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

The beauty of early non-conference tournaments exists in their compressed schedules. Teams with different capabilities and ceilings typically meet up in a tropical locale, stage a raft of competitive games in a compacted two or three-day window, a champion is crowned and, fin. That is how non-conference events should be: quick, clean, blurringly thrilling, a drive-by snapshot of prospective NCAA Tournament match-ups, a winter sampling of the sport’s crowning postseason event. Think Feast Week, or the Champions Classic, or Maui. The accumulation of quality teams and coaches and players gives each event its own unique brand of entertainment value each and every year, but the timeless temporal convenience of rapid-fire completion is what we value most. It calls upon the spirit of March in November, with more equalized match-ups, less auto-birth low-majors and coaches in ridiculous Hawaiian floral shirts. These cute little early-season gauntlets don’t need fixing. Make more of them. Invite better teams.

Two weak leagues and a scattered set of games could push this season’s Big 12/SEC Challenge into the abyss of early-season tournaments.

Whatever you do, non-conference scheduling lords, do not take any cues from the new Big 12/SEC Challenge. The leagues announced their 2013 lineup Tuesday, and at least two of the match-ups belong in the apex of this season’s partially uncovered non-conference slate. On Friday, December 6, Kentucky and its intergalactic force of indomitable freshmen will take on Baylor, who returns one of the more athletic and imposing frontcourts (Isaiah Austin, Cory Jefferson, Ricardo Gathers) in the country. Four days later, Kansas will take its Andrew Wiggins-equipped squad (an aside: You have no idea how great it feels not to have to include the standard “we don’t know where he’s going” disclaimer every time I type Wiggins’ name. Wiggins, Kansas, got it.) to Gainesville for a meeting with five-star freshmen Kasey Hill, Chris Walker and a respectable supporting group. Those are two excellent December match-ups, spaced just four days apart, stuffed with freshmen intrigue and NBA lottery talent and future Hall of Fame coaches. They are the kinds of games everyone lives for in college basketball’s fluff-filled non-conference season.

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

The few generational prep superstars that surface every so often, the rarefied air not only of their own one-year classifications but of a decade of college and NBA basketball, are special tent posts in the historical arc of individual hoops stars. You know them when you see them (Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, and so on), from the incipient middle school grumblings, to the mind-numbing AAU mix tapes, to the frenetic recruiting buildup, to the actual, final, conclusive, decision date. Wiggins reached that final stage like few players of his ilk ever have before him. Everyone you talked to – all manners of basketball insiders and friends and his own future coach and, reportedly, even his parents – was completely in the dark about his decision. Wiggins had four schools left on the board, all of them variously qualified to welcome the greatest prep basketball prospect since LeBron James to their campus for a brief six-month season, and beyond that – beyond maybe a slight communal leaning that Wiggins would wind up at Florida State – nobody really knew. At 12:15 PM ET yesterday, the college basketball world stood on the brink of an utterly season-revolutionizing event, and Wiggins’ opaque signals and shrouded inclinations leading up made it one of the most exciting sports-related things ever to follow live on Twitter. It was suspenseful. Titillating. Unnerving. It was every stomach tingly-feeling, hands-sweating, acute-attentioned sensation imaginable, and all of it was couched in a thick cloud of uncertainty.

Recruits as talented and as hyped as Wiggins are not yearly luxuries (Getty).

One simple tweet announced the news. Next came the firestorm. I’m not talking about the angry folks on Twitter, the myopic blockheads who can’t possibly fathom why the best high school basketball player in the country would ever decide against attending the school they support. I’m talking about predictive articles like this and this. The exalted leaders of this diffuse college hoops writing profession took it upon themselves to write “Post-Wiggins Top 25’s,” as if one player, sitting on a faux-erected dais in the middle of a high school gym, and a few simple words, could disrupt the entire established elite tier of the 2013-14 college basketball season. Kansas is clearly better now than it was at 12:14 PM Tuesday afternoon, but the rest of college basketball’s projected top teams – a group that, even discounting Wiggins, features at least three (Duke, Michigan State, Kentucky, Louisville, Arizona, etc.) guaranteed national title aspirants, with bundles of future NBA lottery talent to go around – had to be shifted into new relative locations. Wiggins’ decision was that big, that impactful, that not only would Kansas immediately enter the preseason Final Four discussion, everybody else would need to make room for the Wiggins-equipped locomotive and Big 12 frontrunner. Wiggins didn’t just change Kansas; he shifted the tectonic plates of college basketball’s one supra-conference organizing principle: competitive equity.

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

Top-rated prospects are not created equal. Each and every recruiting class features a different No. 1 player with a different skill set and different ceiling and varying amounts of pro potential. You get seasons like 2012, when Nerlens Noel joined Kentucky with every iteration of defensive scouting recommendation and eulogistic praise imaginable. He was a specialist, a defensive savant with a merely “developing” offensive game. Noel would turn out to be an undisputed star and – even after tearing his ACL against Florida in February – maybe the best bet to be taken No. 1 in this summer’s NBA Draft, but Noel’s hype was built more on potential, on unparalleled size-to-position athleticism, on a work ethic that would one day allow him to put everything together into a devastating offensive and defensive force of nature. Andrew Wiggins is not Nerlens Noel, or even Anthony Davis, and certainly not anything like Harrison Barnes, the freshmen preseason All-American that wasn’t, whose under-performance has spawned – and not unjustifiably so – some level of unease about the boundless expectations surrounding Wiggins’ immediate impact at the college level.

The reverberations of Wiggins’ decision will be felt throughout all of college basketball (USA Today Sports).

When we talk about Andrew Wiggins, we’re not just talking about a No. 1 recruit and a likely top overall NBA Draft pick. Wiggins is one of the distinguished few prospects that – according to pretty much any scout or talent evaluator or Youtube frequenter you speak to – offers not only the potential to lift a college team’s one-year baseline to new heights, but the promise of franchise-altering skills in the NBA. So, basically, think Kevin Durant, or LeBron James, or Tim Duncan. While we’re on the subject, the LeBron comparisons are not completely unfounded. A direct prep-to-pros LBJ parallel was invoked on the cover of Sports Illustrated just last year, with a glorifying cover story and headline that read, “The Best High School Basketball Player Since LeBron James Is…”, featuring a 2013 prospect whose name was not Andrew Wiggins. That illuminating SI edition was a tribute to Chicago high school star and future lottery pick Jabari Parker, written and published before Andrew Wiggins realized he was just plain clowning everyone on the high school level and best be reclassifying to expedite his passage to professional basketball. Now that headline seems sort of outdated, or factually incorrect, because a quorum has been reached: Wiggins is better than “the best basketball player since LeBron James.”

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

The transfer market didn’t betray the Oregon Ducks last season, so they gave it another shot this week. They went after coveted former UNLV forward Mike Moser, who instantly became one of the hottest transfer pieces on the market this offseason following his release from the Rebels. Moser could play right away thanks to the graduate transfer exemption, and he could have chosen any number of teams — who wouldn’t want to add an athletic and imposing 6’8” power forward to bolster their frontcourt? Washington, Oregon and Gonzaga had emerged as Moser’s most likely landing spots in recent weeks, and on Tuesday, Moser finally settled on his home state school.

Adding Moser is not an unfamiliar move for the Ducks, who have liberally welcomed transfers in the past (Getty Images).

The Portland native instantly raises Oregon’s chances of competing in a winnable Pac-12. That is the most conspicuously plain reaction to Moser’s news, and it’s probably right. Moser makes Oregon better. Elucidating the scope of that description – how much better? – requires a quick revisiting of Moser’s two-year career to date. In 2011-12, Moser was an absolute force. He played 77.1 percent of the available minutes, posted a top-10 defensive rebounding rate, a top-100 steal percentage, and showed promise on the offensive end. Moser’s athletic skills and instinctual defensive and rebounding work made him an obvious All-America candidate heading into last season. He was big and athletic and skilled, and just beginning to scratch the surface of his immense potential – Moser seemed like one of safest bargains on the table. Not only would he shine individually, Moser would power a talented UNLV group, built on the back of a highly-ranked freshman class that included likely lottery pick Anthony Bennett, to an easy MW title. Moser’s monster season was pre-scripted. He was a virtual lock for stardom.

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

Whenever someone brings up the possibility of a 96-team NCAA Tournament, reaction is unanimously predictable. Folks cringe, unnerved at the idea of seeing the regular season devalued at the expense of more Tournament games involving fewer quality teams. Bubble discussion would cease to be anything remotely close to riveting; when losing conference records and +100 RPI figures (and even uglier tempo-free profiles) are perfectly qualified for at-large admission, the enterprise breaks down. Opening-round byes for top seeds would feel inauthentic. Nobody wants a 96–team NCAA field. Maybe the NCAA, for strictly monetary purposes, but that’s it. The consensus is uncompromising. We bended our backs for 68, but the line of resistance is taut anywhere beyond that.

Next season’s Final Four will have a different TV provider.

If it weren’t for Turner Broadcasting System, the famous sports and drama-bearing cable network otherwise known as TBS or “Turner,” we might just be talking about 96 in harrowing certainty rather than lamenting the distant possibility of a hugely expanded field. That’s the way Sporting News’ Mike DeCourcy sees it — that Turner, in co-bankrolling a deal with CBS in spring 2010 to keep the NCAA Tournament set at 68 teams, essentially “saved all of college basketball.”

The truth is that 68 saved everyone from 96. The truth is that 96 would have been the worst thing ever to happen to college basketball, robbing teams of incentive to excel in the regular season and fans from investing any emotion or interest in how it developed. And the truth is Turner’s cable wealth—it receives income from both subscription fees and advertising, whereas network channels receive only the latter—is the reason the NCAA was able to hold the line at a 68-team field.

In one of the few instances where television contracts actually didn’t ruin something totally awesome about college sports, Turner deserves a hearty round of applause each and every year we watch Greg Gumbel on Selection Sunday list off 68 teams and then stop dead in his tracks. No more, no less. That’s the number the NCAA, Turner and CBS has settled on and – whatever your feelings on the “play-in” games – I kind of like things the way they are. This setup works. The number creates enough competitive balance to evoke truly compelling bubble cut-line angst, while remaining inclusive enough to allow any and all measurably deserving teams to play their way in. Win a few non-conference games, play .500 ball in your power league (smaller leagues have less margin for error), don’t lose to Old Dominion and Delaware in the non-conference (ah, Virginia), and you’re ticket to bracketland is as good as punched. It really is that simple. Could you imagine how much simpler it could have been with a 96-team threshold? I know what the depths of a 96-team bracket looks like. It’s called the CBI, which is a euphemistic way of saying, 96 teams is a dark and scary place.

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

Maybe the most important question is, “is anyone even the least bit surprised?”

That was the first thought that jostled around my frontal lobe after reading Eric Prisbell’s expose in Saturday’s USA Today detailing St. Louis-area AAU Coach Darius Cobb’s admission to receiving multi-thousand cash payments and free-expenses paid trips in exchange for perceived influence and access to Kansas star and likely top-three NBA draft pick Ben McLemore. Cobb reportedly met with various sports agents and financial advisers looking to steer McLemore to the professional ranks after his redshirt freshman season. Even a cursory knowledge of NCAA protocol would lead you to make the following conclusion without much in the way of deep introspective thought: An investigation of Kansas’, and by extension McLemore’s, alleged impropriety could result in the Jayhawks not only losing their Big 12 title and Sweet Sixteen appearance, but having its entire 2012-13 season expunged from NCAA historical accounting. Everything McLemore touched during his college career could be in danger of sheer obliteration. There would be protest and angst and complaints. It would get ugly.

The NCAA ultimately may not be able to find any wrongdoing on behalf of Kansas or McLemore (Getty Images).

Or maybe it won’t: thanks to some quick analysis on the matter at hand from John Infante, the internet’s resident NCAA bylaw expert and author of the famous Bylaw Blog, a completely blood-free resolution of the case seems entirely plausible, even historically prudent. Kansas can look through the superficial ugliness of its star freshman shooting guard and nefarious AAU-circuit go-betweens and financial impropriety, yearn for a punishment-free future and not feel totally nervous about the whole thing. The NCAA, as is all too often the case in high-profile impermissible benefits cases (and as was made glaringly evident in the resolution of the Lance Thomas jewelry fiasco), has no legal means by which to force Cobb, alleged McLemore-invested runner Rodney Blackstock or even McLemore himself, now that he’s declared for the NBA Draft, to discuss his muddy past. The only looming repercussion is if Cobb or Blackstock qualifies as an “agent,” which could very well be the case under the NCAA’s new expansive definition, or – as Infante details in much greater and clearer nuance – if McLemore is proven to have had knowledge and willing acceptance of Blackstock’s (or whoever else was involved) services.

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

Because once-meaningful concepts like academic and cultural similarity, geographical proximity and longstanding tradition no longer control how or why college athletic conferences exist, and because television, you know, does – Thursday’s news out of SEC headquarters is a very big deal, both for  league directly involved, the SEC, along with every other college sports conference. The South Eastern Conference announced a 20-year agreement with ESPN Thursday to air a 24/7 all-encompassing sports network beginning in 2014, with programming that includes 45 football games and more than 100 men’s basketball games annually, plus “selected events” from non-revenue sports and other important offseason dates such as football pro-days and national signing day.

An expansive new TV contract will grow the SEC’s already monumental annual financial take (AP Photo).

This is a very big deal. It is not mars-landing breaking news. Here’s why: the SEC exists in an entirely different plane of football competitiveness and import, stuffed to the hilt with NFL-bound talent and a fervent pigskin culture not seen in any other league across the country, but they were a step or two behind on this conference-specific television fad. The Big Ten and Pac-12 networks already have their own networks, which promise (alongside nonstop league-centric coverage) exorbitant annual sums, serve to expand the otherwise lesser profile of lower-tier programs and clearly represent the way of the future in a bountiful college sports television frontier.

The more subscribers there are in different regions of the country, the more fans that are eager to watch Washington State play Utah on a Thursday night, for example, the more money falls into league coffers and the more other schools – we’re looking at you, AAC – want a piece of the pie. These were the logistical league-hopping dynamics behind much of the recent conference realignment wave (go watch Maryland’s astonishingly candid introductory Big Ten press conference), and they will continue to drive the ship in league membership decisions, even if the ACC’s recent grant of rights deal appears to have ensured at least temporary realignment calm among the major conferences.

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

With each passing season, college basketball moves closer and closer to staging a truly definitive opening day. The goal, for obvious reasons, is to eliminate the brushed-aside nonchalance with which the general sports populace typically treats college basketball’s opening tip. The time slot is hazardous  (The NFL is the law of the land, basically, and college football after that) and aside from a few marquee events in recent years – the Champions Classic, the Ramstein Air Base adventure, the epic aircraft carrier overindulgence of last season – the non-conference season commences in a way that captures the common fan almost exclusively in non-NFL, college football-time slots. College hoops is a fallback at that time of year, an OK-because-nothing-else-is-on ordeal. All of these ambitious season-opening endeavors comprise an attempt to make it the main attraction.

If the event comes to fruition, college basketball will have improved its often overlooked non-conference season (Ardas Photography).

Another such opportunity was brought to our attention late Tuesday night by ESPN’s Jason King, who reported that event management firm bd Global is working with the American Airlines Center in Dallas to stage a headlining “multi-game event featuring some of the nation’s top teams.” The AA Center stuck its toes in the college hoops realm last season when it hosted Texas and UCLA’s ugly December 8 clunker in front of meager crowd support and only a passing glance of national media attention.

This year’s proposed event would be better theoretically, and astutely planned practically. Why? The arena just so happens to be situated a mere afternoon drive’s distance (18 miles, to be exact) away from the modern sports fiefdom known as Jerry World, the site of the 2014 Final Four. Placing this event – which could include up to four games and, in lieu of more enlightening details, should feature a large contingent of Big 12 teams – near the Final Four host site will stoke local excitement in the sport and its nearby teams well in advance of the time of year casual fans typically turn their eyeballs and acknowledge college basketball’s actual existence: March.

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

Recent high-profile enforcement foibles have done nothing to enhance the NCAA’s reputation as an objective arbiter of student-athlete compliance. From the perceived power trip smack down leveled at Penn State in the wake of last year’s Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal to the organization’s admitted screw-up in the Nevin Shapiro case and president Mark Emmert’s long-winded obfuscating filibuster at his annual Final Four news conference – the NCAA ‘s reputation has been tossed through the public relations grinder more often than ever in the past year or so. Anything short of a leadership change or, more likely, a complete overhaul of the amateurism-based economic model, the ethical verbal take downs will pile on each and every time the slightest bit of controversy creeps up.

An uneventful closed-door on the Lance Thomas case promises even more NCAA scrutiny (US Presswire).

Tuesday’s news offered another critical entry point. If fans and media were already skeptical of the NCAA’s enforcement imperatives, the sneaking suspicions that certain distinguished programs are given more leeway in how their violations are monitored, the completely inconclusive resolution of former Duke forward Lance Thomas’ jewelry case adds more kerosene to the proverbial skepticism hype machine.

At the start, everything appeared to be lining up for a textbook impermissible benefits  smack down. Thomas, a forward on Duke’s 2010 national championship team, reportedly made a $30,000 down payment in December 2009 during a non-conference road trip at glitzy New York Jeweler Rafaello & Co., and was simultaneously extended a $70,000 line of credit to pay off the rest of his almost $100,000 bling spree. There were questions to be asked – where, exactly, does a college senior get 30 grand of spending money? Did Thomas use his influence as a Duke basketball player to secure financial assistance? How on earth did a reputable New York jeweler agree to spot the better part of ¾ of Thomas’ nearly six-figure swag money-drop with no obvious recourse to get to the bottom of them/ Those questions were answered Tuesday, and that answer, via a statement released by university officials to The News & Observer, was a big collective sigh of Blue Devils relief: no sanctions, no recruiting wrist slaps, no anything. Guilt-free.

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

Height, size and speed are three of the most basic common denominators transcending the walls of sport-specific performances and, at levels as high as Division I and the professional ranks, allowing players to span their natural gifts across multiple athletic endeavors. Jim Brown is the archetypical multi-sport figure, by most accounts the most dominant running back in professional history and an unfairly fast and strong lacrosse player in his own right. He is the measuring stick by which multi-sport predecessors are, well, measured, and basically everything since — Deion Sanders and Bo Jackson are more recent highlights — has fallen well short of Brown’s tremendous accomplishments. Whether because of kids’ general rushed identification of single-sport priorities – and growing pressures, partially or fully imposed by parents, to devote Gladwellian 10,000-hour practice requirements to a specific sport – or a broader recognition that playing two sports professionally is just really hard, the days of Brown-like dominance appear to be behind us.

After averaging 14.5 points and 9.7 rebounds for Ole Miss this season, Murphy will try and make it in the NFL (AP Photo).

Plenty of others have tried to make the leap, and the latest evidence comes by way of former Ole Miss forward Murphy Holloway, who after not playing organized football since his sophomore year in high school signed a free agent contract this weekend with the defending Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens. The motivation is plainly evident: Holloway is a big (6’7’’, 240 lbs.), fast and explosive athlete. He spent four years honing his hoop skills – curiously enough, Holloway played for the Rebels for two seasons, transferred to South Carolina for a redshirt year, then returned to Ole Miss to play out the second half of his eligibility scorecard – and after helping lead Marshall Henderson and co. to their first NCAA Tournament in more than a decade, the avenues for a professional basketball career apparently didn’t match the opportunity to join the United States’ most lucrative and nationally unimpeachable sports enterprise.

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