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

There is one timeless drawback to the NCAA Tournament that makes its otherwise awesome and utterly thrilling single-elimination format a little bit unfair. When teams enjoy successful regular seasons and earn prime NCAA Tournament seeds but, for one reason or another, see their March livelihoods ended earlier than expected, upset losses serve as a referendum on that team’s entire body of work. If a team doesn’t advance to the round its seed implies – #1-seed Gonzaga getting done in by a wicked 23-point-in-nine-possessions run from Wichita State, for example – it is labeled an underperformer. The regular season accomplishments persist through history as nice adornments to dress up a given program or coach’s CV, but in the wake of an upset loss, there is only one description to accurately assess the better-seeded team: underachiever. I’ve heard this appellation tossed in Indiana’s general direction more than a few times in the wake of its Sweet Sixteen loss to Syracuse (whose customarily suffocating 2-3 zone, perimeter length, and shotblocking prowess, amounted to a terrible match-up for IU), and I suppose you can argue, relative to seeding, this is a completely fair judgment. The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Cohen took it a step further in an article headlined “The Biggest Underachiever in NCAA History,” wherein he deems the Hoosiers’ 2012-13 season a massive failure due to their inability to turn two top-five NBA draft picks – a distinction shared by only 13 teams in the annals of the game – into Tournament-gauged success. According to WSJ, last season’s Victor Oladipo and Cody Zeller-led IU team was one of only three teams with two top-five selections to lose as early as the Sweet Sixteen. The “Biggest Underachiever” designation owes to the other two Sweet Sixteen-losing teams, North Carolina in 1984 and Duke in 2002, having won national championships in seasons prior with those very same top-five picks on board.

A Tournament upset doesn’t define an entire season (AP).

As you might suspect, Indiana coaches were none too pleased to read the ignominious title bestowed upon their newly-minted outright Big Ten conference championship team. Speaking of which, did I mention that? Indiana won the toughest league in basketball in a historically difficult year last season, posted 29 victories, groomed previously raw wing Oladipo into a lottery pick and saw its gradual ascent to the college basketball mountaintop (after the Kelvin Sampson wrecking ball that sent the Hoosiers into temporary hoops oblivion) realized in triumphant fashion. Tournament loss aside, it was a good year for Indiana basketball, and the coaches were going to make sure WSJ heard this message loud and clear. First came tweets from Tom Crean endorsing Oladipo and Zeller, their accomplishments at the school, and exclaiming the specifics of the well-compensated futures his two top-five picks are entitled to in their new professional basketball homes. Associate coach Tim Buckley followed up at the Hoosiers’ summer news conference Tuesday by highlighting his team’s perseverance.

“We’re pretty proud of this group,” Buckley said. “And we’re disappointed as much as anybody else with not going further in the NCAA Tournament. Our fifth-place team (Michigan) in the Big Ten played for the national championship. That’s how good this league was. And for us to do it night in and night out; I don’t think we ever lost two games in a row. “We had a resilient bunch. I’m really proud of what we’ve done, and I think everybody who’s associated with Hoosier Nation should be really proud of what we did.”

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

The merits of college coaching hires take years to assess. Coaches need time to develop their players. Recruiting strategies need to be overhauled. Fans need to buy in. Alumni need to be convinced their monetary contributions are being funneled to the right man with the right vision and the right process to lead their program to future success. All of these things require variously large stretches of time to take hold. For the black sheep among new hired coaches, maybe it never happens.

There shouldn’t be any head coaching changes in Westwood over the next few years (AP).

But everybody at least deserves a chance, right? No matter how putrid a coach’s first few games are, no matter how many fans are calling for his head, no matter how many disparaging internet memes are created to popularize his dishonor, one can typically find reason to give him (or her) the benefit of the doubt. UCLA fans will have to do more than just that with new coach Steve Alford, who had the contents of his contract publicly explored by the Los Angeles Times Monday night. College basketball coaches at blue-blood programs make gobs of money, which Alford does. He also, thanks to a $10.4 million buyout clause (four times his annual pay, according to the Times), isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

By saddling Alford with such a large buyout — more than 10 times what it would have been had he stayed at New Mexico — UCLA is essentially making it impossible for him to do to Westwood what he did to Albuquerque.

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

The hype leading up to the 2013-14 college basketball season will be immense. It already sort of is, when you really think about it: Andrew Wiggins’ announcement to join Kansas set the college hoops world aflame. Duke’s Jabari Parker was plastered on the cover a Sports Illustrated magazine comparing him to LeBron James. Kentucky’s recruiting class is being described in the loftiest echelons of hyperbolic recruiting praise. A host of talented sophomores spurned probable NBA riches for another go with their respective college outfits. Everything about the upcoming season looks great. I can’t wait.

A championship run at the FIBA world championships is yet another testament to the quality and depth of the young talent college hoops will have on offer this season (Craig Miller, USA Today).

Over the weekend, some of the USA’s best players age 19 and under put those expectations on the line in international competition, and held serve in convincing fashion. Team USA beat Serbia Sunday, 82-68, to earn the gold medal at the FIBA U-19 World Championships. Taking home first prize was no guarantee for the Red, White, and Blue, who have won just three of the last eight U-19 FIBA crowns, including 2011’s lamentable fifth-place finish. International basketball – and all the well-coached, cohesively groomed, fundamentally-drilled international players, international rules, and international travel quirks compacted within – is an entirely different breed of hoops. Former US teams as high as the senior level have struggled to adapt to FIBA-regulated play, and this team, for all its massive talent advantages, was not immune to those very same issues. Basketball’s recent popularity worldwide – plus, you know, us not winning every single time we step on the floor – has made one fact exceedingly clear: There are no foregone conclusions in international basketball. Team USA’s U-19 group was not willing to make any.

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

Familiarity and tradition has worked for Butler when executing coaching changes in the past, and it will have to work once more after watching Brad Stevens take an immense NBA leap of faith in agreeing to become the next head coach of the Boston Celtics. Butler wasted no time hiring Stevens’ replacement; shortly after his departure was made official Wednesday night, two candidates–Michigan assistant LaVall Jordan and Butler assistant Brandon Miller–were identified as the only two candidates with any conceivable shot at actually landing the job. Jordan was seen as the frontrunner, and for good reason: he is widely respected in Big Ten coaching circles, played and coached at Butler and was seen as the biggest guiding hand in elevating Trey Burke to First Team All-American/Lottery pick status.

The Bulldogs moved quickly to hire Miller. Navigating their conference jump won’t be quite as simple (AP).

In the end, Butler went with what has worked in the past. Miller is the fourth consecutive Butler coach to be promoted from within, a quintessential Bulldogs hire. And not only did Miller play and coach for the Bulldogs, he is also, like Stevens, Matta, and Lickliter before him, getting his first opportunity as a college head coach at the school. Fortunately for him, this job likely would have gone to former assistant Matt Graves, the current South Alabama head coach and star Butler guard widely presumed to be Stevens’ successor whenever the possibility of Stevens leaving – which was basically, like, any time a high major job opened up over the past three seasons – cropped up. Miller returned to the Bulldogs bench once Graves left for South Alabama, and unwittingly positioned himself for a promotion few college basketball people saw coming at this stage of the offseason. His profile aligns with everything Butler has sought in its recent coaching hires, but this time, the stakes are even higher, and Miller has a more difficult mandate than the other in-house hires that preceded him.

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

The national championship trophy will return to the Bluegrass State next April. That is the national sentiment, however prematurely conceived, about the 2013-14 Division I men’s college basketball season. The reasons for this are easy to divine: Kentucky is bringing in not just their typical boatload of McDonald’s All-Americans and future pros, but the best recruiting class of all time, according to anyone who tracks these things historically. Louisville’s claim is arguably just as convincing. The Cardinals return every significant piece from last season’s championship roster save center Gorgui Dieng and welcome in a junior college point guard in Chris Jones, who, while not nearly as touted as top-ranked Wildcats’ signee Andrew Harrison, should play big backcourt minutes in his first season of major college basketball. Both of these teams are expected to make deep March runs; anything short of a Final Four will be deemed a failure.

A healthy Harris and a fantastic cast of complements makes Michigan State a true title contender in 2013-14 (Getty).

There are a few other teams lurking in the championship hunt, only with much less preseason buzz. The most underhyped of all, and dumbfoundingly so, is Michigan State. Ah, right, the Spartans, you know these guys: Tom Izzo, six Final Four appearances since 1999, a defense and rebound-oriented identity that almost never fails in tight games. And to think, after year upon year of reproving themselves on the biggest national stage, Michigan State might enter this season as one of the most underrated teams in the country. Now is the time to start rating them accurately, because not only do the Spartans have all the discrete parts and experience and talent to break up Kentucky and Louisville’s early preseason championship stranglehold, they have a healthy star point guard ready to make a huge sophomore leap. From NBCSports’ Rob Dauster:

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

Burying news breaks in the lead-up to major work holidays or weekends is a totally normal thing. It almost never fails: use the benefit of most people’s designated R&R time to stanch the quick-spreading news cycle and prolonged Interweb shelf life. Snip the story at the bud before it has a chance to grow. Classic. Except that tactic might not work with Wednesday night’s news, dropped mere hours before our country’s biggest patriotic celebration – at least not among college hoops fans – that Butler coach Brad Stevens is no longer. Indeed, the baby-faced, cool-mannered, whiz kid Bulldogs sideline boss is leaving college basketball for the NBA. And not just any professional coaching job: Stevens is replacing Doc Rivers just in time to lead the 17-time champion Boston Celtics through a massive franchise rebuild. For all the classic cases of college coaches failing to translate their success to the next level, Stevens feels like the perfect hire for where the Celtics are as a franchise and the general direction the NBA is moving as it embraces a larger presence of analytics-savvy decision-makers in high-ranking positions.

The implications in the wake of Stevens’ move for Butler and the Big East are difficult to divine (AP).

But Stevens is so much more than your average KenPom frequenter. In the process of lifting Butler from its Horizon League perch to a brief one-year stint in the Atlantic 10 to the new Big East, Stevens showed what comparatively lightly-recruited talent, empowered by tactical wizardry devised to maximize that talent’s best individual and collective attributes, can become. The height of his tenure, needless to say, were the back-to-back national title runs Stevens presided over in 2010 and 2011, each win over each powerhouse program coach more mind-numbing than the one before it. That’s when Stevens’ Bulldogs became so much more than the plucky Horizon league stalwart most college hoops fans had acknowledged for years. Butler became a national story, and its head coach the envy of any major program looking to replace its fired one.

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

There are a select few college hoops arenas that inhabit a special place in athletics venue lore. Hinkle Fieldhouse is the archetypically quaint “field house” college basketball fans like to get all nostalgic about. Cameron Indoor is suffocating for opposing teams, and endearingly cozy for Blue Devil supporters. Pauley Pavilion, renovated or no, remains a special place to sit back and watch the sport we love played amongst some of its best student-athletes. This list is not finite, but if there’s one glaring omission, one historic arena that warrants a spot in any sport’s list of preeminent hosting grounds, it’s the Carrier Dome. Syracuse’s basketball and football home is buried deep in the cultural annals of Orange sports. Its wacky sightlines, baffling seating arrangements and enormous crowds (by college hoops standards) are defining tent poles in Syracuse’s basketball identity.

The days of saturated Orange stands and infectious gameday environments in the Carrier Dome could be numbered (Getty Images).

Since its construction in 1980, the Dome has taken on an almost mythical architectural status among college hoops fans. Whenever Syracuse fans talk about their basketball team, the conversation won’t normally span more than three or four brief exchanges before a simple question is raised: “Have you ever seen a game at the Carrier Dome?” Unfortunately, my only experience at the Dome was for a football game – which, well, let’s leave it there. But plenty of people, particularly those who either attend or once attended the university, have shown up in droves on many a chilly weeknight, or geeked-up College Gameday Saturday, to watch their favorite team play. If, like me, you are among those who still haven’t experienced the Dome’s typically electric hoops environment, you should probably get on that. Like, fast.

That directive is a reaction to a recent article by Donna Ditota of Syracuse Post Standard, who brings to light comments from athletic director Daryl Gross about the Dome’s prospective relinquishing of Orange basketball hosting duties.

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

The college basketball viewing experience in enhanced by exciting play-by-play commentary. This is not a difficult concept to grasp: Watching games on TV is more fun when the people explaining the dynamics of those games, a) know what they’re talking about; b) don’t go off on too many Vitale-ian tangential rants; and c) employ proper diction and tone, using the inflection of their vocal cords, to accentuate the most thrilling moments. There are but a few commentators who have genuinely mastered their craft, and needless to say, Bill Raftery is one of them. This name should sound familiar; Raftery’s ties to Big East hoops run deep – he’s practically synonymous with ESPN’s “Big Monday” series. When the foundational core of the league’s membership broke off from its unglamorous Conference USA cohorts this season to form its own 10-team conference, taking the Big East league name out the door, it signed a new media rights deal with Fox and ended its long and fruitful connection with Big Monday. That left Raftery with a rather crucial decision to make: Stick with ESPN, where he became part of one of the sport’s best broadcast teams with Jay Bilas and Sean McDonough? Or follow his Big East roots to the upstart sports network Fox Sports 1 (set to debut on August 17)? Raftery wisely chose the latter, and college hoops fans will very much appreciate the implications of his decision.

Adding Raftery is a fantastic move for Fox Sports 1’s college basketball broadcast team (AP).

If Raftery is the most professional hoops announcer in the business, Gus Johnson is easily the most exciting. Johnson, one of Fox’s top play-by-play men across numerous sports (including college football and soccer), was already set to become a part of Fox Sports 1’s Big East coverage. Raftery joined Fox with the understanding he’d be allowed to continue calling Big East games. I’ve basically drawn the dots for you – now all you have to do is connect them. YES: Johnson and Raferty will be calling games together next season. Fox confirmed the dream pairing in a release last Thursday.

“Adding a renowned, popular veteran like Bill Raftery to a family of announcers at FOX Sports that already includes many of sports television’s biggest names is an incredible coup,” said FOX Sports Executive Vice President and Executive Producer John Entz. “More importantly, in teaming Bill with Gus, we have reunited the most energized, entertaining college basketball broadcast team ever, and we can’t wait for them to work their first game.”

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

So much ridicule and scorn has been shoveled on top of the NCAA in recent months that it almost feels redundant to criticize at this point – like a Ferrari-wielding millionaire challenging his Prius-owning cousin to a street race, or the O’Doyle family ribbing Billy Madison through grade school, or USC fans simmering over Wednesday’s news of the congratulatory back slap Oregon received for illegal payments to a recruiting handler. The harsh tones of NCAA critiques have coursed through every contingent of college sports media at one phase or another this offseason, and today, after going down that path on several occasions myself, I’m just not feeling up to it. Sorry.

The punishments handed down to Self and Marshall will be forgotten by the start of the season (AP Photo).

But if you got me in the mood, I might be able to talk about how profoundly funny it was Wednesday to learn the NCAA had issued a public reprimand of Bill Self for a scoring table fist palm during Kansas’s third-round NCAA Tournament match-up with North Carolina that was so destructive he needed to be reminded of his unseemly game behavior three months after the fact. I can picture Self now, watching Andrew Wiggins do ridiculous free-throw line dunks from a comfortable lounge chair, smarting in the Kansas basketball offices while counting his nine Big 12 championship rings. “Ouch, that really hurt!” Self’s sideline demeanor was too publicly unbecoming – because coaches showing emotion during a game is a really bad thing; the NCAA says it, and so it shall be – and too tawdry for a coach who, by all accounts, is one of the purest and most morally pure sideline presences not just in college basketball, but any college sport.

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

College basketball is an extremely entertaining sport to watch. Starting in November, when non-conference play mashes together different conferences’ best teams in far-flung locations for fun, tropical, typically thrilling elimination tournaments, and on through April at the annual national championship net-cutting ceremony, college basketball is never not awesome. For college hoops diehards, this is one of the most obvious statements of all time. Of course watching college basketball is great. Other North American sports fans will respectfully disagree, instead opting to peek in at college hoops in the early weeks of spring, right as conference tournaments heat up and teams kick into next gear for their last-gasp bubble pushes.

An excellent Final Four brought correspondingly strong TV ratings (AP Photo).

Whether you follow college basketball all year long, or have long since dedicated yourself to becoming a March hoops hanger-on, the fact remains that the NCAA Tournament is unflinchingly popular. No matter your level of interest in the progression of teams and coaches over months of non-conference and conference competition, when the brackets start flying off the copy machine, and C.J. McCollum is leading No. 15 Lehigh to a massive upset of near universally-loathed Duke, you’re TV remote is affixed firmly to your reclining chair arm rest or furniture of choice. When the lights turn on, you’re sitting down, losing valuable time at your day job, anxiously checking scores at every available digital outlet and watching. You’re watching the NCAA Tournament.

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