Breakfast buffet: Are referees overworked?

Pull up a chair and sit down at the breakfast buffet, a daily assortment of all the freshest newsworthy college hoops stories on the net. To make a submission, contact me via email or twitter.

• A few weeks after UConn coach Jim Caloun suggested that referees are overworked in the wake of a critical blown call in one of the Huskies' games, officials refuted that notion. Although top referees do officiate as many as 90 games in a 4-to-5 month season, they also typically work regionally, stay in high-full-service hotels and consistently work out and eat healthy to stay in top shape.

• Cornell can clinch the outright Ivy League title and become the first automatic NCAA tournament qualifier with a victory at Brown (11-18, 5-7) on Friday night or at Yale (11-18, 5-7) on Saturday. The Big Red lead Princeton and Harvard by two games apiece and beat both Brown and Yale convincingly earlier this season.

• This is a good read on Butler, one of the nation's few emerging big-time programs that still has some small-time charm surrounding it. Their coach quit his job at a pharmaceutical giant to work there because he relished the idea of being somewhere with great academics and basketball. Their athletic director left the school twice only to return both times because he missed it so much. And their players get little motivational notes in their locker when they arrive for practice at dawn.

• If preseason Atlantic 10 favorite Dayton is going to return to the NCAA tournament this season, it will almost certainly have to win the conference tournament now. The Flyers failed to capitalize on their final chance to earn a marquee regular season win on Thursday night, wasting an 11-point lead in a loss to Richmond.

• One notable conference tournament upset on Thursday from the Big South: third-seeded Winthrop toppled second-seeded Radford, flummoxing the defending champs with a zone that collapsed on Art Parakhouski and forced the Highlanders to hit from the perimeter. Winthrop will meet host Coastal Carolina in the title game with an NCAA tournament berth on the line on Saturday.

• Count me as firmly among those who think the double-bye in the Big East tournament is a benefit to the top four teams, even if we had a couple upsets in the quarterfinals last year. UConn did not lose to Syracuse in six overtimes because it was rusty. It lost because a 6 or 7 seed in last year's Big East was better than a 3 or 4 seed in most of the nation's other conferences.

• Eddie Sutton made his first public comments since his son's arrest, emphasizing that Sean knows he has a problem with prescription drugs and that he needs help treating it. "He'll be all right because he's a strong person who made a mistake," Sutton said. "He realizes that he needs to get some assistance, and that's what he doing."

• Jermaine Dixon's elder brothers were both basketball stars in college, but when the Pittsburgh guard was growing up, Phil and Juan were convinced the good genes had skipped their younger sibling. Maybe that's why it's so gratifying for Juan to see the success Jermaine is having now helping Pittsburgh emerge as the surprise team of the Big East. Said Juan, "I sat there thinking, 'My little brother did it. He made it big. He's playing big-time basketball."

• Duke, Kansas State, Gonzaga and Marquette will headline next year's CBE Classic, hosted by the Sprint Center in Kansas City on Nov. 22-23. How good a field this is will be determined by if anyone enters the NBA draft early from each team.