ESPN Men's Basketball

1. Hofstra coach Mo Cassara said Sunday he was still “heartbroken” and was finding it “really hard,” to deal with the aftermath of four players being arrested for thefts on campus. The Pride then went out and got smoked by SMU. Hofstra has had a tough season already, being displaced for weeks by the Presidential debate, and then dealing with Hurricane Sandy and the after effects of a power outage, and now a devastating legal mess with the team gutted by four arrests.

2. Providence coach Ed Cooley said Sunday night he will know the extent of the injury to leading scorer Bryce Cotton. Cotton played only nine minutes in a win over Mississippi State Saturday before injuring his knee. The Friars have won four in a row despite having a depleted roster that could be down to just five scholarship players as well as walk-ons.

3. Memphis coach Josh Pastner was reminiscing Sunday about being involved in two of the late Rick Majerus’ most significant coaching moments in the past 14 years. Pastner coached against Majerus in the NCAA tournament last March in what turned out to be his last win. Saint Louis lost the next game to Michigan State. Pastner was also a walk-on at Arizona when Majerus deployed a brilliant triangle-and-two in 1998 to shut down the favored Wildcats in the Elite Eight in Anaheim as Utah advanced to the Final Four. Arizona was denied the chance to win consecutive national titles after claiming the 1997 championship. Pastner, like so many coaches in the game, called to talk about Majerus, his coaching, the man and overall just what he meant to the game.

Hofstra did not have a conventional October, and November was bound to be strange.

In early October, preparations for the Hofstra-hosted second presidential debate uprooted the Pride for two weeks before, and one week after, the actual debate itself. (The Secret Service doesn't play.) Two weeks later, Hurricane Sandy battered Long Island -- coach Mo Cassara, who lives on the beach, kept us posted from his office turned dog-kennel/storm bunker -- stranding at least one player off-campus in Brooklyn and causing Hofstra to miss another wave of practices in the midst of recovery.

That was among Hurricane Sandy's least-important effects, of course, but it was an effect all the same. With all that preseason turmoil, it was fair to wonder whether Hofstra would be able to make a go of it early in the 2012-13 season. If they stumbled in the first month, it wouldn't be hard to understand why.

In the first week of the season, that appeared to be the trajectory. Hofstra's 91-62 opening loss at Monmouth was an abject disaster. (Monmouth isn't a bad team, but that's a straight blowout.) On Nov. 11, Hofstra again lost by 29 points, though at Purdue that kind of loss was at least far more forgivable. Either way, after two games Cassara's team had been outscored by 58 points, and it was shaping up to be a long basketball November in Hempstead.

And then, Hofstra went ahead and did something like last week ... and totally redeemed itself!

The Pride didn't just bounce back with a win or two. They went 3-0, with wins over quality outfits. The first came against South Dakota State, which features walking college basketball fandom litmus test (I knew him before he signed a major label deal) Nate Wolters, who besides his relative obscurity also happens to be an excellent, potential All-American-type basketball player. The third came against Marshall, in a 103-100 double-overtime thriller, in which the Pride scored 1.13 points per trip on 91 possessions and somehow got the win despite DeAndre Kane's insane 33-point, 11-rebound, 10-assist triple double. Kane headlines a team that very much believes it should be in the NCAA tournament this year -- Marshall was just outside the bubble for much of last season, was no easy out, and comes with a very tough nonconference schedule this season -- and a win over the Herd is not something any Hofstra observer could have rightfully expected even a week ago.

So, yeah, it was a pretty impressive week by Hofstra. Given the wacky preseason, it's even more so.

Do you guys remember free-throw contests? Growing up in Iowa, our local Knights of Columbus always held a regional free-throw shooting contest. It was always the best gym day of the year. If you made the most free throws out of 25 in your class, you moved on to "regionals," whatever those were. (Free throw "regionals" were a little like the "regionals" on "Glee." Or if you're into good television, "Community.") In any case, it was a cutthroat competition, the pinnacle of pressure at the age of 12. I loved it.

Maybe that's why I find the College Insider "Shots From The Heart" competition to be so very awesome. It's a free-throw contest that, rather than featuring 12-year-olds, features college men's head and assistant coaches. The coaches face off in two separate 64-man brackets, shooting each other out of the bracket and slowly advancing to the Final Four, all for the sake of raising awareness of heart disease and benefiting the Skip Prosser Foundation and the American Heart Association. They're even talking a little trash along the way.

Hofstra coach Mo Cassara is participating and documenting his free throw shooting efforts via YouTube, and while watching a coach shoot free throws in an empty gym doesn't sound exciting, it actually kind of is -- especially as Cassara, who makes his final 19 free throws and 23-of-25 overall, gets hot down the stretch.

Twenty-three free throws apparently wasn't enough to get Cassara that much-desired childhood free throw trophy, but if he shoots like this -- especially in the later shots, which are weighted more heavily in the scoring -- he just might make a deep run. Cassara dropped Creighton coach Doug McDermott in the first round, and he'll advance to play Loyola (Md.) coach Jimmy Patsos in the round of 32. Patsos' first-round victim? None other than Kansas coach Bill Self.

Let's give some credit to the coaches involved. There's a lot on the line here. For one, it's competition with rival colleagues. Bragging rights are everything. And if a coach shoots particularly poorly at any point, he could stand to lose that vague sense of corrective superiority he wields when he forces his players to run extra sprints after missed free throws at the end of practice.

In any case, this field [PDF] appears to be wide open. Why? New Mexico coach Steve Alford, a lifetime 89.3 percent free throw shooter in college, is nowhere to be found in this field. With Alford out of the way, surely this is anyone's competition. Perhaps even Cassara's.