NCAA: Shots, Shouts and Echoes

As the dreadfully-played NFL playoffs continue to lose their hold on the imagination of sports fans, January is no longer a month for ignoring college basketball.

Weekends in the first month of the year are best spent surveying the conference border wars in the cages, coliseums, fieldhouses, auditoriums, pavilions, and arenas across this land.

The hot-and-heavy action from the first Sunday of January was enough to stir up images of March, and to make one forget about the stumbling and bumbling on the gridiron.

Two games from Sunday's slate of college action, both punctuated with twin game-winning threes from the right wing, showed why college hoops is no longer a March-only sport. January jubilation (along with February frenzy) sets the stage for March Madness and the suspense of Selection Sunday. Just ask Eddie Fogler and Mike Davis.

Fogler's South Carolina Gamecocks, after a bottom-rung regular-season finish in the SEC last year, made a bold run to the semifinals of the SEC Tournament, sending conference power Auburn to overtime and nearly earning a chance to play for an automatic bid. With a number of seasoned and talented sophomores in the fold, South Carolina opened this season as one of the more promising young teams in the country. However, due to the suspension of freshman sensation Rolando Howell, the loaded Gamecocks didn't make the splash many thought they would.

Entering the SEC season-opener on Sunday, the Gamecocks were rewarded with a date against the conference's best team (by NCAA Tournament standards), the fifth-ranked Florida Gators. Facing Florida's depth and the inside presence of Gator center Udonis Haslem, South Carolina faced a tall task if it wanted to get a confidence-building, tournament resume-making win it desperately needed. Somehow, the Gamecocks managed to chip away at a 10-point deficit in the game's final five minutes. Somehow, South Carolina managed to get Haslem in foul trouble and limit the imposing big man to just four points. And somehow, without the highly-heralded Howell making much of an impact, South Carolina found itself down by two with three seconds left. Then, one of those magical moments that defines a season cropped up for the Gamecocks, as reserve three-point-shooting specialist Travis Kraft, cold off the bench, promptly got back his own inbounds pass and swished a 24-footer from the right wing. Ballgame.

Don't tell Fogler, Kraft, Howell, or any of the 11,600 fans in Columbia that early January basketball doesn't mean anything. The Gamecocks will have their hands full in an SEC that is extraordinarily deep this year (then again, so will everyone else), but getting this first win will go a long way toward building their profile for the selection committee.

Ditto for the Indiana Hoosiers and their first-year coach, Mike Davis, whose life has understandably been a locus of uncommonly high pressure and anxiety over the last few weeks. The Hoosiers got to spend the first weekend of their conference season at home against Florida's opponent in last year's national championship game, the top-ranked Michigan State Spartans, who entered Bloomington's Assembly Hall with a 23-game winning streak. For a team that has had its share of devastating defeats, the most recent one coming just before Christmas against another struggling big-name program, Kentucky (after which Davis lost his cool in a postgame press conference), the Hoosiers needed to slay the Big Ten's beast. The storyline and the stakes were set. Could Indiana possibly rise to the occasion and give Davis the boost he had to have entering the conference grind?

Sure enough, with the clock running out, Indiana's Kirk Haston classically, magically elevated above two Spartan defenders, the scene made for something out of "Hoosiers," and promptly swished home a trifecta to give Indiana an enormously significant early-January win, 59-58 over the defending champs.

Don't tell Mike Davis that this game wasn't anything less than gargantuan. After all, he simply knelt on the court and bowed over in an act of thankful supplication after Haston's shot went in.

Are the Gamecocks and Hoosiers NCAA Tournament locks? Hardly--the Floridas and Michigan States are still in much better shape. But for one early January afternoon, it felt that two Tournament tickets might have been punched. Put it this way: if the selection committee picks its teams with a punch ballot, then the chads next to South Carolina and Indiana just became a little bit dimpled.