Stunned by their school's decision to cut loose Isiah Thomas last Friday afternoon, members of the Florida International basketball team found a clever way to support the fired coach.

As a speaker introduced a highlight video from FIU's season at Monday night's end-of-the-year banquet in the team's honor, the Golden Panthers got up from their table, walked in a single-file line in front of the podium and exited the building en masse.

Freshman guard Tanner Wozniak said seniors DeJuan Wright and Jeremy Allen suggested the walkout before the banquet as a way for the players to show their displeasure with Thomas' dismissal. FIU fired Thomas with two years left on his contract, ending a three-year tenure in which the Panthers went 26-65 and failed to win more than 11 games in any single season.

"We didn't want to disrespect the program at all or anything," Wozniak said by phone. "We just wanted to show our support for Isiah Thomas. He was a great coach, a mentor and a father figure to us. He didn't have a winning record, but you can't build a program in three years."

The timing of Thomas' firing was what shocked both him and his players most. Instead of beginning the search for a new coach immediately after an 8-21 season, FIU waited a month to get rid of Thomas, decreasing the pool of available candidates and making it more difficult for the new coach to land a recruiting class with the spring signing period starting Wednesday.

[ Related: Thomas' risky attempt to restore tarnished image ends in failure ]

When Thomas called a team meeting Friday afternoon following a routine spring workout, Wozniak said players thought it might be to finalize plans for Easter brunch on Sunday. Instead, the coach walked in with a dazed look on his face and announced to the team, "I want to let you know that I have been let go and the whole entire staff has too."

"Everyone was stunned," Wozniak. "We didn't know what to think at first. He was saying his good-byes to everyone and everybody took it pretty hard. It was a pretty hard time because we all loved him as a coach. He was there for us every time."

Scott Drew (AP)At the end of a year in which Baylor produced a Heisman Trophy winner in football, an Elite Eight appearance in men's basketball and a national championship in women's hoops, the NCAA may throw some cold water on the Bears' celebration.

ESPN.com is reporting Baylor's men's and women's basketball teams are facing possible sanctions stemming from an NCAA investigation that revealed more than 1,200 impermissible calls and texts over a 29-month span. The impermissible calls and texts, made by men's coach Scott Drew, women's coach Kim Mulkey and several assistants, have been classified as "major violations" because of their frequency.

[ Also: Thomas Robinson brings along kid sister in declaring for NBA draft ]

The NCAA enforcement staff began its probe into the Baylor basketball programs in 2008 when it investigated the recruitment of women's star Brittney Griner. ESPN.com reported all the coaches named in the report have acknowledged their involvement in the findings and have accepted self-imposed penalties in hopes of diminishing the potential NCAA punishment.

Among the penalties ESPN.com reports Baylor has self-imposed are scholarship and recruiting restrictions for both the men's and women's programs. The NCAA's committee on infractions is expected to announce next week if they deem more penalties necessary for the programs or the respective coaches.

It won't be a huge surprise to see Baylor men's hoops receive NCAA sanctions considering the skepticism with which other coaches have viewed the Bears' sudden rise from Big 12 bottom feeder to Final Four contender. Baylor has reached two Elite Eights in three years under Drew and has another decorated recruiting class set to arrive next season.

The greater surprise from the story is that the Baylor women's program has also been implicated.

Trent Johnson (Getty Images)When Trent Johnson abruptly resigned from LSU on Sunday to accept TCU's coaching job, the move probably raised some eyebrows among those who don't view the move as a step up in the profession.

Dig a little deeper, however, and Johnson's motivation will become clearer.

There's a vocal segment of LSU fans dissatisfied with the job Johnson did in Baton Rouge during his four-year tenure because the Tigers missed the NCAA tournament each of his final three seasons. A strong 2011 recruiting class and an 18-win season last year bought Johnson more time, but he may have needed to make the NCAA tournament next season to save his job despite the surprising departure of center Justin Hamilton to the NBA draft.

Lending credence to that theory is the statement LSU athletic director Joe Alleva released Sunday night that didn't exactly sound heartbroken by Johnson's departure. Said Alleva, "Sometimes coaching changes work out well for all parties involved, and we will take this opportunity to seek out the best coach for the long-term future of LSU men's basketball."

An NCAA tournament berth at LSU next season would not have been impossible with the return of promising sophomores Anthony Hickey and Johnny O'Bryant. The Tigers will lack frontcourt depth without Hamilton, however, and may need to go to a four-guard lineup with the 6-foot-9 O'Bryant in the middle.

TCU doesn't have the returning talent LSU does after graduating its two best players from an 18-win team, but the Horned Frogs job is more appealing now than it has been in the past. Not only will TCU join the Big 12 next season, the Horned Frogs also appear more committed to basketball than in the past assuming they at least matched the $1.2 million base salary Johnson made at LSU. 

Bruce Weber's ad in the Champaign News-Gazette (via Big Ten Network)Bruce Weber has a message for the Illinois fan base that helped run him out of Champaign last month after his Illini missed the NCAA tournament three of the past five seasons.

Believe it or not, it's "thank you."

Weber, who has since been hired by Kansas State to replace Frank Martin, delivered his message to Illinois fans via a full-page ad in Sunday's Champaign News Gazette. The ad features Illinois and Kansas State logos separated by a basketball that houses the following message: "Thanks to everyone in the Illini Nation for a memorable nine years. GO ILLINI & GO CATS! Coach Bruce Weber."

The advertisement is proof Weber deserves his reputation as one of the classiest coaches in college basketball. Not many coaches would make such a gesture after leaving a program on good terms, let alone less than a month after being fired.

Weber compiled a 210-101 overall record in nine seasons at Illinois, but he won just two NCAA tournament games after leading the Illini to the national title game in 2005. By the time his team was midway through a stretch of 12 losses in 14 games to end this season, Weber's fate was a near foregone conclusion.

Perhaps the breakup between Weber and Illinois will end up being a positive for both sides. Illinois has an up-and-coming young presence in former Ohio coach John Groce and Weber gets a fresh start at Kansas State with plenty of talent still on the roster.

Isiah Thomas (AP)

Three years after NBA hall of famer Isiah Thomas arrived at Florida International eager to revitalize the program and his own tarnished reputation, the school acknowledged the experiment was essentially a failure.

FIU fired Thomas on Friday with two years left on his contract, culminating a tenure in which the Panthers went 26-65 and failed to win more than 11 games in any single season. FIU executive director of sports entertainment Pete Garcia released a terse statement indicating that the school has "decided to take the program in a different direction," a decision Thomas apparently found stunning.

"This is the most surprising thing that has happened to me in basketball," Thomas told ESPN.com. "(I've) never been fired before for basketball reasons. This is the first time.

"When I was in Toronto, I was trying to buy a team and I left. When I was in Indiana, Larry Bird told me that he liked what I was doing but he was closer to Rick Carlisle. The whole thing in New York was crazy. This is the first time someone told me that I was being fired for basketball reasons."

Even though lightly regarded FIU only has made one NCAA tournament appearance in school history, Thomas accepted the school's coaching job because he was convinced he could make a winner out of the Golden Panthers.

[Related: Staying or going? Underclassmen weighing jump to NBA]

Thomas had failed to win a single playoff game as New York Knicks president and general manager, but he saw FIU as the perfect place to atone for those setbacks.  He even took nothing in base salary his first season, instead agreeing to a deal where he received nearly half of any ticket revenue or profits from food and beverage concessions and sponsorships.

The apathy of the Miami market to college basketball and the staff's inability to lure top recruits to FIU made it difficult for Thomas to generate the buzz he originally expected.

In case there was even the slightest doubt whether Kentucky's Anthony Davis plans to enter the NBA draft or not, the future No. 1 pick pretty much put that to rest Thursday night on "Jimmy Kimmel Live."

He bemoaned John Calipari making him go to class second semester. He said the first thing he wants to buy with his newfound wealth is a white-on-white Bentley. And he said his mother is the only person in his family who wants him to return to Kentucky.

"She wants me to stay in school," Davis said. "She really doesn't care about basketball. She cares about education. My dad gives her this look like, 'Are you crazy? Did you not see what happened in college the past year?'"

Nobody can blame Davis for putting his basketball future above a diploma right now considering how little he has left to accomplish in college basketball. Davis was the consensus national player of the year as a freshman and led Kentucky to a national championship Monday night, cementing his status as the surefire No. 1 pick in the draft.

Davis did insist that he might bypass the NBA to stay in school or even take over Kimmel's show, prompting a great one liner from the host.

Deadpanned Kimmel, "We do have a two-eyebrow minimum here though."

VCU's Briante Weber and Rob Brandenburg (AP)

One of the unpublicized ramifications of the Colonial Athletic Association's new TV contract with the NBC Sports Group became clear on Thursday.

The league will no longer participate in BracketBusters.

Since ESPN no longer has the rights to televise CAA games, the network cannot include the league in BracketBusters. The conference was aware of this drawback when it signed a deal with NBC Sports Group that begins next season.

The CAA's lack of involvement in BracketBusters is a blow to an event that already often seems light on marquee matchups many years. ESPN has every right to give coveted late February inventory to its TV partners, yet the absence of CAA powers VCU, George Mason, Drexel and Old Dominion will reduce the appeal and name recognition of BracketBusters.

The only other marquee mid-major league fully committed to BracketBusters is the Missouri Valley Conference. Saint Mary's is among the WCC schools that regularly have participated, but fellow league powers Gonzaga and BYU have shied away from it because they don't want to be perceived as mid-major programs.

The impact for the CAA is the league's top teams will have to find other means to upgrade their non-conference schedules enough to contend for at-large NCAA tournament bids. That could mean anything from home-and-home series with other top mid-majors, more appearances in exempt tournaments or even two-for-one deals with power conference teams often reluctant to schedule a CAA school.

For as long as BracketBusters has existed, fans of mid-major teams have debated whether the boost from a win in the event outweighs the blow to a program's at-large hopes from a loss.

Trey Burke (Getty Images)

All the complaining about the weak crop of point guards in college basketball this winter has caused a predictable spring phenomenon.

Underclassmen point guards who'd benefit from another year in school are entering the NBA draft by the droves, gambling they have a better chance to crack the first round this season than by waiting another year when the pool of top point guards may be deeper.

At least seven point guards or combo guards have given up one or more years of college eligibility and declared for the draft the past few weeks. Some, like Weber State's Damian Lillard or North Carolina's Kendall Marshall, are projected mid-first-round picks. Others, like Villanova's Maalik Wayns, Arkansas' B.J. Young or Lehigh's C.J. McCollum, currently aren't projected to be drafted at all.

One of the only point guards on the NBA radar who returned to school is Texas freshman Myck Kabongo, a top recruit who wisely realized that another year of seasoning in college could benefit his stock. Michigan freshman Trey Burke and Kentucky freshman Marquis Teague have yet to officially declare for the draft, but reports Wednesday suggest Burke is leaning in that direction.

A big reason all these young point guards are choosing to come out this year rather than waiting is because NBA teams in need of a point guard don't have many surefire options in this draft.

The most NBA-ready senior point guards in this draft are Kansas' Tyshawn Taylor, Iona's Scott Machado and Xavier's Tu Holloway, all guys who would be very fortunate to sneak into the late first round. No point guard is considered a lock for the upper half of the first round, though Marshall and Lillard have the best chance.