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

Imagine trying to lump wildly financially disparate athletic programs with different issues and different monetary imperatives under one legislative agenda. Imagine trying to hold that infrastructure together with vague terminology and philosophical principles and vexingly byzantine legalese. Imagine that organization asking an enforcement staff that can’t even police itself to make sure everything runs smoothly – no questions asked, no willingness to adjust. Imagine a near-universally loathed ruling figurehead, whose tenure has been besieged by near-constant turmoil on college campuses, wielding unseen legislative power, refusing to cooperate with influential school athletic directors, eroding public trust every step of the way, and doing it all while publicly casting himself as some enduringly unimpeachable monarch – untouchable, unimpressionable and, most recently, resentfully bitter to any and all external questioning or proposals for change.

Promoting discussion for a move towards a fourth subdivision allows schools with bigger budgets the possibility to change the NCAA’s separation of powers (US Presswire).

The public approval rating of NCAA president Mark Emmert, were there such a measure for the organization’s embattled leader, would not inspire confidence for election day. The rightful scorn and growingly pervasive critiques can’t be (or shouldn’t be) shoved on Emmert’s doorstep; his actions are merely a particularly irksome embodiment of the entire NCAA’s morally and ethically dubious ruling construct. Either way, his spot isn’t up for contestation, so Emmert doesn’t have to worry – even as swaths of media call for his resignation and athletic directors lose confidence in his ability to navigate the NCAA’s hazardous future. Emmert isn’t completely blind to the boiling discontent within his membership, and at the Big 12 meetings in Irving, Texas, last week, he made an important concession that shows he’s open to the concept of realigning the power structure to accommodate more-monied (and thus more powerful) programs.

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College sports programs like to distinguish themselves in readily identifiable and often objectively hideous ways. Wacky uniforms are a micro-mechanism for audacious school-specific branding, and if we’re going to talk crazy uniforms….naturally, we’re going to talk Oregon, whose revolving door of Nike-conceived threads are as much a part of Ducks’ sports culture as athletic competition itself. OU expanded its reach into the aesthetic wilderness with its foliage-themed “Tall Firs” basketball court, which was unleashed to mixed (but mostly negative) appraisals from non-Oregon partisans nationwide. Innovative Nike architect Tinker Hatfield’s plan was ambitious, to apply the most minimal interpretation, and the real thing was gorgeous and repulsive and historic (the trees are meant to pay homage to Oregon’s 1939 national championship team, nicknamed “The Tall Firs”) and brand-inspired, all at the same time. It wasn’t the first time Oregon had jumped headlong into the avante-garde realm of program-patented design eccentricity, and it probably won’t be the last. I can’t wait to see what Phil Knight and his Nike braintrust henchmen dream up next. A duck-shaped Autzen stadium? Optionally-rotational field turf to match each game’s uniform alteration? Something insane. Something mind-blowing. Something Allianz Arena can’t touch in its most visually-arresting elegance.

Another new court design proves schools are taking artistic court stylings more seriously (Buffalo Athletics).

Kind of like what Florida International and George Washington and, following Wednesday’s stunning reveal, the University of Buffalo, which plopped a New York State Silhouette around its trademark royal blue U of B-stamping text, implemented this offseason. The design itself is a conservative but fresh look for a program whose basketball program doesn’t typically make headlines for anything it accomplishes on the court, and you know what? Good for them. Attention grabbed. This floor plan caught my fleeting web-scanning attention span, even if I’m not particularly fond of the subtle state-owning intimation/appeal to territorial ownership located smack dab at center court. If dreaming up fancy court designs is about making a splash and giving your university an unmistakably unique and school-centric vibe, this court does exactly the opposite. “State University of New York” is an official part of Buffalo’s whole name-recognized branding description; it’s the little description that appears in size eight italicized text next to (wait for it) “University of Buffalo” on every hoodie and coffee mug and every last folder and pencil available in the official university library campus store. But did anyone stop to consider the possibility that making the word Buffalo, the actual university, bigger than New York, the state that houses it, might be a smart way to send a visual message for BUFFALO itself, and not state silhouette-contrasted NEW YORK? The text size contrast, and text placement, obscure the entire purpose of sports court design eye candy. They don’t even highlight the University’s own name.

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

College basketball fan bases are a personal and intensely provincial point of debate. Fans of teams around the country take their passionate school fandoms more seriously than they ever should, and when one university’s supporting group dare make a definitive statement elevating its own team-endorsing fervor over others, tension is inevitable. Shouting matches and recriminations are a natural evolution of the conflict. Fans care about their college basketball teams, but more than that they care about their college basketball teams more than you care about your college basketball teams. You can imagine how these kinds of debates play out amongst college hoops’ insanely obsessive followers, the Dukes and North Carolinas and Kansases of the world. The antagonistic bite on the court – that intangibly rousing feeling you get while watching Duke-UNC or Syracuse-Georgetown (ugh) or Kansas-Missouri (double ugh) – cuts just as deep as the fan base bitterness. Naturally, these arguments cross over into the unnavigable ether of comment sections and message boards and Reddit. The result is almost always a solution no one feels satisfied with. Nobody wins.

An impossibly blissful offseason somehow got better for Louisville wonks Wednesday, who can now, even if mostly unfoundedly, argue their fan base’s unmatched stature (AP).

A new analytical authority tried to bring order to the psychological fan base warfare by ranking college basketball’s fanbases on a system that is…..completely unpsychological. Indeed, Emory Sports Marketing Analytics came out with its list of “Best Fan Bases” Wednesday and (drum roll, please) the Louisville Cardinals claimed the top spot. The logical next question – in what solar system is Louisville the “best fan base” in the country, and Kentucky, you know, not? – will not make members of the #BBN particularly happy; it took little time for this specific bit of information, the disparity in the rankings, to ruffle the feathers of internet-dwelling Wildcats fans. UK came in at seventh, behind the likes of Arkansas and Texas.

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

Trying to toe the balance of preserving sports arenas’ quaint historical charm while ensuring things stay modern and cutting-edge enough to keep up with the day’s practical standards for an enjoyable game day experience is a tricky calculus. Fans love tradition. They admire the architectural vestiges of a bygone era. The Wrigley Field Ivy. The Green Monster at Fenway Park. Touchdown Jesus at Notre Dame Stadium. These traditional sports landmarks wouldn’t be the same without their share of antiquated and sometimes outmoded quirks. Embracing the modern age and installing Wi-Fi hotspots and turning your basketball arena into whatever this thing is, are all prudent and progressive moves, and it’s hard not to sympathize with head-scratching sports arena designers finding it harder and harder to lure fans away from their comfy home viewing confines. The modern HD flat-screen viewing experience, accompanied by a soft recliner with 45 different back reclining angles, your multi-purpose social media device of choice, in-sight kitchen convenience, free food and an unoccupied bathroom and most of all, reduced costs, are tremendously difficult to resist. Traffic stinks. Twelve-dollar popcorn tastes just as mediocre as microwave-brand bags. That screaming buffoon spilling Budweiser on your lap is really starting to bug you. I concur. I mean, even the hegemonically dominant NFL is struggling to fill the seats of its wildly popular teams’ state-of-the-art  arenas.

A few changes here and there are fine, as long as Hinkle remains distinctly Hinkle (AP).

Some sports venues are better left untouched. Their distinctive visual features makes them what they are, and any radical changes would violate the essence of their lasting attraction. They are perfect just the way they are. Gradual attendance drain isn’t an existentially dizzying structural concern, like the NFL, because fans pony up ticket money and fill seats — being there, literally, beats being there through your pixelated mini Ipad retina display no matter how you measure the costs of attendance. If you’re a college basketball fan – and if you’re reading this page, what are the chances you aren’t? – the one thought rattling through your parietal lobe when you hear the words “renovations” and “Hinkle Fieldhouse” in the same sentence is nothing positive, or even nominally encouraging. You’re downright disappointed — turn Hinkle into a sterilized, plastic, artificial husk of corporatism? How could they?!

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

Give a top-100 backcourt star enough touches and shot attempts, and he probably won’t find much of a reason to complain about his freshman season of college basketball. Using 19.2 percent of your team’s possessions, firing off 22.2 percent of available shots and logging 29.2 minutes per game seems like a pretty sweet deal for a rookie joining a preseason Top 25 team, all things considered, and after watching five of last season’s eight top scorers leave either through transfer or graduation, you’d think former UNLV guard Katin Reinhardt might find favor in the idea of returning to more shot-making opportunities, an even higher usage rate and a coach with no choice but to green-light his talented if mercurial returning sophomore shooting guard in a lineup relatively devoid of offensive firepower. Reinhardt wasn’t clamoring for more shot attempts, in other words.

A move to a new program could allow Reinhardt to jump into the point guard spot he opted not to compete for at UNLV (AP).

Turns out, shots and individual scoring freedom weren’t what Reinhardt was interested in after all. All those shots and possessions – and the mediocre 98.6 offensive rating and 45.8 effective field goal percentage they partly created – didn’t accord with Reinhardt’s personal developmental hoops agenda. He wanted a position change all along, a switch from his shot-heavy off-guard spot to point guard, where he believes he has a more secure future at the next level. Head coach Dave Rice spun it that way to the Las Vegas Review-Journal Sunday night, and lo and behold, Reinhardt’s position-swapping desires were so pressing and so uncertain, that the rising sophomore two-guard has decided to transfer to another school.

Katin told me why he was leaving. He said that he feels his best opportunity to play in the NBA is to play more minutes at the point guard position. Katin would have had an opportunity to compete for minutes at the point, but I’ve never guaranteed anyone that they will start or play a certain number of minutes.

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

An obvious implication of the NCAA’s move two years ago to open up individual workouts to players enrolled in summer classes was an improved brand of non-conference performance. Teams would be better suited to kick off their schedules with gusto. Much of the sloppy rust that typically defines November and December would be cleaned up, replaced by a crisper and more cohesive style of play. There was little regard for what other rippling effects this new rule might have. Coaches seemed to love the idea, anyway, and for all the obvious reasons. A slightly disconcerting side effect of the NCAA cutting the tape on summer team workouts rose to the surface with Thursday’s release of USA Basketball’s list of accepted tryout invitations for the Under-19 Czech Republic-located FIBA World Championships. The list is not short on talent or, slippery as it is to define in today’s diffuse one-and-done landscape, star power – Louisville’s Montrezl Harrell, Oklahoma State’s Marcus Smart, Villanova’s Ryan Arcidiacono and Arizona’s Aaron Gordon are among the accepted invites. But it’s missing an important and highly touted subset of players: the top players from the class of 2013.

Summer practice time has forced players and coaches to rethink how they approach preseason preparation (Getty Images).

With the exception of Gordon, the second-ranked power forward and fourth-ranked player overall, according to ESPN Recruiting nation, the list features none of the breathtaking talents that have national recruiting analysts in unanimous agreement over this class’s distinguished eminence. 2013’s top tier of talents is a rare collection of athletic wonder and refined skill and future lottery potential, and almost none of it will go into putting the best outfit possible on Eastern European courts this summer to represent the stars and stripes. Scan the list yourself, then peek back at any 2013 class rankings, and the absence of essentially every consensus top-20 player is hard to ignore. The Jabari Parkers and Julius Randles and Noah Vonlehs are all passing up the opportunity. Many of these players are scattered about the nation’s traditional blue-blood programs, but Kentucky – as part of building the best recruiting class of all time, Andrew Wiggins’ exclusion duly noted – owns six top-100 commitments in 2013, and none of them decided to join up with Team USA at this summer’s event. John Calipari spoke with The Sporting News’ Mike DeCourcy about his players’ collective rebuttal of national team participation, and when you dig beneath the image of Calipari’s nebulously slick media guile and accept his words at face value, their decision is perfectly respectable (and not at all unpatriotic – just in case you were ready to summon one of those tortured “what about the old days?! These kids have no sense of what it means to wear the stars and stripes!!” blusterings). It makes the most complete sense.

“Most of it is, they didn’t want to play. I’m not forcing kids to do anything,” Calipari told Sporting News. “I think the reason they all turned it down is, they want to get started.”

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

Coaching the biggest basketball superstars on planet earth into one cohesive group with a compacted practice schedule and unflinchingly mountainous expectations, among other obstacles, is not as easy as it seems. With minimal exceptions, every player is accustomed to being “the guy” on his own NBA team, where the frequency and type of shots taken are, for better or worse, monitored liberally – superstars are going to get their shots up whether you like it or not. When you mash these egos together on one, putatively dominant, practically unwieldy Team USA squad, vast philosophical and schematic adjustments melding is required. Ego-massaging is another part of the gig. Reduced shots and individual credit-basking glory is part of the cost of doing business. It’s an entirely different style and breed of basketball, this quirky thing we like to call international play, and without the right head coach in place, things can get out of hand pretty quickly. Matter of fact, Before Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski arrived on the scene, they did: In 2002, a George Karl-coached Team USA became the first American team composed of NBA players to lose in international competition when it fell to Argentina in the preliminary rounds and finished sixth at the FIBA World Championships in Indianapolis. Two years later, then under Larry Brown, team USA lost a convincing semifinal game to Argentina at the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics. The days of Dream Team dominance and universal hoops royalty were slipping away. USA basketball needed a new face and culture and identity to offer a different spin on the stale and out-of-touch approach demonstrated by previous NBA coaches. It needed Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski.

Making another run at Olympic glory, and picking up Coach K to lead the charge, is a wise move by USA Basketball chairman Jerry Colangelo (Getty Images).

You know the rest: after an initial bronze medal toe-stub at the 2006 World Championships, USA polished off two Olympic gold medals and a 2010 FIBA World Championship with a second-tier layer of then-rising stars, not once losing a game over four years. Coach K has accomplished everything he set out to do during his reign as USA Basketball’s transformative leader – blend a group of ball-dominant stars into one functioning whole not once or twice but for three sizably important world events, restore the rightful preeminence of the red, white and blue’s international hardwood stature, forcefully remind the rest of the world that yes, there is good basketball being played in Europe and China and South America, but no, you don’t have Kevin Durant ripping threes on the wing, and LeBron James guarding centers and point guards on the same possession, and Chris Paul whipping cross-court passes with pinpoint accuracy. This is USA Basketball, unbeatable and dominant and good. Mostly just good. Beijing 2012 restored the customary USA-headed international hoops hierarchy, and Coach K – who still, in case you forgot, kind of has a pretty good thing going right now in Durham – had ground off every bit of tread on the international tires. It was time to move on. Pass the torch. Recruiting and leading Duke to annual national championship contention is prohibitively exhausting on its own; the added onus of Team USA must have been a terribly draining, but hugely fulfilling, experience. Enough was enough.

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

In professional sports, the offseason is when most teams proactively set out with clearly defined roster goals, scour the personnel grapevine and come up with intricate ways to improve their respective outfits within the limiting constructs of salary cap barriers. Teams dangle mid-level exceptions and veteran minimum deals in the hopes of discovering that year’s market inefficiency. LeBron James goes on national television, announces his decision to join the Miami Heat, generating millions of dollars for local Boys & Girls Clubs charities in the act, and immediately transforms into some variation of demonic NBA anti-Christ. That is, in its most polarized narrative rendering, the very essence of free agency – player movement, buzz, flash, improvement, cost-cutting, not-five-not-six-not-seven-championships-type stuff. It’s a complex system that involves a tsunami of minor contingencies and rules, each sport offering its own unique guidelines to control the same underlying concept: free player movement.

Landing Black, after landing Wiggins, makes Kansas the Big 12 frontrunner in 2013-14 (AP Photo).

College sports are different. The nomadic tides of inter-team player voyages is much easier to follow, the stipulations and legislative jargon more streamlined and simply understood. There are two primary ways teams go about acquiring new players. The first is the transfer, which is complex only when coaches and players make it so – but the idea is simple. A player leaves one school, finds a new one, and begins his career in a new and hopefully more personally gratifying location. The more common mechanism underpinning the constant churn of the player-eligibility cycle is recruiting. First year players replace last year’s first year players, moving up the ladder and burning eligibility along the way, right up until the clock runs out and careers come to a screeching halt. Kansas used both avenues to improve its perennially dominant basketball program this offseason. If you live under a rock, or somehow happened to gloss over the fact that the best high school prospect of the past decade announced his college choice last week, the name Andrew Wiggins probably remains something like an ethereal, distant, fairy-tale concept. If you’re up to snuff on even the most nebulous outer fringes of  the college hoops news cycle, the name should ring a bell. Wiggins did announce his intention to play his (assumed) one season of college basketball at Kansas, and on Monday night KU learned its bullish offseason fortunes were only just beginning.

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

Lavish contracts of conference commissioners and university presidents and whopping cable rights deals lie at the nexus of most any modern-day ethical and moral-based anti-amateurism rant. People see massive salary figures and television revenues, look the other way and see student-athletes making not a dime over what’s guaranteed from one-year, renewable, merit-based grant-in-aid scholarships, and wonder how anyone could ever allow such a system to take root. They get angry, and furiously shout denunciatory things at their computer and television screens (theoretically, anyways). They read updates about the impending Ed O’Bannon lawsuit, and how its sweeping implications have the potential to completely uproot the NCAA’s long-unimpeachable amateurism ruling model. They envision a future where collegiate athletes are granted what their physical talents and revenue-generating abilities rightly deserve – in an Olympic-style model where bylaw 785947.23 doesn’t exist and where the financial stakes aren’t so egregiously stacked against the very athletes who generate all this money in the first place. They see the injustice, and slowly, surely, more and more people are getting behind the idea that the popular clichés about “pure athletic joy” and “for the love of the game” are really nothing more than an ingenuously contrived shield against legitimate takedowns of a broken system.

Four years as leader of the nation’s premier D1 West Coast athletic conference has earned Scott huge financial bonuses on top of an already sizable base salary (U.S. Presswire).

Some folks are still split on the idea of a new college sports world order, which probably means they didn’t really react much at all to Monday’s Wall Street Journal report that Pac-12 head Larry Scott is, according to recent tax documents, the richest conference commissioner in all of college sports. In the four years since taking over his current post, Scott has amplified the Pac-12’s financial value with such groundbreaking developments as the Pac-12 Network, a $3 billion broadcast rights deal with ESPN and FOX, the additions of Colorado and Utah and, to tie everything together, a convenient and numerically-pertinent branding tweak – goodbye Pac-10, hello Pac-12. For those moves, along with his typical everyday conference commissioner work – whatever that actually entails (I think we’d all love to know) – Scott’s total take in 2011-12 rounded off somewhere north of $3 million. Not far off was Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany, who took home $2.8 million that same year. SEC commish Mike Slive barely made half of Scott’s number, totaling $1.6 million.

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

Last time Ben McLemore’s name whirled its way into the national sports consciousness, it was for entirely undesirable reasons. We weren’t talking about McLemore’s immense redshirt freshman season, or his sweet shooting stroke and rising NBA draft stock. We were talking about the NCAA, and the possibility of McLemore leaving Kansas in a scurrilous amateurism-violating lurch after USA Today’s Eric Prisbell brought to light comments from the former Kansas star’s AAU coach detailing his alleged acceptance of money and travel benefits from a purported agent. A web of important questions were raised: did McLemore take impermissible benefits? Did he have even the slightest inkling his AAU coach, Darius Cobb, was receiving money and free trips to Los Angeles behind his back? And if he did, what were the punitive repercussions for Kansas’s proud basketball program? Was the NCAA’s biteless enforcement mechanism unequipped to tackle a situation like this? Would McLemore eventually give his side of the story? Could he even stomach the idea his former AAU coach and friend would take a potentially damning impermissible benefits case to the most widely-circulated newspaper in the country?

More clarity on Cobb and Blackstock’s malfeasance could be on the way if McLemore speaks with the NCAA (Getty Images).

Some of those questions were answered last Thursday at the NBA Draft combine in Chicago, where Sports Illustrated’s Seth Davis got McLemore on the record. McLemore didn’t mince words – the allegations cited in Prisbell’s report are, true or not, completely over his head. “I didn’t see no money going around. My mom hasn’t seen no money going around. We don’t know nothing about it,” McLemore told Davis. “So it was kind of new to me.”

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