Wow, Ms. Summit, you look like a new woman since your divorce!
That hand is dangerously close to her… soft drink.
Rocky Top, Indeed!
(h/t to the Big Lead for uncovering these dandies)
Predicted Order of Finish.
WYN2K. The NEC is currently going through a down cycle, but it hasn’t always been that way. In the 23-year history of the 65-team NCAA Tourney, the NEC has earned a non-#16 seed twelve times, getting a seed as high as #13 twice, in 1996 (Monmouth) and 1997 (LIU). Lately, though, the Northeast Conference has been stuck in #16 seed hell, having earned a bottom seed three years in a row (the 2006 appearance was in the PiG – Monmouth defeated Hampton). Over those last three years, the NEC’s OOC record is 94-215 (.304), featuring wins over Seton Hall (FDU – 2007), S. Illinois (Monmouth – 2006), Rhode Island (Wagner – 2006) and St. John’s (St. Francis (NY) – 2005). As you can see, it’s a better conference in general than the SWAC and MEAC, but it too typically cannot compete with first- and second-tier leagues.
Predicted Champion. Sacred Heart (#16 Seed NCAA). With twin NEC behemoths CCSU and Monmouth (6 of last 8 NCAA bids) likely to have down years, Sacred Heart is poised to take over the crown of the NEC. Five of the top seven players return from a team that finished winning seven of their last eight games before falling in a close one against CCSU in the NEC championship game.
Others Considered. Robert Morris returns a trio of high-scoring players for a team that was considered disappointing last year. Notable from a statistical oddity bent is that 6’0 guard Tony Lee shot a sizzling 67% on two-point FGs last year (150-224), which is an extremely high percentage for a small guard. Mt. St. Mary’s returns its leading scorer and assist man from a squad that earned a reputation of playing very hard on every possession. Wagner has everyone back from an 8-10 team that showed some promise midway through the conference season last year.
Games to Watch. Like a broken record, there will only be one NEC game on your television this winter.
RPI Booster Games. With only 18 games against BCS opponents, the NEC will have to make it count if they want to earn RPI points this year (the league was 1-20 vs. BCS teams in 2007). But there are a few opportunities for the league to take advantage of down years among several Big East teams (and one former Big East squad) if they catch them sleeping.
Odds of Multiple NCAA Bids. Again, zero.
Neat-o Stat. This isn’t a stat, but it’s neat-o nonetheless. Earl “The Goat” Manigault’s cousin, Ronald Manigault, is a junior college transfer at LIU this season. If he’s anything like his cousin (see video tribute below), LIU may become the And1 crowd’s underground team of choice this season.
64/65-Team Era. In 23 appearances, the NEC is actually the least successful conference of the era, going a measly 1-23 (.042) over this period. When you consider that the one win was Monmouth in 2006’s play-in game, it looks even worse. Despite getting two #13 and #14 seeds, the NEC has never been able to pull off the big upset.
Final Thought. The NEC champion has played well as a #16 seed vs. the #1 seed in two of its last three NCAA appearances, but simply wore down in the second half against a far superior team (2005 – CCSU down one at halftime to Illinois; 2006 – Monmouth down seven with six mins remaining vs. Villanova). In order to have a legitimate chance to win a game, the NEC champ will likely have to win enough nonconference games to improve its RPI enough to earn a #15 or #14 seed. Unfortunately, we don’t see a team capable of that in this year’s NEC.
Since we’ve been on the police blotter kick lately, we may as well continue with an epilogue to one of our previous taser stories. No, not the Florida John Kerry heckler, bro. Actually, we’re referring again to Pitt PG Levance Fields, who as you may recall, on Sept. 16 became involved in an altercation with an off-duty police officer:
According to Pittsburgh police reports, Fields, 20, was arguing with an unknown man and using obscene language outside Puro nightclub early on the morning of Sept. 16. An off-duty officer working security at the club on 19th Street said Fields appeared to have been drinking and ordered him to stop yelling. The officer said Fields punched him in the chest, grabbed his belt and reached for his gun, and the officer and his partner used a Taser gun to subdue and arrest Fields.
Let’s pick out the key piece of information here, in case you scanned over it.
Fields punched him in the chest, grabbed his belt and reached for his gun
Fields Should Thank Pat O’Brien His Attorney
Now, we’re no expert in this sort of thing, but it seems like making a play for a cop’s gun is grounds for all kinds of nastiness to come down on you. So imagine our surprise when we heard this news from Pittsburgh:
Prosecutors agreed on Tuesday to drop charges of disarming a police officer, public drunkenness and aggravated assault, stemming from Fields’ alleged scuffle with a police officer on Sept. 16. A lesser charge of simple assault will stand. In exchange, Fields must spend nine months in the Accelerated Rehabilitation Disposition program and serve 50 hours of community service. If he completes the probation without incident, his record will be expunged, defense attorney Robert DelGreco Jr. said.
So Fields went from facing several felonies and a near-guarantee of jail time… to a lone misdemeanor of simple assault. And for what penance – fifty hours of community service? We think we did that much tree planting and mail sorting in one semester for alcohol violations in college.
Either Mr. DelGreco, Jr., is a master of advocacy on behalf of his clients, or the Allegheny County DA has Pitt season tickets. Considering the Panthers lost Aaron Gray and Levon Kendall from last year’s Sweet 16 squad, the potential loss of Fields could have made for a boring winter in the Steel City. As long as Fields can spare 1.28 hrs/week for community service over the next nine months and resist any and all urges to throw haymakers at officers, Pitt basketball should remain a viable entertainment option for Stephen A. Zappala, Jr., and his friends.
Predicted Order of Finish.
WYN2K. As bad as the SWAC is as a conference, the MEAC is only marginally better. But make no mistake – it IS better. Computer rankings for the last three years reflect that the MEAC lords over the SWAC, as it has won over twice as many OOC contests (70-268; .261) than its sister conference over the last three years. Yet, the MEAC champion is still a play-in game stalwart, finding itself in three of the last four PiGs and entering the NCAAs as a #16 seed each of the last five years. Exhibiting the same problem with OOC “guarantee games” as the SWAC, only Florida A&M and Delaware St. had overall winning records last year. Now, if the league could only keep its coaches out of trouble… Morgan St.’s Todd Bozeman (yes, that Todd Bozeman), SC State’s Jamal Brown and FAMU’s Mike Gillespie have all experienced legal trouble in the last year (Brown and Gillespie were fired).
Predicted Champion. North Carolina A&T (#16 Seed NCAA). Aggie Pride is back, as former Louisville champion (1980) and current A&T head coach Jerry Eaves continues to rebuild a program that was an NCAA regular in the 80s/early 90s (ten trips from 1982-95). Lightning-quick PG Steven Rush leads the charge for the 27th quickest tempo in the nation, and it doesn’t hurt that he has F Jason Willis and a cast of five other senior regulars from a team that made a late push in the MEAC last season.
Others Considered. Todd Bozeman’s Morgan St. squad intrigues us because his team improved leaps and bounds over 2006 based largely on the attitude shift he instilled into the program. Plus, he’s bringing the best recruiting class into the league this year. Hampton is also a team to watch because of Rashad West, a 6’1 playmaker who is likely the best player in the league. Coppin St. returns all five starters from an underachieving squad last year.
Games to Watch. Similar to the SWAC, there’s only one game that will matter in the MEAC.
RPI Booster Games. The MEAC plays 43 games against BCS conference opponents this year, and all but one is on the road. The key point here is that the home game is definitely winnable, as are a couple of other road games.
Odds of Multiple NCAA Bids. Zero. See SWAC.
Neat-o Stat. Don’t come to this league if you’re seeking beautiful offense. Nine of its eleven teams last year rated in the bottom 20% of teams nationally for offensive efficiency, and three of its teams (UMES, Howard, Norfolk St.) earned the ignoble distinction of being the least efficient defensive teams in the nation.
65-Team Era. Counting PiGs, the MEAC is 3-22 overall, with two trips to the second round – Hampton (#15) over Iowa St. (#2) in 2002, and Coppin St. (#15) over South Carolina (#2) in 1997. The MEAC is responsible for two of the only four #15 over #2 seed wins in history.
Final Thought. At least the MEAC isn’t the SWAC, right?
This is too good to be true, and yet it is absolutely true…
A senior defensive back for the Florida Gators is facing burglary charges, just days before Florida’s showdown with #1 LSU. Gainesville Police arrested Earl “Tony” Joiner, 21, early Tuesday morning outside a towing yard. Investigators say Joiner was trying to get his girlfriend’s car out of Watson’s Towing on SW 1st Street. Witnesses told police a man pushed open the heavy gate surrounding the fenced yard, which was not open at the time. The man got into a car and tried to drive away without paying the $76 towing bill. A police officer heard the suspect, identified as Joiner, tell someone on a cell phone, “I am probably about to go to jail, cuz I did push the gate open.”
Paging Frank Tolbert… you might wanna give your SEC comrade a few tips on the art of automobile retrieval. Such as…
Joiner did none of these things correctly, and now he’s facing felony burglary charges.
Predicted Order of Finish.
What You Need to Know (WYN2K). Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the worst basketball conference in America! For three years running, the Southwestern Athletic Conference has found itself at the absolute bottom of every major computer ranking system (RPI, Sagarin & Pomeroy) as its ten schools have gone a collective 32-229 (.123) in OOC games during the last three seasons (easily the worst). Its sacrificial lamb league champion has received eight straight #16 seeds in the NCAAs and four of those teams were relegated to the dreaded play-in game. Just how bad is it? Consider that tournament champion Jackson St. and regular-season champion Mississippi Valley St. were the only two schools with overall winning records last year – no other conference member won more than eleven games. There are no encouraging signs of change for this season.
Predicted Champion. Alabama A&M (#16 Seed NCAA). Yes, we’re predicting a worst-to-first here, but the Bulldogs are the only SWAC school returning all five starters from last season, including dynamic sophomore guards Trant Sampson and Cornelius Hester as well as 6’11 defensive freak Mickell Gladness (6.3 bpg), who blocked an astonishing 20.5% of shots while he was on the court last season.
Others Considered. Grambling is an interesting team because they return four starters including the SWAC’s best all-around player Andre Ratliff, but they also open a brand-new 7500-seat arena and we shouldn’t discount the “new barn” effect. Mississippi Valley St. is another team to watch because they won the regular-season crown last season and return former Southern Miss coach James Green, who has inspired his teams to play maddening D, which will keep them in the hunt.
Games to Watch. There’s only one game you’ll find on tv from the SWAC, and it’s the only game that matters for this conference all season.
RPI Booster Games. The SWAC plays 28 games against BCS conference opponents, and 26 of those are on the road. In a weird scheduling coincidence, only Auburn deigns to venture into a SWAC gym, and it does so twice – it could lose either of these if Lebo’s team isn’t careful.
Odds of Multiple NCAA Bids. Nil. It’s never happened before, and the reality of the non-conference “guarantee games” in the SWAC will ensure it doesn’t happen again this year.
All-Name Team. Alabama St.’s Grlenntys “Chief” Kickingstallionsims is a cinch for national honors, but Texas Southern’s St. Paul Latham is another worthy candidate.
Neat-o Stat. The SWAC likes to run, as half of its teams were among the top 62 fastest tempos in the nation in 06-07. By the same token, though, none can shoot the ball, as 9 of its 10 teams were among the bottom 35 teams last year in effective FG%.
65-Team Era. The SWAC is 1-21 in the era. Southern University (#13) defeated Georgia Tech (#4) 93-78 in the first round of the 1993 NCAA Tourney.
Final Thought. The SWAC isn’t worth much in basketball, so we’ll give it some love for something it’s actually good at.
Now that we’re firmly into October, roughly ten days from Midnight Madness and only about five weeks from the opening tipoff of a regular season game, we’re going to try our hand at providing some preseason content here. Here’s what we envision (but please don’t hold us to it):
1. Conference Primers – a daily rundown of some useful and not-so-useful information on all 31 conferences from worst to first.
2. NCAA Bracket – a semi-weekly update as we go through the conferences as to where we predict each team will be slotted in the 2008 Dance.
3. Preseason Magazine Reviews – as they come out fast and furious over the next month, we’ll grade them as we already have with Athlon and Lindy’s.
4. Blogpoll – we’re teaming up with our new friends over at March to Madness (administrator extraordinaire), NCAA Hoops Today, SEC Hoops: TGTBTU, March Madness All Season, A Sea of Blue and College Hoops Heaven (likely more to come) to provide the first annual college hoops preseason blogpoll.
5. All-Everything Teams. We’ll do a traditional all-american team right before the season begins, but we’re going to try to mix that up with some other nontraditional all-whatever teams here.
6. Anything Else – we’ll continue with our usual fare of linkage and thought-provoking (gulp…) commentary where appropriate. If anyone has an idea of something else they’d like to see, hit us up at rushthecourt@yahoo.com.
We wouldn’t be doing our job if we let this one pass us by.
See Ya in 2015 Bud
Over the weekend various outlets reported that the appropriately-named Bud Mackey, a top 50 player from Georgetown, Ky. (Scott County HS) who committed to Kelvin Sampson’s Indiana Hoosiers, was charged with two felonies related to drug trafficking.
Scott County Coach Billy Hicks last night said he plans to visit Mackey at the jail. “I’m just hoping and praying … you hope it’s not true,” Hicks said. “You hope when it all shakes out there’s a logical explanation. Hicks said school officials told him that they went to look for Mackey when he didn’t show up for a fifth-period English class and found him, smelling of marijuana, near the building. Police found [crack] cocaine in his possession.
They must have found more than just a little blow in his possession to make it through those interminable sixth period filmstrips. In Kentucky, possession of a controlled substance is a class D felony with a penalty of only 1-5 years in prison, while trafficking is a class C felony with a penalty of 5-10 years. Big difference. This suggests to us that Bud was carrying around considerably more crack in his pockets than one man could possibly smoke in a lazy afternoon.
One of Mackey’s Customers
Some blogs are speculating that Kelvin Sampson, known for giving wayward kids second chances, might be inclined to give Mackey another chance at some point in the future. This assumes that Mackey will be out of prison within the next few years, and that’s highly debatable. Construda thinks that anything less than a complete separation between IU and Mackey is a no-win situation, and we agree. This is distinguishable from the JamesOn Curry or Michael Southall situations because they were both convicted for trafficking marijuana. However, the trafficking of crack cocaine, as a general rule, tends to be dealt with quite a bit more harshly. Good luck in the criminal court system, Bud, we hardly knew ye.
Note: if you’re not predisposed to a healthy dose of introspection and self-immolation with respect to college athletics, please skip this missive. We hate ourselves and everything we stand for after writing this.
Consider the following quotation:
If you were giving the [athletic] scholarship to an intellectually brilliant kid who happens to play a sport, that’s fine. But they give it to a functional illiterate who can’t read a cereal box, and then make him spend 50 hours a week on physical skills. That’s not opportunity. If you want to give financial help to minorities, go find the ones who are at the library after school. (emphasis added)
These words were uttered last week in the New York Times by Rutgers literature professor William C. Dowling, who now finds himself embroiled in a brouhaha over the intent and implied racism inherent in his statement. Both the Rutgers university president and athletic director have condemned Dowling’s remarks, and Dowling has shot back at both by accusing them of running an athletic program that openly exploits minority athletes for the university’s gain.
Were it that Dowling was just another old white guy who is completely out of touch with racial politics as it relates to sports in the 21st Century, we might summarily dismiss understand his statement here, but that’s not the case. In fact, Dowling was arrested in the sixties during the freedom rides in the South and his statement above was elicited from a question specifically about minority activity in college athletics (Do big-time college sports provide opportunities to minorities?) – this guy is no racist. For better or worse, if you read his online c.v., you easily find that this guy is about as socially liberal and/or progressive as they come.
Rutgers prof William C. Dowling
But what his statement does is once again expose the dirty little secret of big-time college athletics, a secret that nobody outside of a few academics such as Dowling, Murray Sperber, Andrew Zimbalist and others seem willing to broach. You’ll certainly never hear Dick Vitale or Brent Musberger on fall or winter Saturdays remark as to why Michigan football players average an SAT score of 834 vs. 1271 for the student body or why Duke basketball players average an 887 vs. 1392. Instead, you’re just as likely to hear them refer to players at these schools as quintessential student-athletes who do things “the right way.” After all, exposing the academic hypocrisy at elite institutions such as Michigan and Duke calls into question the integrity of the whole house of cards, and potentially weakens the cash cow on which Vitale, Musberger and others depend.
This is a complex and difficult issue, and we don’t purport to know all the right questions to ask, much less the answers. But to paraphrase Lenny Kravitz, does anybody out there even care? Sure, the standard college fan’s MO is that our guys are solid, upstanding citizens who go to class and caress kittens in their spare time, while your guys are animalistic thugs who don’t even know where classes are held and spend their evenings involved in gunplay and misogyny that would make OJ (Simpson) proud. But it’s not simply a matter of folks caught unawares – what’s quietly whispered among other students and faculty is that the athletes as a general rule are treated differently than the rest of the student body. Class attendance usually isn’t optional, but certain departments and professors are considered amenable to the greater good of the university athletic department, and as such, athletes find themselves in Communications, PE and Sociology majors a disproportionate amount of the time. This doesn’t even contemplate the seemingly endless allegations of university-cum-enabler academic fraud, from Florida State to Tennessee to Minnesota to Georgia and many, many others.
Nobody Here is Worried about Beer & Circus
And yet… despite our knowledge of this institutionalized hypocrisy by the universities, and despite the internal dyspepsia we experience when watching various players in interviews struggle with the English language, and despite the intellectual and moral disconnect of passing judgment on other schools’ troubled players while minimizing and mitigating our own, we still watch the games. Michigan puts 110,000 fans into the Big House every fall weekend, and millions more watch from home. People like us write blogs devoted to the whimsy of whether Florida will win the SEC East or if Keven Durant will go pro. Yet it’s telling that we’re still waiting to hear where yet another incident of beer & circus mentality at a university has led to decreased fan interest to the point where they turn their backs on the athletic program. Incredibly, if anything, it appears that severe NCAA sanctions embolden fans’ ire toward the dime-droppers and the NCAA rather than those students, faculty and administrators perpetrating the crimes in the first place.
The simple truth is that while all of us love to announce to the world that this stuff bothers us, the truth is that as college sports fans, we just don’t care. Or put more specifically, we don’t care enough to demand change, and we say this to be honest rather than flippant. Like many things in life, such as our gender’s insistence that we value other characteristics in women besides attractiveness, the reality is that all of the other stuff is secondary to the girl’s hotness. Sure, we like it when she’s smart, caring, personable, etc., just as we hope our team’s players will behave responsibly on and off the field/court. But what we really want is to win games (and get with the hottie) so that we can exult in the reflected glory of our team’s success, and whether we do so in an ambiguously irresponsible or immoral manner is less important than the results measured in Ws and Ls. So while we completely agree with Dowling’s point that a better way to assist minorities would be to find true student-athletes who excel in both the classroom and the gym, the harsh reality is that such a priority shift would likely turn the teams that we love into Stanford football (1-11 last season) or Dartmouth basketball (9-18), and what alumnus living outside of the ivory tower wants that?
Update: Dr. Sperber referred us to an article he recently wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education called “On Being a Fan.” This article crystallizes the internal conflict of “doublethink” that we feel when we spend our time watching and rooting for college teams while recognizing the hypocrisy of the system. Sperber states this much better than we can:
Such critics have always had logic on their side. But most have overlooked the inescapable reality that fan attitudes on college sports are beyond reason, even irrational, and that frequently they stem from childhood experiences and family bonding: Many of my students at Indiana said that their earliest memories included sitting on the couch with their family in front of the TV and rooting for the Indiana University Hoosiers. For many other fans, the attachment to a team connects to positive feelings about their college days — indeed, that is the basis of my own loyalty. To overturn such deep emotions with logic and reason is almost impossible.
Fourteen Days to go…
Overnight 5: February 16, 2023
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