midnight madness

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SoCalHoops College News

Midnight Madness A Week Early:
Pepperdine, USC & Others--(Oct. 6, 2000)

We attended the John R. Wooden Award's "SoCal Division I College Coaches Tip-Off Luncheon" yesterday, and aside from all the one-liners, all the "good news-bad news" jokes (and no, Coach Fisher, we won't report that one again, so you won't have any explaining to do. . . but about that stock tip, what was that symbol again? ) we learned that this year, Midnight Madness comes a week earlier than normal, or rather that the NCAA fall evaluation/contact period extends a week later, all of which we might have figured out for ourselves had we looked at a calendar, but why do that when you can attend a luncheon like this with 13 of the best college coaches in the country and have them tell you instead?

We'll have a lot more to say about the coaches' luncheon over the weekend when we have some time to write about it, including some small previews of each of the teams and what the coaches had to say about them. But one thing we did want to put out a reminder about concerns two very important "Midnight Madness" events which will take place next weekend.

Can we still use the term "Midnight Madness?" Didn't some guy a couple of years ago actually try to copyright it or register it as a trademark with the US Patent and Trademark office, requiring all the colleges who hold such events to use terms such as "Midnight Bedlam" or "Midnight Tip-Off"?. . . . seriously, that actually did happen two years ago. . . ahh, but we digress.

Pepperdine's Midnight Madness will held next Friday night (or Saturday morning as the case may be) at Firestone Fieldhouse, on the Pepperdine campus. The event is open to the public, and you'll get the chance to see the entire Pepperdine basketball family, coaches, players, mens and womens teams, along with a lot of screaming students engaging in a lot of wild antics. If you've never been to one of these events, its a lot of fun, and at 12:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, the NCAA let's the players practice with the coaches, so you'll see both men's and women's teams conducting scrimmages.

USC is also reportedly holding a Midnight Madness this year, although assistant coach Silvey Dominguez, who stood in for Henry Bibby yesterday didn't announce the location (or if he did we missed it), and we can't find any mention of the event on the official USC Men's basketball site, and there's nothing on the front page of the official USC Athletics website either. There are announcements for the event plastered all over the BibbyBaby Unofficial USC website (aka USChoops.com), but we couldn't find anything about a location for the event there either, nor anything about tickets or whether the event is open to the public. Several people on the BibbyBaby message board have mentioned that the event will occur at the Lyon Center on the USC campus, and if so, we can only give you one bit of advice: Dress cool (no we don't mean cool as in "baaad", but "cool" as in lightly) because the capacity of the place is pretty small and it has no windows, and it will be a packed hot-house. . . .which is a really good excuse, if ever there was one for the Trojans to start the promised groundbreaking on their new arena already.