Games 37, 38 and 39: The ascent to Madness begins

Welcome to the best week-and-change of the year for college basketball fans.

Betwen now and Friday, I expect to be covering no fewer than 17 games here on the blog. This coming Tuesday, I'll head to New York for three days at the Big East Tournament, with a slight detour Tuesday night to check out Penn at Princeton.

Then, on Friday, I'll be in Atlantic City for the quarterfinal quadrupleheader at the Atlantic 10 tournament.

Unfortunately, I won't be at any games on Saturday. That night is my grandmother's 95th birthday party, and I want to wish her full health and many more years of celebrations here in public. She means a great amount to me, so I think you all can understand why I'll be off the grid that day.

But my Philly.com colleagues will be jumping in to help bring you live coverage of Villanova's and Temple's games that day, so don't miss me too much. I'll be back Sunday for our annual Selection Sunday liveblog party.

Before we get to any of that, though, we have a monster slate of games. I'll be at three - West Virginia-Villanova, La Salle-Saint Joseph's and Dartmouth-Penn - and I'll combine them all into one live blog throughout the afternoon and evening.

There's also Temple's last home game of the year, against George Washington. Now since I know you all think I hate Temple, I'll tell you that I'd go to all four but I'd much rather watch complete games than small portions of each. And as the Temple game tips off at 2, I'm not sure I'd be able to make more than the last few minutes if I stayed for the entire Villanova game.

So go right ahead and keep bashing me. I can take it.

Anyway, here are today's scoreboards. There's also the weekly stats compilation. Enjoy this mammoth day of hoops action.

City six scoreboards:

West Virginia at Villanova, 12:00 p.m. (CBS)
George Washington at Temple, 2:00 p.m.
La Salle at Saint Joseph's, 4:00 p.m. (Comcast SportsNet)
Dartmouth at Penn, 7:00 p.m.

Other games include:

Purdue at Penn State, 2:30 p.m. (Big Ten Network)
Rider at St. Peter's, 2:30 p.m.
Harvard at Princeton, 6:00 p.m.
Rutgers at Pittsburgh, 4:30 p.m.