From Andy Katz via Yoni: The NCAA will begin revealing RPI data this season, beginning in January no less. This should have been done 24 years ago when the RPI was invented, but better late than never. I can’t understand why it took until now for the NCAA to do this. As long as at-large selections have been made, the basketball committee has encouraged teams to play a tough schedule. Yet the system by which they evaluate the difficulty of a schedule has never been publicly available. Now all that changes, probably because the college basketball universe significantly misinterpreted the formula used last season due to the NCAA’s secrecy.

                           FG   3pt   FT    Reb
                      Min  M-A  M-A   M-A   O-T  A F S TO BLK Pts
G. McNamara, Syracuse  39  2-14 0-10 13-14  2-4  5 1 1  2  0   17

To clarify something from yesterday, I don’t really have a team of advanced scouts hanging out in gyms around the country and reporting back to me. More like a team of primitive robots running on my home computer.

Even without scouts or robots, it would be an easy choice as to the most noteworthy performance in any of the four games played last night. It was Gerry McNamara’s first game without a made three-pointer since January 20th, 2004 – 54 games ago. There were only eight players all of last season that went 0-for-10 or worse from long range in one game. Syracuse struggled to beat Cornell in part due to McNamara’s epic bricklaying, ultimately pulling out a 67-62 win. Although, his 13-of-14 effort from the line including three free throws in the final minute made his night not as ugly as it first appears. Such a paradox, that G-Mac.

But make no mistake, last night Syracuse won in spite of McNamara. It’s a bonus that the Orange were able to pull out a victory in what will be their worst three-point shooting game of the season (1-19, 5%).