NCAA Basketball george washington Colonials

When we talk about bad decisions by college players considering going pro, we usually focus on guys who should have stayed in school for an extra year. Maureece Rice of George Washington, however, has spent this season proving that it can work the other way as well.

Rice averaged 15.8 points and hit 43% of his threes while leading the Colonials to a third straight tournament bid and declared for the NBA draft. His prospects weren't great, though, so he came back to GW for his senior season. And that's where it all went kablooey. Rice's scoring average dropped to 9.2 a game, he failed in a transition to point guard after Travis King got hurt and ran afoul of coach Karl Hobbs all season. He was suspended on two different occasions and, finally, was kicked off the team last night. The Colonials, wrapping up an awful season, lost to Charlotte shortly after the dismissal but Hobbs refused to credit Rice's absence for the loss.

"It didn't affect us whatsoever," Hobbs said. "I don't know if you guys have been watching the last few games, but it didn't affect us at all."

Since the loss dropped them to 9-16, I think Hobbs is probably right. Rice, Hobbs and the entire GW team would probably be better off if he'd just gone to the D-League, Europe or the local community center instead of coming back to school.

I think Saint Louis coach Rick Majerus is the early front runner for the understatement of the year award. After tonight's loss to George Washington, Majerus said:

"I thought GW played tough on defense. We had some issues. You have to credit GW for playing very well. We have some issues in terms of our offensive proficiency,"

Gee, you think? GW played tough defense and you guys had some issues? Yeah, I'd say so.

The final score was George Washington 49, Saint Louis 20, and the Billikens set the new record for fewest points in a game in the shot clock era. How bad were they? They missed 23 consecutive shots at one point. They finished 7-for-48 (14.6 percent) from the field. They went 1-for-19 from 3-point range. They trailed 25-7 at halftime.

The shot clock was introduced in 1985, and the previous all-time low was 21, once by Georgia Southern against Coastal Carolina in 1997 and once by Princeton against Monmouth in 2005.

But at least Majerus can be happy his team didn't break the all-time record. The fewest points ever by a Division I team was six, set by Arkansas State in 1945 and matched by Temple in 1973.

If you're a careful follower of the American Hockey League, you'll recognize those gentleman to the right as members of the Binghamton Senators. Contrary to popular belief, that's not the only sporting game in town. The Bearcats of Binghamton University, a proud SUNY school like Albany and Stony Brook, field a basketball team. It's okay if that's new information, they've only been around Division I for six years and their 78-94 record hasn't found them any postseason glory. Things are looking up in Upstate New York, though, because they just knocked off George Washington 71-59 for their first win against an Atlantic 10 opponent.

Colonials coach Karl Hobbs took his team up to play the Bearcats because his former assistant Kevin Broadus runs the Binghamton program. He had his boys ready to play from the opening tip. They hit eight of their first 13 shots and jumped to a 25-9 lead. Serbian sensation (it's the first I've ever actually heard of him but I assume he's sensational) Lazar Trifunovic led the Bearcats with 23 points.

GW obviously hasn't gotten the memo that the Atlantic 10 has been among the best conferences to this point. While their mates have been cleaning up on the Big East, they've spent the early season losing to Maryland-Baltimore County and Binghamton. President Bush has cited ongoing debate about the legacy of George Washington, for the first time I'm inclined to agree with him.

Elsewhere on the mid major hardcourts:

A George Washington University freshman has declared for the NBA draft. And if your first response to that sentence is that you weren't aware that George Washington had any freshmen who were NBA prospects, that's because this guy isn't really an NBA prospect.

His name is Monty Singh Harika, and he's an 18-year-old, 6-foot-5, 180-pound pickup basketball player who isn't even on the George Washington team. He played in high school, but the most points he ever scored in a game was two. But he filed the necessary paperwork to get his name entered in the draft, telling D.C. Sports Bog, "I'm just trying to get all my publicity now."

Two years ago a random LSU student entered the NBA draft, saying he wanted an NBA team to give him a tryout. That didn't go anywhere, and this won't either, but it's a lesson to all of you out there that if you're willing to do all the paperwork, you too can have your name listed among the eligible players for the NBA draft.

Was it really so long ago that the A-10, not the Missouri Valley Conference, was considered the best of the rest in basketball? Temple, UMass, Xavier, St. Joe's and even St. Bonaventure and Rhode Island made it seem like a conference that was serious about asserting its presence nationally and in the NCAA Tournament. Then, it all fell apart. It wasn't overnight, but it seems that way now.

St. Bonaventure was decimated by academic scandals that included trying to slip a kid in with a certificate in welding. Rhode Island payed a steep price for bringing in Jim Harrick. UMass had delayed penalties from Marcus Camby and the John Calipari time. Temple slipped in the final years of John Chaney. St. Joe's reached its peak in 2003, but has had to work back up from there.

Lately the conference has been lucky to get two bids to the NCAA Tournament. Only Xavier has remained consistent in this group and George Washington has built itself into a power in the conference.

If the conference is going to have another surge, the last three years will be the ones in which the foundation was laid with the coaches that are in the conference.

• UMass hired Travis Ford, who has quickly put the Minutemen up near the top of the A-10 and was rewarded with a new 5-year extension this week.

• John Chaney retired last year, and Temple hired Fran Dunphy from Penn to rebuild the program.

• Karl Hobbs at George Washington has remained, as has Phil Martelli at St. Joe's to keep the programs in good shape.

• Xavier made the relatively smooth transition from Thad Motta to Sean Miller who just signed a new extension.

• Rhode Island hired Jim Baron away from St. Bonaventure several years ago and he has quietly dug them out of the Harrick mess into a quality program.

• Even Duquesne seems to be making an effort to improve with last year's hiring of Ron Everhart from Northeastern.

• Now, even St. Bonaventure is trying to get something back, by hiring Mark Schmidt from Robert Morris, where he had done solid work building up an NEC bottom-feeder.

That's not to say that all of these hirings will work or that several won't leave for bigger programs. It's that the overall quality of coaches and recruiters in the A-10 may be getting to one of its highest levels in a decade.

UNC and Georgetown are the Nos. 1 and 2 seeds in the East bracket and if both teams can reel off three wins, they will face each other in the Elite 8 in two weeks.

The most memorable tournament meeting between these teams was when the 2nd-seeded Tar Heels faced the 5th-seeded Hoyas in the 1982 National Championship. Some think this game -- and this shot -- put Michael Jordan on the map, but if it wasn't this it almost certainly wouldn've been something else:

That was Georgetown's Fred Brown passing the ball to a very surprised James Worthy as time expired. Yeah, it's a crappy way to lose a game. If you're dying to know what happened, here's the Washington Post account dated March 30, 1982, written by some dude named Wilbon.

Conference: Atlantic 10
Record: 23-8, 11-5 in conference
RPI: 74
How They Got In: Won the A-10 Conference Tournament over Rhode Island 78-69.
Seed/Bracket: 11/East (East Rutherford)

Mascot: Colonials. Kind of self-explanatory when your school is named after the General of the Colonial Army -- which happens to be the name of the GW student fan group for the basketball team.

Big Win: They knocked off Virginia Tech 63-62.

Notable Loss: Took a 19 point beating at the hands of Providence.

Player You Should Know: Maureece Rice was a third team All-A-10 and the MVP of the A-10 Tournament (PDF), but the guy to keep an eye on is Senior Guard Carl Elliot. He is the top assist guy for them, second in scoring, and a solid rebounder. He is also an excellent defender. He does what you want to see from a point guard. He makes the players on his team better.

Outlook: This is their third straight trip to the NCAA Tournament for GW. They have 3 seniors in the starting lineup. They won't be easily intimidated by an opponent. They are fully capable of a 1st round upset if they get a decent seed.

I don't mean to pick on Mike Jarvis, and I definitely don't mean to pick on Yahoo Sports, an outfit I like a lot. But I saw something today on D.C. Sports Bog that I thought merited some discussion. Yahoo has hired Jarvis, the former George Washington coach, as a new college basketball columnist, and I think his first column points to the problem with so many ex-coaches and ex-athletes who are hired as analysts.

Take a look at his first three paragraphs:

In a few weeks the Madness will officially begin – March Madness, that is. As the newest member of the Yahoo! Sports team, I am looking forward to bringing my experience in the college game to you through analysis and commentary as we close in on Selection Sunday.

Before you know it, 65 schools will start the journey of a lifetime. Four schools will end up in the Final Four and one will cut down the nets on Monday, April 2, in Atlanta.

Last year, the George Mason Patriots, from the Colonial Athletic Association, upset North Carolina and Connecticut on a most unlikely journey to the Final Four. Could history repeat itself with another mid-major team?

Did you learn anything from that? Read anything you found insightful? Even if you clicked the link and read the whole thing, did you really pick up any particular knowledge of college basketball you didn't already have?

Jarvis has forgotten more about basketball than I'll ever know. In virtually every case, ex-coaches who become commentators are far more knowledgeable about their sport than the people who got into the industry by studying journalism or broadcasting. And yet that knowledge so rarely translates into anything truly informative. I'm genuinely asking here: Why do good coaches so often fail to use the communication skills a coach needs when they have to reach a broader audience? I wish Jarvis well in this new endeavor, but he's not exactly off to a great start.

Throughout the season we'll look at bubble teams and assess whether they have a better chance of ending up in the NIT or the NCAA Tournament.

Team: George Washington

Record: 7-2

Best win: Virginia Tech at home

Worst losses: USC and Providence on the road

Comments: We'll learn a lot about the Colonials on Thursday, when they take on Air Force. They've had two weeks to get ready for this one, and Air Force is the best team they've played this year. Junior guard Maureece Rice was the Atlantic 10 Conference Sixth Man of the Year last year. Now he's a starter and he and Carl Elliott get almost all the minutes in the back court. Rice and Elliott have been shaky as shooters this year, especially in that loss to USC, when they combined to shoot just 10-for-29 from the field. The one thing they can do is force turnovers: Elliott is seventh in the nation in steal percentage.

Other views: Sportsline calls GW a bubble team. They're currently not ranked in either the media or coaches' polls. They rank 74th in RPI, 68th in Ken Pomeroy's ratings and 68th in the Sagarin ratings.

Verdict: They're in the mix with Xavier, UMass, Dayton and Saint Louis for A-10 supremacy, but without winning the conference tournament they'll be very unlikely to get to the Big Dance.