- For the past month we have been talking about how dangerous Michigan State will be when it gets everybody back healthy later this season. Yesterday, we got our first indication that the Spartans might not be made whole the rest of the season as Tom Izzo announced that Keith Appling might be out for the rest of the season. After about 20 minutes of panic in East Lansing, Izzo clarified his comments to say that Appling might sit out the rest of the regular season. Still Izzo’s initial comments about “shutting [Appling] down” should serve as a reminder that we should be careful about projecting how a team will look when they get all of their pieces back until those pieces are ready to return.
- After the initial buzz around former Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter’s move to push for union status for college athletes we had not heard much about the process. We figured that it would be a long drawn out process that would take years. It still probably will, but tomorrow Colter will attempt to make his case at a meeting in front of the National Labor Relations Board. We will not try to pretend to be experts on labor law, but as Dennis Dodd notes the hearing is to help determine whether the players have the right to collectively bargain for workplace rights. It could be another year before the NLRB even makes that initial decision, which does not even account for the NCAA trying to place injunctions, etc on any progress the athletes makes, but it is still an important step.
- Over the weekend there were two pretty glaring missed calls that might have affected the outcome of the Arizona–Arizona State game and Duke–Maryland game. The former, Jahii Carson’s pull-up on the rim preceding the other craziness, was pretty obvious to any observer. The latter, the officials and scorekeeper forgetting to change the alternating possession arrow, was less so. Still both the Pac-12 and the ACC admitted that they missed the calls in both situations. In terms of impact, the one in Cameron was probably more significant as it occurred with 6:39 left and took a possession away from Maryland in a game that they lost by two points. At the end of the day, it probably will not affect NCAA Tournament bids since neither Arizona State nor Maryland are getting anywhere near the NCAA Tournament outside of watching from their couch, but it is still not a good look for either conference.
- Outside of Jameson’s weekly Award Tour posts we have not put much thought into the end of season awards. But this week’s edition of Seth Davis’ Hoops Thoughts, which includes a list of his top ten choices for Coach of the Year, reminded us of just how much people are sleeping on the job that Larry Brown is doing at SMU. Brown might not end up winning National Coach of the Year honors this year, but he certainly has to be in contention and we would be hard-pressed to come up with ten coaches who have done a better job this past year than Brown.
- Speaking of the most impressive coaching jobs this season, Dan Hanner published an interesting article looking at the changes in efficiency margins after a coaching change for current coaches. The way the numbers and trends suggest which coaches are doing good and bad jobs might not be particularly surprising the degree of some of these changes are quite striking. It should noted that often times the trends are often related to things outside of the coach’s control as you will see with Colorado State, which went from an efficiency margin of 7 before hiring Larry Eustachy to 17 in his first season then back down to 3 this year.
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Not sure how ASU is on the couch watching the tourney. Your logic on that one is flawed.