Shootaround

-Coach Mack's press conference apparently contained more information than one story could hold, so Shannon Russell threw some more of it up on her blog. He gives a little bit of information on his early impressions of Marquette and talks about the balance between good scouting and giving the team too much information. Interestingly, he also notes that it is entirely in Jordan Latham's hands as to whether or not the freshman forward makes the trip. At this point, it doesn't appear Latham is a part of things.

-Nick Fasulo over at NBC's Beyond the Arc blog has outlined his favorite ten matchups of the first round. On a side note, I don't like the custom of trying to call the First Four the first round and the round of 64 the second round. The First Four are still play-in games, no matter how the thing gets packaged. You win that, then you've made the big dance.

-Wondering about the decisions the committee made? The RPI could be to blame. Ken Pomeroy looked into this a couple of days ago on slate.com. As with almost everything he writes, this article is both pointed and thought-provoking.

-ESPN has a great little feature about the futures of the current NCAA tourney teams . Each team gets a couple of paragraphs on what they can expect to lose this year and how they've replaced it with incoming players. It's a nice preview of some of the work we're going to be doing here in the offseason. Obviously, we're going to focus more on Xavier and less on the other 67 teams profiled.

-If you enjoy the worldwide leader's feature on the Fab Five last night - and apparently everyone on Twitter did - you'll like this. It's a copy of the letter that Bill Clinton sent to Chris Webber after the infamous timeout he (Webber, not Clinton) called. President Clinton and I don't see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, but I feel like this was a class move from him. If you missed the documentary, track it down and carve out an hour to watch it.

-Early word is that Xavier pulled Gus Johnson as the announcer for the Friday game. I don't have a link for this just yet, but you can trust me on it. Last time Johnson was on the mic and Xavier was on the floor, this happened. Hopefully X can come out on the right end of the scoreline this time around.

-Finally, ESPN's Andy Katz, Pat Forde, and Eamon Brennan all posted some early thoughts on the bracket. It's nice to X picking up some love on the national stage. We're moving towards complete immersion in the tournament process. Enjoy the run up to the best weekend of the year.