Infiniti partnered with ESPN, the SEC, Big Ten, and National Association of Basketball Coaches to deliver a "360 degree view of college basketball." (You have my attention!!!) This will give us insider stories leading up to the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship. For Infiniti, they see it as a way to reinforce their "Inspired Performance" message with elite coaches who deliver stories on how they inspire their athletes.
Coaches involved will include Mike Krzyzewski of Duke, Bill Self of Kansas, Tom Izzo of Michigan State, Roy Williams of North Carolina, and Billy Donovan of Florida. That's a LOT of Final Four bids involved in this. I'm interested to see how they tie this message back to Infiniti, as it feels like two separate messages to me from the outside. Link here.
CBS introduces the top 10 College Basketball games of the past decade. They are making them all available to watch online, in their entirety, for free. The Xavier vs. Ohio State matchup from 2007 kicks this off, at #10.
If you aren't aware, Xavier trailed by 9 with 3 minutes left before a crazy comeback began. A new game gets unveiled every Wednesday leading up to this year's tourney. Link here.
And here’s another one – Last year’s Nova vs. Pitt showdown – tied with 5.5 seconds to go when Nova went coast to coast to end it. Link here.
I liked seeing Bracketville, a site focused on releasing a new 64-team bracket every Monday. Who needs the top 25 poll, when this is the end goal, right? Link here or follow them on Twitter here. Here’s the teams they call locks, as of now:
- ACC – Duke, Clemson, Georgia Tech, Wake Forest
- Big 12 – Texas, Kansas, Kansas State
- Big East – Syracuse, Villanova, Georgetown, Pittsburgh, West Virgina
- Big 10 – Michigan State, Purdue, Ohio State, Wisconsin
- Mountain West – BYU, New Mexico
- SEC – Kentucky, Tennessee
- West Coast – Gonzaga
- Horizon – Butler
- Missouri Valley – Northern Iowa
- Atlantic 10 – Temple
Warning. Shameless plug alert. Ever wonder what college hoops team does the best in marketing themselves online? I've covered these on my blog this season. In case you don’t want to click but just wonder, here’s the best marketing by conference so far:
- ACC: Duke
- Big East: Marquette
- Pac-10: Stanford
- Big 12: Texas A&M
- Big Ten: Penn State
- SEC: Kentucky
- MVC: Wichita State
- WCC: Santa Clara
(No, I don’t sleep much.)
Conference USA introduced a contest for the Tweetest Fan. 
The winner gets an all-expense paid trip to Tulsa. (For the C-USA Men’s and Women’s tourneys, thankfully or else that would be a really weird prize). This is a contest on Twitter, where fans are given trivia questions and asked to get pictures taken at various locations to show their love for all things C-USA. Cool! Click here.
Kentucky raised over $1M for Haiti. In a showing of the power college basketball can have for good, UK actually led a series of initiatives that raised over a million dollars in support of Haiti.
It started with Coach Calipari making a bold statement that he and key partners will match all contributions. And then it continued by competitive coaches (Like Tubby Smith) calling in to donate for the cause. This is a great read, and it also showed me just how great a guy Tubby is. Can you imagine going out of your way to help someone who took over your old job (essentially) succeed? That’s being selfless and thinking about the greater good. And it’s fantastic. Link here.
Finally, I absolutely LOVE this skills video, put together by Club Trillion, the blog by the last guy on the Ohio State bench, Mark Titus. (his website is here). Check out how he shows off his full game, including a hustle montage that is just golden.
Hope you enjoyed this! Come back tomorrow as we move on to the Atlantic 10 Conference!
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