North Carolina State announced earlier this week that Dereck Whittenburg, one of the heroes of the 1983 Wolfpack NCAA Championship squad, would be returning to the basketball program as an assistant coach. On paper, as it almost always does in these circumstances, the move looks great. Whittenburg’s arrival helps maintain a connection to NCSU’s past glory years, with his mere presence on the staff providing a constant reminder to players, fans, and most importantly, recruits, that the NC State program has summitted the mountain before. Pack fans must admit that this all sounds pretty good, but wait — haven’t they heard this one before? And didn’t it actually not go so well? Mark Gottfriend has done his best to erase the memories of the five-year Sidney Lowe era that preceded his hiring, but the half-decade with the former Pack star (and teammate of Whittenburg on that 1983 title team) at the helm was far too ignominious to have already slipped the consciousness of the Raleigh faithful. Now, of course, we needn’t note that Whittenburg is not running the program as Lowe did, which should figure to make this a far lower-risk hire. But with another Pack star returning to the PNC Arena sideline next season, it begs the question: Is the college star-returning-as-coach really the slam dunk hire fans believe it to be?

Can Dereck Whittenburg Lift NC State To Similar Glory As An Assistant Coach?

Lowe’s failures aside, you don’t have to scan the country long to find examples of alums returning to their old program and succeeding – both as assistants and head coaches. Most notable among current head men is Fred Hoiberg, who in 2010 took over the helm of the Iowa State program he starred at in the early 1990s. Early returns have been good for “The Mayor” in Ames, as Iowa State has won an NCAA Tournament game in each of the last two seasons. Other recent successful examples at the head coach level include Bob Huggins (West Virginia) and Sydney Johnson (Princeton).

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1. The NCAA Tournament (or more specifically the bracket for the NCAA Tournament) as we know it is about to change. Yesterday the NCAA released information on the changes it is set to make starting with the 2014 NCAA Tournament. The changes revolve around seeding being altered by the conference affiliations. The details involved in the changes goes beyond the normal space of this column, but it essentially boils down to three things: (1) timing of potential NCAA Tournament intra-conference match-ups will be determined by how often teams have played; (2) ease the restrictions on placement of multiple highly seeded teams from the same conference; and (3) essentially eliminating the possibility of intra-conference match-ups in the First Four. These might not seem like huge changes to most observers, but it could have a profound impact by creating more fair seedings rather than unnecessarily boosting/dropping teams because of their conference affiliation to help organize seeding.
2. One of the NCAA’s proposed reform took effect yesterday with relatively little fanfare. Yesterday was the first day that the NCAA’s new and improved enforcement policies were in place. In theory the idea that the NCAA will be stricter and more expedient with its sanctions seems like a good idea as does the idea that there will be tiered system of handling infractions. However, we remain skeptical of the people who will be carrying out the enforcement. We have already seen that the NCAA is a deeply flawed organization and perhaps the most important factor in governance is whether the populace trusts that governing body is acting in an appropriate manner. With what we have seen over the past few years we doubt that they do.
3. Over the past three years, Luke Winn has written several articles examining the transfer phenomenon at both the high school and college level. The latest iteration looks at the transfer habits of the top-100 players from the last seven years. Outside of the usual stuff (players who transfer more in high school are more likely to transfer in college, etc) and the rate of transfers in high school is startling, but that was not the most interesting part of Winn’s article. The most interesting part was that while 34.3% of top-100 recruits transfer (a ridiculous number) that number is not that different from the average college student (32.6% of them transfer). So the issues of transferring might be an interesting one for college sports fans it is a much larger academic one.
4. With all of the outcry over conference realignment one of the things that has been largely overlooked is that it creates some really interesting potential rivalries. One of the biggest if not the biggest new rivalry will be Duke and Syracuse at least in terms of basketball powerhouses. For all of Cameron Indoor’s charm the one thing it cannot do is produce a massive crowd, which is something that the Carrier Dome can certainly do. So while the date for Duke’s trip to Syracuse may not be set yet (at least publicly) there are certainly big plans for it as there are reports that the school is looking at having more than 50,000 fans in attendance. Outside of questions as to how well they could actually fill those 50,000+ seats there are obvious logistical/electrical issues that would likely derail this crazy idea before it gets started. We would be interested to see what kind of buzz a game of this size would create although having seen how far away a court can appear in a huge football stadium we are not sure that increasing capacity to this size would be such a wise idea.
5. At a time when professional teams in many cities are taking the cities hostage by requesting either improvements or entirely new stadiums largely paid for by tax payers it is somewhat refreshing to see that Wake Forest is going in the other direction. Yesterday the school announced it was completed its purchase of Joel Coliseum from the city of Winston-Salem for a total of $8 million with a plan to spend an additional $10 million on renovations. We are assuming that this $18 million is coming from the athletic department and booster money rather than being diverted from the school’s other funds so it seems like a perfect model for how sports teams and cities should interact.

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

For many years, the college basketball season would tip off with a relative murmur, drowned out by the football-crazed environment that consumes November. Changing this dynamic has been one of college hoops’ biggest priorities in recent years. Not only has the sport devised new, innovative, quasi-gimmicky events, the NCAA Tournament selection committee did away with its traditional emphasis on the “final 12 games of the season” in order to give equal weight to the entirety of a team’s campaign. The non-conference season has never meant more in the eyes of the selection committee, and if you don’t perform in November in December (or fill your schedule with small league opponents and other RPI anathema), turning in a merely “decent” league season won’t make amends for your cautious and/or unsuccessful pre-New Year efforts. Non-league games are important, and college hoops has sought to highlight their importance by spicing up its typically mundane season opening with eye-opening events like ESPN’s 24-hour marathon, the compacted Champions Classic and other innovative ventures.

If this year’s AFC even comes close to last season’s game in Germany, it will be considered a success (AP).

One of the sport’s more successful recent season tip-off undertakings was the Carrier Classic, which conflated patriotism and Veterans Day college hoops in unique and aesthetically enthralling way. The 2011 game was a huge success: President Obama sat courtside with hundreds of troops in uniform aboard the USS Carl Vinson while Michigan State and North Carolina played a “just OK” game in front of some of the more gorgeous vistas of any sporting event I can remember. It felt magical, or something close to it. One year later, the water cycle did its thing, players and coaches alike decried hazardous court conditions, and despite the event’s commendable patriotic intent, most everyone had agreed that whole boat idea wasn’t going to work out any more. The 2012 Armed Forces Classic was a safer alternative, imbued with the same troops-honoring purpose, and staged on far-flung defense bases in a five-year rotating cycle including all five military branches*. Last season, UConn and Michigan State faced off at Ramstein Air Base in Germany; In 2013, the AFC is setting up shop even further away from the Continental United States. ESPN’s Andy Katz dropped the news Tuesday afternoon: Georgetown and Oregon will kick off 2013-14 at Camp Humphreys Army Base, located 45 miles south of Seoul, South Korea.

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1. See that date up there at the top of the post? Yeah, August 1. Also known as the downswing of the summer, and the corresponding slow, gradual ramp-up to the next college basketball season. It’s not yet time to get excited, but it’s definitely worth a nod to the notion of a season getting here sooner rather than later. With that said, how about some super-duper-early preview materials to get the month started? SI.com‘s Andy Glockner gets things going with a look at the new Big East, featuring three new schools and an interesting existential question on whether a basketball-centric conference can survive and even thrive in major college athletics. And in case you missed it from a few days ago, Glockner also did a review of the remnants of that conference — the AAC — with a heavy emphasis on the defending national champions. 
2. While on the subject of these two non-BCS leagues, Mike DeCourcy examines how a proposed $2,000 “living expenses” stipend that the top football conferences are hoping to add (especially if they pack up for a Divison 4 entity) would impact the likes of these conferences. It’s not an easy question to tackle, nor is it something that the “high-resource” schools populating the Big East and AAC necessarily want to see happen. That said, as DeCourcy notes, there is no realistic scenario where huge basketball schools like Connecticut, Cincinnati or Georgetown would allow regional and national rivals in the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and Pac-12 to offer recruitsan additional and legal financial incentive without also doing so on their own. Those schools would simply have to rework their financial sheets to make it happen, which may require some level of creativity among their accountants and senior management, but let’s not pretend that college athletics isn’t awash in money. The issue at most relevant schools is on the expenditures side, not the revenue one.
3. And what about those revenues? It’s time for your near-daily Ed O’Bannon lawsuit update, and this one is a good one. In a 2-1 appellate decision involving a different case but one that will be instructive to the O’Bannon group’s decision, the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled on Wednesday that video game maker EA must face claims against it for the usage of college players’ likenesses. The video game company had argued that it was protected by artistic license under the First Amendment, but the court rejected that argument. EA, of course, was notorious for using college football and basketball player likenesses to the point of absurdity in its video games, yet still claiming player anonymity because the names were removed from their virtual jerseys. It sounds ridiculous, and it is. As the court stated: the video game likeness had the “same height, weight, skin tone, hair color, hairstyle, handedness, home state, play style (pocket passer), visor preference, facial features, and school year” as the defendant (former Nebraska quarterback Sam Keller). What does this mean for O’Bannon? SI.com sports law expert Michael McCann believes that it means EA will settle its case with that group, leaving its co-defendants the NCAA and Collegiate Licensing Corporation to twist in the wind for the major payouts. Either way, this is another signal that big change is on the horizon.
4. Stipends, Division 4, huge-dollar lawsuits… the NCAA is taking hits on all sides right now. Still, the prevailing wisdom is that no matter what transmogrified shape major college athletics eventually assumes, everyone’s beloved NCAA Tournament will not be messed with. The positive cash flow of over $700 million per year to the NCAA (and eventually parsed out to the schools) is just too valuable to destroy — so goes the thinking, at least. But, as Gary Parrish notes in one of his best columns in a long while, the potential of the monied schools choosing the nuclear option is at least worth our consideration. If there’s a dollar to be made, this cabal has proven that they’ll pursue it, time and time again, and often in the face of public sentiment. If, as we’ve also argued in this very space, the big-time schools decide that they can run their own version of March Madness resulting in a larger piece of the pie than they currently receive, then, as Parrish says, “smarter people [have done] dumber things.” We cannot disagree.
5. In the meantime, America is stuck with the Texases and Ohio States of the world sharing postseason basketball space with the likes of VCU and Gonzaga. Arizona, as a member of the burgeoning Pac-12, is closer to the former group than the latter. And with Sean Miller at the helm, the Wildcats are poised to dominate west coast basketball and stay as a national powerhouse for the next decade or longer. This SBNation.com report from Scott Coleman notes that only two schools have ripped off top 10 recruiting classes in each of the last three years: Kentucky, obviously, but also Miller’s Wildcats. This year’s recruiting class will join a strong returning group from last season to potentially vault Arizona to the top of the Pac-12 standings, and if the reports about Aaron Gordon’s performances over the summer are any indication, he may just find himself standing as the best prospect in the country not named Andrew Wiggins this time next year.