It’s 7 o’clock on the east coast, which means that college basketball is officially upon us. At campuses from Chapel Hill to Storrs, passionate fans have filled arenas just to see the first practice of the season. Texas has not taken part in the “Midnight Madness” in many years — although that temporal name is really no longer appropriate considering the new rules — but the Horns will still be hitting the court in Denton Cooley Pavillion for a team workout. However, the Aggies will be embracing the festivities just one hour from now. And Soulja Boy will be in the house, reminding all the white-bred Ags of College Station to “Crank That.” Ought to be interesting.

Get ready, hoop-heads. Basketball is back.

It’s long been a complaint that the student sections in the Frank Erwin Center leave a lot to be desired. And to keep from pointing fingers at any one particular group, I’ll go ahead and expand that complaint to the entire arena. The simple fact of the matter is that the FEC is rarely home to an intimidating atmosphere, and is nowhere near the level of product that Rick Barnes puts out on the floor every year. And while these are issues I plan on addressing here at LRT as we close in on opening night, today it seems like there may be a little hope that things are going to be different this year.

The marketing department in Belmont has scheduled a night of giveaways, promotions, and general pandemonium to be held in Gregory Gym on Friday, October 26th. While I couldn’t get much in the way of exact details from the gentleman I spoke to in the marketing office, he repeatedly mentioned that they were looking to get the word out to students about the basketball program.

Of course, most students still have no idea what is going on with the ticket system or the Stampede pass, and there is the looming question of whether or not anything will be done to remedy the giant clusterfuck that occurred at the final home game of the season against A&M. And sure, there’s still more to be done to increase attendance in the rest of the arena. But I’m glad to see some acknowledgment that there’s an elite basketball team on this campus and a slight effort to get our gigantic student body to fill up its small ticket allotment.

I’ll post more details as they are released, but for now let’s all cross our fingers that this is the first in a series of initiatives to increase attendance.

While much of the attention this weekend will be focused on the likes of Greg Oden, Arron Afflalo, Joakim Noah, and Roy Hibbert, Longhorn fans will be paying special attention to Kevin Durant. One of four finalists for the Naismith Award, KD will find out on Sunday whether or not he will win the prestigious award as only a freshman. And if he does in fact bring home the hardware, you’ll find full coverage here at Longhorn Road Trip to peruse while eating your Monday morning bagels.

In the coming weeks, I’ll also be working to bring you the tales from the road that have yet to be posted. My goal is to unveil one a week, but if I’m feeling extra-productive, who knows what will appear. Along with that comes the remaining photo galleries, which includes all of the home games and post-season as well. And along the way, I will randomly be revealing different top-ten lists regarding my time following UT hoops — top arenas, top games, best fans, and the like.

If you don’t feel like visiting the page on a daily basis, you can always add the RSS to your news feed if you’ve got an aggregator. Or you could just join in with the hundreds of folks who are bookmarking the page. Either way, you’ll be sure to find new content all spring and summer as we await the start of the next season of Longhorn basketball….and perhaps a new season of road trips.

Yes, we’re alive and in Austin, not dead somewhere on a mountain in Montana. It’s been a weird, weird week without Texas basketball around to talk, think, or write about. I guess I didn’t realize it while the season was going on, but making all of these trips had essentially whittled my life down to school, work, and basketball. It’s kind of odd to have the biggest part of that suddenly missing.

But fortunately, tonight the NCAA tournament is back. I can only hope that these Sweet Sixteen games are as thrilling as Saturday’s second-round action. I may or may not get to a USC wrap at some point this weekend. In all honesty, that game was so ugly and demoralizing, I don’t have a whole lot to say about it.

There is still a ton of stuff going on in the basketball world, though. We’ve got ex-Horns playing in the homestretch of the NBA season, there will be a ton of coaching changes in the college ranks — Tubby Smith is out at UK as of today — and, of course, we get to play the “Will he or won’t he?” game regarding Kevin Durant.

Once again, apologies for the disappearing act this week and enjoy the ballgames tonight. Longhorn Road Trip should be back full force by Monday.

Today I am really excited to finally unveil a new feature here on the site. I’ve mentioned in some previous posts that I have been fooling around with the Google Maps API in order to give you an easier way to navigate the content from all of my trips. I think I have finally gotten the finished product to a point that I am comfortable with showing the public. That finished product is, of course, the map you see below.

Each city I have visited is represented by a basketball, which you can click to open an info bubble for each trip. There you will find links to the previews and wrap-ups from each game, along with the photos and blogs from each city. As I continue to add more pictures and blog entries from past trips, I will update the links in the map.

There is a slight delay between clicking a link in an info bubble and the new page replacing the current one. I’m not sure if there’s any way around that, since I am forced to use IFRAMEs in order to work around the way WordPress sets up directories. If any of you out there are more technologically inclined than yours truly, feel free to leave ideas in the comments section or shoot me an email.

While this map will slide further down the main page as I write more entries, you can still easily find it every time you visit by clicking on the brand new “Map” link in the grey navigation bar up top.

Jayhawk preview coming at you either later this morning from Austin or late, late, late tonight from the outskirts of Kansas City.

Edit: Apparently there is only one basketball showing up for users who have Internet Explorer. I’m not sure what is causing this and I likely won’t fix it before I leave for Kansas. But hey, isn’t this a great opportunity to finally download Firefox like you’ve been meaning to?

Buenos días, readers. This morning, I’ve got three new photo galleries up for you to peruse — Houston, Stillwater, and Lincoln. After I get the Tech re-preview posted, I’ll get back to the rest of the photo galleries and hopefully get them all knocked out before the OU trip this weekend.

The Google Maps feature is coming along quite nicely and should also be ready to roll once the last photo gallery is posted. That will make it a lot easier to find all of the content that’s spread out across the site in an easy-to-navigate map.

Then all that’s left is to finish updating the trip blogs. (Phoenix was posted on Friday night, for those of you who may have missed it over the weekend.) If all goes according to plan, everything should be up-to-date and all of the bells and whistles functional before conference play is over. Which sets us up quite nicely for all of the tournament action, of course.

Can you smell that? March is right around the corner.

Last night, Kansas easily handled Colorado at the Coors Event Center, the only arena in the Big 12 I’ve been to that completely lacks a home court advantage. Hell, for Texas it even skewed neutral if not in favor of the Horns. I would not be surprised to hear that there was more blue and red in the stands last night as the Jayhawks steamrolled the Buffs by 29. It keeps KU right in the hunt for the conference title, as they await a stumble from Texas A&M.

There’s not a whole lot going on in the world of basketball today, besides some games out west in the Pac 10. USC heads to Arizona at 9:30 PM (Central) in a game that is absolutely huge for the up-and-down Wildcats. After losing five of six, including that embarrassment at home to UNC, Arizona has won their last three. They are tied for fifth in the stacked Pac 10, but a visit from UCLA is just two days away. A win tonight is necessary to stop another momentum-killing losing streak.

In Austin, we don’t get this game, but instead UCLA at Arizona State followed by Oregon State at Stanford. Good choice on that one, FSN. Perhaps Austin viewers will find the A-10 clash between UMass and Fordham (8 PM, ESPN2) a bit more thrilling. If not, there’s always the 2004 Powerade Jam Fest at 10 on the Duece. I might just have to clear my calendar for this lineup.

At 6 PM (Central), there’s a generally useless game back east, as St. Francis takes on St. Francis. The two schools — one located in Loretto, PA, and the other in Brooklyn — are in the midst of abysmal seasons. The loser gets the glory of having a 21-loss season, while they both will still be slumming it in the bottom of the Northeastern Conference. If I haven’t sold you on watching this painful display of mediocrity, I’m just not sure what else I can do.

I’ve been toying around with the GoogleMaps API to create a clickable map of the places I’ve visited that will hopefully organize things a little nicer and spruce the place up. Tomorrow I’m dedicating the entire afternoon to the site, so look for some new content and a Baylor re-preview.

Chances are, you didn’t notice the new link stuck at the top of the page today. But it’s there, hidden in between the schedule and our contact information. I’ve got the first two photo galleries up online, with more coming throughout the weekend.

For now, I’ve only got them grouped by city. That means pictures from the game, the arenas, and the places around town are all stuck in the same place. Eventually, I’ll create albums for photos of each player, each game, and one combining all the arenas. Then you can skip the stuff you don’t want to see and get right to what you are looking for.

But in the meantime, click the link above and you can get started with the shots from New York and Phoenix. I’ll get around to the others sometime after I bring you the Baylor preview.

I want to apologize for the recent lack of post-game updates. Much to my surprise, there are actually quite a few of you who check the blog regularly, and I know how much it sucks to visit a favorite page and see no new content.

I knew when I started this journey it was a pretty crazy idea, but I really had no idea of how physically draining it was going to be until this last week or so. Between the start of classes, holding a job, and actually travelling to the games, it’s starting to take its toll. But I wouldn’t trade this for anything — including a few extra hours of sleep each night — and I’m going to continue to bring you updates as often as I can.

Hopefully later tonight I’ll get my post-Villanova thoughts out on paper. But of course, homework comes first, and for some reason I have an insane amount for only having attended the T/TH courses once so far. So maybe by “later tonight” I actually mean “very early on Tuesday morning.” But it’ll be there for you to mull over as you down the morning coffee. And sometime this week you can also expect a ton of pictures to be available. I got a lot of work on the gallery pages done while flying to and from Philly, so by the end of the week you’ll at least be able to see the photos from New York, Phoenix, Houston, Tennessee, and a few home games.

So again, thank you for reading. And I must once more offer my apologies for failing to bring you timely post-game updates for the last three games. But keep coming back, because I promise I’ll be here all throughout conference play and into the post-season.

So the comment feature is fixed for those of you using Internet Explorer. Of course, for you IE folks the layout and colors still look like a baby vomited up pea soup. And for that I apologize.

If any of my readers happen to be HTML or CSS geniuses and would like to offer some help, please feel free. I might give you a piece of gum I chewed, which will definitely fetch a pretty penny on eBay. Or I could just give you a public thanks in this space.

But in the meantime, for all of you who have e-mailed or IMed to say the comment feature doesn’t work — problem solved. Talk amongst yourselves. I’m all verklempt.