Today, I continue to preview the early season tournaments with printable bracket links, title odds, and commentary. Click here for Part 1.

Legends Classic Printable Bracket

The Legends Classic might be the most highly anticipated early season tournament because of the potential finals matchup between Indiana and UCLA. Both highly acclaimed programs have had struggles in recent seasons, and with both teams returning to the top of the polls, this game will generate more than its normal share of interest.

Indiana should have an advantage early in the season since they can depend so heavily on last year’s starting lineup. But I would expect at least one new face to make a big impact for the Hoosiers. Whether it will be freshman Yogi Ferrell, Jeremy Hollowell, or Hanner Perea providing a key spark, or the oft-injured Maurice Creek, the joy for the Hoosiers will be seeing which new player helps take the team to a championship level.

For UCLA, adding Top-5 recruit Kyle Anderson will be a big help, but the key question will be how such a tall lineup can function effectively. Offensively, UCLA needs to worry about its spacing and figure out what to do when teams dare the Bruins to take threes. Defensively, UCLA may have to play more zone than Ben Howland has ever utilized because his players may not have the quickness to keep perimeter players in front of them. But as Georgetown showed last year, a zone with four players 6’8” or taller can be extremely effective.

CBE Classic Printable Bracket

The expectations for St. Louis are somewhat lower now that head coach Rick Majerus has left the team for health reasons. But the Billikens returning lineup still looks strong enough to win the A10, and early in the season they should be particularly dangerous. Last year ineligibility issues limited the Jayhawks, but this year’s lineup looks like what you would traditionally expect from a Bill Self team. There are the veterans with Final Four experience like Jeff Withey, Elijah Johnson, and Travis Releford who should anchor the team in difficult situations. And there is a talented group of newcomers like Perry Ellis and Ben McLemore who should provide the athleticism to compete against the elite teams. Washington St. lineup is not strong enough to hang with the Jayhawks, but look for Kansas transfer Royce Woolridge to try to have a big game against his former team.

Maui Invitational Printable Bracket

I think that there is a misconception that teams are only exciting to watch if they have Final Four expectations. North Carolina may be in rebuilding mode, but in my eyes that actually makes them more fascinating to follow this year. Freshman Marcus Paige will likely take over at the point-guard slot, and given Roy Williams track record as a coach who lets his elite freshmen recruits play, the team may live or die by how ready Paige is to pilot the Tar Heels fast-break offense. But North Carolina doesn’t have to depend on Paige to win this year. Dexter Strickland has some experience as a point-guard from last season and I would expect him to play major minutes at point-guard as well. But the real key is that North Carolina doesn’t have to run-and-gun to win this year. All the returning talent at the 2-guard spot should mean that North Carolina has the profile of a team that will be lethal in the half-court. If they choose to go four-guards around James McAdoo, they could attempt to replicate what Missouri did last year, and be plenty effective.

More realistically, Roy Williams will try to develop a few more post players alongside McAdoo. And Tar Heels fans may have to wait patiently as freshmen forwards Brice Johnson and Joel James make their share of mistakes early in the season. But it is all part of the broader North Carolina strategy. While Mike Krzyzewski’s Duke teams are usually in top shape in November and prepared to dominate from the start of the season, Roy Williams runs his lineup to be peaking in March. And all the mistakes Paige, Johnson, and James make in November should be worth it late in the season.

As usual, Texas has high expectations because of its talent including seven players who were top 100 recruits coming out of high school. This year the hype is focused on freshman forward Cameron Ridley. But for a team that will be relying entirely on freshmen and sophomores, Texas is surprisingly experienced. Myck Kabongo, Sheldon McClellan, Jonathan Holmes, and Julien Lewis all played major minutes last year and should be poised for breakout seasons. Their experience could very well carry Texas to the Maui title.

Marquette also has a number of quality pieces if only Buzz Williams can find a way to put them all together. How will he best utilize a roster of offensive specialists (like Davante Gardner) and defensive specialists (like Chris Otule) will determine how far the Golden Eagles can fly. But Buzz Williams has proven he can fill in for major losses year after year, and I would expect nothing less this season.

On paper, Marquette’s season outlook isn’t much worse than that of North Carolina or Texas. But this tournament ‘s title odds aren’t based on team quality as much as they are based on match-ups. Texas gets the favorable draw on the south side of the bracket with non-D1 Chaminade and offensively challenged USC or Illinois in the semis. Meanwhile North Carolina gets a favorable first round match-up with a decimated Mississippi St. roster but will face a tough semi-final matchup. On the other hand, Marquette gets the worst of all worlds, likely needing to beat a much improved Butler team to even get a crack at the semis.

Cancun Challenge Printable Bracket

Iowa and DePaul are both slowly improving, but not at a rate that would perk any national interest.

Great Alaska Shootout Printable Bracket

The two most intriguing teams are teams that are switching conferences this year. Oral Roberts is joining the Southland conference where they will immediately be the favorite. And Belmont has dominated the ASun prompting the move to the OVC this year. Look for those two teams to meet in the final.

Battle 4 Atlantis Printable Bracket

Last year’s Maui invitational may have had more big names. But the 2012 Battle 4 Atlantis tournament may very well be the strongest early season tournament that we have seen in a long time. It would not be a surprise for all 8 of these teams to make the NCAA tournament at the end of the year.

I have already explained why Duke should expect a bounce-back season. And while Louisville might have the best defensive team in the nation, the team has enough questions on offense to keep Rick Pitino up at night. I have already written about Missouri’s talented transfer class. And Josh Pastner is becoming a better coach as his roster of talented players matures into upperclassman.

But the real story here is the first round underdogs that could still make a deep run. Minnesota brings back all its key players from last year’s NIT runner-up team and adds Trevor Mbakwe back into the mix. Mbakwe was arguably Minnesota’s best player prior to his injury, and so his return is huge for the Gophers. Former Blue Devil assistant Johnny Dawkins is sadly on the opposite side of the bracket as Duke. But behind superstar sophomore Chasson Randle, Stanford might just be able to steal a couple of wins to give Dawkins a shot at his mentor.

Northern Iowa head coach Ben Jacobson took a veteran team to the NCAA tournament and upset Kansas three years ago, and he has a veteran team again this year. With all but one key rotation player returning, this looks like the year Northern Iowa makes some noise again. Finally, leading scorer Bradford Burgess is gone which will mean VCU will be searching for a new identity early in the year. But you can never count Shaka Smart out in a tournament setting.

Old Spice Classic Printable Bracket

This is another tournament where the mid-major squads should dominate. I can’t quite decide which under-the-radar player nationally I am more excited to see, Gary Bell Jr. of Gonzaga or Jake Cohen of Davidson. All Bell did last season was make 48% of his threes as a freshmen. And he almost single-handedly kept Gonzaga in its NCAA tournament game against Ohio St. last year. On the other hand, on a points per minute basis, few players are as productive as Davidson senior Jake Cohen. Cohen has never averaged worse than 12 PPG, despite never playing more than 62% of his team’s minutes. But when the season was on the line last year, he came up the biggest. Louisville’s defense was extremely stingy last season but all Cohen did was score 24 points against Louisville in the first round of the tournament.

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The older I get, the more I see that one of the things I love most about sports is the variety of it, the diversity of it and the CHARACTERS. Men’s tennis is at its best in many years because, for the first time in a long time, the top three or four players all have wildly different styles. The Tim Tebow story was fun on so many levels, but one of those levels was that he was just SO DIFFERENT in how he played — I’d say we are entering a great time for quarterbacks, because Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers and Eli Manning and Drew Brees and Michael Vick and Cam Newton and Tebow and others are not really alike at all.

-- Joe Posnanski

As a basketball fan, I’ve never understood the division that exists between fans of the NBA and the NCAA. While the NBA has the best basketball players in the world, March Madness is compelling in its own right and as entertaining as anything that happens on the professional level.

In the NBA, the owners of the 30 franchises consider turning a profit and getting an equal shot at the top players a right, regardless of how well (or how poorly) they run their organization and the respective size of their fan-bases. Since every losing team is a few ping pong balls from the rights to a LeBron James, Kevin Durant or Dwight Howard, personnel determines scheme in the NBA.

In contrast, the vast majority of the 344 Division I programs in college basketball have little chance of ever receiving a commitment from a McDonald’s All-American. But instead of petulantly trying to sabotage the sport in a misguided effort to legislate fairness, schools try many creative ways of leveraging the talents of the players they can recruit. As a result, scheme determines personnel in the NCAA.

At Syracuse, Jim Boeheim has made a Hall of Fame career out of running a contrarian scheme, in his case an aggressive 2-3 zone. The Orange traditionally have rosters full of “1.5’s”, 6’3+ combo guards lacking the quickness to defend elite PG’s and the size to defend SG’s, and “3.5’s”, 6’8+ combo forwards lacking the quickness to defend elite SF’s and the size to defend PF’s. However, because Syracuse never plays man defense, the athletic deficiencies of their players are minimized.

So while nearly every NBA team runs a fairly similar system of isolations, pick-and-rolls and man defense, an incredibly diverse array of styles can be found in the college game. On one end of the spectrum, teams like Missouri play four guards and pressure the ball 94 feet for 48 minutes, on the other, teams like Wisconsin run a deliberate motion offense, trying to minimize the number of possessions and shoot at the very end of the shot-clock.

In the NBA, the players are too good for the “40 Minutes of Hell” system (which Mike Anderson has brought to Missouri and Arkansas in the last few years) to be successful. Like Mike Leach’s bizarre pass-happy offense in college football, Anderson’s system, which he learned as a member of Nolan Richardson’s staff in Arkansas in the 1990’s, has philosophical holes that professional athletes can exploit. Nevertheless, that doesn’t make them any less entertaining on the collegiate level.

And with 68 teams set to compete in the NCAA Tournament, there are a lot more surprises in the college game. Even programs ranked in the top-15 like Murray State have barely been on national TV this season.

We have a pretty good idea of how teams like the Pacers and the 76ers match up with the top of the Eastern Conference but not whether an undersized Murray State squad can handle the size of an elite team from a Power Six conference. It’s an open question how Isaiah Canaan’s speed and athleticism translates outside of the Ohio Valley Conference. Non-conference play in college basketball generally ends in late December, so it’s almost impossible to gauge how younger teams like Texas, Washington and Tennessee who have found their groove in the last two months will fare in March.

In the NBA, it’s hard to envision a scenario where Chicago, Miami and Oklahoma City aren’t three of the final four teams left in the playoffs. In the NCAA, as many as two dozen teams have a legitimate shot at making a run at the Final Four.

Of course, in terms of entertainment, none of this makes the NCAA necessarily better or worse than the NBA, just different. But, as Posnanski writes, there’s something to be said for the concept of “different” in the modern sports world. Basketball fans of all stripes should enjoy March Madness; the NBA will still be here in a few weeks.

Andy Katz kicked off the coverage by telling us that in the eyes of Connecticut head coach Jim Calhoun, last year’s five wins in five days Big East championship was more meaningful to him than winning the national championship. If Calhoun’s words don’t seem plausible, then ask yourself this: Would Ohio St. head football coach Urban Meyer be chided for saying beating Michigan is more important than winning a national championship? Sometimes beating your rivals on the biggest stage is the most satisfying thing you can accomplish. How many kids in Philadelphia dream of winning a national title in a dome in San Antonio? Almost certainly there are more city kids whose dream is to step on the floor at Madison Square Garden and win the ultimate East Coast championship. Whether that dream will continue in the future remains to be seen, but for at least one more year, the Big East tournament remains the big stage.

DePaul vs Connecticut

- In case you’ve been living under a rock, at 8-10 in the Big East, Connecticut needs to win this game if they want to earn an at-large NCAA bid.

- Early in the game DePaul’s Royal Clahar wacked Alex Oriakhi in the nose. Oriakhi shoved him out of the way and earned a flagrant foul. After looking at the monitors, the officials decided Clahar’s face slap was innocent and only Oriakhi was punished.

- I thought the game was decided when the score was was 19-15. DePaul’s Jamee Crocket, who was on fire against Seton Hall, had a deep but open look from the top of the key. His three pointer rimmed off. DePaul’s best chance of an upset was if Crocket had another hot day shooting and when his shot was off, DePaul’s chance at an upset bid went from slim to none.

- Doris Burke asked a fair, but biting question about the job Oliver Purnell is doing at DePaul. “Is his system (full court pressure and high-pace) destined to fail in the Big East where there are so many great ball-handlers? Is DePaul simply becoming a repeat of Providence under Keno Davis, with no defense and great offense?” This is a tough call for me. I think what Keno Davis wanted to do and what Oliver Purnell is doing is about upgrading the overall level of talent. You can use a high-pace to help sell the program as a fun place to play. The problem for Keno Davis was that his best players kept leaving. If Oliver Purnell can upgrade the talent level at DePaul, I think he will be willing to play half-court basketball more often, and use pressure more selectively. But when you know you are over-matched in the half-court, why play that style?

- UConn started 7-for-7 from three-point range with Ryan Boatright hitting a corner three, and yet the lead was only in the single digits. Finally Andre Drummond blocked a shot out to center court which led to a Boatright lay-up and the lead was double digits.

- Just before halftime, Jeremy Lamb drove to the basket and went over 1000 points for his career. Lamb had 17 in the first half and 25 in the game.

-The lead ballooned to 63-40 before Connecticut got a little lazy, and you can’t play against DePaul’s pressure defense when you aren’t attacking. But the outcome was never really in doubt. Last year’s first round win was a little more impressive for Connecticut, but the important thing for the Huskies is that they advance to play another game.

- Of note in the final minutes, DePaul’s Krys Faber fouled Andre Drummond who was 0-4 from the line and shoots 31% on his free throws this season. But Faber wasn’t making a legitimate basketball play, (he just hugged Drummond under the basket), and so the strategy back-fired. Faber was called for a flagrant foul, and even though Drummond did miss both free throws, UConn got the ball back.

-Kemba Walker’s mom was in attendance and she remains the team’s good luck charm as Connecticut won 81-67.

St. John’s vs Pittsburgh

-Pittsburgh fans everywhere had to be extremely annoyed early in the game when Andy Katz had a four-minute interview with Steven Lavin. Lavin is certainly loquacious, so ESPN can’t get all the blame for the interview going long, but to ignore the action when the game was competitive early seemed like a bad decision by ESPN’s production team.

-At the end of the first half, a St. John’s player lost the ball and it hit the stantion, (the big arm the backboard hangs from). That should have meant the ball was out-of-bounds, but the officials missed it and Pitt was off on the fastbreak. I rarely blame officials for missing calls, but that seemed like a pretty hard thing to miss.

- As Pittsburgh began to pull away Doris Burke noted, “St. John’s essentially only has two players that can score, Moe Harkless and D’Angelo Harrison.” That’s a harsh assessment, but it really makes Harkless' production all the more impressive. Everyone knows Harkless is going to get the ball and he still scores.

- With Pittsburgh pulling away, the conversation turned to a discussion of the new early entry rules. Essentially players have to decide immediately after the draft whether to declare and that is really going to make for some tough decisions for players like Moe Harkless.

- I felt bad for God’sgift Achiuwa. He had a fabulous day grabbing offensive rebounds but he could not make a bucket to save his life. He missed a number of point blank shots and was 1-10 from the field. Pittsburgh prevailed 73-59.

Seton Hall vs Providence

- Many people believe Seton Hall needed to win this game and beat Louisville to have any shot at the NCAA tournament. Bilas put it this way in the pre-game, “Like most bubble teams, Seton Hall has proven that they can lose games.” 

- After losing to DePaul last weekend, here is how the Seton Hall blog South Orange Juice described Seton Hall’s NCAA chances. “D-E-A-D. Present me as many ridiculously absurd, unconventional Big East Tournament miracle scenarios that you can think of. Seriously, it will be COMICAL. After an 86-58 loss at DePaul on Saturday evening, the Pirates do not even deserve a berth to the BIG EAST TOURNAMENT.”

- And I am guessing the folks at South Orange Juice had some very uncomfortable moments early in this game. Seton Hall came out very tight, failing to score a point in the first 5 minutes of the game. But after falling behind 9-0, eventually the Pirates got hot and won by 32.

- Bad Pun Alert: When Patrick Auda picked up his 3^rd foul in the first half, Bilas noted, “Is he Auda his mind doing that?”

- With Seton Hall up by 27 points in the second half, Andy Katz interviewed Rick Pitino. Unlike the Lavin interview, this was a much more appropriate time to distract from the action, and it provided a nice bit of comedy. According to Pitino, Seton Hall is now officially “in” the NCAA tournament, and they don’t need to win tommorrow’s game (against Louisville) to prove it. Pitino also noted that Ralph Willard (his former assistant and father of the Seton Hall head coach Kevin Willard) had only smiled once the whole game despite the Pirates leading by 27. Seton Hall eventually prevailed 79-47.

Rutgers vs Villanova

- Sean McDonough started the game with a complaint about how the Round of 64 in the NCAA tournament is now called the Second Round and how he thinks that is misleading. “Now people read the record books and see a team lost in the Second Round and think they must have won a game in the tournament! It’s like when the NCAA got rid of Division 1AA because that was somehow viewed as inferior. People still don’t know what FBS and FCS stand for.”

- Late in the first half Rutgers took the lead and the ESPN scoreboard broke. The time and score disappeared. Rutgers took the lead by hitting 5-of-5 threes to end the first half, but the 34-30 halftime lead was short lived. Rutgers started the second half 2-for-20 from the floor and couldn’t mount a serious charge down the stretch.

- It would have been a blowout earlier if not for some mistakes by Villanova. At one point Mouphtaou Yarou stole a pass and Rutgers’ Kadeem Jack was called for the intentional foul in the full-court breakaway. But just when Villanova looked like it could blow the game open Yarou missed two free throws and Villanova failed to score on the ensuing possession. Even with Villanova’s own struggles, they eventually prevailed 70-49.

- In the second half Sean McDonough fit in one more random complaint, this time about how the Big East tournament is too big with 16 teams and how they will have to reconfigure things when there are 18 teams in the league. For the record, I think the Big East can have 18 teams, let everyone play, and still fit the tournament in 5 days. Assuming as when there were 13 teams, they can fit five games in a day, the bracket structure would look like this:

Day 1 – 9 vs 18, 13 vs 14, 12 vs 15, 10 vs 17, 11 vs 16

Day 2 – 8 vs 9/18, 4 vs 13/14, 5 vs 12/15, 7 vs 10/17, 6 vs 11/16,

Day 3 – 1 vs 8/9/18, 4/13/14 vs 5/12/15, 2 vs 7/10/17, 3 vs 6/11/16

I am in favor of inviting everyone to conference tournaments because it gives bad teams a reason to try to get better, and it makes the NCAA tournament a true bracket of 300, not a bracket of 68. But Tuesday at the Big East tournament was a bit dull. Of course, that’s the beauty of college basketball, quantity eventually leads to quality. The number of major conference teams in action is only going to increase over the next few days and the best is yet to come.