The 2013-14 Atlantic Coast Conference men’s basketball season is a mere three weeks away, but the buzz about the conference’s potential began in early July when Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Notre Dame officially became members. The staggering history among the conference’s basketball programs was thus enhanced, and talk about the dynastic possibilities of the ACC in the present and years to come has been touched on by just about every coach in the league. The coaching legend that is Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski famously exclaimed on May 24 that the inception of the three teams previously aligned with the Big East into the fold would mean, “We’re going to be a 10-bid conference. We’re going to be the best conference in the history of the game. It’s exciting to be part of that.”

The Greatest Collection of College Basketball Coaching Talent Ever? (credit: ESPN/T. Bell)

Now that’s a bold proclamation, even from someone with the sterling resume of Krzyzewski. After delving into a variety of metrics, though, it becomes clear that this league is something special this year (and will be that much more formidable in 2014-15 when reigning national champion Louisville joins the fold), even relative to what is considered some of the greatest college basketball conferences ever assembled. But if metrics exist to suggest the current ACC belongs among the elite of the elite, then that means there are metrics that can be used to track its progress as the season moves along to see how it stacks up with the other all-time greats.

One such measuring stick is the number of teams included in the NCAA Tournament, a perennial sign not only of a conference’s strength from within, but also how it handles non-conference foes during the regular season. The record for most teams selected for an NCAA Tournament happened as recently as 2011, when the Big East (interesting, right?) placed 11 of its 16 squads in the Big Dance. However, only three of those teams made it as far as the Elite Eight (although one was the eventual national champion, Connecticut). Looking at this year’s ACC, it’s difficult to project anywhere close to 11 NCAA participants, but being battle-tested in conference play proved to be a boon to the Big East two years ago. Could the same happen with the ACC this year? Some of the presumed middle-of-the-pack teams, such as an NC State team forced to replace a bevy of talent, for example, must rise to become a force for the league to boast the fantastic depth it claims it will have.

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

Conference realignment is destructive and all-powerful. It is not all-conquering. The most recent frenzy of shifting league alliances, fueled by a nauseating blend of football, greedy athletic department officials and lavish broadcast rights deals, prompted all kinds of doomsday scenarios for college basketball. At one point, as the Big 12 inched closer and closer to a landscape-altering implosion, it looked as if Kansas, one of the true bluebloods of the sport, would be left without a conference to play hoops in. We actually reached the point where Kansas joining the Mountain West was a real, imminent thing. You know what happened next. The Big 12 survived, and the Jayhawks continued to win conference championships without blinking. The Border War – Missouri and Kansas’ long-standing rivalry, which dates back to a bitter slavery-motivated Civil War-era feud – was lost with Missouri’s move to the SEC, and a host of defections from the old Big East led to the creation of a new hoops-only Big East and a super-charged ACC. But in hindsight, the movement was less injurious for college hoops than most predicted early on.

The extension of the SU-GU rivalry should motivate others to remake similar games into annual nonconference fixtures (AP Photo).

The biggest casualty? Rivalries. I mentioned the Border war, but the Georgetown–Syracuse hatefest – which reached peak intensity in 1980 when John Thompson II ended the Orange’s 57-game winning streak at the old Manley Fieldhouse, Syracuse’s home before the Carrier Dome – was also cast aside by conference switches. The Hoyas and Orange had played their last game as co-members of the Big East last season – including a thrilling, emotional overtime match-up in the Big East Tournament semifinals – and unless the two schools came together and decided to rekindle the rivalry outside of league play, college basketball would lose another of its great annual hate-filled match-ups. Syracuse and Georgetown were parting ways, but was there a legitimate reason they couldn’t they toss scheduling logistics and lopsided recruiting benefits (the Orange playing in talent-rich Washington D.C. is eons more valuable than the Hoyas traveling up to the great rural countryside of Syracuse, NY) aside, and agree to some sort of home-and-home arrangement? Was there really no hope? Syracuse had already schedule out-of-conference series with former Big East rivals Syracuse and Villanova, after all. Setting something up with Georgetown seemed like the logical next move.

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

Because once-meaningful concepts like academic and cultural similarity, geographical proximity and longstanding tradition no longer control how or why college athletic conferences exist, and because television, you know, does – Thursday’s news out of SEC headquarters is a very big deal, both for  league directly involved, the SEC, along with every other college sports conference. The South Eastern Conference announced a 20-year agreement with ESPN Thursday to air a 24/7 all-encompassing sports network beginning in 2014, with programming that includes 45 football games and more than 100 men’s basketball games annually, plus “selected events” from non-revenue sports and other important offseason dates such as football pro-days and national signing day.

An expansive new TV contract will grow the SEC’s already monumental annual financial take (AP Photo).

This is a very big deal. It is not mars-landing breaking news. Here’s why: the SEC exists in an entirely different plane of football competitiveness and import, stuffed to the hilt with NFL-bound talent and a fervent pigskin culture not seen in any other league across the country, but they were a step or two behind on this conference-specific television fad. The Big Ten and Pac-12 networks already have their own networks, which promise (alongside nonstop league-centric coverage) exorbitant annual sums, serve to expand the otherwise lesser profile of lower-tier programs and clearly represent the way of the future in a bountiful college sports television frontier.

The more subscribers there are in different regions of the country, the more fans that are eager to watch Washington State play Utah on a Thursday night, for example, the more money falls into league coffers and the more other schools – we’re looking at you, AAC – want a piece of the pie. These were the logistical league-hopping dynamics behind much of the recent conference realignment wave (go watch Maryland’s astonishingly candid introductory Big Ten press conference), and they will continue to drive the ship in league membership decisions, even if the ACC’s recent grant of rights deal appears to have ensured at least temporary realignment calm among the major conferences.

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

There are scores of issues in the present configuration of college sports. The NCAA is probably the largest, and the most heavily-critiqued; the entire enterprise is littered with various points of contention. It almost feels like a breaking point – the moment when schools decide they just can’t proscribe themselves to the current rules and regulations, that an entirely new system must be constructed to preserve their continued participation – is being reached. The ongoing Ed O’Bannon lawsuit could bring the very severance and utter dissolution many schools have feared and/or resigned themselves to for years. Others will welcome the potential revolutionary financial shift the O’Bannon suit purports to engender. Successful or not, something is going to happen. It’s ominous and inevitable and suspenseful, akin to the slow and sleep-inducing introductory clutter of a Russian novel, or the first two rounds of the NBA playoffs. An apex is coming, you’re just not sure exactly sure when.

In a rare move of conference unity, the ACC motioned to solidify its league membership by fixing its schools’ media rights revenues to the league itself.

A similar logic is just as easily transferred to another flashpoint in college athletics: conference realignment. I know, I know: You cringe at the very mention of the two-word phrase. It has, over the past however so many years, terminated traditional rivalries and ripped proud leagues to shreds and completely redefined the substantive meaning of league membership. Cultural and academic harmony, let alone geographic proximity, are so very blasé. If you’re not chasing football money or a bigger “footprint” or a more lucrative broadcast rights deal, you’re a real-live college athletics conference anachronism. Get with the times, man. None of this stuff is fun to talk about, and at this point you’re probably considering clicking away in fear of whatever new conference switch may have taken place.

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Call Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany a greedy businessman for caring more about the bottom line than tradition. Call him a savant for getting in front of the conference realignment fiasco by adding Nebraska before anyone had a chance to blink. However you feel, you can’t deny that the man knows how to run a conference. Forbes recently ranked the most valuable athletic conferences and the Big Ten came in at No. 1, ahead of the mighty SEC. While myself and probably many others were surprised to see the B1G on top, maybe we shouldn’t have been. The conference has a better balance of football and basketball powers than any other league. There are football blue bloods like Nebraska, Michigan and Ohio State, and perennial basketball powers like Indiana, Michigan State and Ohio State. Here is how the top six power conferences fared:

1. Big Ten: Total Income (bowl games + NCAA Tournament + television revenue): $310 Million
2. Pac-12: $303 Million
3. ACC: $293 Million
4. SEC: $270 Million
5. Big 12: $262 Million
6. Big East: $94 Million

What Does Jim Delany’s Latest Move Mean For The Big 12? (US Presswire)

It should be noted that the SEC’s television revenue is about to get a huge boost when it receives a new TV deal soon. It will likely jump the conferences above it on the list and vault the league to No. 1 shortly afterward. But this is a Big 12 microsite, so that’s a different conversation for a different day. The Big 12’s $200 million yearly television revenue lags behind the SEC, ACC, and Big Ten, but as the article points out, it isn’t as bleak of a forecast as it may seem. With only 10 members on board, each school receives $20 million per year and is still allowed to negotiate and keep its own tier three television rights, which usually includes certain non-conference football and basketball games as well as Olympic sports. The Longhorn Network, for example, gives Texas an extra $15 million per year. Fifth out of the six major conferences isn’t the best spot to be in, but it’s a far cry from a year ago when nobody knew if the conference would even be around today. Successfully adding TCU and West Virginia after the departures of Missouri and Texas A&M were key for the conference’s survival, and while time will tell if the two schools were the best available options, the phrase ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ rings in the background. With its television deal in place and schools making great money, the conference is not in as much in danger of being preyed upon as, for example, the ACC is right now. Maryland will bolt to the Big Ten soon while Florida State and Clemson have been rumored to be interested in the Big 12. It looks like the ACC will have 14 members next season if both schools remain in tow, though, as Pittsburgh and Syracuse will join the league.

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Andrew Murawa is the RTC correspondent for the Mountain West Conference.

Conference Round-up

It was a pretty quiet week on the hardwood around the conference, with just nine total games played by conference teams, eight of which resulted in wins, with six of those wins decided by an average of 27.3 points. Air Force absorbed the lone loss by getting drilled at Richmond, while Wyoming completed its perfect pre-conference slate by squeaking past SMU in Dallas. Elsewhere, Colorado State notched a couple of solid home wins by taking care of UTEP and St. Bonaventure.

The most intrigue in the conference over the past week came again in the court of conference realignment as the possibility of San Diego State remaining in the conference after this season is still up in the air. Mark Zeigler of the San Diego Union-Tribune has the most comprehensive rundown of the decision facing SDSU and the Mountain West, and after reading that, I’d put the odds somewhere south of 50% that the Aztecs will be playing in the MW come 2013-14. But, the odds are still higher than they were before Boise State opted to remain in the conference. Regardless of which way the Aztecs decide, it is probably a pretty good bet that if the Mountain West exists in some form a decade from now, it will look much, much different than it does now. Regardless of whether the conference’s giving in to Boise’s demands for special treatment turns out to be a good decision or bad, the odds are strong that it will cause some problems down the road. The Mountain West was formed when the 16-team WAC proved unsavory to some of the conference’s elite teams; it’s possible that somewhere in the future, further upheaval spawns a new home for many of the current MW teams.

San Diego State And The Show Are A Hot Basketball Commodity, But Is This Their Last Mountain West Season?

Putting all of that aside for now, good times await for the Mountain West. Conference play tips off tonight and with six teams eyeing potential NCAA Tournament consideration, we’re in for yet another great season. Further down, we’ll take a look at what each team has accomplished in the non-conference slate, and what they need to improve upon from here on out.

Reader’s Take

Team of the Week

Wyoming – The Cowboys only played one game this week, and that one game was against an SMU team that has a 22-point loss to Rhode Island and a 13-point neutral-site loss to Arkansas-Little Rock on its resume. But in going to Dallas and emerging with a hard-fought three-point win, the Cowboys put the finishing touches on a perfect 13-0 non-conference slate, good for the best start in the history of the program. Just how good the Cowboys are in relation to the rest of the conference, let alone the rest of the nation, remains to be seen. A home win over Colorado and a road win at Illinois State are nice pieces, but more significant tests await.

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Andrew Murawa is the RTC correspondent for the Mountain West Conference.

Looking Back

It’s been two weeks since we last caught up with the teams of the Mountain West, so we’ve got a lot to catch up on. All three of our favorites in the conference (San Diego State, UNLV and New Mexico) have taken losses since we last did this, but at the same time, each of them has a quality win mixed in there as well. Meanwhile, the next tier of teams – Colorado State, Wyoming and Boise State – have all been blemish-free over the past two weeks. It still appears there is a drop-off between the top three and the next three, but it remains to be seen just how far that drop is. We’ve got one more week of some pretty uninspiring non-conference games before conference play tips off and we start to get some answers to our outstanding questions.

We’ve also been keeping our eye on a situation off the court, as the conference realignment shuffle continues. On New Year’s Eve, it was reported that Boise State would wisely back out of its agreement to join the rapidly dwindling football Big East and remain in the Mountain West. With Boise sticking around, suddenly San Diego State, which had been steadfast in its intentions to stick with the move to the Big East, decided it too wanted to stick around, but the Mountain West, apparently fed up with SDSU’s foot-dragging prior to that, isn’t exactly jumping back into the relationship. ESPN’s Brett McMurphy reports that the MW is poking around to see if there are other schools who would be a better fit with the conference. In the end, perhaps the only thing that would keep SDSU out of the conference would be if the MW is able to persuade BYU to rejoin. In an ideal world from a basketball perspective, both of those schools would rejoin, which would bring the conference up to 12 basketball teams next year, but that would also bring the football total to 13, probably one too many. If it is a choice between BYU and SDSU, though, the Cougars are the slam dunk choice.

After A Serious Fling With The Big East, The Mountain West Conference Has Acquiesced To Boise State’s Demands (BSU Athletics)

All of this was made possible when CBS allowed the conference to restructure its television agreement, allowing the conference to sell games to other national networks. It should be noted that the MW did have to cave to a pretty significant request wherein Boise State’s home football games will not be a part of the conference’s television rights contracts, allowing the school to sell those games themselves. Further, Boise will still owe some sort of buyout to the Big East for their change of heart (provided such an entity still exists to pay that buyout) and the Mountain West has agreed to chip in some amount to help Boise make that payment (rest assured that such an arrangement will not be made with SDSU). While this works out for the time being in keeping the conference together and perhaps even persuading BYU to rejoin, this sort of concession to one school at the exclusion of others is the exact type of thing that drove Nebraska and Texas A&M out of the Big 12. It remains to be seen if this type of move is sustainable, but, if everything works out for the best, we could be heading back to a MW basketball slate that still features SDSU, UNLV, BYU and New Mexico as its flagship programs. It the realm of unintended consequences, is quite possible that the Big East’s Catholic Seven defection could go a long ways towards rescuing another great basketball conference.

Reader’s Take

Team of the Week

Colorado State – The Rams swept to an impressive win in the Las Vegas Classic tournament just in advance of Christmas, winning four games in a week and capping that run off with a 36-point blowout of Virginia Tech in the championship game. They backed that up with a workmanlike 25-point win against Adams State this past weekend. We still don’t know just how good this team is after they’ve been completely remade from a guard-dominated team to one that relies on crashing the boards, and they still haven’t been tested much, but CSU fans have good reason to suspect that this iteration of the Rams is even better than last year’s tournament team.

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

Tonight’s Lede. ACC Contenders Make Statements. If you’re still questioning Duke’s status as the No. 1 team in the country, that stance is at least somewhat tenable. There are other teams – Michigan or Arizona, to name a couple – that have looked equally impressive in the context of easier schedules, but if “who-beats-who” isn’t your main barometer for gauging teams, and you feel Duke simply hasn’t looked as complete or well-rounded as the Wolverines or the Wildcats or Louisville or any other team, well, that’s your prerogative. But if you’re still questioning Duke’s position atop the ACC, there’s no logical explanation for your premise. You’re wrong (sorry!); it is just that simple. With that in mind, two teams (Miami and NC State) made strong claims to the No. 2 spot in the suddenly top-heavy league, and while a final verdict won’t be delivered for a few months, tonight’s events provided a nice early measuring stick for the league’s upper tier.

Your Watercooler Moment. Who’s Better: Miami or NC State?

With Durand Scott back from his suspension, Miami is poised to make a run at ACC glory (photo credit: US Presswire).

The preseason top-five buzz on NC State always felt like a huge stretch. A couple of talented freshmen don’t instantly elevate an 11-seed to national contender status. Using last season’s NCAA Tournament success as a baseline for predictive measures is always a risky endeavor. When the Wolfpack were run off the Puerto Rico Tip-off floor in a 20-point bludgeoning at the hands of Oklahoma State, my inclinations were confirmed. Miami didn’t carry nearly the same level of hype into this season, though an early season loss at Florida Gulf Coast cratered the Miami-as-ACC-contender bandwagon before it ever got rolling to begin with. Both teams have since recovered, and both proved their early season stumbling points are very much in the rear view Tuesday night. The Wolfpack’s 88-point output against a team as defensively sharp as Stanford – the Cardinal entered Tuesday ranked 15^th on a per-possession scale – is without doubt the best we’ve seen Mark Gottfried’s team look thus far. I’m ready to revise expectations for the once vastly overrated Wolfpack. Even so, I’m even more impressed by Miami’s thorough dismantling of UCF, who boasts a future NBA big man in Keith Clanton and – this counts double in my vague which-win-is-better grade book – was playing at home, riding a three-game winning streak. Both wins provide credible non-league resume heft, and while I’m eager to anoint an ACC No. 2, it’s simply too early to make subjective judgments when league play has yet to begin. Here’s what I know, though: Miami and NC State stumbled early, got back on their feet and appear to be rounding into form at just the right time. The ACC season will parse out the specifics. For now, the Wolfpack and Hurricanes belong in the league’s upper echelon, with Duke living a distinguished existence inside its own category.

Tonight’s Quick Hits…

• Big Ten Powers Struggle With Cupcakes. The scheduling powers-that-be set up Ohio State and Michigan State’s slate with putative guarantee games before big non-conference tests against Kansas and Texas, respectively (Texas isn’t the team most envisioned heading into the season, but the Longhorns are no pushover). The Buckeyes faced Winthrop, who hadn’t picked up its first win over a Division I opponent until it beat Ohio three days ago, while the Spartans had a slightly trickier road game at Bowling Green on their hands. These set up perfectly as two tune-up games for two Big Ten frontrunners. In the end, Ohio State and Michigan State got tougher tests than they probably expected, although both managed to come away with victories. Whether these struggles were a mere product of a common case of look-ahead syndrome or something more concerning that bears watching heading into the weekend remains to be seen. Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Murawa is the RTC correspondent for the Mountain West Conference.

Conference Round-Up

Much like everywhere else around the country, it was an exceedingly slow week in the Mountain West. Between last Tuesday and last night, just 10 games were played involving MW teams. Two teams in the conference haven’t played a game since we last did this. And, with the exception of the two games played by Fresno State, the MW teams have escaped unblemished against largely mediocre teams. As a result, your weekly MW rundown may be a little lighter than normal.

But the big news around the conference may be the ripples from the Big East breakdown that are reaching the Mountain West’s shores. While for now, San Diego State and Boise State are maintaining their intentions to follow through on their plans to join the Big East beginning next season, you just know that behind the scenes, both schools are seriously weighing their options. As the MW Connection details here, there are basically three options for these two schools: (1) head to the Big East as planned, regardless of the diminishing state of the conference, for football, with the rest of their sports in the Big West; (2) remain in the Mountain West and possibly bring other schools with them; or (3) go independent in football and keep other sports in the Big West. Obviously, the people involved in making these decisions know a lot more about the financials of these decisions than me, but for what it’s worth, while the Big East is in the middle of negotiating a new television contract, the MW remains locked into its current contract with CBS through 2016, and the network has an additional option to extend that contract to 2019. Of greater concern to the MW than whether they are able to keep BSU and SDSU around may be whether they are able to fend off advances from other conferences. For instance, the Big East, which may in the interest of self-preservation and establishing a western outpost to satiate the likes of BSU, SDSU, SMU and Houston, take a shot at teams from the conference. There may not be a lot of fat on the football bones of the teams remaining here, but if the Big East can poach, say, UNLV, New Mexico and Colorado State they will (aside from really needing a re-branding) be able to cobble together a strong basketball conference. But, who am I kidding? Up until this week, basketball was rarely mentioned in this whole realignment fiasco, except to note that basketball doesn’t matter.

Reader’s Take

Team of the Week

Nevada – Yay! Home wins over Cal Poly and San Francisco! Rejoice! OK, so those wins aren’t suddenly going to turn the Wolf Pack into an NCAA Tournament contender, but given that this is a team with losses to UC Irvine, Marshall, Drake and Pacific on its record, not to mention several other near-misses, the fact that Nevada handled that level of competition by an average of double-figures is a sign of progress. As is the fact that they finally showed some semblance of aggressiveness on the glass, grabbing nearly 40% of offensive rebound opportunities this week, and better than 80% on the defensive end. Jerry Evans was particularly effective, grabbing 14 total rebounds against Cal Poly.

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Patrick Marshall is the RTC correspondent for the Missouri Valley Conference.  You can also find his musings online at White & Blue Review or on Twitter @wildjays.

Looking Back

• Realignment May Finally Hit the MVC—Since 1995, only the Missouri Valley Conference and the Ivy league have not been affected by conference realignment. That may change soon depending on what happens with the seven catholic schools that are breaking away from the Big East. A lot of overtures to an “All-Catholic” league have been on peoples’ wish lists for some time, but many thought that it could never become a reality. Now with these teams looking to start their own league, they need more members. It seems natural that Creighton would be on that list. A lot of scrambling and rumors have led some to believe that Evansville was also looking to head to the Horizon league. While this speculation has been squashed by both Creighton and Evansville officials, you would have to think that if this new league gets big enough, that the Bluejays would be in the mix. The panic button hasn’t been hit yet, but every school in the Valley should have a backup plan just in case the league loses one or more members.

Wichita State’s New Year’s resolution is to get Carl Hall healthy again.

• Losses to Top Teams–Wichita State lost to Tennessee last week, but it wasn’t until the practice after that game when they lost Carl Hall to a hand injury that will keep him out of action for a month. Hall has been the steady force for the Shockers while they implement a slew of new players into the mix this season. With the Valley grind so close to its arrival, they will need Hall’s presence and leadership to get on the right foot as conference play gets started. Making matters worse, freshman guard Ron Baker will be sidelined for at least six weeks with a stress fracture in his foot. Baker isn’t as important a player as Hall, but it leaves a 25 minute-per-game gap that will need to be filled as well. Creighton also lost a key player for an undetermined time with guard Josh Jones. Jones blacked out before a game against Nebraska on December 6. An atrial flutter in his heart has sidelined the Bluejays’ sixth man for at least a month. He will have a procedure performed and could be cleared again at some point, but it is hard to tell whether he will be able to come back or if he even would want to. His energy and smile is infectious and his performance on the court, like an 18-point outburst against UAB earlier this season, will be missed and may raise some questions about Creighton’s depth.  For Illinois State, they make the news in the wrong way with Geoffrey Allen first being suspended from the team and then arrested for selling marijuana.  Although Allen didn’t play much this season, news like this can be a distraction to the team as it moves forward.
• Surprise of the Non-conference Season–The MVC has been full of surprises this season, including the notion that Bradley and Southern Illinois look ahead of schedule. Bradley’s second year under Geno Ford appears to be on the right track as the Braves have been able to get some nice wins on the road, something that they had trouble doing the past few seasons. If they can win out in the non-conference season, they could look better than some of the other teams that were expected to be ahead of them.  For the Salukis, Barry Hinson put together a schedule that could definitely give a troubled team a big confidence boost. Southern Illinois won’t win any strength of schedule contests, but they have been playing together, winning close games, and even getting some road wins. They both will finish the non-conference season with .500 records or better. The current bottom third of the conference — Indiana State, Drake, and Missouri State — are a bit of a surprise in that they are on the opposite end of things right now. The biggest disappointment has to be Missouri State. The Bears are 0-8 against Division I competition as a result of a lot of injuries. With the road they are going down, they could head into conference play still looking for that first D-I win.

Power Rankings (current record and last week’s ranking in parentheses)

1. Creighton (10-1) (1)–The Bluejays keep winning and are coming off of a trip to California where they didn’t have the best night of shooting but were still able to come out with a double-figure victory. In all of Creighton’s wins this season, they have had a winning margin by 10 or more points. Doug McDermott continues his spectacular play as of late and has the nation’s best scoring average per 40 minutes over the past two seasons  at 29.3 points per game. He has had back-to-back 30-point games, which is a first for Creighton in more than 20 years. Creighton is 8-1 against power conference teams over the past two seasons. Read the rest of this entry »