Here's Georgetown's Patrick Ewing Jr. at Thursday night's college basketball dunk contest in San Antonio:

Amazingly, that behind-the-back dunk didn't even get Ewing past the first round of the competition, as his first dunk was incredibly weak. Arkansas senior Sonny Weems won the title. You can see Weems' between-the-legs dunk (which in my view isn't nearly as good as Ewing's) after the jump.

When the seedings were announced for the NCAA tournament on Sunday, there was a scramble for the next level of seedings. No, not the N.I.T. or College Basketball Invitational ... but the hotels which will host each of the eight teams in the site.

Take Raleigh, for example, which hosts games of Friday and Sunday. The East's top seed North Carolina gets to stay at the Embassy Suites in nearby Cary, NC (by the way, it is just a 20-mile ride from UNC's campus to the game). Georgetown, the #2 seed in the Midwest will be at a Sheraton in Raleigh.

#16 seed Mount St. Mary's gets a Holiday Inn near the NC State campus. #15 seed Maryland-Baltimore County gets a Holiday Inn near a mall.

The director of sales and marketing for the Holiday Inn Brownstone has no problem with his hotel's low-seeded status.

"We know our place in the community," Kevin Johnson said. "We're not a four-star hotel, but there were probably 20 hotels who put in for this. So we look at it as a 'glass half-full' situation."

I guess.

Georgia wrote the most improbable of endings to its stunning run through the SEC Tournament today, winning its third game in 30 hours to earn a spot in the NCAA Tournament.

The Bulldogs improved their overall record to 16-16, but they sure haven't looked like a .500 team lately. After an SEC season in which they won four games and lost 12, they've completed an SEC Tournament in which they won four games and lost none.

The first two of those wins were in overtime, and thanks to a tornado damaging the Georgia Dome, the final three wins had to happen over the course of just two days, with Georgia winning an almost unprecedented two games on Saturday before winning the title today.

Georgia coach Dennis Felton, who was on the hottest of seats entering this Tournament, now appears to be safe in his job. It would be hard to justify firing the coach whose team is the best story in college basketball, and that's just what Felton's team has become.


Previously on FanHouse:
Dennis Felton Thinks His Team Has Been Eliminated From the SEC Tournament
Dennis Felton Leads Georgia to Two Wins in One Day, Drawing Praise From Bob Knight
Georgia Beats Arkansas, Advances to Big Dance With SEC Tournament Title

With the damage suffered to the Georgia Dome by severe weather during the end of the Alabama-Mississippi State game last night, the Southeastern Conference has decided to move the tournament to Georgia Tech's Alexander Memorial Coliseum.

Early Saturday morning, SEC director of communications, DeWayne Peevy, told ESPN.com by phone from Atlanta that Georgia and Kentucky would play at noon Saturday in a makeup of the postponed quarterfinal on the campus of Georgia Tech at the Alexander Memorial Coliseum, instead of the storm-damaged Georgia Dome. The first semifinal pitting Tennessee and Arkansas would take place at 6 p.m. while the second semifinal between the winner of Kentucky-Georgia and Mississippi State will tip at approximately 8:30 p.m.

Alexander Memorial Coliseum holds just over 9,000 people so the league is limiting attendance to just the players' families, cheeleaders, bands and the normal credentialed people. There will be refunds for people who held tickets to the semifinals and beyond.

Word is that the SEC wanted to just name co-champions by having the Kentucky-Georgia game on Saturday and both semifinals on Sunday. However, the NCAA told the conference that not having a conference championship game would force the committee to take away its automatic qualifier.

It's early march, which means it's time for us to hang on every word spoken by Joe Lunardi, the ESPN bracketologist who has carved out his own niche as the world's foremost authority on which teams are getting into the NCAA Tournament and which teams will be left out.

Lunardi is the guru of the Bubble, so what Lunardi said on ESPN Radio today was particularly interesting. Explaining why he wouldn't want to expand the Tournament field beyond 65 teams, Lunardi said, "The bubble is pretty bad."

Lunardi hasn't updated his bracket with the weekend's action, but going into the weekend he listed Arkansas, Arizona State, Virginia Tech and Maryland as the last four teams in, with Florida, Syracuse, Saint Joseph's and Western Kentucky as the last four out.

Fans of those eight teams won't want to hear that the bubble is bad, but Lunardi is basically right: The bubble teams aren't particularly good basketball teams, certainly not good enough that it's realistic to think they could win six straight games to win the title. So while the bubble teams are the ones that garner the most attention at this time of year, the bubble really isn't very good. And expanding the field would just make the bubble worse.

CBS has complete control over the games in the NCAA Tournament. What games are shown. Where they are shown, and most importantly -- when they will choose to switch them over to another game. Let's just say that the people at CBS Sports did nothing to inspire confidence today.

A double-header of basketball on CBS featured Arkansas at Kentucky to lead things off. The game was tight the entire way. Kentucky had a lead with just under a minute left. Patrick Patterson went to the free throw line with 51 seconds left. Patterson sank the first one to give Kentucky a 58-55 lead. Before he could shoot the second some brilliant mind switched coverage to the opening tip of 10-15 St. John's and 22-3 Duke.

They didn't just switch over in New York and North Carolina. They did it in Kentucky, Ohio, Florida and just about everywhere.

Who made that call? A tight conference game that means something, and they switch to the opening tip of a game that was expected to be and was a complete blowout?

Perhaps this was subtle CBS marketing to get people to sign up for their March Madness package. "Don't trust us to stick with the game you want to see, buy the pay package rather than take that chance."

Solid marketing tactic.

Arkansas blew the baby Gators out of the water on Saturday, leading by as many as 28 points and settling for a 19-point margin at the final buzzer for an 80-61 victory in Fayetteville.

John Pelphrey is proving he can flat out coach and his senior-laden squad is showing they can ball with the best of them. When the Razorbacks play the way they did against Florida, they stand a good chance of beating any team they face. They're big, powerful, fast and athletic. Their forwards and center range from 6' 9" to 7' 0". They have one of the SEC's best point guards in Patrick Beverley. As a team they're in sync and clicking on all cylinders right now.

The Hogs could be the best team in the west. Mississippi State just dropped their second game in a row, this time against the conference-leading Volunteers, but as my colleague Andy Katzer noted, the Bulldogs could have taken the game if not for poor free throw shooting. And Ole Miss seems to be in a bit of a slump; they lost to South Carolina at home on Saturday night.

The Razorbacks are now 5-2 and tied for second overall in the SEC with Florida and Mississippi State.

The Bears have lived off of the three-point shot this season with 40% accuracy. Tonight in Dallas, Baylor could never find the range against Arkanas. A lot of the credit should go to the Razorback defense that really fought through screens and really came out on Baylor to contest many of the shots. It did open a lot of things inside for Baylor, so that they led through most of the game. Late in the game, though, Baylor found itself reverting to what it had done best despite the success inside. They kept trying to hoist threes with minimal success, finishing a dismal 3-20.

Arkansas really tightened up their defense in the second half, and continued consistent offensive output. Sonny Weems came up big late in the game. He shot 7-11 including 3-4 on threes, but most importantly he sank 4 free throws in the final 20 seconds when Baylor had twice closed to within three, to keep it a two possession game.

Arkansas came away with a vital 85-78 win at a road, semi-neutral site. It was their best non-conference win of the season for the Razorbacks. Arkansas hadn't really done anything to distinguish itself in the non-con portion of the season until this win. Their best win to this point had been at home against an inconsistent Missouri team.

When Maryland beat Morgan State on December 6, it was Gary Williams' 131st nonconference home win in 134 tries. When Maryland hosts Delaware on Friday, he'll take his third whack at number 132. After losing to Ohio, Williams and the Terps got beat in College Park again yesterday by their neighbors from American. That's a pretty rare occurance in the 80 year history between the two schools. The only other Eagles win was in their first meeting, sometime in the 1926-27 season. The exact date has escaped memory, something that's unlikely to happen with yesterday's 67-59 win.

Derrick Mercer won't soon forget his 18 points, for example, and Bryce Simon will always remember his career-high 17. None of the Eagles will forget holding the Terps to five first half baskets nor will they need reminders of the way they outhustled, outrebounded and outdefended their more heralded opponents. For a team that's lost to Fairfield and Loyola (MD), this win came out of left field and will have Williams pulling out his hair in search of answers.

Greivis Vasquez had 28 points and the other guard Eric Hayes had 16 but the rest of the Terps only made four baskets. Maryland was so flat and lifeless, though, that its pretty clear the problems go well beyond shooting. Williams benched Braxton Dupree and Landon Milbourne in the second half, probably the first of many changes in what's looking like a long season.

Elsewhere on the mid major hardcourts:

You'll have to excuse my FanHouse mate Ryan Ferguson. He's a diehard Florida fan, which means in the last couple of years he's seen two basketball championships, a football championship, and a Heisman trophy winner. If what is placed before him isn't shiny and unblemished, he naturally recoils just a bit.

Maybe that's what happened when he declared the SEC college basketball's whipping boy for 2008. Sure, he since reneged on that stance a little, talking Kentucky fans (and himself, maybe) off the ledge. But while the SEC basketball season hasn't gone exactly the way anybody expected, there's at least a couple of metrics that say SEC basketball isn't all that bad.

Take Jeff Sagarin's computer rankings, which has the SEC ranked as the fourth best conference in the country. Of course, any fan of the conference would like to see the SEC at the top, but it's still ahead of two other major conference and well ahead of any mid-majors. Two-thirds of the SEC are in Sagarin's top 64, also, and all but one (Auburn) is in the top 100.

Ken Pomeroy's ratings show similar numbers, with the SEC rated fifth-best but still in the thick of major conferences. Like with Sagarin, most of the SEC is in the top 64 of Pomeroy's rankings, and all but one is in the top 100. That top-100 thing might not sound like much, but the only other conference that can claim the distinction is the Pac-10 -- and it's got two fewer teams. The bad news from Pomeroy's system: no SEC teams in the top 25.

One more thought, with defending champs Florida being young (good, but young), and with traditional power Kentucky and preseason fave Tennessee looking for footing, keep an eye on Vanderbilt (with Shan Foster and freshman AJ Oilvy) and Arkansas (with Jon Pelphrey making things fun again in Fayetteville) to make noise in the SEC.