We all know UConn (19-8, RPI #41) will be going to the NCAA Tournament, but how about those Fairfield Stags (19-10, RPI #94) and those Hartford Hawks (16-12, RPI #169)?

Well, Fairfield is just one win away from qualifying. The Stags, who gave #1-seed North Carolina a big scare as a #16 seed in the 1997 tournament, need only to beat Manhattan tonight at 7:00 PM Eastern time in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference championship game, and they’ll be back in the Big Dance. (Judging by their RPI, they’d probably be a #14 or #15 seed this time.)

The University of Hartford team, meanwhile, is still two wins away from an NCAA bid. The Hawks need to beat Vermont tonight in the America East conference semifinals at 9:30 PM Eastern time, and then win the conference title game (against either Boston University or Northeastern) on Saturday at 11:30 AM Eastern.

Go, Nutmeggers, go!

UPDATE, 1:44 PM: Breaking news: Georgia, projected as a #3 seed by SI.com, is going to fire its coach (former UCLA coach Jim Harrick) and skip the NCAA Tournament because of alleged NCAA violations. Wow!

USC’s recently hapless men’s basketball team (11-16, 6-12 Pac-10) managed to qualify, barely, for the Pac-10 tournament with a 86-68 win Saturday over Washington State, ending a seven-game losing streak. (Only the Pac-10’s top eight teams get to play in the conference tournament. With a loss, the Trojans would have been in danger of finishing ninth.)

Better yet, our good friends at UCLA came through for us — unlike at the end of the football season — by beating Washington, 83-72, thus giving us the #7 seed instead of the #8 seed in the conference tourney. Why is this important, you ask? Because it saves us from playing the nation’s top-ranked team, Arizona, in the first round! That unenviable task falls to the Bruins; we’ll be playing Stanford, second in the conference and 17th in the country, at 6:40 PM Pacific time on Thursday. (If Washington had beaten UCLA, they’d be playing Stanford and we’d be playing Arizona. Instead, Washington is staying home, having finished ninth in the conference.)

USC must win the Pac-10 tournament in order to qualify for the Big Dance (a.k.a. the NCAA Tournament). That means we must stun Stanford on Thursday, upset either Cal or Oregon State on Friday, and win the conference title game on Saturday… which means we need to hope UCLA, Arizona State or Oregon upsets Arizona before we have to deal with them. (Say it with me, again: Go Bruins! Go Bruins!)

If we did win the tourney and make the NCAAs, we’d probably be seeded around #13 or #14, judging by our RPI rating. (Well, judging by our current RPI, we’d be ranked #15 or #16, but presumably we’d move up a bit if we won three tournament games against good Pac-10 teams.)

In other news, the women’s basketball team lost in the first round of their Pac-10 tournament, 64-63 to Washington. The Women of Troy finish 14-17 overall, 8-10 in the conference.

Meanwhile, back at my other alma mater, Newington High School’s #3-seeded ice hockey team lost to #11-seed Suffield, 3-2, in the Division I state tournament quarterfinals Saturday. Bummer. The Indians finish their season 18-5-1.

Oh, well. There’s still the boys basketball team to root for. Those Indians, seeded #8 in Class LL with a 15-5 record, play at home Wednesday against either Newtown or South Windsor in the second round of their state tournament.

USA Today has an article today discussing something I’ve been worrying about for weeks now, and especially for the last few days: what if news coverage of the Iraq war pre-empts CBS’s coverage of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament?

The timing increasingly appears to be setting up perfectly for a direct conflict between March Madness and Middle East Mayhem. With the U.S. and our allies preparing to set Monday, March 17 — that’s a week from Monday — as Saddam Hussein’s final deadline, and the NCAA first round scheduled to begin Thursday, March 20, it now looks very likely that a war against Iraq will, at the very least, complicate CBS’s four-day blitz of NCAA first- and second-round coverage.

Here is what USA Today is reporting:

If war news pre-empts any CBS coverage of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, the network’s obvious alternative is to move games to cable channel TNN — both are owned by Viacom. But that might raise an odd issue. Broadcast networks such as CBS often use regionalized, rather than national, sports coverage. Affiliate stations are used to switching back and forth between simultaneous games.

“And we’re talking to (Viacom channels) Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite and TV Land,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out how we could do four separate feeds. It’s a lot more complicated.”

There is also the possibility, according to various reports, that some games could end up on, of all places, MTV.

Meanwhile, the Grand Forks Herald reported Sunday on the NCAA’s own contingency plans.

Perhaps I should replace my annual Living Room Times NCAA pool with a contest predicting possible outcomes of the war…

USC’s rather dismal men’s basketball season continued Thursday with a 73-67 home loss to #21 Stanford. Not that the unranked Trojans were expected to win — but they should have. USC had plenty of chances down the stretch, but kept missing critical shots, taking stupid shots at key moments, and basically just failing to capitalize on their opportunities. Becky and I were there, and saw the miserable scene unfold before our eyes.

Of course, it didn’t help that the refereeing was horrible. USC got called for several ridiculous fouls late in the first half and early in the second half that resulted in Stanford getting points that would later prove crucial. And the Cardinal got away with a number of blatant fouls near the basket that prevented USC from scoring. And one point, I yelled out in the referees’ direction, “How much is Stanford paying you?” Becky later stated, “You are the worst referees in America! We should drop you on Iraq!”

The Poynter Institute says the TV media did a good job covering yesterday’s tragedy. I tend to agree. My dad does, too. He points out that “Dan Rather, very admirably, kept UNDERLINING and EMPHASIZING and JUST TO REITERATING many things.” Of course, Dan Rather always does that. Dan Rather probably insists on providing his doctor “context and perspective” every time he goes in to report that he’s got a cold.

I’m waiting for the Stephen F. Austin student newspaper, The Pine Log, to post its Monday morning issue online. Stephen F. Austin University is in Nacogdoches, Texas, so I wonder what kind of coverage they’ll have.

USC’s Daily Trojan, for its part, has no appreciable coverage of the shuttle tragedy. But it does have coverage of USC’s 91-76 win in men’s basketball over #22 Oregon. (I was going to go to that game, but the shuttle tragedy and all this blogging threw my weekend schedule way off. I still have tons of homework to do.) The upset victory is a rather significant development, considering the Trojans have been sucking it up big-time most of the season. Maybe there’s hope for an NIT bid yet!

Yesterday in men’s basketball: Pennsylvania 99, USC 61.

That’s right, the Trojans were creamed by the Quakers (5-4), an unranked, thoroughly mediocre Ivy League team that boasts losses to such powerhouses as Drexel and Delaware. And the game was in Los Angeles, for heaven’s sake. USC is now 6-5, with notably ignominious defeats at the hands of Rhode Island, UC Santa Barbara, and now, Penn. Hey Trojans — how do you spell NIT? (And guess what: On Thursday, we get to play #2-ranked Arizona. Oh, goody.)

Another ouch, in women’s basketball this time: the Women of Troy (6-9) lost to archrival UCLA, 72-64.

I miss football season already.

Men’s college basketball: USC 85, UCLA 80!

In a basketball game that apparently had all the appeal of a Gray Davis-Bill Simon campaign, the USC Women of Troy out-sucked the UConn Huskies on Sunday, shooting 18 percent from the field en route to a 68-44 loss to the defending national champs at the Hartford Civic Center.

Said UConn coach Geno Auriemma, referring to his own team’s performance in a game where the Huskies gave up 30 turnovers: “That was the most god-awful exhibition of basketball I have ever witnessed.” And yet USC still managed to lose by 24 points. How? Well, there was that little 18 percent thing — the lowest shooting percentage in school history. And then there was, um, lack of effort? “None of us were really in the game, me personally in the first half,” said USC star Ebony Hoffman. “We all could have played a lot harder.” So much for the notion that everybody puts on their “A” game when facing the team with the bullseye on its back. Sheesh.

It should be noted that I’m basing all of this on news accounts, since I couldn’t watch the game in person or on TV. Which reminds me of the really frustrating thing about it: USC played UConn today in Connecticut, and then next weekend they play Tennessee in Los Angeles. If those two games were reversed on the schedule, I could have gone to both. But as it is, I can’t go to either one. I was Los Angeles today; next weekend, I’ll be in Connecticut. D’oh!

In a game that saw each team prematurely celebrating victory within the space of a few seconds, the USC men’s basketball team lost at Rhode Island in overtime tonight, 73-71, after an apparent game-winning three-pointer at the buzzer was waved off when an instant replay showed it was released after time expired. The Trojans had mobbed each other on the court after the shot, only to learn it was no good.

The Trojans only had their last-second chance because Rhode Island’s players stupidly began celebrating on the court after hitting an apparent game-winning shot of their own with 2.2 seconds left. USC took advantage of the Rams’ premature celebration to rush the ball up the court unchallenged, but Desmon Farmer’s shot was just barely too late.

USC coach Henry Bibby complained that Rhode Island should have been assessed a technical foul for its on-the-court celebration after the go-ahead basket with 2.2 seconds to go. Oh, well. But hey, at least UCLA lost, too.

In brighter news for USC fans, the women’s volleyball team — ranked #1 in the country — went to Santa Barbara and swept the #6-ranked Gauchos, 3-0, to finish their reulgar season 24-1. The NCAA Tournament will begin Dec. 5, with the Women of Troy favorites to win the national title.

USC’s football team beat Arizona State, 34-13 on Homecoming Day, to keep the Trojans’ Rose Bowl hopes alive. USC now just needs to beat UCLA next week, and hope Washington State loses to Washington next week and to UCLA on Dec. 7. (Or, hope Washington State wins both of those games, and hope either Miami or Ohio State loses to somebody, so Washington State will go to the national-championship Fiesta Bowl and USC will weasel into the Rose Bowl via the back door.)

Meanwhile, USC’s women’s soccer team beat San Diego on Friday, 1-0 in overtime, to advance to the second round of the NCAA Tournament. The Women of Troy’s next opponent: archrival UCLA, tomorrow at 1:00 PM, for the right to play in the Sweet 16.

Also on Friday, the women’s basketball team won their season opener, the women’s volleyball team swept UCLA, and the men’s water polo team beat UCSB.

Hail the conquering Trojans!

Getting back to football for a second: it’s too bad Ohio State pulled off another close victory, beating Illinois by a touchdown, because a Buckeye loss would have improved USC’s Rose Bowl hopes a lot (by improving Washington State’s Fiesta Bowl hopes). But Texas’s loss to Texas Tech is very good news for USC; if Texas had finished in the BCS Top 4, but had failed to win its conference (which seemed likely), the Longhorns would have gotten an automatic at-large BCS bid. Now that almost certainly won’t happen, which opens the door a little wider for the Trojans to secure that bid… to the Rose Bowl if the Cougars go Fiesta, or perhaps to the Orange or Sugar Bowl, even if the Cougars don’t. Only time will tell.

One more thing, not USC-related: the Newington High School football team lost a heartbreaker to Bristol Central, 26-20, Friday night at home. The Indians had a chance to make a late comeback when Bristol Central had a 4th-and-1 at their own 39 with 2:20 left, but before the Rams could even snap the ball to punt it away, the Indians committed a personal foul, giving Central an automatic first down and sealing the loss. Newington falls to 3-7 on the year. Still, the Indians have a chance to wrap up their best season in years — and their first Thanksgiving win since I was in middle school — when they play lowly Wethersfield (1-8-1) on Thanksgiving morning. Let’s hope for the best. Go Indians!