The Road to No. 1 will feature prominently on the front page of tomorrow's Spokane Spokesman-Review. I think there will be quite a few papers sold and framed on college dorm room walls come Tuesday night.

According to a Jon Rothstein tweet, Fairleigh Dickinson will fire coach Greg Vetrone at the end of the season. Ryan Peters breaks down the season for the Knights over at Big Apple Buckets and why Vetrone is now on his way out. I would say Vetrone is the first coach fired for performance reasons this season, because ODU's Blaine Taylor probably did something else to get himself canned, and South Alabama's Ronnie Arrow retired. He definitely won't be the last. Time to start building the list.

Our Dr. Geeves couldn't make it tonight, so I stepped in to talk with Parks on the latest Full Court Press. We discuss Bracket Busters (who helped themselves and hurt themselves), and also what makes teams like Belmont and Akron tick. Oh, and then it is time to do some gloating about our Fantasy team. Go Mid-Major 5! You can check out the whole show here.

The final Bracket Busters tips off this evening, and while we understand that this will have little bearing on who makes the NCAA Tournament, it might have at least a little bit of sway within the committee room in the negative direction. John Templon breaks down who needs the game more in his latest post at Big Apple Buckets.

GMUHoops looks at a recent story in the George Mason media that hints that Patriots head coach Paul Hewitt might have killed a plan to improve the basketball facilities. The improvements would have come at the cost of other programs, but when has any coach not looked out for their own program, especially one that had coached at a major program. Very interesting.

Things aren't exactly looking up in the latest edition of the ESPN Bubble Watch. Wichita State moved to a "lock" status, and Creighton is still there. But teams like Belmont, who has faltered as of late, and Akron, which has the opposite problem of recreating Drexel's odd resume from last season, are not yet guaranteed spots in the NCAA Tournament. Eamonn Brennan lays out all the issues, so we know what to gripe about on Selection Sunday, just one month away.

So what happens when you don't turn the ball over, and you don't take the ball away from your opponent too often? Well, it might just mean you win more often. At least that is what a study by Hoop Vision's Jordan Sperber seems to say. He looked at how teams who pulled a "Bucknell" fared over the last five seasons, and found that it has a not so bad correlation to their adjusted efficiency. The dirty details are all at the link, including one team that dominates his measure over the last several years.

ESPN's latest mid-major rankings are out. The 4-Letter's voters pretty much confirm what we have all been thinking during the last couple of weeks about the Missouri Valley: thinks don't look good for getting multiple bids in the NCAA Tournament. Creighton and Wichita State are now No. 8 and No. 7 in the rankings, after being just behind Gonzaga for most of the season. I think it would be stomach-turning to think about the teams that have passed them. We should echo their pick for Jackie Carmichael as the player of the week. We ran a Game Score on the Illinois State forward's line last night, and while it wasn't the best of the evening, it was a strong 64 for the big man. Who know that Illinois State would come alive like this behind Carmichael given the way they started the conference slate?

Our newest writer, Parks, also happens to be a member of FanTalk Radio and has his own online radio show about college basketball in general and, more specifically, the DC/Maryland/Virginia area. Why do you care? Because I now appear on a weekly basis to assist in his endeavor, and I'm awesome. Listen to the whole thing or just tune in around halfway, Skype bugs and all.

The Blackbirds' athletic director released this statement over the weekend: "LIU Brooklyn has suspended indefinitely four members of its men's basketball team for their involvement in a Sept. 14 altercation on campus. No other student-athletes were implicated in this incident. Until all legal and appeals processes have been completed, we will not comment further on this matter." Not just suspended from playing basketball, but suspended from school entirely. This is not going to end well.