Something for everyone!

A few thoughts before the weekend:

1- I agree with a number of the comments about my bit on court-rushing, and I guess I wouldn't call what the Penn students did inexcusable. I still wouldn't do it if it was up to me, but my question is, if the game wasn't televised, would they still have done it? I see too many games on TV where students rush the court for what I would consider a questionable situation, in my opinion, just so they can be on Sportscenter that night. But this win was special, and maybe it wasn't anywhere near the worst court-rushing I've ever seen.

2- As you may have seen, the athletic department is now offering video streams of games from the Palestra on its Web site. Basically, you pay 10 dollars for the rest of the year and you get basketball and wrestling, including archived on-demand content.

There was a trial run during the Temple game last week, and the last 18 seconds are on the site as a sample. The Saint Joseph's game tomorrow is being offered free as another carrot, so hopefully, as Josh mentioned below, you can check it out if you can't go to the Palestra. Unlike the sample video, this game will have audio, synced up from the radio broadcast with Brian Seltzer and Vince Curran. This will be the case for all the games that have audio, which is still free for the rest of this year.

Finally, there will be some road basketball games available at schools that have the same service. I believe those include Dartmouth, Harvard and Princeton.

According to Brian Head in the Penn athletics marketing department, they are testing the service to gauge the interest of Penn fans before setting up more formal pricing plans, possibly including audio, for next year and beyond.

At this point, Head said, 185 people had signed up for some form of the service, after two days.

And while it may make some revenue eventually, that's not the immediate aim.

"There's significant initial investment, eventually it will be nice to make money, but that's a secondary goal," Head said.

With so many games not televised, and a national fan base, he added, the department thought this would be a good service to the faithful and at least get the school some more exposure.

I think it's a pretty good idea, and we'll see next year what the prices are.

3-As Josh also wrote, the SJU game is not on TV. I tried to find out why, and it's a little complicated and I'm not entirely sure of the reason, but here's what I could figure out. CSTV owns the rights to all Atlantic 10 home games, which tomorrow night is, and they are not airing it. But, they can still sell the game to a local channel, which has not happened.

The question is, why? Two CSTV spokesmen told me that they were not sure of why this specific game was not picked up, but only that there are packages available to local outlets -- such as all Xavier games -- but that this one was not part of one picked up by Comcast SportsNet, which has 14 A-10 games. CSN is showing the Sixers-Hawks game tomorrow night, so that explains why they don't have the game.

But CN8, which has many other local games, doesn't have it either. A spokeswoman at CN8 told me only that CSTV has the rights to the game and they don't, and one of the CSTV spokesmen told me that to his knowledge, CN8 hadn't picked up any games from them this year.

That could be because previously, the A-10 just gave CN8 and other local stations the rights to the games for free, but this year under the CSTV deal, stations have to pay, and they may not be willing to so.

So that leaves a local channel like the CW or My PHL whatever number it is to do it, like they occasionally pick up some Big East games on ESPN +. Basically, it's just a shame that the game isn't on TV, although at least tomorrow we're saved by the free Penn offer.

4- Anything but Uniform: Saint Joseph's

The Hawks, as they were two years ago, are the home team for this game, so they'll be in white and Penn will be in blue.

The SJU home outfits are slightly different from what they were last year.

I still like the jerseys, although the shoulder stripes are starting to look Nike-like. And good use of all of the school colors, including the gray striping.

Hopefully the Hawks will keep their own look and not go down with the standardization that is infecting college hoops.