Welcome to Championship Week

We have reached the greatest time of year for college basketball fans. March Madness has not truly arrived yet, but Championship Week is the opening act for the biggest party in sports.

Before we get there, however, we need to take a look back at an exhilarating weekend of hoops.

There were big games and clutch finishes all over the place. Cornell clinched the Big Dance's first automatic bid, Pittsburgh smacked down Connecticut for the second time this season, an incredibly young Kansas squad claimed the Big 12 regular season title, DePaul finished a perfect 0-18 in Big East play, and Penn State made me look like I might actually know what I'm talking about by losing at Iowa.

Sunday gave us a thrilling Missouri Valley championship game between Illinois State and Northern Iowa, a Duke-Carolina game whose tipoff wasn't broadcast on CBS because of it, a double-overtime win by Niagara over Rider in the MAAC semifinals, George Mason and Virginia Commonwealth winning the CAA semis and the College of Charleston knocking Stephen Curry's Davidson out in the Southern Conference semifinals.

You might have seen the end of the Niagara-Rider game on ESPN2, which cut away from Santa Clara-Goznaga to show it. If you missed it, the 'Nova fans in particular will be interested to read Bilal Benn's monster line from the game later on in the post.

Oh, I forgot the 29-foot buzzer-beater Penn's Kevin Egee hit at Columbia, giving the Quakers a chance to finish conference play at .500 if they beat Princeton tomorrow. There's video of the shot after Benn's line.

And did I mention the four-year probation sentence that Florida State got slapped with? Give me your best interpretation of what "FSU" stands for in the comments, and if I like one enough I might come up with a prize. Apparently it's not just free shoes anymore.

While it's not quite Sunday anymore as I wirite this, it's nonetheless time for this week's compilation of RPI teamsheet data from Basketball State. It includes Sunday's conference tournament results with one exception: the Portland-St. Mary's West Coast Conference tournament semifinal, which did not tip off until 11:30 p.m. But from what I can tell, the result of that game should not have affected this data very much.

This week's wild card conference is the SEC. Even though all of its teams have suffered really bad losses this season, talk persists of at-large bids. I wonder if the football stadiums next door to the basketball arenas have something to do with that. I wouldn't mind if none of them got in, but someone's got to win the conference tournament. What do you think?

Note that for the Big East, Atlantic 10 and Big Ten, teams are listed in order of conference tournament seeding, not official standings. I figure that makes more sense as we start to look towards this week's games. SEC teams are split by division.