Washington assistant coach Raphael Chillious now has a secondary NCAA violation attached to his name, a little gremlin that will follow him around for free for the rest of his coaching life. True, it doesn’t sound like much, but if you don’t think you did anything wrong, and you felt like you had some assurance from the NCAA that you wouldn’t be found guilty of anything, you wouldn’t want it on your record, either.

Chillious Didn't Intend Any Wrongdoing, But Still Took the Ding (image: UW)

The reason we’re debating whether or not the flick on Chillious is justifiable is an article by Todd Dybas at Sportspress Northwest, and it’s a piece that you should read in its entirety for its detail and the quotes from the principals. Here’s a quick version of the story:

Chillious let a Sports Illustrated reporter shadow him as part of a story about the recruiting process. While on a recruiting trip, during a conversation with an old friend, Chillious mentioned the name of a prospect he was in town to see. The reporter, sitting nearby, wrote the recruit’s name down.

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Green Bay’s Eric Valentin is all of 5’4 and 143 pounds. He’s played in five of the Phoenix’s 19 games this season, and he contributes 1.2 points and 0.6 rebounds in his average of 3.4 minutes per game. And he might be destined for the record books.

Valentin has a knack for hitting half court shots. He read in a Guinness Book of World Records one day that the record for half court shots made in a minute was four. Then somebody hit six on YouTube. The video below shows what Valentin thinks of all that noise:

He used every bit of that 60 seconds, and it doesn’t look like any Guinness officials were around, but who cares? That’s eight half courters for Valentin, and we wouldn’t be surprised if he eventually topped out around 12.

So, here’s a piece of advice for Horizon League opponents: if you’re up against Green Bay in a close one and the Phoenix are lining up to run their last play for a shot to tie or win, even if they’re triggering from the other end of the floor…you might want to double-team the 5’4 guy.

Last week we wrote a piece outlining the reasons behind our opinion that NCAA President-Elect Mark Emmert had made a mistake in publicly supporting the MLB model of amateur player draft eligibility.  Emmert stated on a local radio show in Seattle that he believes that the NCAA should work with the NBA to enact a model mimicking baseball whereby high school players could choose to go pro immediately after their senior year, but those who went to college would have to remain there for three years.  As we clearly stated at the time, all of this discussion from the perspective of the NCAA is merely for the sake of argument because the NBA is going to do what the NBA thinks is best for itself, and if that means requiring one, two or fifteen years of “experience” out of high school before player entry, so be it.  The NCAA is virtually powerless in this regard.

Emmert's Top Job is to Protect This Brand

Nevertheless, taking the position that it is the mandate and duty of the NCAA President to act in the best interests of his organization, we outlined a number of reasons why Emmert is mistaken with the baseball solution.  Without delving into all of them again, the basic gist is that NCAA basketball needs marketable stars to support and enhance its product, recruiting will become even more difficult than it already is for coaches and schools, and players need the extra time to develop their games because so very few are actually ready to perform at a professional level immediately out of high school.   Response to this piece has been mixed.  Eamonn Brennan at ESPN.com seemed to understand the point we were making about Emmert and his role, but he expanded it to a more philosophical argument about whether forcing prospective NBAers into NCAA apprenticeships is “right.”   

Rush The Court is right to say that’s not in the best interest of college basketball fans, or coaches, or universities, all of whom benefit from the compulsory one-year apprenticeship currently being served by even the game’s most League-worthy talent. It’d be much better if all players had to stay for three years; we’d get John Wall for two more years! Awesome! Where do I sign? But that’s wrong. John Wall should be free to pursue his NBA career. He should have been free before he ever stepped foot on Kentucky’s campus. College, as they say, isn’t for everybody. In proposing a baseball-esque system for college hoops, Dr. Emmert did two things, both of them inadvertent: He made an argument against the well-being of college basketball, and for the professional freedom of college basketball’s prospective athletes. What it comes down to is: Which is more important?

We’ll answer.  From the perspective of Dr. Emmert as (soon-to-be) President of the NCAA and Supreme Chief Protector of the Game, the overall interests of the sport and its continued success trump the “right to work” component of a handful of high school basketball players each year.  His new job is to advocate for the NCAA as an entity, carefully weighing options to ultimately move the enterprise forward.  Since 96% of the NCAA’s operating budget comes from the NCAA Tournament (media rights + revenue), he needs to remember where his bread is buttered.  If he pushes for a baseball model that ultimately makes college basketball less interesting to casual fans and, therefore, the media, he’s not successfully performing his job.  This is a classic example of where academic arguments about what is right/wrong fail to properly mix with advocacy, and once again gives us pause about Emmert’s ivory tower worldview.

Webber Was Right: Elite College Athletes are Exploited

All that said, and as Kentucky blog A Sea of Blue expands upon, we certainly agree that the entire house of cards is exploitative from the player perspective.  Mitch Albom’s book Fab Five (People You Meet in Heaven) recounts a much-repeated incident where Michigan star Chris Webber found himself without enough money at the mall one day to purchase food.  As he walked by a sporting goods store and saw his own #4 UM jersey hanging in the window for sale, he became frustrated by the fact that seemingly everyone (Michigan, Steve Fisher, NCAA, Nike, etc.) other than himself was earning money as a result of his prodigious talents.  This anecdote seems humorous now in light of later findings that Webber took hundreds of thousands of dollars from agent Ed Martin during those years, but the story illustrates how one-sided the system remains, even nearly twenty years later.  Elite players are still generally no more than serfs for the one or two years they’re under the auspices of the NCAA (three years for football), contributing mightily to the billions of dollars of revenue they’re enabling while seeing very little in return.  This is unlikely to change. 

The larger point we’re trying to make here with respect to President-Elect Emmert is that it is not his job to suddenly make NCAA sports just, equitable and fair to the players whose talents are being exploited.  He will not be called upon to advocate for the Chris Webbers of the world because the Chris Webbers of the world didn’t put him in that position — rather, the college presidents did.  Therfore, his duty, much like the CEO of a major company, will be to protect the organization’s assets and push the enterprise forward so that in 2020, the NCAA can ask for two or three times as many billions of dollars in media licensing fees.  We’ve explained to him how he should go about getting there (hint: making things more like college baseball isn’t the answer); it’s up to him to decide whether to listen. 

Last week a federal appeals court in Chicago reinstated a lawsuit against the NCAA that takes a direct shot at its lottery-based process for distributing the oh-so-coveted Final Four ducats each year.  Many fans who have never attended (or tried to attend) a Final Four may not know this, but depending on the size of the venue, the NCAA offers a good number of tickets for sale to the general public every year.  Next year, with Houston’s Reliant Stadium (and its 71,500 seats) hosting the final weekend, the NCAA is offering 20,000 seats for sale to the public.  A lottery process determines if your application is one of the lucky few.  From the NCAA website:

Only one properly submitted application per individual/household will be accepted for inclusion in the NCAA’s ticket selection process. The NCAA will use a random, selection process to determine successful Men’s Final Four recipients in July 2010.  Those individuals selected to receive tickets will be notified by the end of August.   Individuals not selected to receive tickets will receive a refund of the full application deposit amount by August. Men’s Final Four tickets may not be offered as a prize in a promotion, sweepstakes or contest, or auctioned for fundraising purposes unless authorized in advance by the NCAA.  (emphasis added by RTC) 

These Will Cost You a Pretty Penny (+ Processing)

The rub of this lawsuit is that the NCAA also requires a nonrefundable $6-$10 processing fee with each application, regardless of whether you “win” or “lose” the tickets.  So if you are one of the many unlucky applicants and your check isn’t fortuitously chosen from the hopper, you will only get a refund for the value of the tickets, not the processing fee.  Due to this nice little Ticketmaster-esque add-on of a few extra bucks to play the game, this “lottery” for Final Four tickets (where everyone loses even when they win) might just be illegal in the state of Indiana. 

The class-action suit (of residents from New York, Arizona and Oregon) argues that the state government of Indiana (where the NCAA is HQ’d) is the only entity within the Hoosier State who may lawfully run a lottery, and as such, the NCAA’s money-making fee structure is in clear violation of the law.  The Court of Appeals decision agreed in stating that people who apply for Final Four tickets are not aware that they are gambling (“pay to play”) when they submit an application, and the NCAA could have avoided this whole mess if they’d simply refunded the processing fees to those who did not win tickets. 

The next phase of the case will be discovery and another chance in front of the District Court, but it seems from our viewpoint that the NCAA is probably going to have to pay something on this whether as part of a large settlement or a judgment against them.  By refusing to refund the processing fee, there’s just something that doesn’t pass the sniff test here, and undoubtedly the Court of Appeals had that in mind in sending the case back.  Going forward, however, it seems as if the NCAA could make a very simple change and resolve this.  Either eliminate the processing fees of those who, you know, don’t actually get processed (the “losers”), or take away the processing fee completely and just add $10 to the face value of every ticket.  Will markedly fewer people submit applications if the lower-level seats are $210 instead of $200; or $190 vs. $180 for uppers?  Not likely. 

So we heard there was some news about our beloved NCAA Tournament yesterday. . .

1. As was reported here at RTC, the NCAA has announced the format of the “First Four”. Over the next few days you will see a ton of analysis online, but be sure to keep checking back here, as we’ll probably have more to say on this topic, and we want to hear your takes as well.  Later this morning, our first Bracketology taking into account the 68-team field for 2011 will be released.
2. Some of you may remember Royce White from his bizarre YouTube exit from Minnesota almost seven months ago. White recently announced that he intends to play for Iowa State and Fred Hoiberg.  White is filing an appeal to play for the Cyclones next year instead of sitting out the usual one season. Hoiberg could really use some talent inside after losing Craig Brackins and a group of other decent-if-not-great inside players to NCAA rulings or transfers.
3. To all the couch coaches out there, you will have to wait there until at least the middle of November as Chicago State filled the final head coaching vacancy in Division 1 men’s basketball when they named Tracy Dildy as their new head coach yesterday. We would like to congratulate Dildy on his first college head coaching position after spending nearly two decades as an assistant at six different schools.
4. Boise State rising senior guard La’Shard Anderson was arrested on Saturday night on two misdemeanors: disorderly household and resisting/obstructing officers. Based on reports, it seems like police responded to a loud party complaint at Anderson’s residence and he refused to cooperate with police when he spoke with them outside the house. A hearing is set for August 2nd. To date, Boise State’s only response is that the school is reviewing their conduct policy (read: hoping that the charges against Anderson are dropped so the school can give him the minimum punishment possible).
5. Some good news for Kentucky fans although it will be hard to ever top getting five 1st round picks (I’m joking.  Seriously, don’t shut down GMail with hate mail). Fresh off their FIBA U17 World Championship, future Wildcats Marquis Teague and Michael Gilchirst talk about how winning is more important to them than stats (shocking thing to say in the news), but UK fans have to be impressed with the stats that the future Wildcats put up even though Teague did struggle with his shooting during the tournament.

This should make for some interesting in-game chants next season for opponents of the Duke Blue Devils, especially if Butler, Michigan State, or West Virginia is the opponent.

Of the squads taking part in the Final Four in Indianapolis this past March, three of them — Butler, Michigan State, and West Virginia — achieved Academic Progress Rate (APR) scores good enough to put them in the top 10% of all men’s college basketball teams, and therefore earn themselves an NCAA Public Recognition Award.  Yes, you read that right.  The only Final Four team not earning the award this time around:  Duke.

Da'Sean and his 'Eer teammates are in the Top 10% of the NCAA's APR scores, which should silence some of Huggins' detractors. (K. Binder/Blueandgoldnews.com)

At this moment, if you’re a Duke fan, you are probably positioning yourself at your computer, ready to fire off to us what’s sure to be a nasty e-mail or comment, indeed.  Well, sheathe your keyboards.  The APR is one of the tools used by the NCAA to monitor academic progress of each individual student-athlete, but keep in mind that it’s not perfect.  According to the linked AP article above from ESPN.com, each student-athlete earns a point for his program by simply staying at the school, and another point for doing well enough academically to stay eligible.  Each graduating player also earns a point.  The team loses a point for each player who transfers, and another for each player who leaves for the NBA, though we’re not sure what those things have to do with academic performance.  If a player isn’t in good academic standing when they leave/transfer, that’s another point lost.  All these points are then thrown into some mathematical formula, and every team in every sport is given a score.  A score of 1,000 is perfect, and 925 is considered the “minimum level of academic success.”  Fall below 925 for a semester or two, and you could be facing a slap from the NCAA’s pimp hand of sanctions.

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Usually the discussion of rule changes is about as sexy as Heidi Montag’s visible scarring around her bosom, but hey, it’s the offseason and we’ve never been ones to turn away from a perfectly good plastic appendage just because of a few imperfections.  The NCAA Rules Committee came back with its annual recommendations last week, and there are three primary ones to take note of this year.  Although the media has been rightfully focused on the immediate recommendation regarding the wanton throwing of elbows (more on this below), it was two of the other experimental recs (one men’s and one women’s) that caught our eye.  Both involve line-drawing (or more accurately, curve-drawing).  Maybe we’re just anal when it comes to court geometrics, but we prefer clearly defined rules and a clean-looking playing surface.  Both of these proposed experimental rules will help with those objectives.

Battier Was a Charge-Taking Machine at Duke (SI/M. Millan)

First, we’ve griped for what seems like an eternity about the “Shane Battier” rule — the notion that players in the college game could set up to take a charge directly underneath the basket even when the offensive player had already left his feet prior to the secondary defender/charge-taker getting into position.  The NBA never had this problem in large part because referees were hesitant to call it (and players wanted to avoid certain posterization), but for the last fifteen years or so it was one of the most despised calls in college basketball.  Nothing infuriated us more than watching a spectacular offensive move into the lane get erased as a slow helpside defender rushed to set up under the rim, received contact, flopped onto his rear along the baseline and looked for the call.  More often than we’d care to remember, the johnny-come-lately defender would be rewarded with the offensive foul, the basket would be erased, and steam would gently rise from our ears. 

Last year the NCAA finally began to address this problem by enabling an imaginary restricted zone underneath the basket where charges would not be called, a clear response to the NBA’s recent success in adding a restricted area underneath its hoops.  This worked well enough to eliminate the most infuriating transgressors — those who would camp out directly underneath the rim — but the imaginary aspect of the collegiate “line” still left way too much discretion in the hands of the officials.  Depending on the officiating crew working that night, the imaginary arc might extend out only a couple of feet from the front of the basket; whereas in others, it may extend out three, four or even five feet.  The existing rule using the invisible line was a good faith effort by the NCAA to clean up play under the rim, but it is just too difficult and ambiguous for referees to consistently apply from game to game.  In response, the NCAA has moved closer to providing greater clarity with an experimental rule effective next season that will allow a restricted area arc in the paint for the preseason tournaments and exhibition games.  Once everyone sees how well it works in those contests, our hope is that it will become a standard part of the floor in coming years.

We Hate the Multiple 3-pt Lines

The second rule change is only cosmetic when it comes to the men’s game, but for some reason it really bothers us to see courts that have multiple three-point lines on it.  A new experimental rule for next year’s women’s game involves moving their three-point line back to the 20’9 distance that the men currently use.  An analysis performed by the NCAA found that nearly two-thirds of attempts in the women’s game were already coming from behind the longer line and the corresponding make percentages were similar.  Hopefully this is the first step to unifying the three-point line distance between sports and getting rid of the unsightly redundancy on courts that host both men’s and women’s games (i.e., most of college basketball).

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Andrew Murawa is the RTC correspondent for the Pac-10 and Mountain West conferences and an occasional contributor.

Just over a year ago, the NCAA Legislative Committee voted to scale back the amount of time that players who apply for early entry to the NBA Draft have to withdraw their names from the draft and retain their college eligibility, a change that went into effect this season. Where last year undergraduates who had not hired agents had until June 15 to pull back out of the NBA draft, this year the limit for such a decision is May 8, a deadline that, among other things, also conflicts with academic responsibilities (including finals) for many of those 80 U.S. collegiate undergraduates who have declared for the draft. With NBA teams only allowed to begin working out draft prospects beginning on April 29 and with undergraduates needing to come up with a final decision by May 8, many of the benefits of “testing the waters” rule have been eliminated.

Yes, Let's Make It Harder for Players to Get Informed

The theory behind the rule that allows for undergraduates to declare for the draft and then reconsider and return to school has been that the players will get a chance to work out for NBA teams, talk to general managers and scouts and get a feel for how the NBA perceives their game — what are their strength and weaknesses, what can they work on, and, perhaps most importantly, where they might get drafted. However, with the window for these players to get input from NBA teams reduced to just over a week, players may only get a chance or two to meet with NBA teams, if at all. According to an ESPN poll released last week, of the 19 NBA teams that responded, only two – the Lakers and the Blazers – had any plans to hold workouts for potential draftees prior to the May 8 deadline. And according to BYU head coach Dave Rose, whose star guard Jimmer Fredette is among those still weighing his draft options, “A lot of teams told us they’re going to start working out guys on the ninth of May,” the day after the deadline. Quite simply, for the players among the list of early entrants who have not yet hired agents and who are looking for a little guidance from NBA scouts on their decision, there is little or no help coming.

So, why was this rule even put in place? According to the NCAA, the extension of the deadline into June was “intrusive on academic performance during the spring and increased the potential for outside individuals to have a negative influence on the well-being of student-athletes.” However, for a player like Butler forward Gordon Hayward, who took final exams on Friday, Saturday and Monday, he had exactly four days to gauge the level of interest of NBA scouts. His plans: meet with a couple of agents to figure out the whole process and work out with a trainer in Indianapolis to get a little stronger. For Hayward, he is likely a first-round lock regardless of whether he does or does not work out for any NBA teams, but the point of the rule in the first place is to give guys like him an opportunity to gather as much information as possible in order to make his decision. Giving the kid four days directly after his finals wrap up neither eliminates the potential intrusion on his academics nor decreases outside influences from having a negative impact on his decision. In fact, it would seem that the limit on the amount of interaction that these players have with NBA talent evaluators would be more likely to have a negative impact, giving them less of a realistic look at their NBA chances and perhaps allowing them to fall back on the accolades of less-established talent evaluators (i.e., their family and friends) telling them that they are superstars.

We Thought the NCAA Wants Student-Athletes to Graduate?

The change in the rule began with a recommendation from ACC coaches last year, and coaches are the ones who this rule change benefits the most (although, frankly, it doesn’t really even benefit them much). The theory goes that if coaches can get a definite answer from players on the fence about going to the NBA, they can better plan for the next year, possibly recruiting additional players to take the place of early departees.  However,  even by May 8, the pickings for coaches that lose players early to the draft are slim at best. At this point, just five of the Scout’s Top 100 recruits for the 2010-11 season are still unsigned (two of whom, Terrence Jones and Luke Cothron have verbal commitments elsewhere, and at least one of the remainders, Kadeem Jack, now appears headed to prep school). Even if a coach gets bad news in late May that an undergraduate will indeed be staying in the draft, they’re not typically going to be able to replace a player with that kind of talent so late in the game. Andy Kennedy, the Ole Miss head coach whose Terrico White is among the early entry candidates, confirmed such a notion, saying “the shortened window isn’t going to help regardless” of whether he remains in the draft or not.

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Over the past few months this site and many others that cover college basketball were filled with columns about what was viewed as an almost certain expansion of the NCAA Tournament to 96 teams. It turns out that almost everyone in the media (including us) had it wrong as the NCAA announced its plans to expand to a 68-team tournament while being broadcast on CBS and the 3 Turner networks (TBS, TNT, and truTV). Technically the NCAA Board of Directors still has to approve the changes next Thursday, but that should be a rubber stamp situation given the unanimity in today’s decision. The deal, which should account for approximately 96% of revenue for men’s college basketball, will pay the NCAA $10.8 billion over 14 years (or a little over $771 million per year) compared to the previous deal of $6 billion over 11 years (or slightly more than $545 million per year). That deal, which was signed in 1999, allowed the NCAA an opt-out by July 31 of this year. Once the NCAA exercised that option it was widely believed that their intention was to sign with ESPN in the network’s attempt to take over all things sports-related. When it became clear that ESPN was no longer the front-runner in the bidding, everyone’s attention turned to the CBS/Turner bid. We will get to the whole 68 team thing in a bit just bear with us while we go through the TV issues.

Coming soon to TBS. . .

While everybody is familiar with CBS’s work on the NCAA Tournament since they have broadcast every NCAA championship game since the 1982 Tourney which involved a freshman named Michael Jordan hitting the game-winning shot, Turner’s association with college basketball is a little less well-known. When I say “less well-known,” I mean that I am unaware of any prior association between Turner Sports and college basketball.  Some news reports are indicating that the NCAA was leaning towards the joint bid because of their desire to have every game broadcast nationally, which would require four channels broadcasting games. Even though ESPN would have that capability (ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNews, and ESPN Classic) and we are still searching for truTV on our local cable provider (Comcast in Boston) it is being reported that this desire favored the CBS/Turner deal. All of the games will continued to be streamed online. What this will do is eliminate the need for Greg Gumbel to switch you to a different game (often at inappropriate times) and allow those of us who don’t get DirecTV’s March Madness package to watch two close games at once on a split screen (assuming you have picture-in-picture on your TV). [Ed. Note: TNT/TBS reaches almost six times as many households as DirecTV (99 million versus 18 million).] It is unclearexactly how much ESPN bid for the NCAA Tournament, but it is believed to have been relatively close to the CBS/Turner bid.

We won't be seeing these two broadcasting NCAA Tournament games any time soon

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Has there ever been a non-prime number so beautiful as this one? 

The NCAA made the right decision, from its release this afternoon:

Late Wednesday, the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee unanimously passed a recommendation to the Division I Board of Directors to increase tournament field size to 68 teams beginning with the 2011 Championship. The recommendation will be reviewed by the Division I Board of Directors at its April 29 meeting.

Much more later…