1. Next year’s ACC/Big Ten Challenge will be highlighted by three big matchups: North Carolina at Indiana, North Carolina State at Michigan, and Ohio State at Duke. There will also be three other games featuring solid teams: Minnesota at Florida State, Virginia at Wisconsin, and Michigan State at Miami. Given how down the ACC should be next year it is a pretty solid set of top-level games. The other games? They will be borderline unwatchable. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on your opinion of tacky t-shirts), Tyler Zeller will not be playing, which means we will be spared countless shots of the Zeller family wearing those atrocious shirts with half of one logo on one side and half of another logo on the other side. Now they can just show their support for Cody Zeller instead of tormenting us with commentators talking about their split loyalties. Actually the commentators will probably still do that.
2. With all the talk of power moves and money being the driving force behind conference realignment it is somewhat amusing that the biggest winner of the chaos (at least for basketball) may end up being the Atlantic 10. Yesterday, reports surfaced that Virginia Commonwealth intended to move to the Atlantic 10 joining Butler as new members of the conference that lost Temple and Charlotte. This apparently was news to the CAA as the commissioner of the conference said that VCU has not made the CAA aware of its intention to do leave for the Atlantic 10. If the move does go through it will be interesting to see how the Atlantic 10 adapts to the loss of two major media markets while gaining two of the premier basketball programs in the country (mid-major or otherwise). Meanwhile, Old Dominion announced that it would explore a potential conference membership change although it did not indicate that it had an open offers to change conferences. Theoretically, VCU moving to the Atlantic 10 would close the door to a spot for Old Dominion, but with all the movement we have been seeing surely there will be an opening somewhere in the not too distant future.
3. We recently linked to a piece by Andy Glockner looking at the coaching carousel from a big picture view. Now we have his CBS counterparts–Jeff Goodman and Gary Parrish–analyzing each move on a team-by-team basis. One thing that we found amusing was that two writers (particularly Parrish) who have had no qualms ripping others including their colleagues (Poll Attacks, anyone?) were effusive in their praise of almost all of the new hires. The two exceptions: Trent Johnson to TCU, which was described as “a strange hire”, and possibly Ray Harper to Western Kentucky. Other than that it is basically all “good”, “great”, or some variation on that.
4. Like many people making a major decision, Florida State president Eric Barton uses a pro/con list to guide his decision-making. Unlike most people Barton isn’t trying to decide on something like what kind of car to buy. Instead, Barton’s pro/con list is about whether the school should stay in the ACC or move to another conference like the Big 12. As you can see the con list is literally quite a bit longer than the pro list, but the school may have 2.9 million more reasons per year to add to the pro list. If the school does make the move, which we still have a hard time seeing, it would create a fairly significant change in the ACC and likely start another wave of conference realignment moves.
5. After a brief hiatus since his last post (nearly two weeks) Luke Winn is back taking a look at three-point defense. Building on the work of Ken Pomeroy that we linked to in February, Winn examines the efficacy of teams that limit the number of three-point attempts and those that essentially invite their opponents to take shots from beyond the arc. For those of you who tend to get overwhelmed by advanced metrics it is a fairly intuitive piece that analyzes teams looking at the percentage of shots their opponents take that are short two-point attempts, long two-point attempts, and three-point attempts. While many successful teams take vastly different approaches to come to a successful result on defense, the degree to which they do so can be staggering. Having said that although we usually agree with Winn’s work we do have some qualms with his assertion that teams are essentially playing the lottery by allowing opponents to take three-point attempts increasing the likelihood of an upset. The anecdotal evidence can be spun to be compelling, but there are enough stories of good teams getting hot from three against better teams and still not winning (like Wisconsin against Syracuse this year) that we are not quite willing to accept the theory even if we agree with it on a theoretical level.

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2012 at 5:00 am by nvr1983 and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: duke, florida state, fsu, indiana, miami, michigan, michigan state, minnesota, nc state, north carolina, north carolina state, ohio state, old dominion, unc, vcu, virginia commonwealth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.