As the saying goes, Americans love a winner, but they also love a loser. The fellows who played for Caltech men’s basketball team from 1996 to 2007 are anything but “losers” — they have or will have degrees from Caltech, folks — but they did lose a lot of basketball games. In that interval, the Beavers went completely unvictorious, dropping 207 straight games against their Division III opponents before beating Bard College in January 2007. Just this past February, Caltech ended a 26-year/310-game conference winless streak, knocking off Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference foes Occidental College. They even made a movie about the Beavers’ 2005-06 season and their quest to end those streaks; the 2007 documentary film Quantum Hoops isn’t available on Netflix, but it’s readily accessible through Amazon.

The Caltech Story, In Whatever Form, May Be Heading To More And Bigger Screens (Image: Gary Friedman/LA Times)

It looks like Disney and Ben Stiller are hoping you’ll still love these so-called losers enough to part with a little of your hard-earned. [Ed. Note: again, it feels odd to type “losers,” since there are probably dudes on that team who invented one or more of the electronic gadgets I’m reading or listening to music through at this very moment, and any of them could hack and destroy our site in eight seconds with an old Timex Sinclair and a dial-up land line.] If they get their way, you’ll be seeing a fictionalized comedy re-make of Quantum Hoops in theatres soon. Stiller’s production company is evidently preparing the new version, though no details have been released regarding casting or a director. Stiller would have to shave his head to play head coach (at the time) Roy Dow; if they’re going to fictionalize this thing, though, that’s probably a detail they’ll overlook.

By the way, the student body RTC’d after the win in February that broke the conference losing streak, obviously one of the most justified RTCs ever. So, why wait for a fictionalized account of the 2006 team when you can see the real thing from last year’s squad right now?…

Earlier today, John Calipari was reported to have made the following comment on a Memphis radio show:

Police each other, give it to league commissioners and schools to deal with. If it goes beyond that, there’s a board there that’s ready to deal with it. (…) You’ve got coaches being fired over phone calls and text messages. Some. Other guys can make phone calls and it’s not that big a deal.

Now, we admit we didn’t hear the interview, let alone the segment that produced the above quote. We heard it first in the audio that’s embedded in the original story at CBS’ college basketball blog. We can’t tell you what the interviewer asked Calipari that prompted that answer. The audio also has the rest of Calipari’s response (there’s a little bit more after the quoted section), which is more on how he’d change how college basketball is policed. Taken by itself, the quote above could easily be construed as a little jab at Mike Krzyzewski, given the alleged minor violation Coach K may have committed during the July recruiting period wherein he supposedly communicated with a recruit and shouldn’t have. That’s a typical reaction, since that incident is fresh in the collective hoophead mind.

Even If It Was a Jab, What's More Important Is...Was What He Said True?

If you listen to the rest of the audio, however, in the full context it sounds like Calipari is referring to a larger problem in the profession — wouldn’t it be a safe assumption that if the world knows about Krzyzewski’s possible mistake that John Calipari knows other coaches who have done the same thing but haven’t been fired for it? — as opposed to intentionally getting in a dig against one guy. At worst, if it’s a dig, it’s an unintentional one. We’re not saying Calipari or any coach is above such a thing, but frankly it just doesn’t sound like he’s trying to zing one person when you listen to the available audio.

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It’s an ancient debate in college basketball — which would you rather have: experience or talent?  Most coaches will quickly answer, “both,” but in today’s 1-and-done era of hoops, building a stacked team of juniors and seniors is not as possible as it once was.  John Wooden once famously said, “I’d rather have a lot of talent and a little experience than a lot of experience and a little talent,” and although he usually had bushels of both on hand at UCLA, his sentiment has come to define the attitude of most modern-day coaches.  John Calipari at Kentucky is the poster boy for recruiting grade A talent that he knows is likely to only spend a single season in Lexington, taking the stance echoed by Wooden that if he has enough ballers at his disposal, he can push them over the top to a Final Four and (presumably) a national championship.  On the other hand, a history of the 1-and-done era has shown that even though teams with Kevin Loves, Derrick Roses and Brandon Knights occasionally break through to the final weekend, they don’t win national championships.  Experience, rather than pure talent, seems to carry more weight in early April.

Did Wooden Have It Right on Experience vs. Talent?

So which is preferable, and which has more actual, on-court value to elite teams?  Our friends over at Burnt Orange Nation recently took a stab at answering this question, and while several of the findings generally support common basketball sense, there was one item that stood out upon our review of BON’s well-considered post.  First, the findings that support what we all fundamentally know:

1. BON found that there is a correlation between SRS (Simple Rating System, a metric of success showing how far above the scoring margin mean a team plays) of elite teams and the percentage of the available minutes played by a top 30 RSCI recruit.  In other words, having better talent playing on the roster generally makes teams better.
2. Interestingly, BON found that there was no correlation between the SRS of elite teams and the percentage of the available minutes played by RSCI recruits rated from #31-#100.  Therfore, at the elite level of basketball, it is only the elite recruits who tend to impact teams’ success.
3. BON also showed there is a correlation between the SRS of elite teams and total minutes of experience.  Put simply, the more returning minutes a team has, the better it should be.

But it was the following finding by BON that provided something completely new and interesting: A rough way to quantify the relationship between talent and experience among elite teams:

In a typical college basketball season, a starter earns about 1100 minutes played, and plays about 15% of the total minutes for his team.  Using our regression model, getting a player with a top 30 RSCI ranking into the starting lineup has a slightly lower, but similar effect on predicted SRS as does returning one player who has started for two seasons, or two players who have each started for one season.  Adding an additional top 30 recruit to the starting lineup improves the predicted SRS by about 2 points.

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The old adage is that there’s no “I” in team, but many people fail to remember that there’s actually a healthy dose of “me” within that word — half of it, in fact.  The current collegian who most embraces the modern and more cynical interpretation of that aphorism is none other than Mississippi State’s Renardo Sidney.  The 6’10”, insert-weight-here, conundrum of a talent is entering his third year in Rick Stansbury’s Bulldog program, and his fifth as the sport’s poster child for more headaches and hype than peace of mind and production.  But give the portly kid from Jackson, Mississippi, credit — he keeps finding new and inventive ways to alienate himself.  The latest and greatest act in his own personal passion play is his decision to skip out on his team’s August trip to Europe in favor of returning to John Lucas’ training facility in Houston to try to get his weight under control before the start of next season.  According to Brandon Marcello at the Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger, Sidney recently said:

Another Strike Against Sidney?

Everybody has their own opinion but I’m doing what I have to do.  There’s nothing else going on. They can say what they want to say but, like I said, I know what I have to do basketball-wise. I wasn’t ready to go (to Europe) and I felt like I really wasn’t in shape. I wanted to come back down here and get some more work.

At one point during the late spring, Sidney had reportedly ballooned up to 320 pounds, well above his listed playing weight of 270.  He lost 23 pounds during his first cycle through Lucas’ camp at the early part of the summer, but his stated goal is to lose the remainder before school begins at Mississippi State on August 17.  Why Sidney doesn’t feel that traveling and training with his own team and setting an example as an upperclassman coming off an underachieving year is beyond us, but the enigmatic center has often made decisions that inspire head-scratching among most observers inside the sport. 

The big question on everyone’s mind is whether this decision is simply cover for something else, and if such a strange allowance on the part of the coaches and Sidney himself (who willingly gives up a free summer trip to Europe with your team?) represents the beginning of the end for him at Mississippi State.  Marcello’s follow-up column today addressed this very concern and it’s worth repeating — with as much trouble as Sidney has caused during his two-plus years at MSU and barely anything to show for it (unless you count a 10-9 record chock full of half-winded performances as something), it might simply be the right time for the two to permanently part ways.  Even if Sidney loses the requisite weight in Houston over the next month, he’ll have missed out on another chance to bond with his teammates and will no doubt find additional trouble somewhere else before the start of next season.  For a Bulldog program that has been consistently good for the better part of a decade, the best outcome for Rick Stansbury and the MSU faithful may be to simply hope that Sidney never returns.  We hate to completely write off a kid like that, but at what point do you finally say “enough is enough?”  Another month, and Bulldog fans may know the answer to that question.

Roy Williams was born in Marion General Hospital in the little town of Marion, North Carolina, just under an hour away from Asheville. If anyone driving near that hospital ever doubted that, they have no reason to do so now.

Dan Wiederer of the Fayetteville Observer wrote on his blog yesterday that on Monday Williams was honored with a highway marker — you know, those brown sign-plaques that stand in front of important places that give you a small bit of history about the location — a block south of the building in which Williams was born. The sign mentions that he’s a “National Championship Winning College Basketball Coach” for UNC and that he was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame. And, naturally, it’s Carolina blue.

Duke Fans, Deface This At Your Own Risk (Image: McDowell News)

But will it stay that way? As Wiederer mentions in his article (which you should check out in its entirety), Williams had a few words prepared for the folks who were on hand to mark the occasion. In his comments, the legendary coach mentioned that the people of the town needed to keep a close eye on the sign, adding, “If you ever come in one morning and there’s eggs and some things like that on it, just go arrest the dadgum Duke people in town.”

He was joking, of course. Then again, maybe it was one of those jokes that, after you make it, you dont mind so much if people take seriously. Either way…congrats, coach. Looks pretty sweet.

We now know one thing that 2010-11 National Player of the Year Jimmer Fredette won’t be doing to supplement his income while locked out by his Sacramento employers this coming year: Hitting the links.  The phrase Jimmer for three took on a whole new meaning over the weekend in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, as the tenth pick in the NBA Draft spent more time hacking around in the rough and serpentining around the greens of the American Century Championship than finding the sweet spot at the bottom of the cup.  How bad was the nation’s best college basketball player?  Gulp… even worse than Barkley.  From the Salt Lake Tribune:

Make Sure to Duck if You See These Two Behind You

Fredette finished dead last (83rd place) at the American Century Championship golf tournament on Sunday afternoon, ending up with minus-88 points. Fredette had minus-30 on Friday, minus-28 on Saturday and minus-30 on Sunday. The worst he could have gotten each day was minus-36. Jay DeMarcus of the country music group Rascal Flatts finished second-to-last at minus-83, and Charles Barkley was third-to-last at minus-68.

Basketball players with their lanky frames and inability to stand still as a general rule didn’t perform well in this tournament, with Shane Battier (#77), Digger Phelps (#72), Jason Kidd (#56), Deron Williams (#46) and Penny Hardaway (#41) joining Chuck and Jimmer in lighting up the Edgewood Golf Club with high degree of difficulty shots from every nook and cranny in the Tahoe basin.  The highest placing hoopster was former NC State star and current LA Clippers head coach, Vinny del Negro (#11), with His Airness and Jesus Shuttlesworth also placing modestly (tied at #23).

In typical good-natured Jimmer fashion, he tweeted out after his final round that he’ll be “much improved” next year.  Given the look and feel of an NBA work stoppage that will likely leak well into next calendar year, The Jimmer will certainly have plenty of time to work on his golf game.  Whether anyone will remember who he is depends on a bunch of other factors, but for at least this one year, he gave Sir Charles a reason to feel good about himself.   

In the past eighteen months, those of us who love college sports — NCAA Division I sports, specifically — have witnessed a series of near-misses that has threatened to overhaul and redefine the games we care about so dearly.  The first shot across the bow was the NCAA’s presumptuous near-expansion to a 96-team NCAA Tournament, an idea hatched with dollar signs in its eyes and only quashed when the public and media covering the sport threatened to go Vancouver at the organization’s Indianapolis headquarters.  The second shot was last summer’s conference realignment madness, a tumultuous sequence of fits and starts that didn’t as much change the landscape of the six power conferences as it left everyone shaken by just how brazen and inequitable the system underlying major college athletics has become.

Is the NCAA Tournament As We Know It On Its Last Legs? (Getty/A. Lyons)

The point of these two events — neither of which resulted in sea changes, mind you — is that, as the power and influence of the alpha dogs of college athletics rises, we appear to be pushing closer to a tipping point where we’ll no longer discuss what almost happened rather than what did happen.  The 74 basketball schools (and 66 football schools) that comprise the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, and SEC wield the vast majority of everything — dollars, budgets, fans, television contracts, merchandising, etc.  And as their profit margins continue to increase, these schools and leagues are correspondingly irked that their governing body, the NCAA, is getting in their way.  Whether they see the future of intercollegiate sports as allowing the payment of players or involving agents or full-cost scholarships or third-party enforcement of rules, these power schools know that ideas ultimately favorable to their bottom lines are often at odds with the other 250+ NCAA D-I schools.  This is why, despite existing statements to the contrary, many observers believe that the endgame of all of this wrangling will result in a complete secession of the schools from the major conferences to their own separate entity.  Call it the Confederate Collegiate Athletics Association, if you like, but don’t ignore the possibility.

Big Ten commissioner Jim Delaney was recently quoted in a piece by Steve Wieberg at USA Today, and it’s abundantly clear that he (and likely the other power conference commissioners) see an Armageddon-like future to blow up the NCAA as his ‘nuclear option.’

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“Get a good night’s rest.”  We’ve all heard it from the time we were little kids — whether it was our parents extolling us before a big trip, our teachers warning us before a big exam, or a coach encouraging us before a big game.  And while conventional wisdom in every facet of our lives suggests that sleep is a necessary building block toward high achievement, people rarely specify how much rest is enough.  That is, until Stanford Medical School, using Johnny Dawkins‘ men’s basketball team as guinea pigs, decided to study that exact question.  For the past two basketball seasons, Cheri Mah, a researcher focusing on the science of snoozing, tracked the sleeping habits of eleven Stanford Cardinal players, putting them through the following protocol:

Get Your Zs Using Your Very Own Cardinal Pillow

The researchers asked the players to maintain their normal nighttime schedule (sleeping for six to nine hours) for two to four weeks and then aim to sleep 10 hours each night for the next five to seven weeks. During the study period, players abstained from drinking coffee and alcohol, and they were asked to take daytime naps when travel prohibited them from reaching the 10 hours of nighttime sleep.

The results, at least in a practice setting, will undoubtedly have coaches from Orono to San Diego and everywhere in between seeking to move lights-out to an earlier time and re-think the utility of those punitive 6 AM practices some choose to employ.  Mah’s team found that the players ran three full-court sprints (“suicides”) 4.5% faster with more sleep than they did at baseline, and their shooting percentages from both the foul line and the three-point arc improved by nine percent.  Keep in mind that the improvements were noted in team practices rather than game settings, but players generally self-reported that they felt less fatigued and their performances at both practices and games improved as a result.

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There are many, many things to love about college basketball, but one of the best parts of being a fan is to glance at your team’s schedule for the upcoming season and quickly locating the two, three or four ‘big’ games on the slate.  The mind’s eye wanders with anticipation of a season filled with opportunities to lord over the fans of the schools one hates the most, whether longtime conference foe, annoying regional rival, or up-and-coming frenemy.  Those ‘rivalry games’ on the schedule are often just as intense and in some cases more important than the other 30+ games combined — just ask Carolina fans how important it is that the Heels beat Duke, or Tennessee fans how badly they want the Vols to beat Kentucky.  In the absence of any other major successes in a given season, that one victory can carry the day for an entire fanbase through the offseason.

Pitino & Calipari Elevated the Memphis-Louisville Rivalry

Some of the very best such rivalries in the game today involve pre-conference matchups between regional rivals where the fanbases simply do not care for one another.  Kentucky-Indiana.  Wisconsin-Marquette.  Missouri-Illinois.  Gonzaga-Washington.  Cincinnati-Xavier.  BYU-Utah State.  Any Big Five game.  A few others have either been lost to the dustbins of history for any number of reasons, or never got started to begin with.  Maryland-Georgetown.  Connecticut-UMass.  Ohio State-Cincinnati.  Memphis-Louisville.  Ah yes, that one.  With today’s announcement that the former MVC/Metro/Great Midwest/Conference USA powerhouses will meet this coming December as part of the Basketball Hall of Fame Shootout, one of the grand old rivalries of the sport will soon resurrect from the dead.  

The game, on December 17 at the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville, will represent the first of a two-year home-and-home series that we hope the schools have enough sense to continue.  They have not played since the Cardinals left CUSA for the Big East in 2005, the longest such drought in nearly fifty years between the two schools; and while the press releases all state that Louisville owns the all-time record against Memphis, 51-34, the insider nugget is that the two schools are deadlocked at 24-24 since the 1980-81 season.  In the modern era, this rivalry has been one of the most competitive in the entire landscape of college basketball, and the two fanbases are already juiced for the opportunity to see their old enemies again.

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We’ve known for some time that former Gonzaga guard Demetri “Meech” Goodson was giving up basketball to return to his home state of Texas and pursue college football with the remainder of his amateur eligibility.  We learned today through The Spokesman-Review (via Fox 26 Houston) that Goodson will end up at Baylor for his two seasons on the gridiron.  Presuming that Bears head coach Art Briles is aware that he’s adding a tremendously athletic 6’0, 175-pounder with a ridiculous first step and quick hands to his roster, Goodson told the television station that he will be enrolled in the Waco school and ready to work out very soon.

Goodson Could Provide Spot Defensive and Leadership Minutes at Baylor

Just get my transcript from Gonzaga shipped over to Baylor.  I shipped it out (Saturday). Once they get all that stuff done, I’ll be there. It’s a great feeling.  I’m excited. A bit nervous because I haven’t played (football) in a while. Once I go and start hitting the weights and learning their system, I’ll be all right.  I could probably go overseas and make some money.  But professionally, football will be a better move for me just because of the number of basketball players who make it and the number of football players. That was basically why I did it.

Considering that there isn’t much of an NBA market for undersized point guards who average five points per game and have trouble shooting the ball from distance (career 20% three-point shooter), this is a fairly enlightened move on Goodson’s part.  With the transfer, not only does he give himself two seasons to fully re-adjust to playing football — the last time he suited up on the field was in 2006, during his sophomore year in high school — but he also joins a Baylor team coming off a 7-6 (4-4 Big 12) season where the depth chart shows only one returning starter at his favored cornerback position.  An opportunity to prove himself against the light-em-up offenses of the conference would enable Goodson a pretty good opportunity to eventually become a future NFL defensive back.  Incidentally, his older brother, Mike Goodson, a considerably bulkier player at 210 lbs., is currently a running back with the Carolina Panthers (see video of a TD last season here).

The intriguing part to this transfer saga between sports is what, if any, effect this might have on Baylor basketball.  The Bears are already settled in the point guard slot for the 2011-12 season with incumbent junior AJ Walton manning the spot and JuCo transfer Pierre Jackson coming in to provide relief.  But what if something goes wrong with one of those two players prior to the 2012-13 season (which, coincidentally, is when Goodson would be eligible to play his fourth and final season of hoops)?  Or, what if Goodson’s foray into football doesn’t go as well as planned (injury, rustiness, etc.)?  Is Scott Drew really going to sit idly by and not accidentally “bump” into Goodson at the athletic training facilities or cafeteria when there’s a proven winner on the hardwood walking around his campus?  Would he not want a seasoned veteran like Goodson in his locker room to provide backup minutes as an athletic defender to close out games? 

Drew has made major waves in his ability to recruit nationally at a school with virtually no basketball tradition, earning commitments from top players such as Perry Jones, III (Duncanville, TX), Deuce Bello (Greensboro, NC), and Quincy Miller (Winston-Salem, NC) in recent years.  Are we really supposed to believe that he doesn’t have the power of persuasion needed to entice Goodson for a final run in the gym?  Only time will tell, but it wouldn’t shock us in the least if we see Goodson suiting up for the Bears in both the primary fall and winter sports two seasons from now.