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

Anytime a coach signs on the dotted line for a substantial raise, the occasion for historical praise and legacy analysis and career achievement evaluations is ripe. Michigan coach John Beilein gets the treatment following Wednesday’s official announcement of a three-year contract extension guaranteeing a $2.45 million salary over the next six seasons. Beilein’s rise was explored in depth during Michigan’s recent national championship run, but with a few months distance from the accomplishment, and a fat raise show for it, Beilein and his long career warrants further review. The statistic you always hear about Michigan’s well-compensated coach is that he’s the only coach ever to win 20 games at the NAIA, Junior college, Division III and Division I levels. The other popular distinction on Beilein’s resume – and this one somehow feels even more unique, even if it’s not – is the fact that he has never once been an assistant coach. Through the meandering path that saw Beilein rise from Newfane High School to the brink of a national championship, Beilein has enjoyed master control the entire way.

Last season’s roster forced Beilein to change his traditional style (Getty).

Those are interesting points, and there are plenty of other notable bullets on Beilein’s CV, but arguably the most interesting (and the most timely) comes from this past season, where Beilein pushed Michigan to a place few believed the Wolverines could ever reach just two decades following the crippling Ed Martin scandal. For the first time in his long and storied career, Beilein had a roster full of real, athletically gifted, elite high-level athletes. They were good basketball players, too, all of them: from Trey Burke to Mitch McGary to Glenn Robinson III and on down the line. In his previous coaching stops, including much of his recent tenure at Michigan (even as recently as 2011-12, when relatively unathletic players like Evan Smotrycz, Stu Douglass and Zack Novak were key contributors), Beilein resigned himself to the humbling fact that – without elite athletes to play hard man defense, and run traditional ball screen and pick and roll offenses – he needed schematic quirks, eccentric offensive sets, and untraditional defensive strategies to beat opponents not with superior basketball talent, but with sideline acumen and tactical wit. They were smart concessions: the 1-3-1 defense, the two-guard front offense, and whatever other means Beilein used to veil his teams’ typical lack of athleticism. Beilein needed a way to level the playing field against bigger, tougher teams, so he adjusted to survive. And with sporadic evidence to the contrary, Beilein’s tactics worked. His teams got by. Kevin Pittsnoggle did this. Things clicked.

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Bennet Hayes is an RTC columnist. He can be reached @HoopsTraveler.

Whether you are a member of the media and present by necessity, or if you are simply a fan sitting on your couch after midnight (that witching hour when ESPNews suddenly equates to programming gold), you have all been dragged through that same presser. The one where the coach tells you about how happy he is despite the loss, “because his guys competed for 40 minutes.” The one where the winning coach still isn’t that happy, because “this game was just another one on the schedule.” And yes, here comes the moment when both coaches admit to knowing they “can’t get too up or down about tonight” because the college basketball season is most surely a marathon, not a sprint. Coachspeak is everywhere these days, and with the mounting media attention on even the smallest of college programs, it’s difficult to blame coaches and players for sticking to this unoriginal script. They may be boring us as fans and media, but they become sure to avoid the negative PR that can accompany even the smallest of verbal missteps. So what happens when we find a coach or player who doesn’t seem to have received this most banal of memos? We pay attention. And right now, there are no two college athletes (in their respective sports) that we pay attention to more than Johnny “Football” Manziel and Marshall Henderson.

Henderson’s on-court antics, by and large, captivated college basketball fans last season. His recent issues off the court have proven equally attention-grabbing, for all the wrong reasons.

The tales of Manziel and Henderson are far from identical, but both are prominent college athletes who have drizzled a little extra flavor on their public personas (both on and off the field/court). Each has experienced the boon in media attention, fans, and Twitter followers that comes with not only being a standout on the court, but a colorful personality off it. However, armed with the nation’s collective eye, both have also felt the flip side of the fame – the inevitable backlash that comes when you take that reckless behavior a step too far. Manziel’s discretions have been less serious than those of Henderson, particularly in the eyes of the law, but his most recent blunder— leaving the Manning passing camp early due to alleged misbehavior — has had no problems finding every major news outlet. Henderson’s trouble-making at Ole Miss had largely been limited to brash behavior on the court and some equally unfiltered commentary off of it (#whitegirlwednesday) — that is, until he was indefinitely suspended last week after being arrested for cocaine and marijuana possession.

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

The details surrounding the departure of former West Virginia forward Aaric Murray were encapsulated in two words by Mountaineers coach Bob Huggins: “mutual agreement.” Seems simple enough, only it’s really not – not when you look back at the marijuana charge Murray was assessed with while sitting out the 2011-12 season following his transfer from La Salle, or the disciplinary issues Murray ran into that forced him to miss a game in December 2012. There is a clear history of crossing the line with college hoops’ now-most high profile free agent forward, and while the offenses themselves don’t condemn Murray’s future in college (or even professional) basketball, the more important question is, will any team be willing to take a chance on him?

Coaches must proceed cautiously before bringing Hairston in (AP).

This question wouldn’t be as pressing as it is, were Murray not already graduated from and finished with his coursework at WVU, checkpoints that will allow Murray to play for another school this fall per the NCAA’s graduate transfer exemption (provided Murray enrolls in a graduate program not offered at WVU). West Virginia was brutal to watch last season. This was surprising for a couple of reasons: 1) Bob Huggins almost never coaches bad teams; 2012-13 was a glaring exception. 2) And this is more comedic than surprising, but as the Mountaineers toiled away in the lower half of the Big 12 last season, I kept coming back to the comments Huggins made after learning his team had been picked to finish sixth in the Big 12’s preseason coaches poll. “If we’re the sixth-best team in that league then it’s a hell of a league,” the head coach said in October. Part of the reason that placement baffled Huggins, and came off as a slightly pessimistic evaluation for most other observers, was because Murray promised to give WVU some of the hard-nosed Hugginsian grit his teams so routinely infuse into their collective DNA – the stuff that typically makes his teams so physically demanding and brutal to match up with. At La Salle, Murray was a force on both ends: His 106.1 offensive rating on 26.2 percent usage, 11.0 offensive rebounding percentage, 19.0 defensive rebounding percentage and 7.6 block rate in 2011 underscore that basic description.

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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 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. 

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. 

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 reached @ChrisDJohnsonn.

Most present-day criticisms of the NCAA nitpick its ethical and moral standards. They excoriate a system where athletes hand over the rights to their likenesses and athletic talents, yet are deprived of a slice of revenue those talents generate. They berate a byzantine rulebook filled with inane bylaws and regulations. They attack “amateurism” from every rhetorical angle. The verbal takedowns have hit a fever pitch in recent years as the NCAA’s handling of various high-profile impermissible benefits has provided convenient ammunition for fire-breathing columnists and national commentators. As long as amateurism is upheld as the foundational pillar of NCAA enforcement, and athletes remain removed from any monetary benefits on top of what’s offered in one-year renewable grant-in aid scholarships, the organization will be forced to tolerate a bombardment of scrutiny with no recourse to shift the public discourse away from its doggedly indignant mindset.

Losing a high-ranking enforcement official like Newman Baker is a continuation of a scary trend within the NCAA’s enforcement wing (Getty).

Lamenting the NCAA, the institution, has and will continue to be a prominent feature of American sports media. Now there’s a new dimension to attack, and it goes deeper than flawed ideals or morally corrupt philosophies or anything about the NCAA’s actual legislative structure. These days, the NCAA has far bigger concerns than angry middle-aged sportswriters railing on amateurism, because before long, it may not have enough staff members to maintain amateurism’s grip on college athletics in the first place. Yahoo!’s Pat Forde delved into the deteriorating culture inside the organization a couple weeks ago – how over the past 18 months, the NCAA has seen some of its top investigators pack up and leave for compliance positions at various universities. The end result, as Forde writes, is an environment where athletes, coaches, boosters, agents and whoever else might be inclined to step outside amateurism’s restrictive boundaries are encouraged to go right ahead and do their worst. They can, in other words, break rules without bearing a passing concern for the consequences on the other end. The coast is clear. The people that prop up amateurism, and wield the power to cripple athletic programs with scholarship reductions and postseason bans, are quickly leaving the premises. Moving on. Fleeing the scene before the bottom drops out.

This is a problem.

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

One top-10 recruit’s eligibility issues on one national championship-capable roster typically wouldn’t feel like anything to work up a sweat over five months away from the start of the season. Chris Walker is one of the top players in the class of 2013. His addition arguably makes the Gators the most wholly-talented group Billy Donovan has coached since the 2006-07 national championship starting five. Florida would be better with him than without him. These things are all true, and they are all real. But academic eligibility issues like Walker’s – he still needs to complete three core courses and improve his ACT score before becoming eligible – usually (re: usually) tend to untangle themselves before the start of the season. It’s not like Walker attended high school classes that didn’t actually exist. And besides, what’s the worst that could happen? Walker is ruled ineligible for the non-conference season, only to enter Florida’s lineup around New Year’s for a repeat mashing of SEC competition? When you really bore down into what the Gators bring back, and who they welcome for the very first time, Walker’s possible ineligibility is less than crippling specter. More like a minor buzzkill in an otherwise tantalizingly positive summer season lead-up.

Unless Walker’s academics keep him out for a large number of games, Florida fans best be relaxing, instead counting all the positives the Gators have going for them right now (Getty).

Viewed on its own merits, Walker’s situation is an annoyance. A tic slowly sucking the preseason optimism out of Florida fans. Nothing more and nothing less. This particular situation is different, because Walker’s ineligibility isn’t the only thing the Gators are anxiously tracking this offseason. There are other concerns, and when you add everything up and lop Walker’s prospective ineligibility on top, what once looked like one of the four or five best teams in the country in the rushed postseason Top 25 deluge has a fistful of questions to get past before season opening in November. Senior point guard Scottie Wilbekin has been suspended indefinitely by coach Billy Donovan for an unspecified violation of team rules one year after a similar punishment forced him to miss the first three games last season. We can only presume another brief multi-game absence, or some form of serious punishment, is in the offing. There’s also senior forward Patric Young, who underwent a procedure in April on his ankle, and whose game – frustratingly unrefined and only incrementally improved offensively – hinges heavily on his sheer athletic capability. Forward Will Yeguete likewise had his right knee scoped out one month later, the second such arthroscopic procedure in a four-month span.

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

Job resignations don’t get more prescient than former UNC chancellor Holden Thorp’s decision last week to leave the school for the smaller and less hectic D-III pastures of Washington University in Saint Louis. Thorp’s stated reason for leaving – that the burden of making crucial decisions about a major college athletics program, lopped on top of his educational and administrative responsibilities, had worn Thorp thin over the past three years – is the perfect precursor for the recent news surrounding the Tar Heels’ athletic program. The academic scandal that surfaced last year to widespread dismay and doomsday-forecasting, then faded from the national spotlight, appears to have turned a resentfully bleak corner. A public records request from the Raleigh News & Observer issued last year, around the time of the initial reports of academic malfeasance within UNC’s athletic department, was granted just this month, and the findings only further validate Thorp’s clairvoyant departure. Emails between Tar Heels’ athletic-academic officials and Julius Nyang’oro – the former head of the former, erm, extinct African-American Studies department that allegedly greased the rails for scores of athletes (including football, and possibly men’s basketball, players) to stay eligible through fraudulent, or even non-existent, classes – turned up evidence of even greater systemic failures than we might have initially thought. The details aren’t pretty. This exchange between former football academic coordinator Cynthia Reynolds and Nyang’oro offers a window into the sort of deep institutional collusion UNC potentially left unmonitored within its athletic department.

What once looked like a swath of compelling but forgotten circumstantial evidence could lead to heavy punishment (Getty).

In one email from September 2009, Cynthia Reynolds, a former associate director who oversaw academic support for football players, told Nyang’oro in an email that “I hear you are doing me a big favor this semester and that I should be bringing you lots of gifts and cash???????”

When allegations of academic propriety were first brought to the fore, reaction was critical and uncompromising. All the signs of a collectively coordinated academic fraud were plain: shoddy transcripts, rinky-dink classes, a rogue department head with a dubious academic track record. Slowly but surely, the whole thing poofed into a cloud of oblivion. Nothing to see here, folks. We’ve got this under control. The media heat may have cooled, and powerful interweb columnists may have loosened their clench on UNC’s academic reputation, but the actual evidence never disappeared. Julius Peppers’ specious and internet-leaked transcript was still lying around on some investigator’s desk. The African-American Studies department’s comically easy jock classes did take place. Holden Thorp bolted the premises for a reason. The condemning evidence never went away, and now, after a year’s delay, when the dust had cleared and UNC athletics had emerged from the foreboding smog of NCAA sanctions and leaky academic oversight, the forgotten demons are reappearing.

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