- It should not come as a surprise, but yesterday Greg Whittington announced that he intended to transfer to another school. Whittington, who was dismissed from the Georgetown team last month, might be the most sought-after transfer on the market as he averaged 12.1 points and seven rebounds in his first 13 games last season before before being ruled ineligible for the remainder of the season due to academics. Over the summer, Whittington tore his ACL and was still recovering before being kicked off the team. Whittington has reportedly set a visit at Rutgers this weekend and has been in contact with Memphis, Nebraska, and South Carolina. As Jeff Goodman notes, there is some question regarding how much eligibility Whittington has remaining since he missed half of last season due to injury and was sitting out this season recovering before being dismissed from the team.
- Perhaps he was waiting for an adequate sample size, but in this week’s edition of his Power Rankings Luke Winn brought back the famed Aaron Craft Turnometer and appears to have replaced Russ Smith with Craft’s Ohio State teammate Shannon Scott as the other Turnometer. Surprisingly, Scott is actually outperforming Craft in this metric. Of course, the more impressive thing regardless of whether Scott is actually outdoing Craft on the defensive end is that Ohio State now appears to have two guards playing that level of defense. The other stat that could our eye was the ridiculous three-point shooting from Connectictut. Based on their regular shooting we would expect them to come crashing back to earth pretty soon.
- We have heard of many coaches and sports figures donating money to various causes, but we have never heard of one donating money to their employer. Apparently that is what Josh Pastner as he donated $250,000 to the Memphis athletic department. Pastner’s donation will go towards the school’s $40 million fundraising goal, which is aimed at upgrading the school’s athletic facilities. As the school’s athletic director notes it is largest donation ever made by a Memphis coach and frankly we do not understand why he would do it. We could understand a former coach doing it, but for a fifth-year coach who at times has been mentioned as being on the hot seat it seems kind of ridiculous.
- With the much-discussed rule changes one of the biggest points of debate is how they are affecting games. The best way to do this is by looking at the numbers and the NCAA has done just that releasing its data as of December 8, 2013. According to the NCAA’s analysis the effects are encouraging with scoring up, shooting percentage up, and turnovers down. As the NCAA admits it might be too early in the season to read too much into these numbers. Perhaps the most surprising number is that team fouls are only up by less than two fouls per game. So while the popular narrative is that foul calls are out of control the data does not appear to back that up.
- The NCAA might take a cursory overview of the statistics, but if you want an in-depth analysis you have to go to Ken Pomeroy who broke down the turnover issue into steal turnovers and non-steal turnovers. For some reason, Pomeroy decided to use this post to try to figure out if charges are coming back into the game as the year goes on even though he does not even try to measure them directly. We won’t bother with that because it seems like a flawed assumption. What the post is good for is actually looking at the numbers that he measured. As you would expect steals have dropped with fouls being called more tightly (or at least that is the way it is perceived). On the other hand although non-steal turnovers have also decreased they are approaching prior years.
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"We have heard of many coaches and sports figures donating money to various causes, but we have never heard of one donating money to their employer. Apparently that is what Josh Pastner as he donated $250,000 to the Memphis athletic department."
Maybe there's something in the Tucson water.
http://uanews.org/story/tucsonans-cole-and-jeannie-davis-commit-265-million-arizona-athletics-facility-master-plan