Wisconsin junior-to-be Ben Brust has been places in his college career. From Chicago he ended up committing at the University of Iowa, where - after the firing of head coach Todd Lickliter - a Big Ten panel ruled that he was eligible to transfer to another Big Ten school. Whereupon, he settled on Wisconsin.

Now, heading into his third season in Madison, the 6-1 Brust is the top returning 3-point shooter for the Badgers, having connected on 39% of his attempts. So surely he's in the gym working on his mechanics and getting ready for next season. That, and writing about NASCAR.

Wait, what?

In March the SEC ended in improbable fashion with Vanderbilt knocking off Kentucky for the conference title. The world was righted when Kentucky once again assumed juggernaut form in the NCAA tourney on their way to the national title. After they cut down the nets Kentucky went home with the trophy, and now the conference seeks a new identity. The SEC is primed for a shakeup the likes of which they haven't seen in many years.

THE TEAMS

The new guys: Missouri and Texas A&M will be making their SEC debuts. Of course Missouri - who was knocked off by No. 15 seed Norfolk State - is entering having lost five of their top seven players to graduation. And adding to the new look will be a slew of transfers into the program. A&M, for their part, loses three starters from what was a very disappointing team.

THE PLAYERS

The early exits: No conference lost as much as the SEC in terms of players jumping early to the NBA draft. In all, twelve players left, which is four more than any other conference. Kentucky lost their entire starting lineup. Mississippi State lost their best player (Arnett Moultrie) and their most-famous-for-all-the-wrong-reasons player (Renardo Sidney). Florida (Brad Beal) and Vanderbilt (John Jenkins) both lost their best players. LSU lost Justin Hamilton. Bama lost Tony Mitchell. And Texas A&M lost Khris Middleton.

The transfers: Anthony Gill and Damontre Harris (South Carolina), Kadeem Green (Mizzou), Charles Hankerson (Bama), Naji Hibbert (A&M), Rodney Hood (Mississippi State), Jamal Jones and Dundrecous Nelson (Ole Miss),Willy Kouassi and Josh Langford and Cedric McAfee and Bernard Morena (Auburn), Julysses Nobles (Arkansas), Walter Pitchford (UF), Ralston Turner (LSU), Wes Washpun and Renaldo Woolridge (UT)

The seniors: Those that played at least 40% of their team's minutes: Darius Miller (UK), Erving Walker (UF), Jeffery Taylor, Lance Goulbourne, Brad Tinsley, Steve Tchiengang and Festus Ezeli (Vanderbillt), Cameron Tatum (Tennessee), JaMychal Green (Bama), Terrance Henry (Ole Miss), Dee Bost and Brian Bryant (Mississippi State), Storm Warren (LSU), Michael Sanchez (Arkansas), Gerald Robinson and Dustin Ware (Georgia), Kenny Gabriel (Auburn) and Malik Cooke (South Carolina).

Maryland Terrapin fans were delivered a bit of a shock when Terrell Stoglin opted for the NBA in the final moments of underclassmen declarations. It turned out that he'd been suspended for the year, so he really had little choice. Couple this with Pe'Shon Howard's knee surgery, Sean Mosley's graduation and the transfer of Mychal Parker, and depth on Maryland's perimeter suddenly became a concern.

Enter the graduate transfer rule. Shooting guard Logan Aronhalt has graduated from Albany, and now will be enrolling in grad school at Maryland. That, and playing basketball.

Aronhalt is coming off surgery of his own, though he should be good to go in a couple months.

At Albany, Aronhalt was a high volume player. He took over 26% of the shots in all three of his seasons, and maintained an assist rate under 10 (in other words, be careful when you give him the ball because you ain't getting it back). But he does something which the rest of the Maryland players cannot do.

The Stony Brook Seawolves didn't have much success after entering Division I a little more than a decade ago. They had losing seasons. They faced probation due to low APR scores. And they were burried at the bottom of a less-than-powerful conference. In 2008-09 they had their best season, finishing 8-9 in the America East conference. Then in 2009-10 they rode senior Muhammad El-Amin to a 13-3 conference record and their first regular season championship. Last year, they repeated.

A little more than 10 years in Division I and things are looking up. The next step is winning the AE tournament and advancing to the NCAA's.

Today, Stony Brook announced the commencement of their $21.1 million dollar renovation to Stony Brook Arena. It won't be online for over a year, but it will be an impressive facility on Long Island. And it will be a great recruiting tool.

Check out the artists' rendering after the jump.

Expansionpalooza is driven by a mix of four things: practical economics, fear, greed and football. For fans it's that last one - football - which is the driver. But the end result will have far reaching consequences on the other sports. Those other sports are ones which are often subsidized by the football program, though basketball is a different animal. Basketball is often self-sufficient, and at a few institutions it turns accounting on its head and kicks down cash to the (usually awful) football programs.

For the Kansas Jayhawks, this could mean many things. Kansas has the premier basketball program in the Big 12. Texas has all of the resources to be able to match them, but hasn't. The Jayhawks have won the Big 12 regular season title in eight straight seasons (shared twice), and haven't finished worse than 2nd in thirteen years. That's the most dominant conference team in the nation.

But now the Big 12 looks to be expanding. A journalist with really good ties to Florida State claims that their move is inevitable. The other two most talked about teams are Clemson and Louisville. Regardless of who is right, the consensus seems to be that somebody is moving.

Already, TCU and West Virginia are in. TCU's basketball program is underwhelming, but West Virginia is solid. And they have the finances to remain competitive with the upper echeolon of the Big 12. Their overall athletic budget isn't anything special, but their hoops budget is. It's not on the Texas/Kansas level, but it's only one level down. Swapping TCU and West Virginia for Texas A&M and Missouri will probably be about a wash in basketball terms.

A new Pepsi campaign featuring former Duke guard Kyrie Irving as an old man schooling people on the court.

Unlike college football, college basketball actually rewards difficult schedules. The NCAA Committee repeatedly states that RPI doesn't play a major role in their decisions, and then they promptly put forth a field of 68 in which RPI is obviously the far most important determining factor. Of course, RPI is a lousy way of tracking individual team strength, but in composite rankings like SOS it does a fairly decent job. Still, we're not dumb, so we'll stick with Pomeroy unless we absolutely have to talk RPI.

And in that light, the University of Virginia's schedules under coach Tony Bennett have been awful. You would think that at Virginia - a school of supposedly bright people - that someone would figure out that he's harming his chances at the post-season.

Last year the Hoos home games included Michigan (scheduled by the conference for the ACC/Big Ten Challenge), George Mason, Wisconsin Green Bay (ranked No. 180 by Pomeroy), Winthrop (256th) and four schools ranked worse than 330th. Their road schedule was slightly better with trips to Oregon, Seattle and LSU. Overall, their non-conference strength-of-schedule was pegged by Pomeroy at 286th. The previous season? 291st. His first season? 218th.

Shaka Smart meanwhile - who lives up to his name - has had two straight years of top-50 non-conference SOS.

Today some news leaked that UVA's schedule might be improving, and it's right in line with VCU's strategy.

#VCU coach Shaka Smart said today that he and #UVa's Tony Bennett agreed to a home-and-home a while back, but haven't found dates that work.

— michael phillips (@michaelpRTD) May 18, 2012

Each March, come the Big East Tournament, I spend plenty of time making fun of the stupid format of their conference tourney. With 16 teams, it doesn't take a mathematician to figure out how to run a 4-day tournament with no byes. Yet the Big East (and a few other conferences) not only has byes for the top teams, but they have double byes.

Apparently, focus groups and bean counters have determined that the Big East can make more money if they format their tournament as they do. And since this is 2012, and this is college sports, if something makes more short-term money than that automatically qualifies it as a good idea.

Well, apparently the ACC has been paying attention. Because today the ACC "announced" that they will be going to double-byes once Syracuse and Pitt join the conference. The "announcement" came in the form of a sentenence buried at the end of an unrelated story.

So rather than having the top two teams gets byes and everyone else begin on Thursday - now seeds 11-14 will begin on Wednesday, seeds 5-10 will join the fray on Thursday, and 1-4 will chime in on Friday.

Oh joy.

@amilejefferson welcome to a long line of mediocre big men in Duke Blue

— hunter biggs (@biggs099) May 15, 2012

@AmileJefferson ...Good luck sitting on the bench cuz theres no playing time....#gopack

— Jason A. Jarrett (@roxiesdaddy2012) May 15, 2012

@AmileJefferson....By the end of the season, he will transfer due to lack of playing time....

— Jason A. Jarrett (@roxiesdaddy2012) May 15, 2012

@AmileJefferson You are a BEAST....you look awesome in the red and black of NCSU....

— Jason A. Jarrett (@roxiesdaddy2012) May 4, 2012

@AmileJefferson Your a bitch for pickin Duke over Kentucky , good luck when Nerlens smashes you this year whore#BBN

— Eminem = GOAT (@KirbyRay24) May 15, 2012

Wolfpack head coach Mark Gottfried seemingly can't miss right now (aside from losing some depth with transfers). He improbably reached the Sweet-16. He's bringing in a top-10 recruiting class (top-5 if Amile Jefferson heads to Raleigh). CJ Leslie returned to school. And now he's working on the following season. And the first piece of that puzzle is LSU transfer Ralston Turner.

Turner was a fringe consensus top-100 prospect (coming in at No. 100) out of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and had been recruited by Mark Gottfried. His size (6-6) at SG causes all sorts of problems on the perimeter, and while at LSU he was called upon to score. A lot.

Which is the troubling part. He was recently quoted as saying "my shot is the strongest part of my game." Huh?

However, as a freshman he was asked to partially carry the team. And in doing so he ended up taking a ridiculous 27.5% of the shots when he was on the floor (CJ Leslie didn't even reach 26% this year). So it's understandable that he was a high volume, low efficiency player. It's rare that a freshman (or anyone for that matter) can carry that big of a load and still play efficiently. That year he made 32% of his 3s and 42% of his 2s.

As a sophomore he no longer had to be the man. So it was expected that his metrics would improve. After all, he would be taking shots in the flow of the offense rather than being the offense. And he ended up taking fewer than 20% of the shots.