1. We’re more than officially in the dog days of summer but only the truly committed scribes work all summer covering the sport we love. Seth Davis is one national commentator who came out of his slumber this week to report from Las Vegas with a Hoops Thoughts column on Michigan’s Mitch McGary. The rising sophomore took the college basketball world by storm last March, going from a role player to a key cog for John Beilein’s national runners-up, but as McGary explained to Davis: “So far I’ve only cracked the glass. Next year I’m trying to break through it.” The piece delves into some of McGary’s lesser-known history, specifically his struggles with academics as a result of ADHD, his workout and diet regimen that he enabled midway through last season to give himself a shot at more mobility (and playing time), and his non-decision to enter his name into the NBA Draft because he simply enjoys college life. Great read, especially in mid-July.
2. Another likely star returning to school for 2013-14 is Oklahoma State’s Marcus Smart, fresh off a FIBA world championship in the U-19 division. USA Basketball announced its National Team Mini-Roster on Tuesday, and the rising sophomore Cowboy was the only collegian of 29 players selected. The group of mostly young, rising NBA stars will meet in Las Vegas to compete next week, although no roster spots on Team USA are officially up for grabs. This is simply an opportunity for the players to prove themselves against their peers for future international events. Smart of course is unlikely to make the men’s national team roster for the Worlds in 2014 or the Olympics in 2016, but playing against the likes of Ty Lawson, Mike Conley, George Hill, Kyrie Irving, Kemba Walker and John Wall at his point guard position cannot hurt his overall development. Watch out, Big 12.
3. Louisville‘s visit to meet President Barack Obama will occur next week, on July 23 at the White House. The school waited a bit longer than normal to schedule the event, so that players Montrezl Harrell and Luke Hancock could attend the event after stints in summer international tournaments. While in The District, the team will also make time to tour the Capitol Building with senator and minority leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY). When McConnell isn’t busy tormenting his Democratic opposition in the back rooms of DC, he spends quite a bit of time in Louisville taking in the Cardinals’ biggest games. Although as far as celebrity fans go, we’ll stick with Ashley Judd 70 miles down the road. Sorry, Mitch.
4. Tuesday was the start of SEC Football Media Days, and why do we care? Well, in large part because South Carolina head coach and immodest rabble-rouser Steve Spurrier again went on record stating that the entire SEC — according to him, all 28 football and basketball coaches — is in favor of payments to their revenue-producing players. The stipend he mentioned yesterday amounts to approximately $3,600 per player per year and a little over a quarter-million dollars in annual costs — a relative pittance in a business that regularly deals with annual budgets in the eight- and nine-figure range. And why wouldn’t they want to pay players? It would give them yet another carrot in the recruiting wars against some of the smaller schools and conferences, while correspondingly eliminating much of the regulatory nonsense with monitoring and enforcing illegal benefits that amount to a night out for dinner and a movie.
5. While on the subject of football crossing over with basketball, Colorado quarterback Shane Dillon announced on Tuesday that he is giving up the gridiron effective immediately so that he can pursue his passion on the hardwood at another school. A 6’5″ wing in high school where he averaged a robust 25/12 for Christian High School in southern California, Dillon suffered a shoulder injury and was looking at starting next season third on the depth chart for the Buffaloes. He asked Tad Boyle if he had room for him on his team, but all the scholarships were filled and Dillon isn’t willing to walk on. He’ll look to make his transfer decision in the next few weeks, with a school in the WCC and Big West perhaps his most likely destination.

Bennet Hayes is an RTC columnist. He can be reached @HoopsTraveler.

Whether you are a member of the media and present by necessity, or if you are simply a fan sitting on your couch after midnight (that witching hour when ESPNews suddenly equates to programming gold), you have all been dragged through that same presser. The one where the coach tells you about how happy he is despite the loss, “because his guys competed for 40 minutes.” The one where the winning coach still isn’t that happy, because “this game was just another one on the schedule.” And yes, here comes the moment when both coaches admit to knowing they “can’t get too up or down about tonight” because the college basketball season is most surely a marathon, not a sprint. Coachspeak is everywhere these days, and with the mounting media attention on even the smallest of college programs, it’s difficult to blame coaches and players for sticking to this unoriginal script. They may be boring us as fans and media, but they become sure to avoid the negative PR that can accompany even the smallest of verbal missteps. So what happens when we find a coach or player who doesn’t seem to have received this most banal of memos? We pay attention. And right now, there are no two college athletes (in their respective sports) that we pay attention to more than Johnny “Football” Manziel and Marshall Henderson.

Henderson’s on-court antics, by and large, captivated college basketball fans last season. His recent issues off the court have proven equally attention-grabbing, for all the wrong reasons.

The tales of Manziel and Henderson are far from identical, but both are prominent college athletes who have drizzled a little extra flavor on their public personas (both on and off the field/court). Each has experienced the boon in media attention, fans, and Twitter followers that comes with not only being a standout on the court, but a colorful personality off it. However, armed with the nation’s collective eye, both have also felt the flip side of the fame – the inevitable backlash that comes when you take that reckless behavior a step too far. Manziel’s discretions have been less serious than those of Henderson, particularly in the eyes of the law, but his most recent blunder— leaving the Manning passing camp early due to alleged misbehavior — has had no problems finding every major news outlet. Henderson’s trouble-making at Ole Miss had largely been limited to brash behavior on the court and some equally unfiltered commentary off of it (#whitegirlwednesday) — that is, until he was indefinitely suspended last week after being arrested for cocaine and marijuana possession.

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Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

The details surrounding the departure of former West Virginia forward Aaric Murray were encapsulated in two words by Mountaineers coach Bob Huggins: “mutual agreement.” Seems simple enough, only it’s really not – not when you look back at the marijuana charge Murray was assessed with while sitting out the 2011-12 season following his transfer from La Salle, or the disciplinary issues Murray ran into that forced him to miss a game in December 2012. There is a clear history of crossing the line with college hoops’ now-most high profile free agent forward, and while the offenses themselves don’t condemn Murray’s future in college (or even professional) basketball, the more important question is, will any team be willing to take a chance on him?

Coaches must proceed cautiously before bringing Hairston in (AP).

This question wouldn’t be as pressing as it is, were Murray not already graduated from and finished with his coursework at WVU, checkpoints that will allow Murray to play for another school this fall per the NCAA’s graduate transfer exemption (provided Murray enrolls in a graduate program not offered at WVU). West Virginia was brutal to watch last season. This was surprising for a couple of reasons: 1) Bob Huggins almost never coaches bad teams; 2012-13 was a glaring exception. 2) And this is more comedic than surprising, but as the Mountaineers toiled away in the lower half of the Big 12 last season, I kept coming back to the comments Huggins made after learning his team had been picked to finish sixth in the Big 12’s preseason coaches poll. “If we’re the sixth-best team in that league then it’s a hell of a league,” the head coach said in October. Part of the reason that placement baffled Huggins, and came off as a slightly pessimistic evaluation for most other observers, was because Murray promised to give WVU some of the hard-nosed Hugginsian grit his teams so routinely infuse into their collective DNA – the stuff that typically makes his teams so physically demanding and brutal to match up with. At La Salle, Murray was a force on both ends: His 106.1 offensive rating on 26.2 percent usage, 11.0 offensive rebounding percentage, 19.0 defensive rebounding percentage and 7.6 block rate in 2011 underscore that basic description.

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1. We do not need to tell you that Butler is one of the premier programs in college basketball, but we have to admit we were pretty surprised to hear that Chris Holtmann was leaving his position as head coach at Gardner-Webb to become an assistant coach at Butler. Holtmann, who was named Southern Conference Coach of the Year as he led Gardner-Webb to 21 wins last season and signed an extension through 2018 in April, is just 41 so we are assuming this is a move that will eventually get him a higher level mid-major job. We do not have the contract information for Holtmann at either location, but it also would not be unreasonable to assume that his salary as an assistant at Butler might equal or even exceed his salary as a head coach at Gardner-Webb.
2. With his dismissal from West Virginia yesterday Aaric Murray has now been kicked two teams in his college career. Murray, who averaged 15.2 points and 7.7 rebounds per game at La Salle in 2011, averaged 8.8 points per game at West Virginia last season. Despite his fall off in production last season and his arrest for marijuana possession during the year he sat out, Murray should find a home soon as he graduated this spring and will be eligible to play this coming season. While Murray’s production (particularly at La Salle) will draw interest from many teams they should be weary of whatever issues have led him to be dismissed from two teams despite his considerable skill.
3. It took over a month, but Roy Williams finally issued a statement about P.J. Hairston saying that Hairston “has made serious mistakes and there will be serious consequences as a result”. That statement may seem pretty strong, but Williams did not go so far as to say that Hairston would even be suspended instead pointing out that Hairston is only loosely affiliated with the school (not taking classes) or team (not practicing with the team) right now and is instead giving the legal system time to work itself out. This seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do and realistically Roy has until November before he has to make a decision. Given Roy’s statements and Hairston’s actions we have a tough time envisioning Hairston in the Tar Heel lineup to start the season.
4. With the summer here some college basketball sites are taking some time off and others are focusing in on recruiting, but no site is doing what Big Apple Buckets did analyzing 32 of Jon Rothstein’s predictions from last season. The analysis is not particularly rigid in that it does not necessarily call Rothstein’s predictions right or wrong as there can be some grey area in interpretation, which you can see in the comments section where the author and reader debate Rothstein’s record. Personally we think making bold random predictions are essentially worthless, but it is nice to see someone called out for those predictions even if the outcome is not as bad as one might expect.
5. Finally, we bring you this amazing video courtesy of the Wilt Chamberlain Archive featuring Wilt Chamberlain playing in the 1957 NCAA Tournament. We will let the video speak for itself, but should point out how amazingly athletic Chamberlain looks against opposition that he physically dominates. Looking at this footage should give you an idea of why Chamberlain was so dominant and put up such huge individual numbers.

Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

The lengths parents will go to control and obsess over their children’s youth sports development are legion. The process begins as far back as grade school when children with exceptional athletic talents are weaned off other athletic exploits and forced to devote hours upon hours to the sport their parents have identified as the one most likely to offer an expedient (and financially permissive) path through college, and for the best of the best, all the way to a professional career. Recent NBA draftee Shabazz Muhammad’s infamous age-change is the latest example, but there are countless other cases involving kids whose participation in youth athletics becomes more about the potential awards down the line – college scholarships, professional fame, shoe contracts, and the like – than the pure, blissful, unbridled joy typically inhering childhood athletic competition. Try the recent Wall Street Journal profile of 15-year old New Yorker Jerron Love, a supremely talented prospect with hyper-controlling parents who went as far as to start posting YouTube clips of their son at 11-years old titled, “Jerron Love 11 Year Old Basketball Phenom.” There’s also, more famously, the curious case of Demetrius Walker, chronicled in George Dohrmann’s tremendous book Play Their Hearts Out, which details the rise and fall of  a 12-year-old hoops phenom deemed the absolute surest of “sure thing” prospects before said sureness ever reached a high school basketball court.  Now more than ever, elite sports at the youth level are becoming a more career-oriented endeavor, replacing athletic enjoyment with long-term professional thinking. This shift in thinking has, naturally, gripped youth basketball at disturbingly young ages.

One of the biggest recruiting busts in recent memory, Walker is a popularized example of today’s warped youth basketball culture (Getty).

It has reached the point where, for some prospects, a typical, uninterrupted, seamless progression through middle school is less important than preparing oneself in the most opportunistic way for the recruiting evaluation cycle. How do I know? A recent article in The Star-Ledger provided the newest detail to a culture of elite youth basketball that has officially become a professionally motivated enterprise, wherein some of the country’s most highly touted recruits are repeating grades in middle school to maximize exposure to college coaches and better position themselves to leverage a crucial evaluation window to their greatest possible benefit. All four of New Jersey’s most highly rated prospects in the 2014 and 2015 classes repeated grades, and other big-name talents – including 2013 stars Andrew Wiggins (Kansas), Noah Vonleh (Indiana), Wayne Selden (Kansas), and lottery pick Nerlens Noel – have made the same choice. This is not a new practice. ESPN recruiting analyst Dave Telep, cited in writer Mathew Stanmyre’s article, states, “The genie is out of the bottle. It’s no longer a trend – it’s an accepted practice within high school basketball.” The thinking behind the move is simple: artificially place oneself in a younger age group so as to grant oneself the physical and skill advantages that come with facing a lesser level of competition. That’s the basic idea, but there are a few dynamics at work here, all of which go into making this practice not only a smart and efficient way to elevate one’s relative prep hoops standing, but a wise early career move.

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1. Over the weekend much of the college basketball world was focused on Georgia for the well-known Peach Jam event but it is not the only significant recruiting event of the summer. As those who have followed the recruiting scene know there are a myriad of events over the summer. One of the newly created events called “The8” will be played later this month and feature eight teams with top college recruits coached by current or former NBA players. We do not know who all of the coaches will be for the event, but it will include Chris Paul, Carmelo Anthony, Anthony Davis, and Kenny Smith among others. We are all well-aware of how AAU coaches can steer players to certain program so we would not be surprised to see these coaches guide their players to their former school although it probably will not violate NCAA rules since the coaches as former NBA players probably would not care about the type of payments that get AAU coaches to break NCAA rules and steer their players to specific schools.
2. It seems like with each new day another Marshall Henderson report surfaces that makes his return seem more unlikely. The most news that Henderson had clashed with police for various issues that would be considered minor–playing his music too loud and not wearing a seat belt–if it were not for his issues with more serious arrests. Obviously these are relatively minor issues that would get overlooked for the vast majority of college athletes. The issue with Henderson is one of his disregard for the law and the more incidents he has had (no matter how minor they might be) the worse it looks for him and the program. At this point we would surprised to see Henderson remain with the program and if he does he probably will be sitting out a significant portion of the season. Given all of Henderson’s problems it would probably be best for everybody involved if that was the case.
3. The issues surrounding P.J. Hairston may not move the needle like they do with the Marshall Henderson story for a variety of reasons, but at this point it seems like North Carolina will have to part ways with Hairston as a police report from Hairston’s June arrest indicates among other things that Hairston knowingly accepted the rental vehicle from Haydn “Fats” Thomas. The UNC administration has remained quiet on the issue and we guess they technically can do so up until the season starts in November, but even for a school that is involved in an academic scandal that should be of far greater concern from an institutional level than anything any other program has seen (Penn State excepted) the optics of this no matter the excuse look bad for the school. The NCAA is notorious for dragging their heels before releasing a judgement on eligibility issues so the onus is on the UNC administration to step in and sever ties with Hairston before the NCAA is forced to step in.
4. We still are several months away from the season starting, but we already are seeing signs of what might be one of the biggest stories of the 2013-2014 season: the 2014 NBA Draft. Obviously we love the college game for what it is, but this season will also attract a fairly new breed of college basketball fans–NBA fans checking out college basketball for the player who could be their franchise’s savior. Most of the attention leading into the season has been focused on Andrew Wiggins, but as fans will quickly realize there are quite a few more potential saviors out there. We just hope that the players themselves do not get caught up in the hype and let their games speak for themselves without feeling the need to show off for the scouts.
5. We usually do not cover programs like Mississippi Valley State (honestly do not know anything about it other than Jerry Rice went there) so when it gets mentioned in this space it is almost certainly for a bad reason. That is the case here as the school suspended head coach Chico Potts indefinitely with pay after he was arrested earlier this month for domestic violence. Potts, who went 5-23 in his first season as a head coach, will be replaced on an interim basis by assistant coach Marcus Thomas. The school says that it will keep Potts under suspension until it completes its review of the case. We are not sure what kind of budget Mississippi Valley State has to investigate these type of cases, but we suspect that if they are following that thoroughly we will not see a decision until the case is adjudicated.

1. The story surrounding Marshall Henderson‘s suspension continues to evolve with the latest news being that he was pulled over on May 4 for speeding (the article says “suspicion of speeding”, but we have no idea what that means). When the officer approached the car he smelled marijuana and Henderson handed him a bag containing marijuana and a subsequent search revealed a small amount of cocaine. Additional details around the traffic stop remain unclear, but it appears that Henderson was only issued a citation for not having insurance and somehow was not cited for possession of drugs. We are not clear on the drug laws in Mississippi, but it appears that an individual would not be prosecuted if the amount of cocaine was less than one-tenth of a gram so perhaps Henderson was able to escape the school’s radar for the time if they were not informed of this part of the citation.
2. However, as Andy Katz notes the Mississippi staff tried to address Henderson’s substance abuse issues at least six weeks ago as when they reached out to former basketball star turned drug abuse speaker Chris Herren to help get through to Henderson. As you might have guessed the call was never returned and Henderson continued his downward spiral in some course leading to the announcement of his suspension yesterday. It appears that Henderson has finally spoken with Herren so it appears that at least that line is open to Henderson. We voiced our opinion on how the media (and the public) handles issues around substance abuse in particular when combined with race, but we just hope that Henderson is able to get his life together even if that does not involve a significant basketball career.
3. The next round of criticism of the NCAA is set to begin with USA Today‘s analysis of the the NCAA’s 2011 tax return. Among the interesting aspects of the document the one that will probably get the most attention is the Mark Emmert’s compensation package totaling $1,674,095, which is primarily base compensation ($1,201,159), but also includes retirement/deferred compensation ($234,300), undefined reportable compensation ($214,947), and nontaxable benefits ($23,689). Although the overall size of his compensation package is not that outlandish compared to many CEOs of public companies it will certainly raise some eyebrows especially given the political environment surrounding the NCAA now. As the article notes there were three other executives who made more than $500,000 that year. The other interesting aspect of the tax return was that it spent $9.5 million on legal expenses during the fiscal year. We have no idea what the breakdown of that was in terms of legal action against it or to pay for its legal counsel in ongoing cases, but we figure that with the momentum behind the Ed O’Bannon case that number may rise over the next few years.
4. One of the issues surrounding prep schools (aka basketball factories) is the concern that many of their players will not be eligible to play college athletics due to issues regarding their academic workload at these “schools”. Prime Prep, a school in Texas co-founded by Deion Sanders, appears to be one of those schools and yesterday the NCAA ruled that two of its graduates–Jordan Mickey and Karviar Shephard—were not academically eligible due to academic issues at the school. Mickey, a top-50 recruit who committed to LSU, and Shepherd, a top-100 player who committed to TCU, reportedly had been informed by the school that they would be eligible to play NCAA sports with their grades and the coursework they had completed. However, that appears not to be the case. Some people may point out that it is the student’s responsibility to make sure they are eligible, but realistically this falls on the school because you cannot expect a teenager, who is at most 18- (or 19-) years old to be able to navigate all the details of NCAA eligibility without the help of experienced adult. Both players will appeal the decision, but may have to sit out this season. It is worth keeping an eye on this because the school also has two players who are top-5 players in the next two graduating classes.
5. Last December, Mississippi State and Loyola (IL) played a game to commemorate the 50th anniversary of their historic NCAA Tournament game where the Mississippi State players had to sneak out of Mississippi in order to play an integrated team. Many view it as one of the key moments in sports in relation to the civil rights movement of the era (one that would eventually be overshadowed in the annals of history by the 1966 NCAA Championship Game). On Saturday, Leland Mitchell, one of the most prominent players on that Mississippi State team died at his home in Starkville. Mitchell, who had 14 points and 11 rebounds in the game before fouling out with over six minutes remaining in the 61-51 loss, and his teammates acknowledged that they did not understand the significance of the game at the time in the context of the larger social change that was happening around them. As Mitchell noted, “We were making history. We were ambassadors for the South, though none of us realized it at the time.”

Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

There is one timeless drawback to the NCAA Tournament that makes its otherwise awesome and utterly thrilling single-elimination format a little bit unfair. When teams enjoy successful regular seasons and earn prime NCAA Tournament seeds but, for one reason or another, see their March livelihoods ended earlier than expected, upset losses serve as a referendum on that team’s entire body of work. If a team doesn’t advance to the round its seed implies – #1-seed Gonzaga getting done in by a wicked 23-point-in-nine-possessions run from Wichita State, for example – it is labeled an underperformer. The regular season accomplishments persist through history as nice adornments to dress up a given program or coach’s CV, but in the wake of an upset loss, there is only one description to accurately assess the better-seeded team: underachiever. I’ve heard this appellation tossed in Indiana’s general direction more than a few times in the wake of its Sweet Sixteen loss to Syracuse (whose customarily suffocating 2-3 zone, perimeter length, and shotblocking prowess, amounted to a terrible match-up for IU), and I suppose you can argue, relative to seeding, this is a completely fair judgment. The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Cohen took it a step further in an article headlined “The Biggest Underachiever in NCAA History,” wherein he deems the Hoosiers’ 2012-13 season a massive failure due to their inability to turn two top-five NBA draft picks – a distinction shared by only 13 teams in the annals of the game – into Tournament-gauged success. According to WSJ, last season’s Victor Oladipo and Cody Zeller-led IU team was one of only three teams with two top-five selections to lose as early as the Sweet Sixteen. The “Biggest Underachiever” designation owes to the other two Sweet Sixteen-losing teams, North Carolina in 1984 and Duke in 2002, having won national championships in seasons prior with those very same top-five picks on board.

A Tournament upset doesn’t define an entire season (AP).

As you might suspect, Indiana coaches were none too pleased to read the ignominious title bestowed upon their newly-minted outright Big Ten conference championship team. Speaking of which, did I mention that? Indiana won the toughest league in basketball in a historically difficult year last season, posted 29 victories, groomed previously raw wing Oladipo into a lottery pick and saw its gradual ascent to the college basketball mountaintop (after the Kelvin Sampson wrecking ball that sent the Hoosiers into temporary hoops oblivion) realized in triumphant fashion. Tournament loss aside, it was a good year for Indiana basketball, and the coaches were going to make sure WSJ heard this message loud and clear. First came tweets from Tom Crean endorsing Oladipo and Zeller, their accomplishments at the school, and exclaiming the specifics of the well-compensated futures his two top-five picks are entitled to in their new professional basketball homes. Associate coach Tim Buckley followed up at the Hoosiers’ summer news conference Tuesday by highlighting his team’s perseverance.

“We’re pretty proud of this group,” Buckley said. “And we’re disappointed as much as anybody else with not going further in the NCAA Tournament. Our fifth-place team (Michigan) in the Big Ten played for the national championship. That’s how good this league was. And for us to do it night in and night out; I don’t think we ever lost two games in a row. “We had a resilient bunch. I’m really proud of what we’ve done, and I think everybody who’s associated with Hoosier Nation should be really proud of what we did.”

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1. A little more than a decade ago, a brash young rapper by the name of Marshall Mathers asked us if the “real Slim Shady” would please stand up and take responsibility for his actions. He could have easily been talking about another Marshall in present day — a bad boy Rebel from Ole Miss who plays the game with a certain, shall we say, modernist panache. The most polarizing figure in college basketball, Marshall Henderson, was reportedly suspended indefinitely by the school for a drug violation. According to Gary Parrish, there are legitimate concerns within the university whether he will be allowed to return to the team. Given that Henderson finds trouble nearly anywhere he travels both on and off the basketball court, it’s certainly no surprise that he’s finally run afoul of Andy Kennedy’s team rules. Could this mean that the gifted but certifiable shooting guard who averaged over 20 points per game last season could find himself at his fifth school in five years? Stay tuned on this one – like Mathers, Henderson isn’t one to stay quiet for very long.
2. Trouble just seems to stick to certain people, and at least lately, North Carolina’s PJ Hairston appears to be one of those unfortunate souls. Yet his school, an institution that outwardly takes its integrity very seriously, has been up to this point largely quiet on the ramifications of his June 5 arrest and subsequent revelations that he apparently has some unknown association with convicted felon Haydn Thomas. Athletic director Bubba Cunningham went before the media on Wednesday to discuss the matter, and the tone and general theme of his comments echoed the tried-and-true of the Carolina Way in recent years: Nothing to see at this time. Parroting Roy Williams’ statements from last week, the school does not plan on discussing or doing anything until all the facts are learned. For those of you unfamiliar with organizational theory and messaging, the last part is silent: …until we figure out how to mitigate and manage any possible fallout so that the outcome puts us in the best possible light. Thank you. At least one prominent writer thinks this is the correct play, at least until Hairston is back at school and enrolled in classes a little more than a month from now.
3. There are meaningful statistics and there are manufactured statistics. The difference between the two is sometimes difficult to discern, but the Wall Street Journal has provided us with a fantastic example of such a debate this week. We’ll have more on this later this afternoon, but the analytical premise in this article by Ben Cohen is that college teams with two top five NBA Draft picks in their lineups should be really, really good. Even accounting for the fact that the NBA Draft has moved from a model of demonstrated production three decades ago to one today of relative upside and potential, it’s a reasonably safe tenet. But to make the next logical leap and to assert that a team with those two draft picks has markedly underachieved relative to its peers (Cohen found 13 such two-high-draftee instances), well, that’s where Indiana found itself this week. The Hoosiers only made the Sweet Sixteen with Cody Zeller and Victor Oladipo in this year’s lineup, which when compared with Cohen’s cohort, ties 2002 Duke and 1984 North Carolina as the biggest underachievers in college basketball history. At least that’s the assertion of the piece — and it couldn’t be more wrong. This is a manufactured statistic, because what the analysis fails to tell you here is that there are a number of other talented players on each of those 13 other teams that had a significant effect on their season outcomes. Cohen also glosses over the regular season dominance of those Duke and UNC teams by suggesting that their draft picks had won titles in a previous year — true, but not relevant to that year’s team. IU head coach Tom Crean fired back in reference to the article, tweeting that the duo won 54 games in two seasons and have left the program in great shape heading into the future. Although we’ve consistently argued that Indiana was never as good as its ranking last season, we don’t think that the Hoosiers significantly underachieved relative to the overall talent it had on the floor, or the rest of the nation at-large. More on this later.
4. Kentucky’s Rupp Arena is without question one of the iconic buildings in all of college basketball, but its off-campus location, sheer size and affiliation with a downtown hotel and shopping mall has always felt a bit too sterile and dissociated when compared to the more intimate campus sites around the country. Regardless of that, the mid-70s building is vastly in need of an upgrade, and the Lexington Center Corporation board announced on Wednesday that it had finalized an architectural firm and a builder to provide a two-year facelift that will move the building into the 21st century, and essentially, make the place much cooler. The most interesting aspect from our eyes is that the building will become a stand-alone entity, no longer affixed to the hotel/mall complex, so we’re wondering what that will look like. UK fans, even in mid-July, wasted no time in offering up some advice on possible corporate naming partners (the “Rupp Arena” part isn’t going away). Our favorite: Makers Mark Rupp Arena, with the entire building dipped in blue wax (h/t Jen Smith of the LHL).
5. Finally, the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports‘ annual report on collegiate sports was released on Wednesday, and the headline that was blasted all over the country is that college athletics received a gentleman’s B with respect to diversity in hiring. Digging a bit deeper, though, and some unsettling numbers come to light. Most notably, a “major area of concern” is the steady decrease of black head coaches in men’s Division I basketball, now at 18.6 percent of all positions. This number reflects the lowest percentage in the sport in nearly two decades (1995-96), and is down significantly from an all-time high of 25.2 percent of all head coaches just seven seasons ago (2005-06). Whether this downward trend simply reflects variance in the data or something more sinister is unclear, but it is definitely something that the NCAA should continue to track and take seriously. Given that over 60 percent of D-I men’s basketball student-athletes are black themselves, initiatives to ensure diversity in recruitment and hiring are definitely worth pursuing.

Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

The merits of college coaching hires take years to assess. Coaches need time to develop their players. Recruiting strategies need to be overhauled. Fans need to buy in. Alumni need to be convinced their monetary contributions are being funneled to the right man with the right vision and the right process to lead their program to future success. All of these things require variously large stretches of time to take hold. For the black sheep among new hired coaches, maybe it never happens.

There shouldn’t be any head coaching changes in Westwood over the next few years (AP).

But everybody at least deserves a chance, right? No matter how putrid a coach’s first few games are, no matter how many fans are calling for his head, no matter how many disparaging internet memes are created to popularize his dishonor, one can typically find reason to give him (or her) the benefit of the doubt. UCLA fans will have to do more than just that with new coach Steve Alford, who had the contents of his contract publicly explored by the Los Angeles Times Monday night. College basketball coaches at blue-blood programs make gobs of money, which Alford does. He also, thanks to a $10.4 million buyout clause (four times his annual pay, according to the Times), isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

By saddling Alford with such a large buyout — more than 10 times what it would have been had he stayed at New Mexico — UCLA is essentially making it impossible for him to do to Westwood what he did to Albuquerque.

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