- With how his team has performed this season we figured it would only be a matter of time before something and in the end it was the coach who made the first move. Yesterday, Rick Stansbury announced that he was stepping down as coach at Mississippi State. To those who followed the program it should not be that much of a surprise despite Stansbury’s 293-165 record in 14 seasons at the school. Despite loading up on enough talent to easily make the NCAA Tournament, Stansbury could not coax his team to play well. At the end of the season one of the team’s stars stated that he did not think that his team had the resolve to bounce back to make the NCAA Tournament. Fittingly, Stansbury’s career ended with his team playing uninspired during a home loss in the first round of the NIT.
- It was 23 years ago that Rumeal Robinson sank two of the biggest free throws in college basketball history to give Michigan a national championship. Since that time his life has been a little less than ideal. Most people who frequent this site are aware of his relatively uninspiring pro career and his legal troubles, but we have not seen a story that detailed his life as well as the one in the upcoming issue of ESPN The Magazine. You are probably going to spend most of your day looking over the carnage that is your bracket and planted on a couch watching TV, but if you are going to read one article today that isn’t directly related to the NCAA Tournament this would be an excellent one to pick.
- With the season nearing its conclusion (yes, we know it is awful) John Gasaway takes a look back at 12 proposed “fixes” for college basketball that he came up with in 2010 and proposes some updates. Some of the proposals have already been implemented, which John no doubt takes credit for, but some of them appear to be a long way away. Some of them are a little ridiculous (he was probably straining to get to 12 back in 2010), but there are several that we would like to see. Which ones do you think are the most reasonable to implement?
- Corey Schmidt, Gasaway’s colleague at Basketball Prospectus, goes with someone a little more in their site’s wheelhouse–analyzing whether or not you need a go-to player to win a national championship. After looking at the data, we are not sure that the data says a lot other than you can win it different ways. While the raw data in the post is interesting we would like to see someone provide some work with a “control” (or case control) team that did not win the championship. The data set being used is obviously too small to come to any legitimate conclusions, but it could serve as a nice starting point for someone to build on for a bigger project.
- If you were overwhelmed by all the action yesterday and need to catch up, we have you covered. Outside of our interview with Charles Barkley we also filed our new “Rushed Reaction” from courtside of every single game yesterday. We plan on doing the latter again today and if you are looking for more direct interaction beyond our national Twitter feed, we suggest you check out our feeds for the East, South, Midwest, and West regions. Our correspondents will be filing direct reports from all the locations within the region including pictures and answering any questions you may have.