As one of the four or five people (excluding people who live in four states: Kentucky, Indiana, North Carolina and Kansas) who actually cares about college basketball in December, it’s time to put together our most popular college hoops stories of 2014.
It’s really a shame how so few people care about college hoops until March. And how those who do care, don’t care all that much.
College basketball has done a much better job in recent years of scheduling much better. CBS copied ESPN by having a marquee night with four blue blood programs squaring off in a double header, as the CBS Sports Classic (Kentucky, UCLA, North Carolina, Ohio State) followed in the footsteps of the Champions Classic (Kentucky, Michigan State, Duke, Kansas).
There are more intra-state double-headers popping up too. (Big Four Classic in Iowa, Crossroads Classic in Indiana). In short it’s not just glorified scrimmages against low-majors and mid-majors anymore.
Anyway, here are the five most popular college hoops stories of 2014, numbers indicate unique visitor counts.
1. UPDATED 2014-15 College Basketball Preseason Top 25 Rankings 22,732
2. PHOTOS: New Illinois Fighting Illini uniforms leaked 18,321
3. 2014 NBA Mock Draft FINAL 9,721
4. John Calipari reaffirms that he’s not taking the Lakers job 8,832
5. NBA scouts believe Jabari Parker will stay at Duke another year 7,632
The Sports Bank went over 5,000,000 unique visitors in 2014. Here’s the rest of the year end, most popular archive:
-Five most popular Arturo Vidal to Man United rumor stories of 2014 (Dec 18th)
-Five most popular Juan Mata stories of 2014 (Dec 19th)
-Five most popular Louis van Gaal stories of 2014 (Dec 19th)
-Five most popular Angel Di Maria stories of 2014 (Dec 18th)
-Five most popular Jay Cutler stories of 2014 (Dec 18th)
-Five most popular female sportscaster stories of 2014 (Dec 23rd)
-Five most popular Kentucky Wildcats stories of 2014 (Dec 22nd)
-Five most popular college basketball stories of 2014 (Dec 27th)
-Five most popular college football stories of 2014 (Jan 1st)
-Five most popular NFL stories of 2014 (not including the Jay Cutler list) (Dec 28th)
-Five most popular NBA stories of 2014 (Dec 25th)
-Five most popular MLB stories of 2014 (Dec 25th)
-Five most popular news/pop culture stories of 2014 (Dec 29th)
-Top 20 search terms of 2014 (Dec 30th)
-10 most popular overall (Dec 31st)
-5 most popular Liverpool (Dec 26th)
-5 most popular Chelsea (Dec 26th)
-5 most popular Arsenal (Dec 25th)
-5 most popular Tottenham Hotspur (Dec 24th)
Paul M. Banks owns, operates and writes The Sports Bank.net ,which is partners with Fox Sports. Read his feature stories in the Chicago Tribune RedEye edition. Listen to him on KOZN 1620 The Zone. Follow him on Twitter (@paulmbanks). His work has been featured in hundreds of media outlets including The Washington Post and ESPN 2