Breakfast Buffet: Mark Lyons makes Albany regret good deed

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

• Albany's 88-64 loss to Xavier on Tuesday night was proof that no good deed goes unpunished. After the Great Danes gave stranded Xavier guard Mark Lyons a ride from upstate New York to Cincinnati on their team bus, he promptly repaid the favor by scoring 18 points on a career-high six 3-pointers to propel the Musketeers to a comfortable home victory.

• Long Beach State may have entered Tuesday night's game at UC Santa Barbara below .500 on the season, but the 49ers defeated the defending Big West champion Gauchos 71-55 to emphatically prove they're title contenders. Larry Anderson returned from a wrist injury to score 25 points and Long Beach State held UCSB stars Orlando Johnson and James Nunnaly to a combined 6 of 27 from the floor. 

• Is tradition-rich DePaul a more difficult rebuilding job for new coach Oliver Purnell than football-heavy Clemson was? That's what one NBA scout told the Chicago Sun-Times. "DePaul will be tougher,'' the scout said. "The difference is kids from South Carolina who are good players and may not get into North Carolina or Duke or Wake Forest still want to play in the ACC. The kids [in the Midwest] want to play in the Big Ten more, not necessarily the Big East."

• One of the teams I flat-out whiffed on going into the season was Providence, which I thought might be DePaul-bad and instead has turned out to be downright competitive in the Big East. The Friars showed their mettle again on Tuesday, pushing fifth-ranked Syracuse into the final minutes at the Carrier Dome before falling 81-74.

• We still don't know anymore about the status of Kyrie Irving's injured toe, but we now have a little better idea of when more information will be available. The Duke point guard will have his toe examined next week, at which point doctors will attempt to decide how to treat it and perhaps determine a timetable for his return.

• Michigan probably wouldn't have beaten Purdue anyway on Tuesday afternoon, but it didn't help that star guard Darius Morris was held out of the starting lineup as a result of an undisclosed rules violation. "I made a mistake and apologized to my teammates, and we're ready to move forward. I learned from this experience and from this game," Morris told the Detroit News.

• One of the chapters author George Dohrmann cut out of Play Their Hearts Out to pare the book down was about the relationship between Oregon State guard Roberto Nelson and his father, who is currently in prison. Dohrmann released a couple excerpts from that lost chapter on his blog recently in order to highlight why Roberto's grades suffered to the point that he had to sit out all of last season. 

• Among the cooler items in the Sports Illustrated vault is a photo of former North Carolina coach Dean Smith's practice itinerary for March 4, 1997. There's no real revelations or surprises on it, yet I still spent at least five minutes staring at it for some reason. 

Amanda Swisten Scarlett Chorvat Kim Smith