Morning Five: 07.09.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on July 9th, 2014

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  1. Here’s hoping everyone out there is enjoying the summer and had a safe and happy Independence Day holiday weekend. Legitimate college basketball news remains somewhat incorporeal at this time of year (unless you enjoy silly contrivances over which coach is the “best” at his job), but over the last week-plus there have been a few stories that have made their way into the chattering class. The one that probably holds the most interest from a train wreck meets a dumpster fire convergence is the ongoing saga of former North Carolina guard Rashad McCants. At this point, UNC fans no doubt wish that the key cog of the 2005 national championship team would just go away, as his personal media circus in the aftermath of admissions that he was kept eligible from 2002-05 through a series of bogus classes and other academic shenanigans continues to get weirder. On a SiriusXM radio show earlier this week, McCants made reference to both UNC and the NCAA having a deal worth a total of $310 million “in the works” for him, $10 million from the school to repay him for his exploitation and “lack of education received,” and $300 million from the organization to help him “facilitate sports education programs across the country.” Nobody seems to have a clue as to what he is talking about, as UNC claims that it has yet to speak or hear from McCants since a June 6 letter asking him to do so, and the NCAA probably lost his request somewhere down in the mail room.
  2. On a more serious note, however, UNC fans have been quick to character assassinate McCants, who very well may be in some strange way attempting to shake down the school for what he perceives to have been a lack of ongoing support. At the same time, whistleblowers and other informants rarely come without motive or personality flaws, so the question needs to remain focused on whether McCants (and possibly other members of the basketball program) were recipients of the benefits of sham African-American Studies classes at UNC rather than whether he alone is a reliable source. His unofficial transcript — which shows that all of the As and Bs he earned in Chapel Hill were within the beleaguered department — are enough to call into question the integrity of those courses. And that is presumably what the NCAA is doing with the news last week that it has decided to reopen its previously-closed case into academic misconduct at North Carolina. Also keep in mind here that, in light of the undressing over the concept of “student-athletes” that the NCAA suffered last month at the Ed O’Bannon trial, the organization needs a public “win” that supports the notion that it takes academics seriously. Coming down hard on one of the true blue-bloods of one of its primary revenue sports to set an example wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility in this climate. We’ll all have to wait to see how it shakes out.
  3. To that very point, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation at 2:30 PM later today is expected to tackle the topic of “Promoting the Well-Being and Academic Success of College Athletes.” Chaired by Sen. Jay Rockefeller IV (D-W. Va) and supported by Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), the committee will explore the NCAA’s stated mission to integrate college sports and academics, and whether the commercial enterprise unfairly exploits athletes. Sound familiar? The NCAA is taking hits on all sides, with interested parties from the political to the business to the legal to the educational sectors all clamoring to understand the justifications for a lucrative business model that doesn’t share the wealth with its labor source. If the NCAA is lucky, Mark Emmert won’t be asked to testify if for no other reason than to avoid another jaw-dropping Freudian slip. 
  4. The reason that everyone is getting so chummy with the NCAA’s operations, of course, is that there’s a ton of money involved. The crazy realignment of a few summers ago has calmed down (for now), but as Boise State‘s recent financial settlement with the AAC illustrates, organizations tend to lose their damn minds when there’s a windfall to be grabbed (even if said windfall never actually materialized because it wasn’t thought through). That’s right, Boise State has agreed to pay a total of $2.3 million to the AAC (formerly the Big East) as a penalty for joining and then leaving a league that none of its teams ever actually played for. The Big West, another league that never suited up a single Broncos team, has already received $1.8 million in exit fees, meaning that the final tally in penalties for never actually leaving the Mountain West is $4.1 million. Congratulations to everyone involved, and let there be a lesson learned somewhere within this.
  5. This has been a fun M5, so let’s end it by continuing the theme of poor behavior with some coaching news. College of Charleston head coach Doug Wojcik hit the news late last week with the release of a 50-page report (on a late afternoon heading into a holiday weekend, no less) summarizing a pattern of verbally abusive behavior levied toward his players. Among the details released were that Wojcik had used a homophobic slur on one of his players and generally made a habit of degrading and humiliating them during practice sessions. CofC’s athletic director, Joe Hull, initially wanted to fire Wojcik for his transgressions, but he was overruled by school president George Benson, who instead decided to give Wojcik a one-month suspension without pay (meaning he will miss July’s key recruiting window) and instituting a zero-tolerance policy for any future abuse. Personalities are difficult to change overnight, especially in such stressful positions, so it’ll be interesting to watch how well Wojcik does under these new constraints.

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Morning Five: 06.27.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on June 27th, 2014

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  1. With the NBA Draft in the books we can officially put last season in the rear-view mirror. The top of the Draft was no surprise as Andrew Wiggins, Jabari Parker, and Joel Embiid went 1-2-3. Actually, most of the Draft was not particularly surprising, but there are a few things that caught our eye. Outside of Toronto drafting a player who is “two years away from being two years away”, we we surprised to see Gary Harris and Shabazz Napier slip so far. I don’t think either were guaranteed top-10 picks and Napier was probably a borderline lottery pick at best, but both probably went at least six spots lower than what we would have expected and teams in higher spots made moves to acquire players at similar positions who simply are not as good as these two.
  2. The annual Coaches vs Cancer event announced their semifinal match-ups on Wednesday with Stanford playing UNLV and Duke playing Temple with the winners playing the following night. We would expect Stanford and Duke to meet although UNLV with all of its freshmen could surprise Stanford. If Stanford does advance (we are going to assume Duke will beat what should be a fairly mediocre Temple team) it would produce an interesting match-up between Mike Krzyzewski and Johnny Dawkins. We would not expect the Cardinal to be competitive with the Blue Devils based on talent alone although the Blue Devils may struggle integrating all of their new pieces early in the season. What would be interesting is seeing Krzyzewski face off against his former player, protege, and potential candidate to replace him if and when he does retire.
  3. So maybe that soccer thing didn’t work out exactly how we wanted, but basketball is still a sport that we do not need to rely on other countries to advance. The US demonstrated its dominance with a 113-79 victory over Canada to win the gold medal at the FIBA Americas Under-18 Championships. The victory was one of the closer games for the Americans as they won their five games by an average of almost 57 points per game including this 34-point win that made their average margin of victory plummet. As expected the Americans had a well-rounded attack. Despite what you might read about these wins and how certain players (not student-athletes until they are in college) played we would not read too much into it as they were playing against vastly inferior competition.
  4. A significant college prospect was taken off the recruiting board on Wednesday when Georgios Papagiannis announced that he was signing with a Greek club rather than going to college. Papagiannis, a 7’1″ center was a consensus top-50 player in the class of 2015 and had already taken unofficial visits to Maryland and Penn State. His decision should not come as a shock to observers because foreign recruits provide another potential source of talent they also have a much higher likelihood of opting to play overseas rather than coming to college in the first place.
  5. With the NBA Draft on everybody’s mind this week, CBS had its own draft, but did it for college coaches. As Gary Parrish, who wrote the accompanying article, notes there are many ways to define the best coach. For the purposes of this exercise they defined it as the best coach for the next five years. Most of the selections seem pretty reasonable, but we would question both Mike Krzyzewski (5th) and Kevin Ollie (22nd) slipping so far. Obviously Krzyzewski’s resume is better than his next five-year prospects, but he would have been in the top two in our draft if we had done one. As for Ollie, you can certainly point out that he was very close to getting eliminated early from this year’s NCAA Tournament, but the fact is that he wasn’t and he might be the most coveted NBA coaching prospect in the college ranks, which ought to count for something with recruiting in the future.

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Morning Five: 06.24.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on June 24th, 2014

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  1. Coming into the season Georgia State was already going to be the favorite in the Sun Belt and they became an even bigger favorite last week when the NCAA granted Kevin Ware a transfer waiver enabling him to play for Georgia State next season. Ware, who transferred from Louisville and is best known for his gruesome compound fracture in their 2013 Elite Eight game against Duke, will have two years of eligibility remaining. Even Ware never regains the explosiveness that made him a key piece of that Louisville title team he could be an important piece in a Georgia State team that already had one of the better backcourts in the country with both R.J. Hunter and Ryan Harrow returning.
  2. If you remember the uproar created by Taylor Branch’s opus in The Atlantic nearly three years ago (here’s our Cliff Notes summary and our interview with Branch), one of his major points of contention was that schools only offer student-athletes one-year renewable scholarships. So in the event that the student-athlete is injured, doesn’t perform up to expectations, or the program decides to move in a different direction, the student-athlete is out of luck. Southern California may have taken one of the first steps to ending that practice by deciding to offer four-year scholarships in its “revenue sports”. Those sports will include football and men’s and women’s basketball. We are not sure what the actual effect of this will be (basically what percentage of student-athletes have their scholarships pulled on a year-to-year basis), but it is great PR for the school.
  3. The NCAA released its attendance figures for the 2013-14 season last week. Outside of the big numbers like over 25 million tickets being sold to watch Division I basketball there were some interesting figures. On the macro side of it, attendance was down slightly from previous years–overall attendance decreased slightly (by 104 per game or 356,532 total) and NCAA Tournament attendance decreased too (more than 61,000)–although both can be attributed to a degree by the venues that the games were played in particularly in the case of the NCAA where the regional games were for the most part not played in gigantic domes. If you want a more detailed, but still big picture overview, check out Jeff Eisenberg’s post highlighting eight other key figures from the report.
  4. With the Ed O’Bannon case playing out in court, it was interesting to see Kentucky sign a 15-year, $210 million multimedia marketing rights deal with JMI Sports. Although the deal does not include TV rights, it does include just about everything else for the school and puts it in-line with Alabama as the richest such contract in NCAA history for a school not giving up TV rights. With schools signing these kinds of deals and looking at other potential revenue streams (such as entertaining the idea of selling alcohol at games) it will be increasingly difficult for schools (particularly bigger ones) to argue against providing athletes with a share of the revenue.
  5. With the NBA Draft just two days away there have been a few big updates over the past week both of which you have probably heard by now. The biggest news was Joel Embiid requiring surgery on his broken foot, which will likely make him miss the first part of the season and drop out of the top 3 in the Draft. The other news was that Isaiah Austin withdrew from the NBA Draft and will end his basketball career after being diagnosed with Marfan’s syndrome through what has been described as pre-Draft testing. We are not sure what triggered the work-up (reports say an EKG abnormality, but testing for Marfan’s based on that seems a bit extreme) or what about Austin’s presentation led them to tell him to stop playing–an aortic root problem is the only thing that we can think of–but at least Austin will not go away empty-handed as he had a $1 million insurance policy.

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Morning Five: 06.13.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on June 13th, 2014

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  1. One of the major criticisms of conference realignment was that it would effectively kill many of the major rivalries that help drive college basketball. One of the best to supposedly disappear was the Syracuse–Georgetown  rivalry. It turns out that did not last too long as the two schools reached an agreement to resume the rivalry in the 2015-16 season. The two sides agreed to a home-and-home deal with the first game at Georgetown and the two teams playing at Syracuse the following season. We hope this starts a trend where schools revive rivalries that ended with conference realignment.
  2. The Bruce Pearl experiment is already reaping benefits for Auburn even if Pearl is still technically under his show-cause penalty. Pearl already picked up Kareem Canty in the most confusing transfer this season and earlier this week he got a commitment from Niagara transfer Antoine Mason. Mason, the son of former NBA star Anthony Mason, averaged 25.6 points per game as a junior, which was second in the nation to only Doug McDermott. Mason might only have one year of eligibility left, but he is a huge pick-up for the Tigers as he will be able to play immediately thanks to a graduate student waiver.
  3. Michigan State lost some big pieces this offseason with the departures of Keith Appling, Adreian Payne, and Gary Harris, but they picked up a big transfer in Eron Harris. The West Virginia transfer averaged 17.2 points per game as a sophomore and will sit out this season, but has two more years of eligibility remaining. Harris reportedly chose Michigan State over Michigan and Purdue. Although the Spartans will take a step back next year with all of their departures we would not expect them to stay down for long with Tom Izzo and with Harris coming in a year they should have a major talent infusion.
  4. You might not have heard of Igor Ibaka before, but you can probably guess from his last name that he is the younger brother of Oklahoma City star Serge (ok, maybe the younger brother part might be kind of hard to figure out. Ibaka, who has played at Northeastern Oklahoma A&M, has committed to play at Oklahoma State after averaging 13.7 points and 9.6 rebounds as a freshman at the junior college. He might seem like a very promising prospect given his pedigree, but we would caution you that he will be 22 in July, which is why he cannot play for a junior college team. According to reports, Ibaka plans on spending the next year finishing up his associates degree then transferring to Oklahoma State in time to play the 2015-16 season.
  5. Jim Larranaga probably will never coach a Miami team as good as the one that the 2012-13 team, but he is putting together a pretty solid group of recruits. His latest addition is Oklahoma State transfer Kamari Murphy who will be transferring to Miami with two years of eligibility remaining. Murphy averaged 6.1 points, 6.3 rebounds, and 1.2 blocks per game last year as a sophomore. Murphy will be one of the rare breed of transfers these days in that he will sit out the upcoming season and be eligible to play in the 2015-16 season. We are not sure what how Larranaga has done it, but he appears to have some kind of Big 12 transfer pipeline as Murphy will be joining Kansas State transfer Angel Rodriguez and Texas transfer Sheldon McClellan on the Hurricane roster.

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Morning Five: 06.09.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on June 9th, 2014

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  1. The upcoming 10-year anniversary of the 2005 North Carolina Tar Heel basketball team just got a little bit more awkward on Friday when ESPN released allegations by Rashad McCants that he had been enrolled in fake classes and been given A’s in these classes without having to do any work. Even more damaging was his claim that Roy Williams was aware of this and had essentially signed off on it. Many were quick to point out that McCants had previously given a very different statement comparing his time at UNC being imprisoned back in 2004. Although this does not absolve UNC of any potential wrongdoing it does raise questions about McCants’ credibility as do his past actions. Williams, UNC, and many former players were quick to deny McCants’ allegations. While we agree that it’s reasonable to question McCants’ motivations and whether or not he is telling the truth we do not agree with the large group of people who are calling out McCants for being a snitch. If nothing else this will add another layer of complexity to the ongoing scandal surrounding North Carolina and its issues academic fraud. We are unsure if the NCAA will ever go after North Carolina unless North Carolina reports itself on these issues; however, many will question the NCAA for not being more aggressive in their pursuit of UNC when they have been so strict against players and schools who are involved in payments to those players.
  2. The day that the NCAA and its member institutions have been dreading is finally here. After years of legal maneuvering including a deal by EA Sports to pay student-athletes a nominal sum for using their likeness in games, the “Ed O’Bannon case” will begin later today. By now you are undoubtedly familiar with case, but if you need a refresher or just want to be more educated on the case we suggest that you check out Lester Munson’s excellent article on the case. Having said all of that we would not expect this case or the penalties from it to be decided for a very long time. If you are looking for something interesting to come of it in the near-term, you will probably be disappointed.
  3. On Friday, Manhattan reinstated Steve Masiello as its head coach. Masiello made national headlines in March when he accepted the job at South Florida, but then had the offer rescinded when the school discovered that he had never actually graduated from college. Manhattan eventually accepted him back, but he was on leave until he completed the work necessary to graduate from Kentucky. Masiello will officially receive his degree from Kentucky in August, but apparently was able to produce enough documentation to make Manhattan believe that he has already done the necessary work. Now all Masiello has to do is convince the team, fans, and school that he wants to be there even though it was clear from his decision in March that he does not want to be there.
  4. Maryland fans won’t recognize their team next year. Outside of moving to a new conference, they probably won’t recognize most of the roster. The loss of five players transferring out of the program certainly hurt, but they will be bringing what is in the eyes of many a top-10 recruiting class that includes four four-star recruits. Then in the 2015-16 season, they will be adding Georgia Tech transfer Robert Carter Jr., who announced his intent to transfer to Maryland on Friday. Carter Jr. averaged 11.4 points and 8.4 rebounds per game last season as a sophomore despite missing ten games during the middle of the season due to a torn meniscus. Assuming the incoming freshmen stick around (not a certainty given the way others have transferred out), Maryland could be a dangerous team in the Big Ten in a few years.
  5. If the Oregon administration thought that the sexual assault case involving three basketball players was going away after they dismissed the three players–Dominic Artis, Damyean Dotson, and Brandon Austin–they were mistaken. The alleged victim wrote a scathing letter to The Daily Emerald (the school newspaper) stating that the school “prioritizes winning over safety of our students.” The issue (particularly this issues) goes well beyond this case and beyond athletics too, but hopefully it will add to the ongoing discussion of why events like this in their various forms happen at schools across the country.

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Morning Five: 06.04.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on June 4th, 2014

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  1. If you’re a regular reader, even in the offseason, you may have noticed that we have decided to cut back the national M5s a bit during the long summer months. The objective is to get a couple of them published each week, but we might go for three if we’re feeling a little frisky. The biggest news of the last several days in the college basketball universe was the weekend announcement that the settlement between video game maker EA Sports and over 100,000 former and current student-athletes for the unauthorized use of their likenesses was finalized. The settlement calls for $40 million to be divided among a huge number of class action members, but even if the individual payouts will be relatively small (the named plaintiffs would top out in the low five figures, while most would be in the hundreds), the notion that players deserve some sort of recompense for the use of their images is clear. Note that this settlement does not impact the impending lawsuit between Ed O’Bannon and others against the NCAA, set to begin Monday in US District Court in San Francisco, although some of the evidence from this settlement will certainly come to bear in that case as well.
  2. From a coaching comings and goings standpoint, several high-profile names remained in the news over the last several days as NBA teams seek to fill their open positions. Guys like UConn’s Kevin Ollie and Iowa State’s Fred Hoiberg appear to the collegiate coaches du jour, but the biggest names are always floating around the periphery of those conversations. Kansas’ Bill Self and Kentucky’s John Calipari said in separate conversations with ESPN.com‘s Andy Katz on Monday that they were both incredibly happy with their current situations and had not been contacted this offseason about any open positions. Cue Mitch Kupchak on line two, coach? In keeping with the theme, Florida’s Billy Donovan last week basically said “never say never,” but as SI.com‘s David Gardner writes, he could probably satisfy his itch to coach the world’s best players by following the Coach K model with the US Men’s Basketball team. There’s certainly something to be said for capstone jobs in all three of their cases, but the competitive drive and instincts that got them there keeps them looking for even better opportunities, hard as they might be to come by.
  3. One current college coach who has had no problem finding a better opportunity just around every turn for the better part of five decades is SMU’s Larry Brown. The 73-year old who has completely rebuilt the Mustangs’ program in Dallas and will be in everyone’s Top 25 next preseason (especially with Xavier transfer Justin Martin en route) is rumored to be in the running for the open Los Angeles Lakers job. A number of other names are also under consideration — including Scott Skiles, Byron Scott, Alvin Gentry, Lionel Hollins and Mike Dunleavy — but Brown is perhaps the most intriguing given that he already has an excellent thing working at SMU in contrast with the train wreck awaiting the next coach in LA. With nine NBA franchises already on his resume as a head coach (but none with the Lakers’ pedigree), the job would no doubt be attractive to him, but would the Lakers really want to hire someone that the franchise could only expect to have on board for a couple more years? Let’s hope the itinerant LB sticks around to see through the job in DFW.
  4. One coach that we can’t imagine will be thinking NBA anytime soon, or ever, is Virginia’s Tony Bennett. While a brilliant basketball mind, his system involving shutdown defense and a glacial tempo likely wouldn’t translate very well to the League. Irrespective of that, UVA rewarded its head coach for a #1 seed, 30-win, ACC championship season, with a seven-year extension to his current deal. The new contract locks him into Charlottesville through the 2018-19 season and increases his annual salary to just shy of a couple million dollars per year. Not bad for a guy who was projected to have trouble recruiting ACC-caliber players. Ahem.
  5. This is a neat story from the Chronicle of Higher Education about a young man named Marvin Clark, a Kansas City kid who will be an incoming freshman at Michigan State this fall. The story chronicles the many ups and downs of his year-long recruitment, where he rode a roller coaster of ups and downs as schools from Oregon to Seton Hall and everywhere in-between expressed interest before backing off and picking back up on him again. Raised in a hard-knock situation with no father figure and a mother battling addiction, Clark’s story represents how recruiting can go for many of the kids not rated in the consensus top 25 of the rankings (Clark fell in and out of the top 150), and how perception and relationships can drive as much of the decision-making process as anything else. It’s a good, quality read, and a reminder to most of us readers that, no matter how bad your day might have gone, it probably was better than many of those that Clark faced growing up.

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Morning Five: 05.29.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on May 29th, 2014

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  1. Yesterday, we mentioned that the class of 2014 had only recently finished announcing where they were headed. It turns out that we may have jumped the gun a little as Chris McCullough, a top-25 recruit who signed with Syracuse, is still awaiting his SAT and ACT scores (yes, he took both) to see if he will be eligible. McCullough’s journey to Syracuse has been an interesting one as he transferred from Brewster Academy to IMG Academy last season after being kicked out of the former for violating unspecified school rules. With Syracuse losing its top three players to the NBA Draft (C.J. Fair, Tyler Ennis, and Jerami Grant), whether or not McCullough can play next year could be a critical factor in whether or not they will be towards the top of the ACC.
  2. He is not an incoming recruit, but the announcement that Jerian Grant has been officially readmitted at Notre Dame might be the most significant move since Myles Turner announced that he was heading to Texas at the end of last month. Grant was suspended midway through last season due to academic issues and soon after his suspension the Irish fell apart going 7-13. With Grant (and his 19 points and 6.2 assists per game) returning the Irish won’t be at the top of the ACC, but he should make them a mid-tier team and could make them an upset threat particularly at home.
  3. Much like Grant’s absence late last season for Notre Dame, the injury to Larry Nance Jr derailed Wyoming’s season last year. Given Nance’s contributions to the team–leading them in scoring, rebounds, blocks, and steals–it was not surprise that his absence would have such a profound effect. Fortunately for Larry Shyatt it appears that Nance will be ready for the start of fall practice. Even though Nance tore his ACL on February 18 there was no cartilage damage or any other significant injuries so if his rehab goes well he could make them a threat in the Mountain West if he returns to form.
  4. Oklahoma guard Isaiah Cousins was hit in the shoulder by an errant bullet while he was back home in New York. According to reports, Cousins found himself in the middle of what appears to be a long-running battle between two street gangs. He was reportedly with a group that was not affiliated with either side when he was struck by a bullet.  Cousins, who averaged 11.0 points and 4.2 rebounds last season, is expected to recover without surgery and return to the team when they begin summer activities in June.
  5. We have seen schools do a lot of things to keep coaches, but what Arizona is attempting to do seems unique. A donor is offering football coach Rich Rodriguez, basketball coach Sean Miller, and athletic director Greg Byrne a stake in an oil and gas company (via a MLP) if they stay at the school for another eight years. Based on the current value of the shares this could be worth $6,188,000 each for Rodriguez and Miller and $3,536,000 for Byrne. The Board of Regents will vote on the contracts on June 6 at which time they would go into effect. The only catch for these three is that they have no protection if the value of the company falls. Of course, their shares could also rise significantly. With the high stakes nature of college athletics it will be interesting to see if more universities and their donors follow this model.

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Morning Five: 05.28.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on May 28th, 2014

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  1. Just when you thought that we did not have to worry about a college coach jumping to the NBA, Billy Donovan stated that he won’t guarantee that he will be back at Florida next season. On the surface, it is a fairly innocuous statement, but given the number of job openings out there and the fact that Donovan has already stated that several NBA teams have been in contact with him it will probably raise a few eyebrows in Gainesville. Donovan is already making $3.7 million per year at Florida over the next seasons after signing a contract extension in February so we don’t think he will be able to parlay this into a much bigger salary particularly at Florida, but it will be something to keep an eye on. Based on the current openings we would have to assume his most likely options would be Cleveland, Utah, and Minnesota because we cannot see the Lakers (read: Kobe) or the Knicks (read: Phil) handing over the keys to a college coach they don’t know.
  2. It seems like we just finished up with the recruiting class of 2014 finalizing their destinations and we are already starting to have to deal with news surrounding the class of 2015 and possibly 2016. According to Evan Daniels, there is a chance that Thon Maker (the #1 player in the class of 2016) might reclassify to the class of 2015. According to Maker’s legal guardian the decision on reclassifying will depend on how Maker is doing academically and physically (adding on weight). If Maker does reclassify, he will almost certainly be a top-five player in the class as he already has Arizona, Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, and Louisville pursuing him.
  3. To some people, any time a job opens up at a BCS level school the media is quick to tout it as a big opening and one that could be potentially career-altering for the right candidate. Myron Medcalf is not so sure and thinks that some of these jobs are much less desirable than you may think. While we agree with him that not all BCS-level jobs are created equal we do have some issues with the ones that he picked. None of the schools listed would be considered among the nation’s elite programs, but some of them–particularly UNLV and FSU–are actually pretty desirable in our eyes. Overall many of the programs listed do have quite a few issues that limit them, but we don’t think that would prevent us from jumping at an opportunity here particularly if we were a mid-major coach trying to move up a level. If we were a hot college assistant we might have second thoughts about taking one of these as our first job if other options were available although some coaches in such a position have already done so.
  4. Maryland is not the only major program that is experiencing a mass (transfer) exodus. UNLV is experiencing its own crisis as Deville Smith announced that he will be transferring for his senior season. Smith was the team’s starting point guard last season averaging 9.7 points and 2.7 assists per game. He is the third Rebel to transfer this off-season joining Bryce Dejean-Jones (the team’s leading scorer; headed to Iowa State) and Demetris Morant (headed to Florida Gulf Coast). When you combine that with Khem Birch and Roscoe Smith declaring early for the NBA Draft, the Rebels have lost their top five scorers from this past season, which will make the Rebels a completely different team next season even if their drop-off in performance might not be as high as you would expect given their impressive incoming freshman class.
  5. When looking back at college basketball history, we often tend to overlook many significant individuals simply because they were not at big-name programs. Legendary coach Don Meyer is one example of that, but the outpouring for his funeral in South Dakota on Saturday–several thousand people attended–should be a clear indicator of the impact he had not only on the game, but beyond the court too. Meyer compiled a 923-324 record during his 38-year career of which only four were losing seasons. Meyer is best known for his time at Lipscomb where he was 665-179 between 1985 and 1999. A second service for Meyer will be held at Lipscomb on June 1.

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Morning Five: 05.16.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on May 16th, 2014

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  1. Pundits have been proposing ideas on how to increase scoring and make college basketball more entertaining for years. One of the most common suggestions has been to reduce the shot clock from the current 35 seconds towards the NBA standard of 24 seconds. The ACC might not be willing to go that far, but they will be using a 30-second shot clock during exhibition games this coming season and give its feedback to the men’s basketball rules committee. We doubt that we will see this in regular season games for several years at the earliest, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out and how teams adapt to the changes.
  2. Speaking of the ACC, they will be moving the ACC Tournament from its traditional Sunday afternoon slot–the one it has been in since 1982–to Saturday night in prime time. According to the ACC the reason for doing so is to move into the 8:30 PM time slot on ESPN on Saturday traditionally the conference formerly known as the Big East as well similar spots on Friday night. Although the conference is not saying it publicly we would not be surprised if the NCAA also encouraged them to move it forward to give the Selection Committee more time to finalize its seeding.
  3. The NCAA released its APR scores on Wednesday revealing that eight schools–Alabama State, Appalachian State, Florida A&M, Houston Baptist, Lamar, San Jose State, Central Arkansas, and Wisconsin-Milwaukee–will be ineligible for the 2015 NCAA Tournament. None of these names comes close to having an effect on the national title picture so Mark Emmert won’t get called out at the 2016 Final Four by any of the players from these teams, but there are a couple of notable things about this group. The first is that three of the schools are from the Southland Conference meaning that over 20% of the conference cannot play in the NCAA Tournament. The other is that Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which won the Horizon League Conference Tournament last year after going 7-9 in conference regular season play will also be ineligible. Outside of that we have to wonder how much some schools are getting players to graduate or not count against their score just to keep themselves eligible rather than helping the student-athlete. We assume that some schools are already doing this and that the ones that are failing to meet the scores probably just are not doing a good enough job of it.
  4. If you were expecting Georgia Tech to be competitive in the ACC this season you might want to adjust your expectations after Robert Carter, who averaged 11.4 points and 8.4 rebounds as a sophomore despite suffering a torn meniscus in January. Carter, who was the star of Brian Gregory’s first recruiting class at Georgia Tech, has not announced where he is planning on transferring or even his reason for transferring, but the school has already come out and said that he will not be allowed to transfer to Georgia. With several players graduating and Carter transferring, Marcus Georges-Hunt will be the only one of its top five scorers from last season returning this season. On the bright side for Gregory, he already has an extension through 2018 that he signed at the end of last season and we doubt that Georgia Tech would be willing to buy out the rest of his contract.
  5. Jermaine Lawrence will transfer from Cincinnati to be closer to his father, who is suffering from an undisclosed illness. Although Lawrence’s performance last season (2.8 points and 2.7 rebounds per game) might not seem like much of a loss he was the second-highest-rated recruit during Mick Cronin’s time at Cincinnati as he was a consensus top-25 recruit. Lawrence is expected to transfer to a school closer to his home in Springfield Gardens, New York (basically New York City) and given the way that transfer waivers have been granted we would expect him to be able to play next season if he chooses to do so. With his pedigree and his options close to New York City he should have plenty of options about where to head to next.

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Morning Five: 05.13.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on May 13th, 2014

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  1. It turns out that Ben Howland will not be taking the Oregon State job. Instead, the vacancy remains in Corvallis and according to reports Damon Stoudamire might be the favorite for the job. Howland reportedly told the Oregon State administration that he was no longer interested in the job. While Howland is obviously a bigger name and one with a much better track record as a coach than Stoudamire it is worth noting that he would command a much higher salary than Stoudamire since Howland was making $3.5 million a year when he left UCLA while Stoudamire would reportedly settle for less than $800,000. Regardless of that we don’t think this would be the right job for Howland since he will face an uphill battle creating a winner in Corvallis. We are a little more uncertain with Stoudamire since it would be his first job, but we would think that he is a big enough name that he would want to wait for a better option.
  2. A little over two years after a brawl that threatened the rivalry and catapulted Fake Gimel to national fame, the Cincinnati–Xavier rivalry is heading back on campus. Yesterday, the schools after a two-year trial run having games at a neutral site the games will be coming back on-campus. As we have said in this space many times it made no sense to blame the ridiculous behavior of the two teams that day just on the fact that they were motivated by the fans on-campus. While fan behavior might contribute to on-court aggression it would be an issue at any venue with many fans (the neutral site wasn’t far away from either campus) and to play it front of an empty arena would defeat the entire purpose of the rivalry.
  3. There was quite a bit of significant transfer news over the past few days. The three biggest moves in terms of arrivals were Ryan Anderson, who announced he would be transferring from Boston College to to Arizona, Kareem Canty, who committed to South Florida from Marshall after previous reports indicated that he had committed to Auburn and supposedly was going to visit USF just to see another school, and Seth Allen, who transferred from Maryland to Virginia Tech. Anderson, who has one more year of eligibility left averaged 14.3 points and 7.3 rebounds per game last season and will sit out this season, opted to head to Arizona over Iowa State and Indiana although he did not visit the latter. Canty, who has three more years of eligibility left averaged 16.3 points and 5.5 assists per game last season and will sit out this season, had also been considering Auburn and Penn State. Allen, who has two more years of eligibility remaining averaged 13.4 points per game will also sit out this season, picked Virginia Tech over Virginia and North Carolina State.
  4. There was also another notable departure as well as Terry Henderson joined Eron Harris in transferring from West Virginia. Henderson averaged 11.7 points and 2.9 rebounds per game while starting 17 games for the Mountaineers last season. Henderson has not indicated where he is planning on visiting, but this is yet another early departure for a Huggins’ signee as he is the 12th of the past 16 Huggins recruits to either transfer or never play a game for Huggins. Huggins’ recent run at West Virginia since his Final Four appearance in 2010 doesn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence so we wouldn’t be surprised to see him on the proverbial hot seat before too long.
  5. We cannot stress it enough to recruits: do not sign a letter of intent. One prime example of doing it the right way is former Tulsa recruit Mitchell Wilbekin, who committed to play for Danny Manning at Tulsa. When Manning ran off to greener pastures at Wake Forest, Wilbekin backed out of his initial commitment.  After looking around a bit (and having another Wake commit–Shelton Mitchell–back out of his commitment), Wilbekin decided to reunite with Manning. While this only serves to underscore the importance a coach has in shaping a recruit’s decision we have to wonder about Wake, which is signing a two-star point guard.

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