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

The first thing I think of when reading, writing or listening to anything having to do with the “First Four” is the NCAA’s frustrating semantical insistence that it be referred to as the “First Round.” Technically speaking, it is the first group of games qualified NCAA Tournament teams play, but to imply First Four teams and the other 64 all enter the Tournament needing to survive a “first round” – whether by playing games or not, which is what everyone except First Four teams do – is a confusing mischaracterization casual fans and writers alike could do without. We know what the real first round is, so let’s give it its proper nominal recognition. Sorry, First Four teams, but you can’t merely waltz into a spot in the first round of the NCAA Tournament; you need to earn your way there by winning your – gasp! – play-in game.

VCU

Until the NCAA resolves that issue, I will have trouble looking past any non-branding-related First Four storylines. Today, I’m making an exception. Numerous reports from Dayton Friday brought word that the NCAA rejected the city’s proposal to extend its First Four hosting rights beyond 2015. Dayton, as you probably already know, has hosted the event since its inception, including back when it only involved two teams and was called, whether formally or not, the one and only play-in game. Twelve years later, the NCAA appears to be exploring alternatives. Or maybe it just has commitment issues. The Dayton Business Journal got NCAA spokesperson David Worlock on the record:

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1. You know the NCAA has done something incredibly dumb when it completely reverses a decision it just made, but when the public was made aware of the NCAA’s decision to take away a year of Steven Rhodes‘ eligibility because he participated in games on a military base while serving as a Marine it became clear that the NCAA had to reverse its decision. We are going to assume that the original decision made by someone who was just reviewing the case and following the letter of the law without looking at the bigger picture and definitely without consulting his or her superiors. We will give the NCAA some credit for reversing course quickly, but we suspect that there was some external pressure placed on the organization to reverse its prior decision.
2. We are still anxiously waiting for the release of full schedules, but the powers that be have decided to release the schedules in bits and pieces. The latest part of the schedule to be released is ESPN’s Super Tuesday schedule. As you would expect given the relative strength of the two conferences the Big Ten slate is more compelling and the SEC one features a lof of Kentucky. Obviously the SEC slate is banking on Kentucky rebounding from last season’s collapse and the solid play of this year’s incoming freshman class, but it is hurt quite a bit by the lack of either Florida-Kentucky game since both will probably be featured CBS weekend broadcasts.
3. When we saw that there was news about the First Four we were initially excited by the possibility that the NCAA had finally gotten rid of the farce that is the First Four. Unfortunately, the news was merely that the NCAA was considering alternatives to Dayton as the site of future First Fours. Dayton already has the rights to the next two First Fours secured, but the bidding for the 2016-18 iterations remains open. According to David Worlock of the NCAA, the issue is not so much that Dayton has not been a suitable host, but instead is reflective of conference realignment. Honestly, we have no idea what that means unless the NCAA is planning on changing the format of the NCAA Tournament because of the changes in conference structure since it should not affect the location of what essentially amount to play-in games.
4. Yesterday we mentioned the ongoing issues around Chris Walker’s eligibility at Florida and how it remained one of the major outstanding issues heading into the season. While Jamal Aytes would not be classified in the same category as Walker he remained one of the top uncommitted players in the class of 2013. That is until he committed to UNLV yesterday. A 6’6″ power forward usually does not attract a lot of attention, but Aytes managed to crack the top 100 for most recruiting services. His addition will not be enough to make anybody in Las Vegas forget about Anthony Bennett or Mike Moser, but he could help ease the transition by committee.
5. As those of you who are on Twitter are aware there are some coaches who seem to get social media and those who do not. With that in mind Sporting News put together a list breaking down the best and worst of college basketball coaches on Twitter. Most of the names on the best/worst lists should not exactly surprise you although the names on the worst lists might have such a minuscule presence online that you might not have even been aware that they were on Twitter. We have no idea if this type of stuff has any influence on potential recruits, but we will say it does not hurt to be able to speak their language.

Rush The Court is back with another edition of One on One: An Interview Series, which we will bring you periodically throughout the offseason. If you have any specific interview requests or want us to interview you, shoot us an email at rushthecourt@yahoo.com.

The great history and tradition of UCLA basketball hit some bumps over the past couple of seasons, so after an embarrassing loss to Minnesota in the 2013 NCAA Tournament, Bruins athletic director Dan Guerrero and the school’s administration decided to make a coaching change. Just six days after Ben Howland was relieved of his duties as the head coach, the school announced that it had reached an agreement with then-New Mexico coach Steve Alford to take over the reins of the program in Westwood. Alford is what one would call a basketball lifer. Growing up as the son of a high school coach, he was always around the game which helped him develop into one of the best players in Indiana high school history. Following an illustrious prep career, Alford went on to play at Indiana where he was the team MVP for all four of his seasons in Bloomington under Bob Knight and a star as a consensus 1st team All-American on the 1987 National Championship team. After a four season NBA career, Alford began a coaching career that has seen him make stops at Division III Manchester College, Missouri State, Iowa, and New Mexico. With a 463-235 career record and seven NCAA Tournament appearances under his belt, Alford and his style of basketball were just too attractive for UCLA to pass up in its coaching search. After speaking with the new USC coach Andy Enfield last week, RTC correspondent Walker Carey recently had the pleasure of speaking to the other new coach on the Los Angeles college basketball scene — UCLA coach Steve Alford — about his career, his new team at UCLA, and his outlook on the future of Bruins basketball.

Rush the Court: You accepted the UCLA job on March 30. How has the transition to the new job been and what have you been able to accomplish since that date

Only 48, Alford Came to UCLA With a Long Coaching History Already Behind Him (Don Liebig/ASUCLA Photography)

Steve Alford: We have just hit the ground running. When you go from having a real experienced team coming back at New Mexico – probably my best team. We were not going to have to do a whole lot of recruiting of the team and the classes in the future because we had everything in line with guys coming back and those type of things. It looked like it was going to be a casual offseason, but all of a sudden you make the transition and you start recruiting not just the 2014 class, but you also start recruiting your current team because they do not know you and they do not know your staff. We may have spent more time with our current team than anywhere else. We needed to go in and build that trust – and that takes time. I think over the last four months it has been a balance of all of us as families making a move to the Los Angeles area and that is transition, building trust and recruiting the players on the UCLA team, and getting a move on recruiting the 2014 and 2015 classes.

RTC: UCLA’s history and tradition is arguably the best in college basketball. How much was that a factor in you deciding to make the move to Westwood?

Alford: Probably a lot. It is not just the tradition, but what UCLA stands for as an institution. I have been here four months and no matter what building you walk into or what people you bump into – whether they be administrators, faculty members, students, athletes, or coaches – the whole campus just embodies excellence. The ability to come to a place where excellence is stressed in training, preparation, and taking care of the student-athletes (both academically and athletically) to prepare for an incredible future was very, very intriguing. Additionally, growing up in the state of Indiana and I was obviously a huge Indiana fan because of Coach Knight, but I also had an incredible understanding of John Wooden and the four letters of UCLA, which exposed me to their history and tradition. Growing up in Indiana, the two programs I followed the closest were probably Indiana and UCLA.

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

This is going to be one of the most fascinating seasons of Bill Self’s Kansas tenure. Over his insane nine-consecutive-and-counting Big 12 title run, Self has largely resisted the compressed process of recruiting and bidding adieu to one-and-done players after a single season. Instead, he has turned gradual multi-year development into an art form, recruiting program-dedicated players willing to hack it on the practice courts and bide their time on the bench for a season or more, then enter the starting lineup as upperclassmen with plenty of experience, a solid understanding of the physicality of the college game, and great familiarity with their teammates. This cycle has worked for years, and Self would be crazy not to keep running his program and his player development process the same exact way. That old “why change something?” metaphor applies here. Slow developmental curves are Self’s trademark; John Calipari at Kentucky he is not.

The players surrounding Wiggins could be just as valuable to Kansas’ national title hopes as Wiggins himself (USA Today).

This season, for the first time in recent memory, Self is expected to play at least two true freshmen in the starting lineup (and quite possibly three), one of whom is considered the best high school prospect to enter the college game since Kevin Durant. You know his name: Andrew Wiggins. Wiggins has many titles – basketball destroyer of worlds, modern “Monstar” of college hoops (if you haven’t seen “Space Jam”, well, sorry), face-melting athletic freak, guaranteed franchise-altering NBA superstar – and he is the main reason why, in a matter of seconds, Kansas went from tenuous Big 12 front-runner to legitimate national championship contender when Wiggins, one of the best-kept commitment secrets of recent memory, announced he would play his one year of college basketball with the Jayhawks. Wiggins, it was widely said, would make Kansas great. He was the most talented player Self would ever coach, an instant star capable of lifting any team with any coach – let alone a nine-times-running conference champion with a surefire Hall of Famer patrolling the sidelines – into the national championship discussion. Kansas was going to be good, and Wiggins was the reason why.

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August is arguably the deadest month of the college basketball calendar, but that didn’t stop the crew from putting together an RTC Offseason Podcast to review the last six or seven weeks of news since the NBA Draft went down in late June. Shane Connolly (@sconnolly114) came out of his summer hibernation to serve as our host, and the guys took on the topics of Division 4, what defines success for an NBA coach and whether summer basketball is roughly as relevant to future success as preseason football (full timeline below). We’ll be back in late September as we start to truly gear up for the 2013-14 season. See you then!

• 0:00-12:25 – The Future of the NCAA
• 12:25-20:07 – Butler sans Brad Stevens
• 20:07-24:39 – Never-ending PJ Hairston Saga
• 24:39-27:04 – Summer International Tournaments – News or Noise?
• 27:04-32:48 – ESPN Tip Off Marathon
• 32:48-43:08 – ESPN Gameday Schedule/wrap

1. New Butler coach Brandon Miller was probably already facing an uphill battle replacing Brad Stevens. Not only did he have to contend with a conference change from the Atlantic 10 to the Big East and the departure of several key seniors, but he was also facing Stevens’ considerable shadow. Now he will have to do all of this without Roosevelt Jones, who was perhaps the team’s top returning player, is out for the season after tearing ligaments in his left wrist during the team’s trip to Australia. Butler was going to have a tough time dealing with all the changes and now doing so without Jones might be too much for Miller (or even Stevens if he had stayed) as the Bulldogs seem destined for the bottom of the Big East this season.
2. The NCAA has found itself in quite few politically unpopular situations over the years, but they may have topped themselves with their latest act–taking a year of eligibility away from a Marine veteran for playing games on the base. The latest poster boy for the NCAA’s ongoing quest for bad publicity is Steven Rhodes, a 24-year-old freshman at Middle Tennessee State, who just finished a five-year stint with the Marines and was planing on coming back to play college football. Unfortunately his plans have been put on hold as the NCAA has ruled that Rhodes has to sit out this season. Although Middle Tennessee State is not the typical site for major NCAA stories, we have a feeling that this will turn into a national story in the near-future.
3. The start of the college basketball season is getting very close, which you will be reminded of with the onslaught of college basketball previews that you will see online once the college football season starts and we are pretty much ready for the season to start, but one name–Chris Walker–remains in limbo. Walker, one of the top players in the class of 2013, is still waiting for clearance from the NCAA, but it appears that the NCAA Clearinghouse is reviewing his grades now. We have no idea how long it will take the NCAA to review his grades, but they will need to clear him by this coming week for him to be eligible to play this fall, but if he is eligible by December he could enroll at Florida and play the second half of the year. If neither of those options work, we get the feeling that he might pursue the Ricky Ledo option.
4. When Shivaughn Wiggins announced that he was transferring from Mount St. Mary’s we figured it would not take long before he found a new home and it only took a few weeks as he announced that he was transferring to Coastal Carolina. Wiggins, the NEC Rookie of the Year, averaged 9.6 points per game last season and should be a huge pick-up for Coastal Carolina when he is eligible to play in the 2014-15 season. If you are looking for a more in-depth evaluation of Wiggins’ potential impact on the team, check out the breakdown put together by Big Apple Buckets.
5. Out of all of the Candid Coaches questions that CBS has released the one about which elite 2014 prospect will struggle the most in college is certainly the most controversial. We won’t pretend to know much about any of the 2014 prospects at this point outside of recognizing a few names, but it will be interesting to see if these anonymous comments will affect their ranking at all and whether it might scare off a few coaches. We doubt that it actually will, but we imagine that several of the prospects listed here (and more specifically their parents) will be concerned about that. While this is interesting on some level and will certainly make its way around the message boards we are actually more interested in seeing this come out for the incoming freshman since we will be able to judge those evaluations right away.

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

The NCAA released attendance information from the 2012-13 season this week, with findings ranging from the very interesting — how about those Creighton Bluejays! — to the entirely irrelevant – I don’t think anyone was wondering how many fans came out to watch Fairmont State last season. But amid all the triviality were a few important nuggets.  Yahoo.com came up with a few interesting tidbits from the data earlier in the week, but here are three more observations worth noting.

NIT Be Damned, Big Blue Nation Packed, On Average, 23,009 Strong Into Rupp Arena Last Season — Once Again Good For Most In The Nation

1. Who said the SEC only paid attention to football? The 23,000 that packed Rupp Arena on a nightly basis last season certainly helped the conference’s cause, but six other SEC programs ranked in the top 40 nationally in average attendance – a total that only the Big Ten (12 teams) could top. Furthermore, the conference placed third nationally in overall average attendance — and this despite seeing that number drop over 900 fans a game from its 2011-12 level. Only the WAC, decimated by the departures of Nevada, Hawaii and Fresno State, saw a sharper drop in ticket sales last year. The SEC may be more guilty of the “there are 10,000 fans here but the arena is still only half full” phenomenon than any other league – a trick that isn’t exactly an atmosphere-maker – but in what was a far cry from a banner year for the conference, the overall attendance figures both surprise and impress. There is sport after January down south after all!
2. Let’s be careful not to make a direct correlation between average attendance figures and overall program success, or even fan interest. The easiest way to prove this point is to take a look at the program that finished 47th nationally in average attendance. Duke may be behind 46 teams on this list, but a consecutive home sellout streak dating back to 1990 should be enough to ease any concern with that metric. On the flip side, there are a number of teams with pretty solid average attendance figures, but also with half-empty arenas and relatively disinterested fan bases. Among teams in the top 40 that fit this bill are Tennessee (#8), Arkansas (#20), Texas (#32) and Nebraska (#38). It’s always better to have more fans than less, but program expectations, arena size, and athletic department budget (gasp!) should all be considered in conjunction with this raw data. Read the rest of this entry »

Deepak is a columnist for the Big Ten microsite of RTC. Follow him on Twitter for more about B1G hoops at @dee_b1g.

With less than three months left until the college season tips off, we at the RTC Big Ten Microsite are here to get you excited about the stars who are returning next season and ready to take on the responsibility of leading their teams to conference glory. Over the next few weeks, we plan to evaluate a number of key Big Ten sophomores who will have an impact on their team’s performance throughout the entire season. Today, we focus on Indiana point guard Yogi Ferrell.

A point guard who is rated among the top 30 players in his class by various recruiting services should expect to play a significant role in his team’s offense as a freshman. But Yogi Ferrell had a different set of rules for his first season in Bloomington because Tom Crean’s team already had All-Americans such as Cody Zeller and Victor Oladipo as well as other talented upperclassmen like Christian Watford and Jordan Hulls on board to carry the load. Nonetheless, Ferrell made the most of his rookie campaign by cracking the starting rotation and averaging 7.6 PPG while playing a strong 28.1 MPG. Deferring to his teammates to score in a high-powered offense may not have been easy for the freshman point guard, but his patience will pay off next season when he will be responsible for running Crean’s offense and will by necessity become one of the primary scoring options for the Hoosiers. He will have the opportunity to shine as a sophomore but let’s evaluate the parts of his game that will need to improve in order for him to make the leap next season.

Yogi Ferrell will drive the Hoosiers’ offense next season.

What did we learn from him last year?

Last season proved that Ferrell is a great fit for an offensive scheme designed to push the ball up the court and create opportunities for the wings to either drive to the basket or pull up for shots from beyond the arc. He displayed tremendous speed in transition, leading to plentiful open looks for sharpshooters such as Hulls and Watford. Without such a speedy point guard pushing the ball upcourt, Crean’s offense wouldn’t have led the Big Ten in tempo at 65.7 possessions per game. The freshman averaged 4.6 APG with an assist to turnover ratio of 2:1, not at all shabby for a player navigating a conference that boasts numerous elite defenses. After 30+ games in his career, we now know that he is great in transition, but we haven’t seen as much from him in the half-court. Considering the talent on last year’s roster, there were no plays called for him but in key spots his jumper looked decent even though it wasn’t very consistent (30% from beyond the arc). Despite his middling shooting percentage, he showed a quick release and was not hesitant to pull the trigger if there was an open look from outside. In summary, Ferrell has proven that he has the fundamental skills to succeed in Crean’s offense, but he will need to be more judicious with his shot selection going forward.

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

The P.J. Hairston saga has all the makings of a classic amateurism bombshell. The shady third-party handler vaguely accused of providing money and/or gifts to a college athlete. A star player from one of the most esteemed college sports brands in the country. A drug charge. A loaded firearm and ammunition found outside of an obscurely rented vehicle. The evidence-based suspicion of broader corruption among program athletes. An apparent academic scandal simmering in the backdrop. The amateurism debate reaching flood stage in the public discourse. A high-profile lawsuit challenging amateurism’s very existence. The convenience of the Johnny Manziel saga. It’s all too timely and salacious and interesting, but here’s the thing: We haven’t even come close to reaching the finish line. Hairston was indefinitely suspended from UNC basketball after being ticketed for speeding on July 28, his third reported traffic citation of the summer, and all charges related to his July 5 traffic stop have been dropped. Hairston won’t be punished by the legal system, but that was never the biggest part of his summer saga, anyway.

The final outcome of the Hairston saga is still unclear (USA Today).

No, the most concerning aspect of Hairston’s malfeasance is the status of his eligibility heading into a season in which North Carolina is expected to compete for a conference championship with the junior expected to shoulder the bulk of the point-producing load and solidify UNC’s otherwise shaky defensive perimeter. He may not be able to do any of that if the NCAA finds the vehicles he drove this summer were rented out to Hairston impermissibly, or if any of his dealings with local party promoter and convicted felon Haydn ‘Fats’ Thomas are deemed in violation of the organization’s confusing (and highly controversial) amateurism rules. More than two months out from the start of the 2013-14 college hoops season, Hairston’s future with the Tar Heels hangs in the balance. His status for the upcoming season is just as mysterious as all the plot twists and legal nuance that brought us to this point.

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1. A day after Roy Williams declared that he was tired of talking about P.J. Hairston (news to us since he didn’t talk about it as much as many would have liked him to) Bubba Cunningham, the school’s athletic director, reportedly said that he expects Hairston to miss some time, but still play this season. We certainly understand that Cunningham would like to convey a hopeful message and probably expected that his comments (made at a faculty retreat) would not make national news, but it seems awfully optimistic to think that Hairston will play this season given the publicly available evidence against him.
2. Losing your best player to an injury is never a good thing, but the staff at California has to be thankful that Justin Cobb sustained a fracture to his right fifth metatarsal during a Pro-Am game on Monday night rather than later in the year. Cobb, who averaged 15.1 points and 4.8 assists per game last season, will be out 6-8 weeks, which means that he will probably miss the start of practice, but should be back for the team’s first game. In a strange way Cobb’s absence during the early practices could be seen as a positive as it would allow the team to get his back-ups more practice and accelerate their learning with Cobb out of  way letting them work with the starters.
3. When Robert Upshaw signed with Fresno State it was a surprise to many as the 7-footer passed on many more well-known programs. Now that Upshaw has been dismissed from the team for violating an unspecified athletic department policy for the third time we can see where Upshaw might have otherwise ended up going. Despite a mediocre season in which he averaged an uninspiring 4.1 points and 3.8 rebounds per game Upshaw should have plenty of suitors and it appears that his family is already reaching out to potential destinations. The family has not offered any hints about where Upshaw is looking at, but it is worth noting that he originally committed to Kansas State before backing out when Frank Martin left the school to coach at South Carolina.
4. We hate to be jaded about news that an athlete has gotten into legal trouble, but at this point it takes a lot of surprise. So when we heard that Marshall forward Elijah Pittman had been indicted on misdemeanor battery charges we were not exactly shocked (this isn’t a comment on Pittman since we don’t know anything about personally, but is instead reflective on the number of arrests we have written about in this space). What is surprising is the fact that we had not heard about the arrest yesterday when the indictment occurred on July 31 and the incident in question happened on October 10, 2012. According to the police report Pittman knocked another Marshall student unconscious at an off-campus apartment. Given the fact that Pittman was allowed to play last season–averaging 16.1 points and 4.2 rebounds per game–we doubt that he will miss any playing ime unless it is the result of jail time.
5. With all of the movement we have seen with conference realignment we have wondered what will happen to some of the notable conference challenges. Perhaps the most notable one is the Big Ten/ACC Challenge, which will be back in a similar format this year. While most of the 12 games have some interesting angle (sorry, we are having a hard time getting too excited about Boston College at Purdue), the three big-time games are clearly Indiana at Syracuse, Michigan at Duke, and North Carolina at Michigan State. Although we do think that winning these competitions is largely overrated we will be interested to see how the ACC’s newest members fare as the ACC has lost its grip on the Challenge going 0-3-1 in the past four years after winning it the first 10 years, which also coincides with the Big Ten becoming arguably the premier basketball conference in the country.