- In this week’s mailbag, which seems kind of short without his usual filler, Seth Davis takes a look at the panic surrounding Ohio State, the future of Connecticut in the post-Calhoun era, the immediate future for Bruce Weber and Illinois, and a couple other topics. As usual we agree with pretty much everything Seth says (or he agrees with what we have said before on this site). In particular, the Huskies could be in for a very rough stretch after Calhoun leaves as we mentioned more than two years ago.
- Looking for analysis using advanced statistics from AAU basketball to predict how high school players project in college? If the answer is yes, then we have the link for you. Drew Cannon is continuing his prior work by looking at some of the top prospects from EYBL. We are not sure how much we trust the predictive value of these stats in what amounts to high school all-star games where fundamentals are hard to find, but it is worth keeping an eye on whether these statistics track out to actual on-court performance as college players.
- With the regular season winding down, the noise surrounding national awards is beginning to intensify. The biggest award is obviously national player of the year and right now it looks like it is a two-horse race between Anthony Davis and Thomas Robinson. Unless one of those players falls apart down the stretch we suspect that the various national awards will be split between those two, but the question is which one will receive the majority of accolades. According to Michael Rothstein’s straw poll, Robinson appears to have a fairly comfortable lead. While there are a few interesting choices (read: homer picks), it is interesting that seven of the 54 voters polled did not include Davis in their top 3, which is surprising for the best player on the #1 team in the country. We are guessing that at least a few of the voters have not watched Davis in action on the defensive end where his effect appears to outweigh his individual statistical impact.
- Yesterday, we discussed the impact of the Conference USA/Mountain West merger and how it would have relatively little impact on the rest of the landscape of college athletics as it was merely an attempt to survive. Dan Wolken goes further with that point by saying that it was driven by “pure, unadulterated fear” and that conference realignment will eventually bring about other similar moves that do not appear to make much sense on the surface, but are really just moves made to survive while the big fish continue to suck up more of the resources of the college sports ecosystem.
- Joe Nocera has decided to continue his personal crusade against the NCAA despite the organization’s recent attempt to discredit his work, which is admittedly biased. This week he has decided to take a look at the issue of agents in college sports through the prism of college hockey, which allows players to have professional agents. Hockey is obviously a different animal than basketball in that many of its top players bypass college completely choosing instead to play in a variety of leagues that essentially amount to the minor leagues while hoping to make it to the NHL. Still the issues that Nocera brings up in the article are good ones and if we have any college hockey fans in our audience who are familiar with the workings of agents and its rules relating to amateurism we would love to hear what you think about it compared to how college basketball operates.
View Comments (2)
"Hockey is obviously a different animal than basketball in that many of its top players bypass college completely choosing instead to play in a variety of leagues that essentially amount to the minor leagues while hoping to make it to the NHL. "
This is a bit misleading. Hockey's system is odd....essentially, North American* players start their careers at age 16 (rare talents can start at 15) in one of three/four junior leagues (OHL, WHL, QMJHL, and the USHL, which is weird). It's not AAU as these are full time sports leagues (so there's a lot more structure than AAU and the role of "all star games" is mainly taken by international junior competition), which include some players who have already been drafted.
Now players in the 3 most common junior leagues (the OHL, WHL, and QMJHL) can't go to college - the NCAA rules them not to be amateurs. And this is a majority of young North American Talent. Players in the US Hockey League (USHL) do go to college, and present the situation that Nocera shows. That said, while the quality of the players in the USHL has risen over the years, it's still a substantial minority. (At best I've seen a report a 1/3 of the NHL consists of kids who went to college, and I think that overstates it).
The end result is that college hockey, unlike basketball, baseball, football, lacrosse, and some other sports, is SERIOUSLY diluted from a talent standpoint. There are great players who come out of college of course....but even with favorable NHL agent treatment, most young hockey talent chooses to forgo college.
So if the NCAA wants to foster some level of quality in D1 hockey, it has to let the agents in...there's already enough preventing D1 hockey from being great as it is (which is why there aren't a lot of teams)
Wow, that comment started in a different way than I ended. I meant the comment is misleading in that the Junior Leagues don't really function as Minor Leagues, in the baseball sense of the word. It's very strange - closer to AAU than minor leagues, but much more like professional hockey than AAU is to professional basketball.