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

This is going to be one of the most fascinating seasons of Bill Self’s Kansas tenure. Over his insane nine-consecutive-and-counting Big 12 title run, Self has largely resisted the compressed process of recruiting and bidding adieu to one-and-done players after a single season. Instead, he has turned gradual multi-year development into an art form, recruiting program-dedicated players willing to hack it on the practice courts and bide their time on the bench for a season or more, then enter the starting lineup as upperclassmen with plenty of experience, a solid understanding of the physicality of the college game, and great familiarity with their teammates. This cycle has worked for years, and Self would be crazy not to keep running his program and his player development process the same exact way. That old “why change something?” metaphor applies here. Slow developmental curves are Self’s trademark; John Calipari at Kentucky he is not.

The players surrounding Wiggins could be just as valuable to Kansas’ national title hopes as Wiggins himself (USA Today).

This season, for the first time in recent memory, Self is expected to play at least two true freshmen in the starting lineup (and quite possibly three), one of whom is considered the best high school prospect to enter the college game since Kevin Durant. You know his name: Andrew Wiggins. Wiggins has many titles – basketball destroyer of worlds, modern “Monstar” of college hoops (if you haven’t seen “Space Jam”, well, sorry), face-melting athletic freak, guaranteed franchise-altering NBA superstar – and he is the main reason why, in a matter of seconds, Kansas went from tenuous Big 12 front-runner to legitimate national championship contender when Wiggins, one of the best-kept commitment secrets of recent memory, announced he would play his one year of college basketball with the Jayhawks. Wiggins, it was widely said, would make Kansas great. He was the most talented player Self would ever coach, an instant star capable of lifting any team with any coach – let alone a nine-times-running conference champion with a surefire Hall of Famer patrolling the sidelines – into the national championship discussion. Kansas was going to be good, and Wiggins was the reason why.

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August is arguably the deadest month of the college basketball calendar, but that didn’t stop the crew from putting together an RTC Offseason Podcast to review the last six or seven weeks of news since the NBA Draft went down in late June. Shane Connolly (@sconnolly114) came out of his summer hibernation to serve as our host, and the guys took on the topics of Division 4, what defines success for an NBA coach and whether summer basketball is roughly as relevant to future success as preseason football (full timeline below). We’ll be back in late September as we start to truly gear up for the 2013-14 season. See you then!

• 0:00-12:25 – The Future of the NCAA
• 12:25-20:07 – Butler sans Brad Stevens
• 20:07-24:39 – Never-ending PJ Hairston Saga
• 24:39-27:04 – Summer International Tournaments – News or Noise?
• 27:04-32:48 – ESPN Tip Off Marathon
• 32:48-43:08 – ESPN Gameday Schedule/wrap

1. New Butler coach Brandon Miller was probably already facing an uphill battle replacing Brad Stevens. Not only did he have to contend with a conference change from the Atlantic 10 to the Big East and the departure of several key seniors, but he was also facing Stevens’ considerable shadow. Now he will have to do all of this without Roosevelt Jones, who was perhaps the team’s top returning player, is out for the season after tearing ligaments in his left wrist during the team’s trip to Australia. Butler was going to have a tough time dealing with all the changes and now doing so without Jones might be too much for Miller (or even Stevens if he had stayed) as the Bulldogs seem destined for the bottom of the Big East this season.
2. The NCAA has found itself in quite few politically unpopular situations over the years, but they may have topped themselves with their latest act–taking a year of eligibility away from a Marine veteran for playing games on the base. The latest poster boy for the NCAA’s ongoing quest for bad publicity is Steven Rhodes, a 24-year-old freshman at Middle Tennessee State, who just finished a five-year stint with the Marines and was planing on coming back to play college football. Unfortunately his plans have been put on hold as the NCAA has ruled that Rhodes has to sit out this season. Although Middle Tennessee State is not the typical site for major NCAA stories, we have a feeling that this will turn into a national story in the near-future.
3. The start of the college basketball season is getting very close, which you will be reminded of with the onslaught of college basketball previews that you will see online once the college football season starts and we are pretty much ready for the season to start, but one name–Chris Walker–remains in limbo. Walker, one of the top players in the class of 2013, is still waiting for clearance from the NCAA, but it appears that the NCAA Clearinghouse is reviewing his grades now. We have no idea how long it will take the NCAA to review his grades, but they will need to clear him by this coming week for him to be eligible to play this fall, but if he is eligible by December he could enroll at Florida and play the second half of the year. If neither of those options work, we get the feeling that he might pursue the Ricky Ledo option.
4. When Shivaughn Wiggins announced that he was transferring from Mount St. Mary’s we figured it would not take long before he found a new home and it only took a few weeks as he announced that he was transferring to Coastal Carolina. Wiggins, the NEC Rookie of the Year, averaged 9.6 points per game last season and should be a huge pick-up for Coastal Carolina when he is eligible to play in the 2014-15 season. If you are looking for a more in-depth evaluation of Wiggins’ potential impact on the team, check out the breakdown put together by Big Apple Buckets.
5. Out of all of the Candid Coaches questions that CBS has released the one about which elite 2014 prospect will struggle the most in college is certainly the most controversial. We won’t pretend to know much about any of the 2014 prospects at this point outside of recognizing a few names, but it will be interesting to see if these anonymous comments will affect their ranking at all and whether it might scare off a few coaches. We doubt that it actually will, but we imagine that several of the prospects listed here (and more specifically their parents) will be concerned about that. While this is interesting on some level and will certainly make its way around the message boards we are actually more interested in seeing this come out for the incoming freshman since we will be able to judge those evaluations right away.

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

The NCAA released attendance information from the 2012-13 season this week, with findings ranging from the very interesting — how about those Creighton Bluejays! — to the entirely irrelevant – I don’t think anyone was wondering how many fans came out to watch Fairmont State last season. But amid all the triviality were a few important nuggets.  Yahoo.com came up with a few interesting tidbits from the data earlier in the week, but here are three more observations worth noting.

NIT Be Damned, Big Blue Nation Packed, On Average, 23,009 Strong Into Rupp Arena Last Season — Once Again Good For Most In The Nation

1. Who said the SEC only paid attention to football? The 23,000 that packed Rupp Arena on a nightly basis last season certainly helped the conference’s cause, but six other SEC programs ranked in the top 40 nationally in average attendance – a total that only the Big Ten (12 teams) could top. Furthermore, the conference placed third nationally in overall average attendance — and this despite seeing that number drop over 900 fans a game from its 2011-12 level. Only the WAC, decimated by the departures of Nevada, Hawaii and Fresno State, saw a sharper drop in ticket sales last year. The SEC may be more guilty of the “there are 10,000 fans here but the arena is still only half full” phenomenon than any other league – a trick that isn’t exactly an atmosphere-maker – but in what was a far cry from a banner year for the conference, the overall attendance figures both surprise and impress. There is sport after January down south after all!
2. Let’s be careful not to make a direct correlation between average attendance figures and overall program success, or even fan interest. The easiest way to prove this point is to take a look at the program that finished 47th nationally in average attendance. Duke may be behind 46 teams on this list, but a consecutive home sellout streak dating back to 1990 should be enough to ease any concern with that metric. On the flip side, there are a number of teams with pretty solid average attendance figures, but also with half-empty arenas and relatively disinterested fan bases. Among teams in the top 40 that fit this bill are Tennessee (#8), Arkansas (#20), Texas (#32) and Nebraska (#38). It’s always better to have more fans than less, but program expectations, arena size, and athletic department budget (gasp!) should all be considered in conjunction with this raw data. Read the rest of this entry »

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

The P.J. Hairston saga has all the makings of a classic amateurism bombshell. The shady third-party handler vaguely accused of providing money and/or gifts to a college athlete. A star player from one of the most esteemed college sports brands in the country. A drug charge. A loaded firearm and ammunition found outside of an obscurely rented vehicle. The evidence-based suspicion of broader corruption among program athletes. An apparent academic scandal simmering in the backdrop. The amateurism debate reaching flood stage in the public discourse. A high-profile lawsuit challenging amateurism’s very existence. The convenience of the Johnny Manziel saga. It’s all too timely and salacious and interesting, but here’s the thing: We haven’t even come close to reaching the finish line. Hairston was indefinitely suspended from UNC basketball after being ticketed for speeding on July 28, his third reported traffic citation of the summer, and all charges related to his July 5 traffic stop have been dropped. Hairston won’t be punished by the legal system, but that was never the biggest part of his summer saga, anyway.

The final outcome of the Hairston saga is still unclear (USA Today).

No, the most concerning aspect of Hairston’s malfeasance is the status of his eligibility heading into a season in which North Carolina is expected to compete for a conference championship with the junior expected to shoulder the bulk of the point-producing load and solidify UNC’s otherwise shaky defensive perimeter. He may not be able to do any of that if the NCAA finds the vehicles he drove this summer were rented out to Hairston impermissibly, or if any of his dealings with local party promoter and convicted felon Haydn ‘Fats’ Thomas are deemed in violation of the organization’s confusing (and highly controversial) amateurism rules. More than two months out from the start of the 2013-14 college hoops season, Hairston’s future with the Tar Heels hangs in the balance. His status for the upcoming season is just as mysterious as all the plot twists and legal nuance that brought us to this point.

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1. A day after Roy Williams declared that he was tired of talking about P.J. Hairston (news to us since he didn’t talk about it as much as many would have liked him to) Bubba Cunningham, the school’s athletic director, reportedly said that he expects Hairston to miss some time, but still play this season. We certainly understand that Cunningham would like to convey a hopeful message and probably expected that his comments (made at a faculty retreat) would not make national news, but it seems awfully optimistic to think that Hairston will play this season given the publicly available evidence against him.
2. Losing your best player to an injury is never a good thing, but the staff at California has to be thankful that Justin Cobb sustained a fracture to his right fifth metatarsal during a Pro-Am game on Monday night rather than later in the year. Cobb, who averaged 15.1 points and 4.8 assists per game last season, will be out 6-8 weeks, which means that he will probably miss the start of practice, but should be back for the team’s first game. In a strange way Cobb’s absence during the early practices could be seen as a positive as it would allow the team to get his back-ups more practice and accelerate their learning with Cobb out of  way letting them work with the starters.
3. When Robert Upshaw signed with Fresno State it was a surprise to many as the 7-footer passed on many more well-known programs. Now that Upshaw has been dismissed from the team for violating an unspecified athletic department policy for the third time we can see where Upshaw might have otherwise ended up going. Despite a mediocre season in which he averaged an uninspiring 4.1 points and 3.8 rebounds per game Upshaw should have plenty of suitors and it appears that his family is already reaching out to potential destinations. The family has not offered any hints about where Upshaw is looking at, but it is worth noting that he originally committed to Kansas State before backing out when Frank Martin left the school to coach at South Carolina.
4. We hate to be jaded about news that an athlete has gotten into legal trouble, but at this point it takes a lot of surprise. So when we heard that Marshall forward Elijah Pittman had been indicted on misdemeanor battery charges we were not exactly shocked (this isn’t a comment on Pittman since we don’t know anything about personally, but is instead reflective on the number of arrests we have written about in this space). What is surprising is the fact that we had not heard about the arrest yesterday when the indictment occurred on July 31 and the incident in question happened on October 10, 2012. According to the police report Pittman knocked another Marshall student unconscious at an off-campus apartment. Given the fact that Pittman was allowed to play last season–averaging 16.1 points and 4.2 rebounds per game–we doubt that he will miss any playing ime unless it is the result of jail time.
5. With all of the movement we have seen with conference realignment we have wondered what will happen to some of the notable conference challenges. Perhaps the most notable one is the Big Ten/ACC Challenge, which will be back in a similar format this year. While most of the 12 games have some interesting angle (sorry, we are having a hard time getting too excited about Boston College at Purdue), the three big-time games are clearly Indiana at Syracuse, Michigan at Duke, and North Carolina at Michigan State. Although we do think that winning these competitions is largely overrated we will be interested to see how the ACC’s newest members fare as the ACC has lost its grip on the Challenge going 0-3-1 in the past four years after winning it the first 10 years, which also coincides with the Big Ten becoming arguably the premier basketball conference in the country.

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

There were two reactions when Maryland announced its move to the Big Ten last fall. First, indignant Big Ten fans cried foul and lamented the erosion of its historic Midwestern football tradition and groused about how the Terrapins could never, ever, ever be a good fit in their conference. They aren’t one of us. The other reaction, this one from a smaller strain of the national sports populace, was a grudging acceptance of why Maryland was making its move in the first place. In fact, university President Wallace Loh came right out and said it at the official press conference. Maryland was leaving the ACC for the Big Ten for one reason: money. Conversely, the Big Ten was adding Maryland for one reason: to expand its conference television network into a mostly untapped East Coast television market. In today’s college sports world, when monetary interest and potential broadcast rights bounties mesh so harmoniously, no force – not geographic interest, or cultural fit, or the total renouncement of traditional hoops rivalries – is going to stand in the way. Maryland to the Big Ten was, in the eyes of both parties, a perfect fit. No move in the recent realignment frenzy made more financial sense. There was no mystery.

It will take time, even with a lucrative Big Ten TV deal, for Maryland to improve its financial situation (Getty).

The move looked even more prudent after details emanated about Maryland’s massive athletic department budget shortfall. The Terrapins cut seven varsity sports in June 2012 due to rising costs, and moving to the Big Ten – where teams reportedly earned an average of $24.6 million payouts in Big Ten network revenue and NCAA Tournament earnings last year – seemed like a convenient vehicle to streamline Maryland back to financial stability. The premise was that the Terrapins were on their way to a more comfortable economic life in their new conference. The Big Ten was their financial panacea. Turns out, Maryland’s new conference could be inheriting a more dire financial proposition than most believed possible when the school announced its conference switch last fall. The university commission released a report earlier this week uncovering the breadth of the Terrapins’ current financial peril, and the optics are even more harrowing than last year’s money-driven conference hop implied. According to the report, the athletic department operated at a $21 million budget deficit in the past year, which is attributed to “past financial decisions” and the ACC’s denying Maryland roughly $15 million in conference revenue as part of an effort to collect the $52 million exit fee conference members had voted into place. The report also projects Maryland’s athletic department will continue to operate in the red until at least the 2017-18 academic year, more than three years into its Big Ten membership.

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

During these trying summer months away from the hardwood, a favorite pastime of college basketball fans is putting together the jigsaw puzzle that is the schedule for the season ahead. We still don’t have all the pieces in hand here in mid-August, but over the past few weeks we have heard announcements regarding in-season tournaments, multi-conference challenges, and select non-conference match-ups. The next shoe to drop in the schedule release process came Wednesday, when ESPN unveiled its 2013-14 College Gameday schedule. This new delivery of hoops action to come is a mouth-watering series of match-ups with a pretty comprehensive geographic blueprint (games in seven different conferences are included, plus a Gonzaga vs. Memphis non-conference tilt), and in all likelihood, even more complete coverage of the top of the preseason polls. There is a distinct possibility that every single team in this season’s preseason Top 10 will make an appearance on Gameday. Excited for Saturday nights in 2014 yet? It’ll be hard for that slate to disappoint, but if you will allow for a little nit-picking, we have a few good ideas on how to make Gameday – already a great thing – even greater.

The College Gameday Crew Has A Winter Of Titanic College Hoops Matchups Ahead Of Them, But No Return Trip To Hinkle Fieldhouse Means We Are Probably Safe To Avoid Davis, Rose, Phelps And Bilas In Their “Memorable” Hickory High Jerseys 

With the original and (still) most popular version of College Gameday coming to you from college football’s most famed venues each fall Saturday, there are a few things we wish the hoops variety would steal from their gridiron counterparts. For one, what’s the rush with scheduling? My Wednesday afternoon may have been a little less exciting yesterday, but why not wait until a couple weeks out (like the football guys do) to set the games? That way we avoid providing disappointing teams a national stage (for example, Southern Illinois entered its January 2008 Gameday spot against Creighton with a losing record), and also potentially allow fans to enjoy games featuring surprise teams that may not have been on the preseason radar. Plus, if nothing better materializes, these brilliant original match-ups can stand. Michigan will still be visiting Sparty on January 25, Duke and UNC will still be facing off at Cameron on March 8, and life cannot be any worse!

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1. August is without question the slowest month in the college basketball calendar, but a couple of key releases of information on Wednesday allowed for some pizzazz in an otherwise dry landscape. First and foremost, ESPN’s 2013-14 Gameday schedule was announced, and the early returns on the eight-game slate are quite favorable. In fact, a reasonable argument could be made that the schedule contains the best (on paper) games in the ACC, AAC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC this year. The “mid-major” game between Memphis and Gonzaga is certainly no slouch, and the second ACC game (depending on which between Syracuse-Duke and UNC-Duke is “the best”) is another great match-up. Even the Pac-12 either/or battle between Arizona-Colorado and UCLA-Stanford has promise. We don’t have the entire history of Gamedays in front of us at the moment, but there’s little doubt that we’ve enjoyed a group of games that (again, on paper) has had the star power and quality of these eight. Absolutely. Cannot. Wait.
2. The other promising news that came out of Wednesday was also of a scheduling variety, although not related to the upcoming season. The Champions Classic, a fantastic event that pits blue-blooded powerhouses Kentucky, Duke, Kansas and Michigan State against each other on a round robin three-year basis, is set to extend its contract for another three seasons (2014-16, according to Tom Izzo). As one commenter notes below that revelatory tweet, it would be great if the organizers of the event continued to spread the love around the country so that places other than New York, Atlanta and Chicago would have an opportunity to host the proceedings. Roger Kuznia at TSN believes that the event should open itself up to more schools (such as UNC, UCLA, Indiana, Syracuse, Louisville and Arizona) so that one of the marquee nights of the early season doesn’t begin to lose its luster, and it’s a fair point. We’d like to see a two-night, eight-team event where schools rotate through (avoiding conference foes, of course), with perhaps an opportunity to earn their way into or out of future events based on their performances. Either way, we’re still glad to see the existing format headed to another rendition.
3. The NCAA also released its attendance figures for the 2012-13 season on Wednesday, and as always, the aggregate numbers only get you so far to a real understanding of the topic. We hope to have more analysis on this later today, but for now, The Dagger‘s Jeff Eisenberg does a pretty good job breaking down some of the key stats. That a school like Creighton outdrew a school like USC by more than four times the number of fans per game is a testament to how whacked the BCS system is when it comes to college basketball. The Mountain West also outdrew the Pac-12 by more than a thousand fans per game, and you have to once again address the chicken/egg argument of what drives what when it comes to on-court success. Do fans who demand success at the best programs foster the overarching pressure to win from their teams; or do the teams that win boil up interest by virtue of people’s willingness and desire to associate with winners? It’s obviously a combination of both factors, but we have to believe there’s a pretty strong correlation between fans actually caring (and showing up regardless) and success on the hardwood. The NCAA should do that analysis.
4. Asking a group of college coaches to name the best current coach in the sport would no doubt result in a plurality of names ranging from Mike Krzyzewski to Bill Self to Rick Pitino to several others. But asking a group of college coaches (or anyone, really) to name the best current recruiter in the sport leaves no room for debate — we’re honestly surprised that the numbers taken by CBSSports.com‘s crew didn’t approach 100 percent in favor of Kentucky’s John Calipari. In fact, the man who has inked 15 of the last 50 recruits ranked in the RSCI top 10 (think about that for a second…) didn’t even receive a majority of the votes (49 percent). Still, nobody else was close, as Kansas’ Bill Self (8 percent), Duke’s Coach K (6 percent), Florida’s Billy Donovan (5 percent) and Marquette’s Buzz Williams (5 percent) filled in the other blanks. It’s somewhat interesting that North Carolina’s Roy Williams didn’t receive a single vote — it wasn’t all that long ago that he was considered the best in the business in this regard.
5. It’s called subsequent remedial measures (SRMs) in the legal realm, but what it essentially amounts to are actions made by an entity to mitigate future liability based on an alleged previous wrong (already under litigation). The idea is that SRMs cannot be used to “prove” that the responsible party is guilty of any previous wrongdoing based on those later actions, and it makes sense from an evidentiary sense (the case needs to be proven by intent used at the time of the infraction). But it sure as heck looks bad from a public relations perspective, and that’s exactly what both the NCAA and several of the major BCS conferences are doing now that the Ed O’Bannon/EA Sports case is taking on a life of its own. The SEC, Big Ten and Pac-12 announced this week that it will follow the NCAA’s lead and no longer allow EA to use its trademarks in its college football video game. It’s not all that important with respect to the O’Bannon case, but it’s very important in terms of

1. There’s perhaps nothing more frustrating (yet printable) than good ideas gone bad. Several years ago the Big 12 and Pac-10 tried to capitalize on the popularity of the ACC/Big East Challenge by staging its own “Hardwood Series” event. The only problem was that it started sometime in November and ended around Christmas. It was no more a real “event” than Congress is the voice of the people these days. That same year, the Big East and SEC got into the act, staging a somewhat better neutral-site series that at least took advantage of proximity in time (the games were usually on back-to-back days, but didn’t include enough teams). Still, it was tough to jazz big state school SEC fans up about playing small (mostly) Catholic schools like Villanova and St. John’s — the match-ups just didn’t make for a good fit. The SEC and Big 12, however, represent like upon like. Both leagues are full of mostly rural states that care a lot about college athletics, even if football will always trump basketball in most of those places. An SEC/Big 12 Challenge, at least on paper, had real promise. Alas. The 2013 schedule was released yesterday, and the powers-that-be have fallen into the same trap that the Pac-10 and Big 12 engineered back in 2007 — the games begin on November 14 (Texas Tech @ Alabama) and end December 21 (Oklahoma @ Texas A&M), some 37 days apart. Furthermore, the two best games — Kentucky at Baylor on December 6 and Kansas at Florida on December 10 — were already scheduled regardless of this event. Memo to SEC and Big 12 bigwigs — if you want people to really care, get it right next year.
2. From a possible good idea gone bad to a possible bad idea gone good, Andy Glockner of SI.com used his Twitter cachet to put together a pretty phenomenal list of “rappers taking stage names that include small D-I basketball programs” last night. The derivation of the list came from a social media-fueled hubbub surrounding a rapper named Kendrick Lamar, who apparently decided to bring back some of the gangsta vibe of one-upmanship prevalent to the genre two decades ago, long before Jay-Z, Kanye and Dre completely monetized the industry. Our two favorites from the list were, without question, Big Daddy Duquesne and A Tribe Called Quinnipiac, although Florida Gulf Coastface Killah is damn good too. What, no Wichi2pac Shakurs? No Beastie Boise? Dayton La Soul? OK, we’ll stop now, but hey, it’s August.
3. There was actually one piece of substantive news yesterday in the college hoops universe, and if this the entirety of this saga is any indication, absolutely no one will notice. The NCAA ruled on Tuesday that San Diego will not face any additional sanctions related to the Brandon Johnson game-fixing charges, and there’s no reason why it should have. The school had already admitted a secondary violation based on his efforts to point-shave and later solicit teammates to help him during the 2009-10 season, and there was no evidence that any additional staff members or other athletes had any knowledge of the criminal activity. Johnson is currently serving a six-month sentence in federal prison after pleading guilty to a solicitation charge, while his former assistant coach TJ Brown is serving out a one-year sentence for his part in the scheme. Meanwhile, similar crimes are without a doubt being concocted and/or facilitated throughout the game, but all you’ll hear from the media and talking heads is a whole lot of crickets. It’s a very strange phenomenon.
4. If you have unlimited funds lying around in an offshore account somewhere, you might want to take a look at this offering. Former Ohio State Hall of Famer Jerry Lucas is auctioning off all of his prized memorabilia, including his 1960 Olympic gold medal (considered one of the best basketball teams ever assembled), his 1960 OSU national championship ring, his 1973 New York Knicks championship ring, and his 1979 HOF induction ring. According to Jeff Eisenberg at The Dagger, Lucas’ haul at the minimum auction prices along would total over $500,000 — and there’s no doubt that a collection of such rare pieces will fetch quite a bit more than that. If you do have money to burn, the items are located here, and we have to admit that the 1971 SF Warriors practice jersey for only $500 looks rather enticing.
5. Let’s finish with some recruiting news, or quasi-news, as it were. The consensus top player in the 2014 class, Jahlil Okafor, and a top five player in his own right, Tyus Jones, have talked extensively about playing together in college. Many of the recruiting pundits seem to believe their package deal is a strong likelihood. On Tuesday, Jeff Borzello reported that Jones released his list of official visits, which included three crossover visits with Okafor at Baylor, Kansas and Duke, but visits at different times at Kentucky. Is there meaningfulness behind the shared visits — does it mean that Scott Drew, Bill Self and Coach K are the finalists for the duo’s services? Or is it all simply much ado about nothing, something to pass the time as we slowly slide toward fall. We’ll find out soon enough.