Thanks to Sports Information Directors and our partnership with D3Scoreboard.com, we’re able to bring you a great deal more in-game updates than we ever had in the regular season in past years. As I look now, not even 2 p.m., there are already a half-dozen games with scores of games in-progress. On a busy weeknight you can find more than a dozen going on at the same time.

Thanks to the schools that post them. I hope everyone realizes these are out there for you to keep up on games.

Today’s scores: Men | Women

Also, schools can post links to their live stats package or their audio broadcast by using the Edit feature next to each game under their login.

I’m off to a game myself — want to see Mike Hoyt for Mount St. Mary play in person. The points he’s been putting up are unbelievable. But follow the scoreboard, listen to games, watch the live stats. Should be a good day.

Oh yeah … February is here and the final 25 days leading up to Selection Sunday/Matchup Monday are just going to get more and more crazy.

Some of you don’t even check in here until February begins, and while we certainly welcome you, where have you been? You’ve missed a lot. But we have a lot to get to, as well.

Don’t forget, these tournaments expanded last year. There are 59 men’s teams heading to the NCAA Tournament — 37 automatic bids, three Pool B bids which are set aside for teams not in those conferences, and 19 at-large bids for the teams remaining. In women’s action, there are 63 teams going: 39 conferences have automatic bids, four Pool B bids are set aside and there are 20 at-large bids.

New automatic bids go to the North Eastern Athletic Conference men and women and the Great South Athletic Conference women. The new Northern Athletics Conference won’t be eligible for an automatic bid until 2009.

Remember, too, the NCAA is only going to give us the names of the teams in the tournament on Selection Sunday. They can’t come up with pairings on Sunday anymore, so we’ve dubbed the following day, the day we get the brackets, as Matchup Monday.

It’s a little early to give a good read as to who’s on the bubble, though I did get a call from the Springfield (Ohio) News-Sun this afternoon and gave them my thoughts on a scenario they proposed in which Wittenberg fails to beat Wooster both this weekend and in the NCAC final. (I suggested it would probably be 50-50.)

We still have about 3,000 games left to be played. It’s going to be wild.