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

While Michigan State has found on-court success under the steady hand of coach Tom Izzo, his athletic director Mark Hollis has embraced progressive scheduling tactics that have granted the Spartans access to some of the nation’s most unique events. Last year, Hollis set the standard for inventive hosting sites by spearheading the plans for Michigan State’s game against North Carolina aboard the active warship USS Carl Vinson. The sensational vistas and patriotic atmosphere made the Carrier Classic an unmitigated success. Three similar events next season – on the same day, no less – have been scheduled since, with each taking place on a different U.S. Naval ship; a three-fold amplification of college hoops nationalism, all thanks to Hollis’ trailblazing work. He one-upped himself earlier this year by reaching an agreement for MSU to play Connecticut in a 2012-13 season-opening event at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, an active U.S. forces garrison and NATO site. Hollis’ next endeavor was a historical tribute to the 1963 Mississippi State-Loyola (Chicago) NCAA Tournament game that took place against the wishes of Mississippi’s segregationist governor, which he accomplished by initially offering a neutral site on the MSU campus, then helping to arrange a two-year home-and-home series between the two schools.

The 16-team event will honor the 80th birthday of Nike co-founder Phil Knight (Photo credit: Steve Dipaola/Reuters).

The creative AD has now set his sights on another commemorative event, this one far more inclusive than any of his recent scheduling novelties. According to ESPN’s Andy Katz, Hollis has received confirmation from 16 schools on a dual-pronged mega-tournament honoring the 80^th birthday of Nike chairman Phil Knight. The event is tentatively scheduled for a four-day period in November 2017, with two separate fixtures (The Rose Garden and Veterans Memorial Coliseum) featuring an eight-team fields. Hollis selected 16 Nike-sponsored schools he feels represents “all of college basketball’s power conferences.” With multiple participants from each league, the two-tournament format prevents a violation of NCAA protocol prohibiting conference opponents from playing in the same event. The 16 teams are participating on behalf of their own programs in an effort to pay homage to Knight and his illustrious résumé. Neither Nike nor Knight will be involved in staging the festivities.

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

Thanks to the inadvertent release of what appears to be a prominent former student-athlete’s academic transcript, the breadth and time frame of the UNC academic scandal involving its football team has been brought into clearer focus. On Sunday night, a partial grade summary bearing the name Julius Peppers, now a six-time Pro Bowl defensive end with the Chicago Bears, appeared on the University’s website. The transcript lists a GPA of 1.824, with nine of the 10 classes in which Peppers received a B– or higher – classes that helped preserve his eligibility– falling under the African and Afro-American studies program that’s long since marked a point of emphasis in the school’s investigation into possible academic injustices. In an internal probe that began in June 2010 following an NCAA investigation into improper benefits and academic wrongdoing within the football program, the school identified a four-year window (2007-11) during which former AFAM department head Julius Nyang’oro oversaw 54 impermissible classes, with violations ranging from forged grade reports to lack of teacher supervision to classes that, lo and behold, never actually existed. Peppers, who played reserve minutes on the Tar Heels’ 2000 Final Four team, majored in that tainted department. If the school confirms the validity of the released transcript, his participation on both the football and basketball teams in theory could be deemed retroactively invalid. More broadly, the transcript introduces the possibility that the academic misconduct within the AFAM department could have also involved the men’s basketball program and spans back more than a decade, preceding the initial four-year period highlighted by the school’s internal investigation.

The UNC basketball program may face sanctions for possible academic impropriety (Photo credit: Getty Images).

What began as a textbook improper benefits case now has the look of something far more nefarious. The NCAA, operating under its standard procedure, appeared to have delivered a decisive blow in March by docking UNC 15 scholarships over three years and issuing a one-year postseason ban to the football team. The school’s internal investigation revealed that was just the tip of the iceberg, though its focus – mostly football-centric in nature – remained fixed on a four-year period in which academic advisers steered student athletes into those 54 bogus classes. If Peppers’ transcript is authentic, there’s good reason to suspect the academic fraud began long before the school began investigating it. Perhaps more jarring is the legitimate prospect that more players from the basketball program partook in the illegal behavior, which means that, depending on the specifics of who, when and how each player was involved, the Tar Heels’ four most recent Final Four appearances (2000, 2005, 2008, 2009) are well within bounds for any potential NCAA or self-imposed sanctions.

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Christopher Johnson is an RTC  columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn.

For years the Big East has sat back and watched as conference realignment marginalized its position in the modern college athletics landscape. This realignment – driven almost entirely by football-oriented television rights contracts – prompted Syracuse and Pittsburgh, two league forerunners with longstanding rivalries and successful track records, to bolt for the ACC, a league that in May announced a restructured broadcasting rights deal with ESPN worth $3.6 billion over 15 years. Longtime affiliate West Virginia and near-member TCU also deserted the struggling league in favor of the Big 12 – another league cashing in on the recent power conference TV contract frenzy by agreeing to a $1.2 billion deal with Fox. The Big East in response embarked on a nationwide courtship to increase its membership before entering a crucial 60-day negotiating window with ESPN this September to secure a lucrative TV rights deal of its own. It has since added Houston, SMU, Memphis and Central Florida, with Navy, Boise State and San Diego State also joining as football-only members. Once a bastion of exemplary conference leadership and stability, the Big East has morphed itself into an amalgam of disparate parts with no geographical unity or identity. More importantly, its bargaining hand heading into the crucial negotiating period to determine its future status in the major conference pecking order lacks substance. And so the expectation was that the Big East, now a shell of it former self and withering at the expense of TV rights-motivated inter-league poaching, would muddle its discussions with ESPN and further diminish its standing within the power conference structure.

As the Big East prepares for its crucial TV rights negotiating period with ESPN, Aresco is the perfect leader. It remains to be seen how he will fare in his new position beyond this fall.

The floundering league took major strides Tuesday toward securing a far sweeter deal than it otherwise may have anticipated when it announced the hiring of Mike Aresco as its new conference commissioner. Aresco’s latest position comes on the heels of his stint as vice president of programming at CBS Sports, before which he worked in the programming department at ESPN. The Big East scrambled to fill the vacant position after former commissioner John Marinatto resigned in May amid concerns that he was ill-prepared to lead the league into its critical television negotiations period. The clear hope is that Aresco will work in conjunction with Evolution Media Capital (EMC) and Bevilacqua Helfant Ventures (a group that recently negotiated the Pac-12’s groundbreaking $3 billion TV rights deal) in striking a similarly advantageous package. If the Big East and ESPN cannot reach a deal within the exclusive 60-day negotiating window, then the league’s TV rights will be open to the highest bidder.

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Christopher Johnson is an RTC columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

A three-month chasm stands in the way before another new beginning to another college basketball season. The NCAA Tournament won’t take place for another four months on top of that. But even with that distant timetable, the world’s premier bracketologist, ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, thought it pertinent to release his early projections for the 2013 Field of 68. From this faraway August vantage point, reasonable cases can be made for most every team’s inclusion. After all, no one has actually played any games; thus we have no hard evidence – beyond what our speculative eyes can gather from offseason work, recruiting hauls, summer practices and European tours – that any team actually deserves a Tournament berth. As such, it’s hard to find great fault with Lunardi’s summer projections, if only because we have no factual evidence to debunk their authority. In fewer than three months, teams will officially begin their RPI-building missions, hoping over the winter span to construct a Tournament-worthy resume. It’s a long and enduring process, but come March, Lunardi usually has a pretty decent sense of whose season-long body-of-work belongs and whose doesn’t make the cut.

It’s never too early to begin analyzing March Madness bracket projections

For such a subjective process, Lunardi has over years of trial-and-error deconstructed the Tournament selection procedure into a predictive science. Fans often take his word as fact, or at least to the point where their Selection Show expectations are tempered by Lunardi’s analysis. In that context, it’s not hard to figure out why, even during these late summer months, his brackets drive both positive and negative discussion. The Lunardi bracket craze has reached yours truly, and as a starved college hoops fan, I couldn’t help but pore over its contents. All in all, the entire field seems reasonable, though I did come upon quite a few intriguing placements. To convey my thoughts in coherent form, I’m laying out three teams whose positions seem to be overstating their talent and three others who were undersold by Lunardi’s layout (“Underrateds”). These impressions derive only from the superfluous knowledge we have of each team at this point in the offseason, and how those vague profiles fit within Lunardi’s bracket. When the season begins, my perceptions will no doubt change, as will Lunardi’s March projections, so understand the limited scope from which these interpretations stand. This is merely an avenue to analyze sports’ greatest postseason tournament in a detached and unbiased way, without much in the way of evidence… more than a half-year in advance.

Reaches

UCLA: one-seed (West)

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Christopher Johnson is an RTC columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn .

Early last week Villanova announced the hiring of assistant coach Doug Martin, who formerly served similar positions at a private Catholic high school in Virginia as well as the Team Takeover AAU program, a traditional grassroots powerhouse based out of the fertile Washington DC-area recruiting grounds. The hire was questionable on several fronts, and it brought into clearer focus Villanova’s pursuit of Josh Hart, a member of Team Takeover and a prime target on the prospect market who currently holds offers from Memphis, Cincinnati, Arizona, Rutgers and the Wildcats, among others. Yet it wasn’t Martin’s ties to AAU basketball – and his potential role as a recruiting pipeline for Villanova – that cast legitimate doubts over his hiring. It was his resumé, which according to the school’s website said Martin “played collegiate basketball at UW-Green Bay for coach Dick Bennett from 1991-1995.” ESPN.com’s Dana O’Neil unearthed the specifics of Martin’s factual inaccuracies shortly after the Wildcats released word of their newest employee. UWGB has no recollection of him playing there, nor is there any record of Martin on year-by-year statistics or available media guides from the 1990-91 through 1994-95 seasons, Martin’s indicated time frame of participation. His LinkedIn profile claims bachelor degrees from both UWGB and Viterbo University, an NAIA school in Wisconsin. But according to the Viterbo website, Martin played four seasons there rather than at UWGB. Villanova confirmed the inaccuracies over the weekend, and on Saturday announced Martin’s resignation.

The hiring of Martin raises the question of whether AAU-affiliated coaches will have greater access to assistant coaching positions at power-conference schools (Photo credit: H. Rumph Jr/AP Photo).

In today’s social media-crazed world, where any conceivable tidbit of important information is available at the push of a button, lying about your playing history while landing a job as an assistant at a power conference program is simply astonishing. Gone are the days when factual documentation was accepted with little in the way of thorough web-based analysis or speedy, credible cross-checking services. At first glance, Martin’s error doesn’t seem all that egregious. He never played at Wisconsin-Green Bay – as both his high school and Villanova biographical profile suggests – but rather at a different small-sized Wisconsin school. The two schools fall under different sublets of athletic classification (NCAA Division I and NAIA, respectively), which, by all accounts, is no minor error. Yet Martin’s playing past probably holds little, if any bearing on his ability to coach at one of the nation’s top-tier Division I programs some 20 years later. Don’t get me wrong, defrauding the hiring process, particularly at a time when it’s practically impossible to get away with such bait-and-switch maneuvering, is asinine. And Martin’s forced resignation was indeed the best and only way to handle the situation.

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Christopher Johnson is an RTC columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn.

The advent of interactive web-based communication services like Twitter, Facebook and blogs has allowed coaches to connect with fans in a more direct and personal way than ever before. We witnessed an excellent example of this newfound coach-fan correspondence this summer when Kentucky head coach John Calipari, addressing UK fans directly as “Big Blue Nation,” explained in a long-form blog post on his personal website his new “nontraditional” scheduling philosophy as a roundabout way of rationalizing his refusal to continue the program’s decades-long home-and-home series with border rival Indiana. In “Forming a nontraditional schedule for a nontraditional program,” Calipari focuses on three main points: “Preparing our players for the postseason”, “our fans” and “the financial component.” He laid out his thoughts eloquently, a thoroughly-composed argument that shone some light on why he dared put an end to one of the nation’s deepest and most hostile hardwood conflicts.

With Purvis’ eligibility in question, Gottfried is offering comforting words to Wolfpack fans (Photo credit: Rob Carr/Getty Images)

Calipari’s philosophy (and staunch insistence on playing at neutral sites, such as Lucas Oil Arena) didn’t jibe well with Hoosiers coach Tom Crean, who feared the idea of UK staging an annual recruiting fair in his program’s backyard metropolis, Indianapolis. The talks fell through, and college hoops fans nationwide will lament the loss of one of the sport’s most riveting ongoing territorial battles. But Calipari’s direct approach in addressing UK’s legions of fans made sense in more ways than one. Rather than voice his opinion through the traditional media, Calipari proceeded to convey his thoughts via his own personal mouthpiece. It was forthright, frank and an altogether noble gesture from a man who, even to his own fans, seems to exist within his own impenetrable realm of coaching regality.

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Christopher Johnson is an RTC columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn.

For college hoops fans, winter Saturdays are an overwhelming blur. With so many games spaced out throughout various networks, sitting down and selecting an optimal day-long viewing experience can be somewhat bewildering. When in doubt, the consensus gravitates towards ESPN, where the “College Gameday” crew doles out a constant flow of college hoops action, providing insightful commentary along the way. Starting at 10 AM ET with a studio show staged at that week’s featured game site, a raucous crowd howling in the backdrop, the panel lays out the day’s action, capped with a late-show pick ‘em segment which invariably has the effect of inciting the avid supporters on hand. Then it’s a day’s long succession of enticing fixtures, spanning different leagues, time zones and intrigue levels. The crew — Rece Davis, Digger Phelps, Jay Bilas and for the first time this year Jalen Rose, plus whoever else graces the courtside stage in any given week —  puts a bow on the day’s action with an hour-long recap show, which leads into that week’s marquee matchup. There are few things better than a “Gameday” Saturday: a highly entertaining and energetic crew of college hoops enthusiasts sandwiching a whirlwind of hoop with enlightening breakdowns and analysis about the day’s happenings.

Loved or Hated, Everyone Watches Gameday

In this early-August college hoops lull where the happenings on the gridiron seem to take precedent at most every power conference university, we long dearly for those delightful, couch-side Saturdays. Fortunately, ESPN provided a sneak peak of just how magnificent those Saturdays might be. The network released its “Gameday” schedule Wednesday, and the lineup – at least as far as I can tell from a rather distant August viewpoint – is the best I’ve seen in quite a long time. Maybe ever. The bad news is that January 19, the first Saturday of viewing, seems a pretty long ways away. Not to worry. Before you know it, Midnight Madness will arrive, November and December will slide by and the eight-week selection of action-packed Saturdays will commence. To pique your interest, I’ve put together a ranked list of the eight featured games. There’s no hard and fast criteria here; take this as a simple preferential ordering of which match-ups I feel carry the most appeal. Longstanding rivalries, interesting venues and conference/national title implications will all factor into this 100%-for-fun exercise. On paper, it’s hard to find fault with the selected games. But between now and January, a bad start or two could dampen the hype factor around some of these games. All we can hope is that the scheduled contests maintain their outwardly riveting stature throughout the winter months.

Note: All game times ET.

1. March 9: Syracuse at Georgetown (12 PM), Duke at North Carolina (9 PM)

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

Since 1992, thanks to the Federal Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, legal sports betting in any form has only existed in four states: Montana, Oregon and Delaware have sports lotteries, while Nevada as everyone knows enjoys an entire sports booking industry. New Jersey, home to one of the nation’s most popular casino hot spots in Atlantic City, was granted a one-year time frame between 1993-94 to opt into the exclusive group, but failed to act and thus missed out on the opportunity to become the fifth member state. Governor Chris Christie sought to make up for his state’s inaction last January when he spearheaded the passage of a new law that violated the 1992 Act by legalizing gambling in his state. Christie was essentially challenging a federal law with full knowledge that a long and enduring legal battle would be waged to prevent the new state legislation. He acknowledged as much in May at a press conference in Atlantic City, saying, “If someone wants to stop us, then let them try to stop us. Am I expecting there may be legal action taken against us to try to prevent it? Yes. But I have every confidence we’re going to be successful.”

The NCAA is one of five sports league governing bodies involved in a class-action lawsuit against the state of New Jersey and its groundbreaking gambling law (Photo Credit: AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

Christie has met his day of reckoning. On Tuesday the NCAA and four governing bodies of North America’s major sports – the NHL, NBA, NFL and MLB – filed a lawsuit against New Jersey on the grounds that the state’s legislation legalizing sports gambling within its borders represents a direct threat to “the character and integrity” of sporting events and a “clear and flagrant” violation of federal law. This development comes as no surprise to Christie. He knew full well upon signing the state law of the inevitable flurry of lawsuits that would ensue, and so the governor reiterated his stance after catching word of the organizations’ actions. “I don’t believe that the federal government has the right to decide that only certain states can have sports gambling. On what basis?” he said.

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

Playing formidable competition in early season invitational tournaments is the best way to build a solid RPI foundation upon which to base the rest of your non-conference schedule. In recent years, as teams have adjusted to the notion that non-league scheduling does, in fact, have an appreciable affect on the bubble cut line come Selection Sunday, these tournaments have provided some intriguing matchups featuring national title contenders. The Legends Classic, one of the more anticipated tournaments in the early season college hoops calendar, released its bracket Monday. The 12-team field, on the whole, is a bit underwhelming, but tournament organizers did do us the favor of setting up a potentially epic finale on November 20 at the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Indiana and UCLA, after staging two regional round games on their respective home courts, will need to win only one game against a power conference team before meeting in the tournament’s final game. If UCLA can sneak by Georgetown and Indiana takes care of business against Georgia, the two surefire preseason top-five outfits will put it all on the line for the Legends Classic crown.

The Legends Classic bracket features two national championship contenders in Indiana and UCLA (Credit: Associated Press).

That’s must-see viewing for any college hoops fan, a tantalizing early season matchup of Final Four-worthy opponents. With more than three months remaining before the bracket kicks off, there’s plenty of time to salivate over this enticing showdown. But in these news-bereft late summer months, where Midnight Madness can’t come soon enough, I’m bringing you a way-too-early positional breakdown of what figures to be one of the best non-league fixtures in the upcoming season. To take this a step further, I’ll provide a prediction, score included, as a way of sparking the debate for which team is better positioned to make good on their considerable preseason hype. Remember, Georgetown or Georgia could knock off UCLA and/or Indiana in the semifinals and thus prevent the more favorable and altogether more entertaining finals matchup. But if the Hoosiers and Bruins are indeed what most preseason prognosticators are making them out to be, they should both advance to the championship round. Still, there’s no guarantee, so take this predictive exercise at face value.

Point guard: Yogi Ferrell/Jordan Hulls vs. Kyle Anderson/Larry Drew II

If Ferrell outplays hulls in preseason practice, Crean likely will insert him into the starting lineup in time for this highly-touted matchup. Ferrell is a true point guard who penetrates and finishes at the rim, but scoring won’t be his primary responsibility this season; facilitating the group of talented finishers around him—guys like Victor Oladipo, Will Sheehey, Christian Watford and Cody Zeller—is the first order of business. Hulls has been around long enough to remember discernibly darker days in Bloomington, the pre-Kentucky upset era—faraway as it may seem—and can make up for his deficiencies on defense with experience, leadership and pinpoint three-point marksmanship. He may ultimately start alongside Ferrell at the two. Countering the Hoosiers’ duo is Anderson, one of the more intriguing skills-to-size prospects in the 2012 class. At 6’7″, Anderson poses a major athletic and size advantage over most every point guard, yet he also boasts the shrewd ball handling, court vision and mid-range touch to excel at the position. He functions efficiently on the low block, posting up defenders and finding open shooters on the perimeter. Drew II, a year after transferring from North Carolina, will challenge Anderson for the starting job. Both players should see significant floor time this season, and they could split minutes in this early nonleague tournament.

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Christopher Johnson is an RTC columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn

In response to an increasing number of maddeningly trivial secondary NCAA violations and a widespread rise in the use of smartphone-friendly forms of communication, the NCAA officially removed the coach-recruit digital contact barrier this June when its new cell phone-related recruiting rules went into effect. The new guidelines allow coaches to bombard players who have completed their sophomore year of high school with instantaneous messaging services such as texting, emailing and Twitter direct messaging. Coaches and assistants long rued the seemingly inane restrictions limiting today’s most efficient and instant forms of communication. Fewer contact controls will facilitate more frequent communication while eliminating the ever-present fear of committing a menial rule-break. Coaches can now rest easy knowing their digitized messages will safely reach a recruit’s inbox without having to regret pressing send. The result: A distinctly modernized recruiting world with streamlined communication and a newfound safeguard from the constant threat of an unsuspecting NCAA bylaw wreaking its retributive justice. The new rules makes life easier on the NCAA, too, as the organization no longer has to spend countless hours monitoring the flow of cell phone communication between coaches and recruits.

The NCAA’s new regulations allow coaches to reach recruits instantly with smartphone communication (Photo courtesy Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images).

For the players, the long-term implications of the new contact protocol aren’t quite as rosy. Coaches that for years had wielded a restricted range of communication devices — and restricted usage on those devices — can now reach their desired prospects with the simple push of a button. The means and power to reach recruits now lies in the palm of their hands. Eliminating letters and unofficial visits in favor of texts and emails seems like a pretty fair deal for both sides, provided coaches don’t abuse their expanded degrees of communicative freedom. And therein lies the problem. In a hyper-competitive recruiting market, where coaches work tirelessly to land top high school talents, recruits can be overwhelmed by a barrage of texts and emails. Building a strong bond between player and coach is an integral aspect to any successful recruiting pitch. Now that coaches can make those connections with a few clicks on their handheld device, excessive contact is inevitable.

On Friday, Indiana coach Tom Crean provided a glimpse of what goes into the Division I college hoops recruiting pitch and brought to light another potential downside to the new guidelines. Here’s the tweet that appeared on Crean’s public feed:

“I am doing great. I have been thinking about you alot since last weekend. A whole lot. How are you doing?”

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