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

It was never a question of if, but when for Billy Gillipsie, the embattled former Texas Tech coach who on Thursday officially submitted his resignation from the program. The immediate focus will be on Gillispie’s recent history with the Red Raiders. Namely, the litany of dishonorable allegations – from his inability to get along with assistants and program personnel, to his abusive treatment of players, to his insensitivity for practice time limitations, and a score of other damaging accusations prompting a mass mutiny of players and a meeting with athletic director Kirby Hocutt – chronicled in a CBSSports.com report earlier this month. But it bears remembering that Gillispie was once regarded with high esteem in the college hoops coaching world, a rising star who within the last decade engineered miraculous turnarounds at UTEP and Texas A&M before landing arguably the best coaching position in the sport at Kentucky. Gillispie cited health concerns for his resignation and Hocutt confirmed as much in a statement. But with the mountain of charges piling up against him in recent weeks, his dismissal, whether voluntary of forced, was an eventuality borne of irreparable public and internal denigration, much less a matter of medical distress. Gillispie’s demise in Lubbock completes one of the more unexpected coaching declines in recent memory. For a young leader as successful and precocious and rapidly ascendant as Gillispie once was, it’s shocking to consider his career arc would reach such an abrupt and unforgiving conclusion. He may yet resurface in the coaching ranks, but this latest divorce may have damaged his reputation nearly beyond repair.

The end to Gillispie’s tenure at Texas Tech was just as rapid as his remarkable rise through the coaching ranks (photo credit: AP)

The irony of Gillispie’s downfall is that the brunt of the criticism – his unrelenting intensity, insular if awkward personality, an almost predisposed fanaticism with the game itself – that led to his exit is what propelled his early coaching rise. Gillispie’s coaching acumen was never in question. From an X’s & O’s perspective, few could match his tactical intuition. Gillispie knew the game, knew it so well he was able to jump-start a long-dormant UTEP program from its six-win doldrums (2002-03) to a 24-win campaign and NCAA Tournament berth in just one year’s time. He continued his ascendancy of the coaching ladder at Texas A&M, where he revitalized a stalled-out hoops program of a football-centric institution with recruiting savvy and doctrinal mastery. Two rapid rebuilds, both at programs lacking the baseline ingredients for immediate success – Gillispie’s work at those places was unprecedented. This is what made his hiring at Kentucky in 2007 such a promising endeavor. In Lexington, where the hoops culture runs deep in a basketball-crazed state, winning – and recruiting the best high school players to facilitate that winning – is more than anything a function of juggling various pressures, of enduring the very brightest of spotlight and the pressing demand for national dominance. It was here, at the mecca of college basketball pageantry, that Gillispie cracked. The tendencies and personality traits that defined Gillispie’s coaching style and keyed his climb up the coaching ladder, proved incompatible with the challenge of Big Blue Nation. Two years, zero NCAA Tournament wins, a prompt but expected firing, and a litany of accusations from players and program personnel (not to mention his third drunken DUI arrest since 1999) about his corrosive interactions with peers, oppressive management of players and generally unproductive behavior throughout brought Gillispie’s once booming career trajectory to halt. But even after his fail at Kentucky, it was fair to assume, given his previous success, that Gillispie simply wasn’t prepared for the rigors of the nation’s most demanding coaching job, that he fell into the wrong situation, a victim of circumstance as much as his own coaching shortcomings.

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

Criticizing the NCAA’s amateur-related restrictions and regulations is a trend long since adopted by a sizable majority of the college sports viewing public. The main point of contention, or so it seems, is the organization’s ability to negotiate and license lucrative media rights deals while expressly denying its constituents – the student-athletes themselves and the marketable product their competition creates – a slice of the financial pie. Each and every violation of that fundamental principle, from textbook impermissible benefits scandals to menacing third-party influencers to rogue boosters, amplifies the national discussion. It’s gotten to the point where supporting the NCAA’s legislative agenda draws widespread skepticism and angst, as if the maintenance of amateurism has evolved into a contrarian viewpoint. It wasn’t long ago that the discussion proceeded in reverse, with the now-in vogue free-market position marginalized by a prevailing consensus that the extant system, such as it is, works. As the discourse challenging the underlying structure that defines intercollegiate athletics gained new levels of credibility and authority, it was fair to suspect the NCAA would eventually need to defend its heavily scrutinized system in not only the court of public opinion, but a court of law. Sure enough, a class-action lawsuit led by former UCLA star Ed O’Bannon has challenged those bedrock principles forbidding student-athletes from receiving paid compensation above the school-funded assistance provided by athletic scholarships, otherwise known as grant-in-aids.

The internal disagreements over the NCAA’s concept of amateurism could help advance O’Bannon’s suit against the organization (Photo credit: Isaac Brekken/AP Photo).

The legal dispute is nothing new; O’Bannon initially raised his grievances in 2009. His case, which is scheduled to go on trial in early 2014, has only intensified the public indictment of NCAA policy. In the meantime, while it prepares to face the landmark test case that could dismantle its authoritative standing, the NCAA may need to reconcile its moral and philosophical mission internally. That’s the impression given by ESPN Outside the Lines reporter Tom Farrey’s article revealing in-house dissension over the legitimacy of the NCAA’s treatment of its student-athletes. Email correspondence between school administrators and NCAA officials contains hard evidence of high-ranking authorititative figures harboring substantial misgivings over the basic philosophy upon which the student-athlete ruling system operates. For example, Nebraska Chancellor Harvey Perlman offers scathing criticism of the student-athlete’s absence within the financial component of the NCAA’s media rights and licensing negotiations.

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

At its humblest origins, the Big East was founded in 1979 behind the fundamental purpose of consolidating the East Coast’s best basketball programs into one competitive league. It began with seven members – Providence, St. Johns, Georgetown, Syracuse, Seton Hall, Connecticut and Boston College – and within the next three years added Villanova (1980) and Pittsburgh (1982). While some of that founding core remains, conference realignment has caused massive changes to the league’s membership. Most of the league hopping – almost all of which can be attributed to football-motivated decisions – has taken place in the 21^st century. The latest move saw Notre Dame, who housed its basketball and Olympic sports in the Big East but kept its football independence, declare its intentions to join the ACC. There is no timetable yet for the Irish’s move, but for an athletic program as proud and as financially-supported as Notre Dame, there’s little chance school administrators will linger around in Big East territory for any extended context, even if leaving requires a hefty exit fee. As currently constructed, the Big East will feature a 15-team hoops league in 2012-13. Two years from now, when all the realignment pieces are settled into their new homes, the league will field a decidedly different blend of disparate programs. The hectic realignment frenzy of recent years forced me to research the Big East’s jumbled future membership, an exercise that left me nostalgic about the endless hoops drama the league has produced and discouraged for a bleak future.

A reckless compilation of new programs, the Big East was assembled so that Aresco could present an appealing package to prospective media rights negotiatiors (Photo credit: John P Filo/AP Photo).

Starting in 2013, this is the mixed bag of hoops castoffs the Big East will proudly own: Cincinnati, UConn, Villanova, Georgetown, Providence, Seton Hall, St. John’s, Rutgers, DePaul, Louisville, Marquette, South Florida, Temple, Houston, SMU, UCF, and Memphis. That’s assuming Louisville or UConn or Villanova or any other programs that could fill a potential future opening in the ACC (if Notre Dame joins as a full member, or if commissioner John Swofford looks to add a 16^th basketball-only member) don’t jump ship before then. It’s hardly the grizzled band of geographically-fitting programs we once knew, the one with the hostile rivalries and legendary coaches and highly-appealing hard-nosed brand of hoops. But it’s merely life in the new Big East, the latest example of the detrimental and usually unintended byproducts of conference realignment. A league brought together for basketball purposes was largely undone by the allure of football money. Lest I digress on the evils of conference realignment (a column for another day), the reality – that the Big East, from a basketball standpoint, is now a shell of its former self – warrants a reassessment of the league’s power structure and its future standing among other power conferences. SI.Com’s college hoops’ analytical extraordinaire, Luke Winn – in response to new Big East commissioner Mike Aresco’s comment that, despite realignment-related losses, “We’re still the strongest top-to-bottom basketball conference in the country” – quantified the Big East’s realignment efficiency rate and found the reconfigured league to be the “weakest top-to-bottom major conference, not the strongest.”

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

If we’ve learned anything about the recent conference realignment craze, it’s that the two principles governing inter-league swapping – football, television rights deals and the thick crossover between them – have unintended and often detrimental consequences for the parties involved. Case in point: the Big East, unraveled at its foundational core by realignment forces, has seen itself morph from a tightly-knit group of basketball-oriented schools along the northeast corridor with legendary coaches and historic rivalries to a geographically disparate medley of culturally and academically incongruous programs, cobbled together in a last-ditch effort in the hopes of leveraging a lucrative media rights deal this fall. The deterioration has fueled the ACC – much like in the early 2000s, when it poached Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College from the Big East – into becoming one of Division I college athletics’ premier power brokers, along with the SEC, Big Ten, Pac-12 and Big 12. More relevant to this space, the ACC, once all the moving pieces settle into their new league, is poised to field arguably the best compilation of hoops talent we’ve ever seen.

The ACC added a 15th basketball member in Notre Dame, but could No. 16 be on the way in the near future? (Photo credit: Mike Lawrie/Getty Images)

Commissioner John Swofford added another gem Wednesday in Notre Dame, who plans to join the ACC in all sports except football (the Irish will play five games annually against ACC gridiron competition, but maintain their independence). This addition brings the ACC to 15 teams, an unwieldy number that could have nightmarish scheduling implications. Swofford told ESPN.com that the league has no plans to add a 16^th member, citing the disruption of football division equality, among other factors. Since the league isn’t divided into divisions for basketball, there is no immediate impetus to add another team, but it stands to reason that the ACC will eventually look to move to an even number of hoops teams, and what better place to address the problem than the beleaguered, battered, on-life-support (ok, maybe it’s not that bad) Big East? What follows is a brief analysis of a few potential candidates for that 16^th spot, should it open up in the coming years, with an eye toward each team’s purported value from a hoops perspective.

*Unless Notre Dame decides to relinquish its football independence, it would seem unlikely that the ACC will take on another fully engaged football member so as to preserve its current seven-team divisional configuration. This analysis, therefore, is limited only to basketball-centric schools without major football programs.

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

It always seemed slightly awkward that the Final Four, college basketball’s marquee postseason event, is played out in 70,000-seat football arenas across the country, rather than buildings actually designed to house basketball events. Fans spend the season watching their teams compete in basketball arenas across the country, many of which offer unique, quaint environments that are as much a part of the program as the team itself. In world where ticket revenue maximization and logistical considerations are the driving forces behind stadium construction and renovation, it’s these college hoops atmospheres – Hinkle Fieldhouse, Cameron Indoor Stadium, the Palestra – that give the sport a certain level of authenticity. There’s something endearing about the program-specific uniqueness that envelops college arenas, something vaguely intangible the sport simply wouldn’t be the same without. It would only make sense to have college basketball’s national champion determined under the same setting – not only for familiarity reasons, but to preserve college basketball’s amateur feel at the highest levels of competition. At the very least, basketball arenas – if not college structures, then NBA stadiums – offer settings far more tolerable than the large and unseemly football dome monoliths that have been adopted for college basketball’s three most important games (two national semifinals, and the championship game).

Large Domes like Ford Field have exclusively hosted the Final Four since 1997. That’s likely to continue for the foreseeable future (Photo credit: David J. Phillip/AP Photo).

But its no secret why the NCAA has opted for these awkward hosting sites. For one, bigger stadiums means more seats, which means more ticket revenues. If fans are willing to fill a reasonable proportion of a football dome’s enormous seating capacity in spite of several unattractive features – poor viewing angles, increased ticket prices – then it’s hard to argue with keeping the games in these large structures. From a revenue perspective, it just makes sense. But there are a host of other concerns to consider: space for increasing media contingents, infrastructural necessities (restaurants, hotels, parking, etc.), the conventions and parties and fan events that accompany major sporting events like the Final Four. Large football domes, despite all their aesthetic shortcomings, are better-equipped to handle the event in this regard. In short, football arenas in large cities offer the optimal blend of seating accommodations and resourceful necessities for hosting a sporting spectacle as massive and as important as the Final Four.

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Christopher Johnson is an RTC columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn.

Conference schedule releases, no matter how far in advance of their realization on the court, inevitably spawn anticipatory discussion and analysis of teams and the relative difficulty of their matchups at hand. The excitement prompts some to pencil in their sports-watching travel arrangements, while others pull out calendars and simply mark down designated college hoops viewing days. This year’s Big East docket is not at all different. Of the 135 games on this year’s regular season Big East slate, 75 will be nationally televised, 100 will feature at least one NCAA Tournament team from last season and 37 will match two such opponents. It’s arguably one of the best leagues in the sport, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that most Big East competition is defined by high-quality matchups between nationally successful programs. Still, it’s refreshing to see the specifics of league play – not just in the Big East, but for most of the sport’s high-major conferences – in  plain view and know that those gritty, high-stakes conference matchups aren’t too far off. What follows is a list of my 10 most intriguing games on this year’s Big East slate. The vagaries of nonleague play can alter each team’s outlook before they begin conference games, but from my distant vantage point, these are the fixtures (in chronological order) that inspire the most competitive draw.

The Bearcats are featured in several appealing Big East matchups this season (Photo credit: Jessica Hill/AP Photo).

Cincinnati at Pittsburgh (Monday, December 31 – ESPN2). The first game of league play sets up as one of the most entertaining, a match-up of two hard-nosed teams with established track records and fervent fan bases. The Oakland Zoo has long held a reputation as one of the sport’s most raucous and rowdy courtside environments. Cincinnati brings back its starting backcourt of Sean Kilpatrick, Jaquon Parker and Cashmere Wright from last year’s Sweet Sixteen team, while Pittsburgh hopes to rebound after missing the NCAAs for the first time in 10 seasons with fifth-year senior point guard Tray Woodall, a vaunted frontcourt tandem in Talib Zanna and Dante Taylor and a promising batch of new recruits. The stylistic contrast between the Bearcats’ talented backcourt and the Panthers’ ferocious low block duo should make for an interesting strategic chess match. A must-see showdown of league contenders to send us into the new year: What could be better?

Georgetown at Marquette (Saturday, January 5 – Big East Network). Both teams lose large swaths of minutes and production after earning #3 seeds in last year’s Tournament. The Hoyas do return Otto Porter, a potential league player of the year candidate poised to make an impressive freshman-to-sophomore leap, and welcome in four star-recruits Stephen Domingo and D’Vauntes Smith-Rivera. All the eyes will be fixed squarely on Porter in this one, but the Golden Eagles may have a star of their own in junior guard Vander Blue, an explosive 6’4″ scoring dynamo who should see his shot opportunities increase with the departures of Jae Crowder and Darius Johnson-Odom. These two programs are in the midst of semi-rebuilding projects, but both have more than enough talent and depth to make return runs to the NCAA Tournament. Plus, whenever Buzz Williams takes the floor, it’s always must-see viewing. 

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

Situated only 12 miles apart, an angst-inducing, traffic-clogged car ride away from one another, USC and UCLA have for many years sustained an adversarial existence on the athletic playing fields. The Trojans have dominated their cross-town rivals on the gridiron of late, while the Bruins have lorded over their cardinal-and-gold clad foes on the basketball court. The rivalry is alive and well, and both teams continue to make strides hoping to find ways to outperform one another in the revenue-producing sports. It starts with recruiting, the elemental building block to any successful program. Coaches at top programs like UCLA and USC must be able to seek out and sway the nation’s best high school players to their respective institutions. The meteoric rise of recruiting, propelled by expansive coverage from general scouting sites like Rivals, Scout, 247sports and ESPN Recruiting Nation, has pushed the art of courtship into the national spotlight, and coaches/programs are now judged on their ability not only to win games and draw fans but to also attract the best prospects in the country. The two LA schools have long stood as premium destinations for top-tier high school talents, but in today’s financially-intertwined recruiting market, these programs’ reputations, coaches, facilities and prime location – who doesn’t enjoy the comfort of a sunbath on the way to practice nearly every day of the year? – don’t hold the alluring force they once did. Often times persuading the cream of the high school crop requires more than what NCAA legislation allows.

The subject of an NCAA investigation, Anderson and Muhammad might not see the court in 2012-13 (Photo credit: Albert Dickson/SportingNews)

So even when an historic program like UCLA reels in the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class – as it did in 2012, built on the backs of four commitments and featuring the nation’s No. 1 overall prospect, Shabazz Muhammad – at least some measure of suspicion is warranted. Athletic director Dan Guerrero revealed on Monday that the NCAA has shifted its analytical eye toward that prized recruiting haul. In a statement released by the school, Guerrero confirmed that two members of the Bruins’ incoming class have yet to receive eligibility clearance for the upcoming season. A recent report by Scout’s BruinReportOnline.com  indicated three players (Muhammad, Kyle Anderson and Tony Parker) are in danger of losing their eligibility, but ESPN Los Angeles, citing an unnamed source, reported the ongoing probe concerns potential recruiting violations on behalf of Anderson and Muhammad. Parker, according to the same source, has been cleared to play this season. Muhammad’s recruitment has been subjected to NCAA scrutiny over the past several months, with particular concern over his relationship with financial advisers Ken Kavanagh and Benjamin Lincoln and his method of payment for several unofficial visits. Muhammad was held out of UCLA’s recent foreign exhibition tour to China, but Anderson and Parker both attended with the team (though Parker did not play due to injury).

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

When Xavier announced earlier this month the expulsion of star guard Dezmine Wells, the move seemed rash and awfully premature. At the outset, the school was reticent to release any specific details and we were left to assume Wells’ dismissal was completely within bounds, that his actions were heinous and severe enough to warrant such decisive punishment. XU termed Wells’ transgression a “severe violation of the Code of Student Conduct”, but claimed “federal privacy law restrictions” prevented a more thorough explanation. CBSSports.com’s Jeff Goodman reported the incident involved sexual misconduct, which put Wells – who, in the immediate aftermath of the allegations coming to light, didn’t respond to the school’s actions – in a particularly bad light. As XU’s best returning player, Wells’ actions damaged not only his own reputation but his former school’s prospects on the court next season. Several developments over the past week and change have shifted the tenor of that narrative.

The specious allegations against Wells gave XU all the evidence it needed to expel him (Photo credit: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images).

An Ohio grand jury exposed the XU conduct board for its hasty litigation process, essentially claiming that the suit was improperly adjudicated in a way that violated the basic tenets of the American judicial system. Hamilton County prosecutor Joe Deters officially denounced the XU’s criminal charges and called its disciplinary process “seriously flawed.” XU in response held firm to its protocol and refused to back down after the grand jury’s ruling. The school reiterated its stance on Wells’ actions under the contention that its ethical and disciplinary standards differ from those of the American justice system, and thus covered itself against criticism from the suspicious eyes of nuanced legal officials like Deters. In a statement released to ESPN.com’s Dana O’Neil, XU justified its retributive protocol:

The process used by the Xavier University Conduct Board is the standard used in American universities. The XU Conduct Board heard evidence that may or may not have been heard by the grand jury. After the Conduct Board reached its decision, the matter was considered and upheld by an appeal board of members of the student body, faculty and staff and is final.

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

The fickle nature of college hoops owes itself to a number of different factors. Every year there are a handful of teams that underperform or overperform versus expectations for various reasons, from team chemistry to coaching philosophy to collective work ethic. Perhaps the most uncontrollable element of a team’s performance is injury, the sudden and often catastrophic medical ailments that – in the blink of one single cut to the hoop, defensive rotation or hard sprint down the court – dramatically alter teams’ seasons and programs’ trajectories. Last season we saw several injuries to key players, some more impactful than others, fundamentally shift the competitive balance in various leagues. For those players, the situational outlook was bleak: not playing competitively with the team you’ve spent all summer practicing with just plain stinks. But for the most part, their departures faded into the periphery as the season wore on, players began furiously rehabbing their various injuries, teams adapted and college hoops rolled along with minimal fuss.

If Mbakwe can return to form, the Gophers could be poised for an NCAA Tournament berth (Photo credit: Tom Olmscheid/AP Photo)

There was a strikingly large proportion of one particular injury last season, or at least it seemed that way for several of the sport’s most influential medical breakdowns. It’s known as the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tear, and it’s one of the most common and oft-repeated of all athletic detriments. A complete recovery normally requires major surgery, between six and nine months worth of substantial rehabilitation and a cautious return to athletic activity. I’ve identified six instrumental players who experienced this very process after tearing their ACLs last season and all of them are expected to return – rehabbed and ready to go – for a redeeming 2012-13 campaign. Each player is rejoining their teams (or in some cases, new teams) under slightly different circumstances from which he left, with situational and rotational specifics dictating the terms of their returns. I’ve tried to dig into some of the circumstantial elements playing into these players’ comeback seasons and how you should expect them to fare this season. Here are the results of my research, a full-fledged breakdown of college hoops’ big-name torn ACL-returnees. Enjoy… and try your best to avoid a similar fate.

Trevor Mbakwe (sixth-year senior, Minnesota)

This isn’t unfamiliar territory for Mbakwe. Way back when he still played for Marquette – the same year (2007-08) Mario Chalmers’ legendary three-point shot KO’d a high-powered Derrick Rose-led Memphis team in the national finals – Mbakwe missed the majority of the season with a knee injury. He recovered, packed his bags and moved on to Miami Dade Community College, where he averaged a modest 16.3 PPG/13.2 RPG double-double while earning Southern Conference Player of the Year Honors. When he eventually made his way to Minnesota, after sitting out the 2009-10 season while awaiting trial for a felony assault charge, Mbakwe unleashed the ferocious rebounding and inside scoring touch he demonstrated in the JuCo ranks on Big Ten forwards. Much to the chagrin of Tubby Smith’s middling program, Mbawke had only played one full season and six full games last year before going down with an ACL tear.

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Christopher Johnson is an RTC columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn.

As Arizona State muddled down the stretch to its second straight NCAA Tournament-free season, there were small signs that maybe (just maybe) the Sun Devils, in a reversal of the program’s stark two-year downward spiral, were trending upward. Sophomore center Jordan Bachynski saw his scoring and rebounding totals jump over the latter portion of conference play and the Sun Devils notched consecutive wins for the first time all season, including at home over in-state rival Arizona to knock the Wildcats off the at-large bubble cutline . The positive momentum dissipated quickly when three key contributors – sophomore guard Chanse Creekmur, power forward Kyle Cain, and leading scorer Trent Lockett – left the program for various reasons. Despite the personnel departures, there was reason to believe ASU could build upon Bachynski’s semi-improvement, work in six incoming players, unleash highly-touted prospect Jahii Carson at the point, and make some noise in an arguably top-heavy Pac-12. For coach Herb Sendek, who over the past two seasons has posted a lowly 22-40 record, anything less than an NIT appearance in 2012-13 is probably a firable outcome. Turning the Sun Devils around and saving his job after a quasi-exodus of scoring output and rotation minutes is an onerous proposition in and of itself. Sendek learned Thursday afternoon he will undergo his saving grace season without two familiar faces. Just a day after losing assistant Scott Pera to a similar position at Penn, Lamont Smith packed his bags and left to join Lorenzo Romar’s staff at Washington.

After losing two top assistants, the pressure has ratcheted up on Sendek’s hold on the head coaching job (Photo credit: Gus Ruelas/AP Photo).

Doug Haller of The Arizona Republic spoke with Sendek after Smith made his announcement.

Honestly, the timing isn’t ideal, but I think it creates a great opportunity for us. […] It provides us with an opportunity to bring in two very talented members for our staff, so at the end of the day, I suspect it will be a win-win for everybody involved.

Putting a positive spin on these departures is a completely understandable approach: Sendek needs to show newly-promoted athletic director Steve Patterson he’s not going to simply buckle under the pressure of two poor seasons and a depleted coaching staff. The defections are tough to swallow, but Sendek clearly isn’t giving off any hints of displeasure or other negative reactions. Optimism aside, Sendek now finds himself in an extremely unfavorable position. On the eve of what is arguably a tenure-defining season, Sendek must produce respectable results out of a new-look roster with little in the way of sideline help to congeal the disparate parts. With two transfers, a pair of freshman and a now-eligible Carson expected to play significant minutes, Sendek has to find ways to work in the influx of new players and create a functional system around veteran mainstays like Bachynski and seniors Carrick Felix and Chris Colvin, all while providing signs of appreciable progression in an improved league.

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