With 97 of the top 100 prospects in the class of 2014 already committed to colleges, the majority of ongoing recruiting speculation has turned to this year’s junior class. Two five-star prospects from the class of 2015 are currently committed in forwards Ben Simmons (#8 overall, LSU) and Mickey Mitchell (#16 overall, Ohio State). Today Malachi Richardson became the third five-star recruit to make his announcement as he chose to stay on the East Coast and play at Syracuse. The 6’6” Richardson is rated as the No. 17 prospect in the class of 2015 and the No. 3 small forward. He made his college selection this afternoon from Trenton Catholic (NJ) High School and chose the Orange from a list of six schools that also included Arizona, Connecticut, Indiana, Rutgers, and Villanova. He most recently took an unofficial visit to Syracuse and watched its victory over Indiana in the ACC/Big Ten challenge. With that commitment, Richardson joins four-star forward Tyler Lydon (#94 overall – 2015) in Jim Boeheim’s 2015 recruiting class. Richardson is a lethal scorer with a sweet stroke from the outside and will cause a lot of problems in the Syracuse 2-3 zone defense with his 6’10.5” wing span.

2. Top Center in 2015 Receives Hall of Fame Visitors

Two Hall of Fame coaches made their way out to Milwaukee over the past week to check in on 6’10” Diamond Stone, the top center in the class of 2015, and the No. 2 prospect overall. Last Friday, Mike Krzyzewski and Jeff Capel started their Midwestern recruiting trip by watching Stone and his Dominican (WI) High School team defeat St. Thomas More in a game where Stone finished with 23 points. Four days later, Roy Williams and assistant coach Steve Robinson made a quick trip to Wisconsin and watched Stone’s 24-point performance in a blowout win against Prairie (WI) High. Both rivals have made Stone their number one big man target in the class of 2015; however, it might be hard to get the five-star center out of his home state. Marquette’s Buzz Williams and Wisconsin’s ‘Bo Ryan have also recruited Stone hard during his early high school tenure. Marquette sits right in his back yard and had Stone on campus for its version of Midnight Madness this fall. He was also high school teammates with freshman point guard Duane Wilson. UNC currently has Wisconsin native J.P. Tokoto in its starting lineup, but the last time both UNC and Duke went after a Wisconsin kid they both lost out to Bo Ryan in the recruitment of freshman guard Bronson Koenig. Expect Stone to receive a lot more visits from Coach K and Roy while Buzz and Bo Ryan try to keep the talented big man in Wisconsin.

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With the single best day of college basketball games facing us on Saturday, this week’s RTC Podblast is almost singularly committed to previewing and talking through some of the biggest match-ups. OK, we made some time to talk about Florida and Kansas too, but the majority of the ‘blast looks ahead to the likes of Iowa-Iowa State, Michigan-Arizona, Kentucky-North Carolina and a number of other really interesting weekend games. As always, Shane Connolly (@sconnolly114) hosts, and despite his penchant for choosing road teams, he carefully leads us through what is without question the biggest weekend of the 2013 part of the season schedule.

Make sure to add the RTC Podcast to your iTunes lineup so that you’ll automatically upload it on your listening device after we record. And feel free to contact us through Twitter or email — we’re listening.

• 0:00 – 7:05 – Reflecting on Kansas vs. Florida
• 7:06 – 9:40 – Iowa vs Iowa State Preview
• 9:41 – 13:50 – Michigan vs. Arizona Preview
• 13:51 – 17:35 – Kentucky vs. UNC Preview
• 17:36 – 22:03 – All the Other Great Games This Weekend

It’s happened to many a college basketball fan (hopefully not just me). You pull up kenpom.com, just needing to check Doug McDermott’s offensive rating, or Syracuse’s adjusted tempo. You quickly accomplish your goal, but 45 minutes later, Doug McDermott’s offensive rating has morphed, several times over, into a glance at individual seasons similar to Joe Trapani’s 2007 campaign at Vermont. Fortunately, I am not here to discuss John Shurna’s freshman year (one such similar season), and instead, I’ll spare you a bit of KenPom wandering. Via college basketball’s statistical maestro, here are four takeaways in comparing his metrics with the current AP Top 25.

The Folks In The Oakland Zoo Are Probably In Agreement With KenPom’s Take On Their Panthers; After A 9-0 Start, Pitt Is #4 With Pomeroy, But Still Unranked In The AP Poll

Most Overrated/Underrated

KenPom’s ratings are never a perfect match with the polls. Expect the two evaluative systems to converge a bit as the year progresses, but let’s note the teams with the most decisive split of opinion at the moment. On the plus side of things, Pittsburgh sits at #4 in KenPom’s ratings, despite having not yet entered the AP poll. The potentially underrated (at least by AP voters) Panthers were third in “receiving votes” last week after a 9-0 start to the year. One of the teams that beat the Panthers into the poll was the Missouri Tigers, yet they rest some 37 slots below Pitt at #41 in KenPom’s rankings. Mizzou hasn’t done anything wrong yet – the Tigers are also 9-0 and coming off consecutive victories over West Virginia and UCLA – but Pomeroy’s model doesn’t yet view them as an elite squad. Other teams that pollsters are a bit keener on include Colorado (#37), San Diego State (#40), and UConn (#21).

Extremes Of The Youth Movement

Read the rest of this entry »

1. It should not come as a surprise, but yesterday Greg Whittington announced that he intended to transfer to another school. Whittington, who was dismissed from the Georgetown team last month, might be the most sought-after transfer on the market as he averaged 12.1 points and seven rebounds in his first 13 games last season before  before being ruled ineligible for the remainder of the season due to academics. Over the summer, Whittington tore his ACL and was still recovering before being kicked off the team. Whittington has reportedly set a visit at Rutgers this weekend and has been in contact with  Memphis, Nebraska, and South Carolina. As Jeff Goodman notes, there is some question regarding how much eligibility Whittington has remaining since he missed half of last season due to injury and was sitting out this season recovering before being dismissed from the team.
2. Perhaps he was waiting for an adequate sample size, but in this week’s edition of his Power Rankings Luke Winn brought back the famed Aaron Craft Turnometer and appears to have replaced Russ Smith with Craft’s Ohio State teammate Shannon Scott as the other Turnometer. Surprisingly, Scott is actually outperforming Craft in this metric. Of course, the more impressive thing regardless of whether Scott is actually outdoing Craft on the defensive end is that Ohio State now appears to have two guards playing that level of defense. The other stat that could our eye was the ridiculous three-point shooting from Connectictut. Based on their regular shooting we would expect them to come crashing back to earth pretty soon.
3. We have heard of many coaches and sports figures donating money to various causes, but we have never heard of one donating money to their employer. Apparently that is what Josh Pastner as he donated $250,000 to the Memphis athletic department. Pastner’s donation will go towards the school’s $40 million fundraising goal, which is aimed at upgrading the school’s athletic facilities. As the school’s athletic director notes it is largest donation ever made by a Memphis coach and frankly we do not understand why he would do it. We could understand a former coach doing it, but for a fifth-year coach who at times has been mentioned as being on the hot seat it seems kind of ridiculous.
4. With the much-discussed rule changes one of the biggest points of debate is how they are affecting games. The best way to do this is by looking at the numbers and the NCAA has done just that releasing its data as of December 8, 2013. According to the NCAA’s analysis the effects are encouraging with scoring up, shooting percentage up, and turnovers down. As the NCAA admits it might be too early in the season to read too much into these numbers. Perhaps the most surprising number is that team fouls are only up by less than two fouls per game. So while the popular narrative is that foul calls are out of control the data does not appear to back that up.
5. The NCAA might take a cursory overview of the statistics, but if you want an in-depth analysis you have to go to Ken Pomeroy who broke down the turnover issue into steal turnovers and non-steal turnovers. For some reason, Pomeroy decided to use this post to try to figure out if charges are coming back into the game as the year goes on even though he does not even try to measure them directly. We won’t bother with that because it seems like a flawed assumption. What the post is good for is actually looking at the numbers that he measured. As you would expect steals have dropped with fouls being called more tightly (or at least that is the way it is perceived). On the other hand although non-steal turnovers have also decreased they are approaching prior years.

The reputation Jay Bilas has developed over the years as one of the most vocal critics of the National Collegiate Athletic Association is well-earned. He frequently hammers away – via Twitter and otherwise – at president Mark Emmert and the controversial institution he presides over. Just last summer, Bilas highlighted the NCAA’s fundamental hypocrisy regarding its stance on player likenesses with his ShopNCAASports search bar revelation. Months before, in an extensive interview with Andy Glockner, Bilas opened fire on the NCAA in general, and Emmert in particular, calling the latter an “absentee president.” Those are just two examples. Scroll through Bilas’ tweets and you’ll find an endless supply of reasoned NCAA criticism (with plenty of rap lyrics sprinkled throughout; Young Jeezy even dropped Bilas’ name in a song). Most sports fans also know Bilas for his college basketball analysis, which – much like his frequent disparagement of the NCAA – is almost always, whether written or televised, very much on-point. If, in the preseason, you read Bilas’ “College Hoops Opus,” for instance, you’d feel so prepared for the upcoming campaign, you probably wouldn’t have spent any money on preview magazines.

Jay Bilas and Mark Emmert Traded Barbs Yesterday

As you no doubt already know, Bilas is a pretty smart guy, and he knows it, too. Which is why his latest squabble with Emmert was so predictable. Emmert was in New York Wednesday for the IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum, where he fielded questions from reporters about various NCAA-related issues. Responding to a question about Bilas, Emmert said, “I appreciate how passionate he is about college sports. I don’t like the ad hominem [personal] attacks.” Emmert followed up. “I dare say I know more about running complex organizations than him and he knows more about basketball.” Naturally, Bilas retorted: Read the rest of this entry »

1. When all the pundits saying that pay-for-play was coming we said that it was still a long way away. Yesterday, Mark Emmert agreed with us. According to Emmert, despite the public’s perceived growing desire to see college athletes be paid the college administrators he has talked to do not agree with that sentiment. Emmert did note that most were in favor of trying to better cover the actual cost of attendance and offer more substantial benefits for players. It is almost always unpopular to do so, but we continue to agree with Emmert’s sentiment on this although our reasons are more economically driven and reflect a belief that paying some athletes (sorry, student-athletes) would have a detrimental effect on the average college athlete in much the same way that Title IX has been perversely dealt with in the sense that some schools will just start cutting sports because they simply do not have the money to subsidize full scholarships when they are spending big money on a few athletes for revenue sports.
2. Any hopes of Providence fans that the team could compete in the Big East this year were dashed by the announcement that sophomore point guard Kris Dunn would undergo season-ending surgery on his injured shoulder. Providence has been able to compile a respectable 7-2 record mostly without Dunn, who sustained the injury during an exhibition game on November 2 that forced him to miss the first three games of the season before returning for four games in which he looked like a completely different player averaging 3.8 points per game shoot an anemic 31.6 percent from the field. This is the second straight year that the Friars had their hopes of being competitive dashed by losing a key guard. Last year it was Ricky Ledo, who did not qualify academically. This year, in addition to Dunn, the Friars are also playing without their top two incoming recruits–forward Brandon Austin and guard Rodney Bullock–who have been suspended indefinitely since before the season started for an undisclosed team rules violation.
3. We did not expect Drake to contend in the Missouri Valley Conference this year, but they certainly could have been a top-tier team in the conference. Those hopes may have ended with the announcement that senior guard Gary Ricks Jr. will miss the remainder of the season after fracturing a bone in his left foot. Ricks was the team’s second-leading scorer at 12.3 points per game, leader in assists at 3.6 per game, and also its best 3-point shooter at 45 percent on the year. Ricks’ departure will not only mean an increase burden on Richard Carter, but also the remained of the players who have essentially functioned as role players with Carter and Ricks running the show this season.
4. We are not sure why it suddenly became a major topic yesterday, but the Internet was all over the announcement by Seton Hall that Tom Mayaan, an Israeli citizen, had to leave Seton Hall to join the Israeli army. For those who are not familiar with the Israeli army, all Israeli citizens over the age are required to serve (men for three years and women for two years). That in itself would be a notable story, but the thing is that it appears that this was known as far back as November 19. Mayaan only put up modest numbers (2.4 points, 2.7 assists, and 1.2 rebounds per game) so it seems like the Pirates will be able to replace his production and perhaps he even may serve as a rallying point for the team.
5. Former North Carolina State coach Sidney Lowe pleaded guilty to failing to file taxes in North Carolina between 2009 and 2011. In exchange, Lowe received a suspended 45-day jail sentence, was placed on 36 months of unsupervised probation, must complete 100 hours of community service within the year, and must pay more than $79,000 in restitution plus a $2,000 fine. According to reports, Lowe made $962,000 in 2009, $953,000 in 2010, and $659,000 in 2011 with a base salary of $210,000 per year that came to $760,000 per year when TV and radio contracts were included with the remainder of his income coming through bonuses. While this is not nearly as embarrassing as what happened to Kentucky legend Richie Farmer it is an ignominious end to a star on the 1983 championship team in what might be his last significant moment in association with the school.

First things first: Gonzaga’s 80-76 win over West Virginia on Tuesday night will not go down as any sort of victory for the ages. Heck, it may not even count as a “good win” come March. But before we strip away all its value, with say, a game of “name a Mountaineer”, let’s also give the Zags a little credit. Grabbing a road victory, in a hostile environment, over a competitive power conference team is never an easy task. Every Big 12 team – Oklahoma State and Kansas included – will be happy if they leave Morgantown with a win this season. Signature victory it is not for Mark Few’s team, but with another “taking-care-of-business” performance in the books, the Zags look poised to hang around the top of the polls for yet another season. Of course, that upward November to March trajectory has ended in a Tournament nose-dive too often for almost anyone to take the Zags seriously these days — no matter how good a regular season they may register. The familiar question begs: Is this Gonzaga team built to win in March?

Kevin Pangos And The Zags Can Score The Basketball (Just Ask West Virginia), But Will That Offensive Efficiency Finally Equate To March Success? (AP)

Let’s hold off for a moment on evaluating Tournament potential, and first admit that the Zags are pretty good at picking up wins in the months leading up to March. Down eight with eight minutes left, and with Ken Pom’s win probability graph suggesting just a 15% chance of a Gonzaga win, this game long looked like one that might not support the above thesis. But in those final eight minutes the Zags did what they do best: score the basketball. The nation’s most efficient offense pumped in 24 points before the buzzer sounded, with a trio of Kevin Pangos threes serving as Coliseum-silencers along the way. Gonzaga has now scored at least 79 points in every game this season; this despite playing at a tempo that ranks below the national average. Just like last year’s 32-3 team, who finished second nationally in offensive efficiency, these Bulldogs can really score. Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who watched Missouri beat UCLA last Saturday probably came away impressed with the Tigers’ backcourt trio of Jordan Clarkson, Earnest Ross and Jabari Brown. The three guards combined for 63 points, 12 rebounds and nine assists, and attacked UCLA’s defense from inside and out, on the break and in the half-court, on spot-ups and dribble penetration. The Tigers were impressive, so it was no surprise to see them ranked no. 24 in the AP Poll released on Monday. If you watched Missouri beat the Bruins, you might even be inclined to argue that the Tigers deserve a higher ranking. I was impressed with Missouri. I think it was underrated heading into the season. Now that coach Frank Haith is done serving a suspension that – if we’re being totally honest – should have kept him away from the sidelines far longer than five games, the Tigers are in position to climb the rankings in the coming weeks, and maybe even challenge Tennessee and LSU for the de-facto SEC regular season bronze medal (i.e., the team that inevitably finishes behind Kentucky and Florida for third place). But what really struck me about Saturday’s game had nothing to do with Missouri. Near the end of the first half, Bruins freshman Zach LaVine pounced on a Tigers turnover just beyond his team’s three-point line, dribbled the length of the court, took off from one step inside the paint and flushed home a ferocious, one-handed windmill dunk.

This wasn’t the first time I had heard of LaVine. I knew coming into the season he was one of the nation’s better freshmen – though one who was more overlooked than he otherwise would have been in most years because of how loaded this freshman class is. I knew he was a good athlete, someone who could score, someone who could give the Bruins another scoring threat behind guards Jordan Adams and Kyle Anderson. But this – one of the most impressive breakaway dunks I’ve seen from any player at any level – was something I wasn’t quite prepared for. So I spent some time looking around on YouTube, found this clip, rewound each of LaVine’s dunks at least three times and quickly came to the conclusion his jam against Missouri was downright mediocre by comparison.

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“Quality over quantity” might be the best way to describe Tuesday night in college basketball. A majority of schools are in finals week, and as a result, players need their study time. So that means rest. Or easy opponents. Or both. But that wasn’t the case with No. 13 Kansas and No. 19 Florida yesterday. It’s safe to assume that these two schools aren’t in finals prep this week, so they took the opportunity to play each other in Gainesville. Jayhawks coach Bill Self went with four freshmen in the starting lineup. It perhaps wasn’t the greatest of ideas against the Gators’ dual point guard system, but it was the Gators’ zone that stifled Joel Embiid, Perry Ellis and most of the rest of the Jayhawks, leading to a 67-61 win. This prompted a short debate about KU’s offense versus the zone.

If Indiana played Kansas and each zoned the other, would anyone score?

— Dana O'Neil (@ESPNDanaOneil) December 11, 2013

Part of the situation with Self seemed weird. Why start four freshmen? It almost seemed like a move that Chuck Daly would make, a la the 1992 Dream Team’s scrimmage against that college all-star team (although I’d be willing to bet Self wouldn’t throw the game.) Maybe it was a move to prepare the Jayhawks’ youth for the conference season, when trips to Manhattan, Stillwater, Ames and Norman await.

Kansas' Bill Self gives Joel Embiid his first career start. Jayhawks will start four freshmen against Gators tonight.

— Jeff Goodman (@GoodmanESPN) December 11, 2013

That youth showed early for Kansas, who allowed the Gators to go on an blistering 21-0 run. Andrew Wiggins keyed a near comeback, bringing his team back to within range before Florida held them off. For the most part, Kansas was sloppy with the ball, couldn’t shoot and was horrible defensively.

Pretty amazing 21-0 run by Florida. And that's with four missed fts during the run.

— Pat Dooley (@pat_dooley) December 11, 2013

Another Andrew Wiggins three gets Kansas within six of Florida. Only 1:20 to go. ESPN.

— Nicole Auerbach (@NicoleAuerbach) December 11, 2013

That was the 24th turnover for Kansas. Yes, 24. Seriously.

— Myron Medcalf (@MedcalfByESPN) December 11, 2013

It all added up to a 67-61 loss. Read the rest of this entry »