1. The news that have the Twitterverse buzzing yesterday was the news that next season might start out with four games being played simultaneously at Cowboys Stadium. The idea, which is being proposed by Mark Hollis (the man who brought us the Carrier Classic and the game at Ramstein Air Base in Germany), is on the surface ridiculous, but when you dig a little deeper. . . it is even more ridiculous. Look, we appreciate the fact that Hollis is trying to come up with a way to promote college basketball, but at some point gimmicks stop being cute and start becoming ridiculous. There have already been a number of writers who have went into detail about why this would be a logistical nightmare (dealing with whistles, shot clocks, etc from the other three games) so we won’t go into too much detail other than saying somebody needs to put a stop to this madness. As we noted on Twitter yesterday we don’t need gimmicks to market college basketball we just need a quality product on the floor.
2. Most programs tend to maintain a similar style of play, but as Corey Schmidt as Basketball Prospectus notes that is not always the case. Earlier in the week he pointed out a handful of teams that were playing at a significantly faster pace than last year and yesterday he released his list of teams playing at a significantly slower pace than last year. Most of them can be explained by a change in coaches, but there are several teams that have managed this transformation while keeping the same coach. It will be interesting to see if these trends will continue once conference play starts.
3. It appears that Clemson does not have a three strikes policy for Milton Jennings as they have reportedly decided to bring their troubled senior forward back after a two-game suspension following an arrest for marijuana possession. Jennings is expected to be back for the team’s game against Arizona on Saturday. We appreciate the thought of trying to help a young adult out by keeping him in the program and (hopefully) on track to get a college degree, but the timing of this seems a little too convenient for a repeat offender.
4. We have mentioned the pending death of the Big East for a while now and if you were not convinced perhaps the reports on their upcoming TV football contract may change your mind. According to reports the Big East is looking at a deal near $60-80 million per season, which might sound like a decent amount of money until you consider they were expecting well over $100 million per season going into negotiations and the Pac-12 has a $250 million per season deal. If the new TV deal is around the reported range then the schools would be looking at shares around $4-5 million per season compared to over $20 million per season for Pac-12 schools.
5. As much as we hate to say it college football and the revenue it brings in through its TV contracts is really what drives realignment (see the above point). This point is further driven home by data from recently released figures from the federal government looking at the revenue of the various athletic departments and the share that comes from football. The figures also demonstrate the large gap between the haves and have-nots. We still have a hard time getting behind schools who say they cannot afford to give players a stipend, but when you see such a large gap between schools that are still in BCS conferences you start to understand why there is so much dissension about finances at the NCAA level.

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2012 at 5:30 am by nvr1983 and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: milton jennings. 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.