A tense rivalry game between Marshall and West Virginia was only 97 seconds from the final buzzer Wednesday night when hostilities finally boiled over.

Deniz Kilicli had just scored a basket to give the Mountaineers a seven-point lead when West Virginia's Juwan Staten and Marshall's Robert Goff got tangled up on the floor beneath the basket. As Staten went to get up and run back down court, Goff delivered what appears to be an intentional kick to the groin, igniting tempers on both side and sending referees to the courtside monitor to figure out what happened.

Goff received a flagrant technical and was ejected, while fellow Marshall big man Nigel Spikes was assessed a technical that happened to be his fifth foul of the night. West Virginia guard Gary Brown got a technical for jawing with Goff and four other Mountaineers were ejected for wandering off the bench toward the center-court fracas.

It's unfortunate Goff allowed his frustration to get the best of him, but credit players on

Pierria Henry (US Presswire)

1. Charlotte served notice Wednesday night that its undefeated record may not merely be a product of a tissue-soft early schedule. Guard Pierria Henry scored Charlotte's final six points including two game-clinching free throws with 10.5 seconds left as the 49ers upset Davidson 73-69 to improve to 8-0 for the first time in school history. Does this mean Charlotte is an Atlantic 10 contender? Probably not. But it also means the 49ers aren't this year's Tulane, which started 9-0 last season and finished 15-16.

2. It may be time to pump the breaks just a bit on Boise State's early-season resurgence. The same Broncos team that smoked Creighton in Omaha and pushed Michigan State to the buzzer in East Lansing didn't fare so well in Salt Lake City on Wednesday night. Senior guard Jarred DuBois scored a game-high 18 points and Jason Washburn added 13 points and six rebounds as Utah smothered Boise State early en route to a surprisingly one-sided 76-55 win.

3. If Tennessee fans were hoping basketball would be a good distraction from a poorly run football coaching search, they've probably scrapped that idea after Wednesday night's loss at Virginia. The good news is the Vols managed more points than they did in a humbling 37-36 loss to Georgetown last Friday. The bad news is they scored only two more points. Virginia beat Tennessee 46-38 in a game in which the Vols shot 15 of 52 from the field.

4. Dayton hadn't done much to suggest it could finish in the upper echelon of the Atlantic 10 this season, but the Flyers' 81-76 road upset of Alabama was definitely an eye-opening result. Point guard Kevin Dillard scored 17 of his 25 points in the first half and forward Josh Benson had 21 points and six rebounds against a taller Alabama frontline, enabling the Flyers to become the first team to score more than 67 points on the Tide this season.

5. There seems to be a fair amount of surprise at how bad Villanova is again this season, but I can't figure out why. The Wildcats were awful last year, they had two of their better players make ill-advised decisions to leave school early and the recruiting class they brought in was good but not program-changing. That adds up to a 4-4 early-December record and home losses like Wednesday night's 76-61 setback against a Temple team that looks like an Atlantic 10 contender yet again.

A group of female Florida State students with a message for Andrew Wiggins (via @fdubski)

The women of Florida State did everything they could Wednesday night to sell top recruit Andrew Wiggins on the school during his official visit.

Florida State cheerleaders (via @KySportsRadio)Unfortunately for the Seminoles, the basketball team didn't make as good an impression.

Florida State was never remotely competitive in a 72-47 home loss to rival Florida, falling behind by 20 at halftime and by as many as 37 in the second half as Wiggins and his father watched from their courtside seats. It was an atrocious enough performance that Wiggins was probably more likely to commit to the Gators at the end of the night than he was the Seminoles.

Florida State could not generate many clean looks against Florida's array of smothering defenses, an ill-timed poor performance for the Seminoles considering the importance of selling Wiggins on the school. Wiggins, the consensus No. 1 recruit in the class of 2013, is expected to choose between Kentucky and Florida State, his father's alma mater.

[Y! News blog: Sorority's party photo stirs outcry on the Web]

If the basketball was uninspiring for Wiggins, what the talented forward witnessed in the stands was likely a lot more enticing.

One row of female Florida State students spelled out "WE WANT WIGGINS" across their white shirts. A group of older women waved signs urging Wiggins to sign with the 'Noles. Florida State's cheerleaders even brandished a pair of clever signs taking jabs at Kentucky, one of which read "Seminoles hunt Wildcats" and the other of which read "FSU has hotter girls."

A sign welcoming opponents to Wyoming (US Presswire)

In the aftermath of the additions of Butler and VCU this offseason, the Atlantic 10 received some buzz as college basketball's seventh major conference.

The league may very well merit that honor in future years, but right now it isn't even the best of the next tier of conferences.

That title goes to the Mountain West, which is off to an even better start this season than it was last year when the league landed four teams in the NCAA tournament or the previous year when BYU and San Diego State spent most of the winter in the top 15. The Mountain West's six top teams have combined to amass a 41-3 record entering Wednesday's slate, with the three losses coming against Syracuse, Michigan State and Oregon.

Boise State (6-1) owns a road win at then-No. 11 Creighton. Wyoming (9-0) won at Valley contender Illinois State just a few days after handing Colorado its first loss. New Mexico (8-0) has toppled UConn and Davidson. Colorado State (6-0) blew away Washington by 18 points in Seattle. And that list of wins doesn't even include those tallied by UNLV (6-1) and San Diego State (6-1), the two prohibitive favorites to win the league entering the season.

Granted Air Force hasn't tallied in any noteworthy wins, Fresno State is rebuilding and Nevada has been disappointing, but that top six is better than the Atlantic 10's upper tier and could hold its own against some power six leagues. The Mountain West currently checks in fifth in conference RPI, ahead of the SEC and the Big 12.

Should we have seen this coming? Perhaps, in retrospect.

Farmingdale State's AJ Matthews is averaging 27.2 points and 15.4 rebounds (courtesy of Farmingdale State athletics)

The phone call began like so many others Farmingdale State coach Erik Smiles has received before.

A man whom Smiles had never met called in May 2011 to gauge his interest in a pair of junior college prospects searching for a four-year school. One was the man's son. The other was his son's teammate.

"You get these calls a million times, so I didn't think much of it," Smiles said. "He's like, 'My son is a guard,' and I'm thinking, 'OK, a guard.' And then he says the other kid is a 7-footer. At that point, I almost rolled off my couch in shock. I'm like, 'Holy Jesus. You have a 7-footer?' At our level you just don't hear that."

Intrigued yet skeptical, Smiles invited the man and the two players to meet with him on campus the following morning. Then he spent the next hour scouring the web for any tidbits of information he could glean about his mystery visitors.

What he learned was 5-foot-10 Ryan Davis and 7-foot-1 AJ Matthews were teammates at Broward Community College in Florida during the 2010-11 season and originally planned to spend the next two years together at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Matthews averaged 19 points and 11 rebounds at Broward and drew interest from Cincinnati and Oklahoma State, which made him absurdly overqualified to play for a Division III program like Farmingdale that competed against teams whose tallest players were 6-foot-5.

[Also: Florida State coeds make pitch for top hoops recruit]

When Chuck Davis brought his son and Matthews to meet with the Farmingdale coaches and tour the campus the next morning, Smiles asked why the two players had scrapped their plans to go to FDU. The elder Davis explained that both failed to qualify academically to play Division I or II basketball, so he was scrambling to help them find a Division III school near their New York homes with affordable tuition and space on its roster.

Reggie Hearn and Brady Heslip (Getty Images)

Baylor became the first team in almost four years to defeat Kentucky at Rupp Arena on Saturday. Northwestern lost at home on the same day to an Illinois-Chicago team that has dropped a combined 46 games the past two seasons.

Surely the Bears had no trouble handling the Wildcats at home three nights later, right? Well, not quite.

In a result that epitomizes the unpredictability of college basketball, Northwestern upset Baylor 74-70 on Tuesday night. The Wildcats built an 18-point second-half lead and still led by 11 with three minutes to go, but the Bears implemented a full-court press to whittle the lead to two in the final seconds.

What the loss provides Baylor is another hard-earned lesson about the importance of respecting every opponent and playing with maximum effort in every game. The Bears previously lost at home to Charleston, another team not even in the same stratosphere as Baylor talent-wise.

Baylor probably would have delivered an early knockout punch to Northwestern too had it played with the same intensity the entire game as it had during its second-half charge in the closing minutes. Instead, the Bears were crushed on the glass and lost focus guarding backdoor cuts or closing out on shooters.

The effort level was certainly there from Northwestern, which actually resorted to taunting during its second-half spurt to build the lead. The Wildcats badly needed a signature win after getting beat by Maryland and scoring just 44 points in the loss to Illinois-Chicago.

Danny Berger (US Presswire)Utah State's rivalry game against BYU on Wednesday suddenly seems trivial as a result of the scary medical situation involving one of the Aggies' top players.

Junior swingman Danny Berger is in critical but stable condition Tuesday night after he stopped breathing and collapsed during practice at the Spectrum earlier in the day.

Athletic trainers performed CPR to get Berger breathing again and used a defibrillator on his heart until an ambulance arrived. Berger was transported to Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, where he will undergo further tests and evaluations to determine what caused the collapse.

As a result of the incident, Utah State says the status of Wednesday night's BYU game is unknown. The Salt Lake City Tribune is reporting the game will be postponed.

Berger, a starter for Utah State, has averaged 7.6 points and 3.6 rebounds in five games this season, helping the Aggies to a 4-1 start. The Oregon native blogged Monday about the joy of this past weekend's overtime victory at Santa Clara and how much he was looking forward to traveling to face BYU.

Drexel's Damion Lee (US Presswire)

With the college basketball season now almost a month old, we have enough of a sample size of games to start to determine which teams are better or worse than projected. Here's a look at the teams who have failed to meet expectations so far:

1. Drexel (2-5)
Losses: at Kent State 66-62 OT, Illinois State 86-84 OT, Saint Mary's 74-64, Xavier 69-65, Rider 75-66
Why they've disappointed: Drexel returned all but one key player from a 25-win team that narrowly missed the NCAA tournament last season, which is why the Dragons were optimistic about landing a bid this season for the first time in 16 years. That goal is not out of reach in an unusually weak CAA, but the Dragons have already squandered any hope for an at-large bid by losing five of its first seven. What's really odd is that so many of Drexel's problems have been on the defensive end, by far the program's biggest strength last year when it had much of the same personnel. The Dragons are eighth in the CAA in field-goal percentage defense and they're struggling to control the glass or force turnovers.
Can they recover? All hope is not lost for Drexel this season in spite of the massively disappointing start. First of all, they're capable of getting better defensively, especially if big men Dartaye Ruffin and Darryl McCoy step up and better fill the void left by the graduation of Samme Givens. Secondly, the CAA is weak enough this season that the Dragons probably don't have to play at the level they did last year to repeat as league champs. VCU is gone, Old Dominion is rebuilding and George Mason and Delaware have been the class of a down league thus far. Even with the defense regressing and guard Chris Fouch lost for the season due to a broken ankle, Drexel has the backcourt firepower to challenge both the Patriots and Blue Hens.

2. UCLA (5-3)
Losses: Georgetown 78-70, Cal Poly SLO 70-68, San Diego State 78-69
Why they've disappointed: Under pressure to succeed this season after missing the NCAA tournament two of the past three years, UCLA coach Ben Howland landed an elite recruiting class in hopes of sparking a resurgence. So far, that hasn't happened. A team ranked in the top 10 in many preseason polls has tumbled out of the Top 25 thanks to losses to Georgetown, Cal Poly SLO and San Diego State and close calls against UC Irvine and Georgia. Worse yet, guard Tyler Lamb and talented center Joshua Smith have transferred, leaving the Bruins with only eight scholarship players available — four freshmen, three North Carolina castoffs and sophomore guard Norman Powell.
Can they recover? Not only does a deep March run seem unfathomable from this group, a lot will have to change just for the Bruins to sneak into the NCAA tournament. Shabazz Muhammad needs to shed 10 pounds he put on over the summer and regain the burst he had in high school. Kyle Anderson either needs to find a comfort zone playing off ball or persuade Howland to put the ball in his hands and let him showcase his passing ability. And UCLA has to find a way to mask its lack of quickness defensively, whether that's via a packline man-to-man defense or a two-three zone. Even if the Bruins improve defensively as the season goes on and get more out of their two prized freshmen, this is still a team that's very vulnerable to foul trouble or injuries. In other words, there's considerably less hope for UCLA than there was a few weeks ago.