeks is just shooting,” Martelli said. “We do some heavy lifting to try to get some bulk, but we try to stay off of their legs. We don’t let them play any pickup, and we very rarely will play one-on-one.”

Pumping iron is a huge part of any college basketball team’s offseason regiment, and the Hawks are no different. Players are often known to drop a lot of weight during the season.

“That’s something that we pay a lot of attention to, [but] we weren’t as bad this year,” Martelli said.

There has been vast debate among fans as well as experts about whether Villanova shooting guard Scottie Reynolds will make a good NBA player. Some people view him as a first-round pick, and others believe he’ll be playing the majority of his career overseas.

But that time might not come yet.

According to a spokesman from Villanova athletic communications, they “have no announcements planned for Scottie relative to the NBA and fully expect him to be a part of the men’s basketball team in 2008-09.”

Villanova would not make Reynolds available for comment.

After a spectacular freshman season, Reynolds was good in 2007-08, but he wasn’t Superman. The First-Team All-Big 5 selection averaged 15.9 points per game and hit 38.3 percent from three, but perhaps as a result of having to take the team on his back in the early parts of the season, he shot only 41.2 percent from the field and had an assist-to-turnover ratio of 1.06.

Coming off of the NCAA Tournament run, should Reynolds go to the league? Leave your comments below.

According to a couple media sources, Brown men’s basketball coach Craig Robinson will be the new coach at Oregon State.

Barack Obama’s brother in law took home an impressive 11-3 record in the Ivy League this year, losing only to Cornell (twice) and Yale in overtime. The Bears lost to Ohio in the first round of the College Basketball Invitational, 80-74.

Oregon State is a member of the Pacific 10, one of the best conferences (if not the best) in college basketball, but the Beavers went a miserable 6-24 record, and an even more pathetic 0-18 in the conference, losing their last 21 games. Yes, you heard me right, 21 games.

The Beavers lost at home to Washington, not a tournament team, 97-59. Their best win last year was against Idaho State. Needless to say, the man who may be leaving Brown after only two years has his work cut out for him.

Is this a good move for Robinson? Was he, in a way, using Brown, just coaching there for two years before leaving? Leave your comments below.

While running on the treadmill at Pottruck today, I caught a few minutes of the college basketball skills competition on ESPN. La Salle’s Darnell Harris took home the three-point contest title, knocking off Chris Lofton of Tennessee. Harris’ strategy was to shoot set shots, barely lifting his feet off the ground, to prevent himself from tiring out. Highlights of the contest and an interview with Harris can be found here. And would you guess which team held him to his lowest, single-game three-point total in non-conference play this season…

Job-seeking coaches, be wary. Tim Floyd called Indiana’s athletic director recently (to get a leg up on the job, or merely to schedule a game, we’ll never know) but apparently had the wrong number. Presto, chango — public relations disaster!

So, Craig Robinson, if you want to talk to Providence about that job, take a bit more care beforehand and don’t end up like this poor guy.

– This post appeared in conjunction with the joke issue on April 10, 2008 – 

Just days after Brown basketball coach Craig Robinson left for Pac 10 bottom-dweller Oregon State, according to a source within the Penn basketball program, the Bears have an offer on the table to Penn coach Glen Miller, and there’s a good chance he’s going back to Providence.

Robinson, who posted an 11-3 Ivy League record and earned a berth into the College Basketball Invitational, left after only two years at Brown.

Miller struggled to a 8-6 league mark, breaking the streak of three-straight conference titles for Penn.

The Bears want to get their head coach locked up for next season, and don’t want to let a disgruntled Miller stay at Penn a minute longer than he has to.

Miller declined to comment when called on his cell phone, but the source (who would only go by the first name of “Vasu”) said the coach was stressed out, and fed up with “a number of things, the lack of [expletive] athletes, the egos on the team, losing to cow colleges like Columbia, Joe Gill, the crappy facilities and a junior varsity program that was able to beat the varsity team in a scrimmage, and let Miller know about it for weeks after.”

Apparently coming to Penn thinking he would receive the calls that Penn and Princeton typically get, Miller still got jammed up his ass by several officials on occasion this season.

Miller also has been disappointed with the city of Philadelphia, calling it, in a December 2006 interview, “filthy, dangerous and with an inadequate subway system that is inefficient, expensive and that’s lack of funding is the only thing worse than the manner in which it is run.” Miller also agreed with women’s coach Pat Knapp’s assessment that “The D.C. Metro is like a Formula 1 racing car, and SEPTA is like a bicycle.”

If Miller does decide to leave, Penn will have a long, tough search process ahead of it. It has been reported that the list of possible successors to Miller should include: Perry Bromwell, Chris “Bubba” Sparxxx, LaShawn “Obie” Trice, Friedrich Ebede, Stephen “I’m better at sports and smarter than you” Danley, Isiah Thomas, The ’stache, The Hawk (which will never die), Tim Legler’s hot Eagles cheerleader wife and Mike Jarvis.

Raise your hand if you had four No. 1 seeds in your Final Four. I did, actually — two years ago. But I was promptly ridiculed by my friends for having a cheap bracket, and I haven’t done the same thing since. Shows what I know.

Obviously, I was less surprised by Kansas’s win over tenth-seeded Davidson than by Memphis’s over second-seeded Texas. (I’m still of the mindset that free-throw shooting matters, but the Tigers reminded me that it doesn’t matter if the game isn’t close.) In the grand scheme of all things basketball, though, Davidson’s loss was far more important. Every year’s Tournament is a testing ground to see how the rest are holding up to the best in college basketball, whether all this parity we keep hearing about is a reality. In that sense, Stephen Curry’s sudden transformation back into mortal man was far more jarring, because what might have become a great Tournament for midmajors turned into a banner Final Four for the elite of Division I.

We had a midmajor in the Elite Eight and had Western Kentucky, whose success came at the expense of another midmajor, Drake, in the Sweet Sixteen. That’s better than last year, when Butler was the only midmajor to win two games (I don’t count Southern Illinois and UNLV) but not the sea change that enthusiastic promoters of the game want us to believe.

So yes, San Diego and Siena won games. And yes, Davidson almost became the next George Mason. But this March has been by no means a step up for midmajors. Four No. 1’s in the Final Four is an insult to the injured. It’s hard to be a fan of the little guy right now and celebrate.