It seems like we have an Anthony Davis post almost every other day, but it also seems like the power forward from Chicago has managed to keep himself in the news for the past two weeks. Just one day after Davis announced that he had made his college decision, but was not going to announce it to the world just yet (something that we viewed with a weary eye at the time), the Chicago Sun-Times published a story about the quasi-announcement, but also threw in a rumor about the Davis commitment reportedly being up for sale. While some may consider the current form — which, at the time of this post, includes a few sentences about the possibility that a cash payment may have been involved in the recruitment of Davis — to be both meritless and tactless the major issue comes from the originally posted story (posted as a picture after the jump), which included the following passage:

The rumors/sources that have Davis choosing Kentucky are also alleging that the commitment cost over $200,000. Davis Sr. has flat out denied everything.

On one hand, the paper and the author technically (and likely legally, although Kentucky apparently does not agree) did nothing wrong as he only stated what an anonymous source had said, and the journalistic “code of ethics” compels him not to reveal his sources. He also allowed the Davis family to refute the rumor. That same journalistic “code of ethics,” however, also calls on O’Brien to verify wildly inflammatory statements or at least vet the source and accusation. After the LeBron-Markazi incident that lit the blogosphere on fire over the past few weeks, we can’t say for certain what the reason was for the re-edit although it is curious that the Sun-Times did so without even mentioning it (like Kentucky fans will ever let them forget it). Given that the Sun-Times pulled out the previously stated passage and left the rest of the piece intact, it seems reasonable to believe that its editors felt uncomfortable with O’Brien’s defense of that particular part of the accusation. As Michael DeCourcy noted, if the accusation had any merit it would be the headline of a national story, not something that was buried in a local story — even if the local paper is widely read.

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1. From the this-cannot-possibly-be-a-good-idea department, Tennessee forward Emmanuel Negedu — you remember, the Vol who had a freakin’ heart attack last fall during a workout — is transferring to New Mexico because the school will let him play basketball again.  That option had been closed off to him by UT, so he was looking for another school willing to give him a chance.  We certainly understand when Negedu says that not playing basketball made him feel “like he was dead,” but he actually was dead for a little while last fall and we certainly hope that the New Mexico doctors who have cleared him earned their medical degrees away from the Caribbean islands.  Sheesh.  If the NCAA approves his medical waiver, he could play as soon as the 2010-11 season.
2. This is going to be an ongoing theme all summer long, but the Big Ten is holding its annual meeting for coaches and administrators this week in Chicago and expansion is on everyone’s mind even though it’s not officially on the agenda.
3. There are reports that everyone’s favorite networker, World Wide Wes, has been quietly contacting NBA teams with coaching and salary cap space about the possibility of bringing John Calipari and LeBron James as a package deal next season.  Our take on this is simple: if Calipari gets a realistic opportunity to coach the best player in the world during his prime the next five seasons, he’s going to take it.  The good news for UK fans is that there are many peripheral issues at play here, and the likelihood of such a package deal actually occurring is not all that high.  Gregg Doyel, for what it’s worth, doesn’t believe the hype.
4. In a lawsuit pitting former Oklahoma State assistant coach Jimmy Williams against current Minnesota head coach Tubby Smith over a hiring dispute, former OSU head man Eddie Sutton was called as a witness yesterday.  Evidently the folksy coach got very angry under cross-examination when questioned about his time at Kentucky in the 1980s, going so far as to ask the judge whether he could ask the lawyer a question, and ultimately apologizing to the court for his behavior.
5. Former president Bill Clinton gave the commencement address at WVU Sunday, and Da’Sean Butler was one graduate that impressed the former commander-in-chief, stating that he rooted for the Mountaineers in the Big East Tournament and the NCAA Tournament after Georgetown (his alma mater) was out.  Butler tweeted out afterward:  Met with the Real Pimp C today—-Bill Clinton. Cool dude n knows his basketball. It kinda surprised me. Oh yea I 4got I’m graduating!!!!!!
6. A bonus this morning: the NBA Pre-Draft Camp list of invitees is out for this season, and 53 players will get a chance to improve their stock later this month in Chicago.  Here’s the complete list:

Solomon Alabi, Florida State
Cole Aldrich, Kansas
Al-Farouq Aminu, Wake Forest
James Anderson, Oklahoma State
Luke Babbitt, Nevada
Eric Bledsoe, Kentucky
Trevor Booker, Clemson
Craig Brackins, Iowa State
Avery Bradley, Texas
Derrick Caracter, Texas El Paso
Sherron Collins, Kansas
DeMarcus Cousins, Kentucky
Jordan Crawford, Xavier
Ed Davis, North Carolina
Devin Ebanks, West Virginia
Derrick Favors, Georgia Tech
Tiny Gallon, Oklahoma
Charles Garcia, Seattle
Paul George, Fresno State
Luke Harangody, Notre Dame
Manny Harris, Michigan
Gordon Hayward, Butler
Lazard Hayward, Marquette
Xavier Henry, Kansas
Darington Hobson, New Mexico
Damion James, Texas
Armon Johnson, Nevada
Wesley Johnson, Syracuse
Dominique Jones, South Florida
Jerome Jordan, Tulsa
Sylven Landesberg, Virginia
Gani Lawal, Georgia Tech
Greg Monroe, Georgetown
Daniel Orton, Kentucky
Artsiom Parakhouski, Radford
Patrick Patterson, Kentucky
Dexter Pittman, Texas
Quincy Pondexter, Washington
Andy Rautins, Syracuse
Stanley Robinson, Connecticut
Larry Sanders, Virginia Commonwealth
Jon Scheyer, Duke
Lance Stephenson, Cincinnati
Mikhail Torrance, Alabama
Evan Turner, Ohio State
Ekpe Udoh, Baylor
Jarvis Varnado, Mississippi State
Greivis Vasquez, Maryland
John Wall, Kentucky
Willie Warren, Oklahoma
Terrico White, Mississippi
Hassan Whiteside, Marshall
Elliot Williams, Memphis

1. Eddie Sutton made his first public comments about the charges and the future of his son Sean Sutton in an interview with Tulsa World yesterday.  Sean Sutton was arrested back on February 11th and charged with attempting to possess controlled substances, and soon after admitted an addiction to pain killers.  The elder Sutton expressed confidence in his son, saying “He’ll be all right because he’s a strong person who just made a mistake.”
2. Santa Clara sophomore Troy Alexander is impressive.  His stats this season: 1.1 PPG, 0.5 RPG, 0.7 APG in 30 games.  Ah, but his most meaningful stat is found in the “Lives Saved” column.  He’s been raising awareness about the malaria epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa and has been raising money via Facebook and Twitter to buy mosquito-repellent nets for children’s beds.  The nets are draped over the beds so the kids don’t get bitten and contract the disease while they sleep.  The cost of one net?  Ten lousy bucks.  A life saved.  If you don’t think malaria is a big deal, there are some studies out there that say malaria has actually killed one out of every two people who has ever lived.  Alexander initially wanted to raise $1,000, but has already tripled that.  He does this through the Nothing But Nets campaign, an organization jump-started by everyone’s favorite punching bag these days — Rick Reilly.  We won’t post Troy’s Facebook page, but we will link his page at NothingButNets.net.  Bravo, brother.
3. According to the 49 responding journalists in AnnArbor.com’s final player of the year poll, Evan Turner is widening his lead over John Wall.  Interestingly, Turner was the only player named on every ballot.  Three voters didn’t have Wall ranked first, second, OR third, and 32 of them didn’t name Wesley Johnson anywhere.  Wow.
4. The host schools — that is to say, the teams that automatically advance to the “championship rounds,” win or lose — have been announced for next season’s O’Reilly Auto Parts CBE Classic in Kansas City.  Duke, Kansas State, Gonzaga, and Marquette will be the sites for the regional round games from November 14-17, and then will move on to the Sprint Center on November 22-23 to play each other in matchups to be determined later.
5. Are referees working too much?  It’s been a big topic for some time, and especially this year.  Conference bigwigs and coaches may think refs are overworked, but the referees seem to disagree.  ACC referees’ supervisor John Clougherty, though, feels the critics might have a point, saying of his refs, “They are independent contractors.  I can’t tell them how many times to work.”  Interesting piece by Ray Glier of the New York Times.

Former Oklahoma State coach Sean Sutton, son of famed coach Eddie Sutton, was arrested on Thursday for attempting to fraudulently possess controlled substances.  He was jailed in Stillwater, Oklahoma last night and the original report from Tulsa World did not specify a time for his arraignment.

Also from the report, an extra wrinkle to this is that Sutton used his cell phone as a means to obtaining the substances and had been receiving shipments from multiple states (New York and Washington are specified in the story) containing the drugs.  A parcel had arrived for Sutton in Stillwater on Thursday; when he went to pick it up, Oklahoma narcotics agents confronted Sutton, who eventually confessed that he was “addicted to painkillers” and had been ordering the controlled substances to feed the addiction.  There is also the question of Sutton having made multiple visits to austin tx drug rehab but not revealing to the individual doctors that he was doing so, as a means to obtain the drugs.

The package snagged by the Oklahoma agents reportedly contained “Adderall and clonazepam.”  Adderall is a brand name for a combination drug containing dextroamphetamine and amphetamine, substances that increase the amount of certain neurotransmitters in the brain.  It increases awareness and wakefulness, as  well as libido, and decreases appetite.  It’s usually used for treatment of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, but it has a very high potential for addiction.  The street value comes from the effects mentioned above, and it’s frequently abused a stimulant and a weight-loss drug. These drugs can be addictive and it is important to take customized rehab treatment from popular rehab centers if you’re addicted to it.

Clonazepam is the generic name for a drug more widely known as Klonopin, a drug most often used as treatment for seizure disorders like epilepsy, or as a treatment for anxiety.  Because it has an overall net “depressant” effect, it is often abused as a sedative or in conjunction with other drugs to enhance the first drug’s effect.

No other substances were named in the Tulsa World report.

(h/t: @TheBigLead)

Sometimes the NCAA’s policies, procedures and processes are so difficult, convoluted and nonsensical that it’s difficult to even begin to explain why they don’t make much sense.  It took a little while, but we think we have a grasp on the latest chapter in NCAA idiocy covered.  It all comes down to transparency (or the NCAA’s lack thereof).  Quite possibly the biggest complaint that fans of schools investigated (or not investigated) by the NCAA is that the whole process — from how schools are targeted and chosen for investigation, reviewed, and ultimately adjudicated, is shrouded in a veil of secrecy.  Sometimes college sports fans must feel like the NCAA is actually a poorly-functioning arm of the NSA given the way they operate.  Some of the more notorious examples of what we’re talking about from the last few years are no surprise to anyone.  For example:

• How does Corey Maggette not get Duke into hot water after the fact, but Derrick Rose does for Memphis?
• John Wall and Ryan Kelly, anyone?
• Eddie Sutton took down Kentucky over payoffs but Kelvin Sampson is banned for five years over phone calls?
• Why are some legal doctrines (strict liability) selectively used in some situations but not in others?
• Can anyone, anyone at all, explain Reggie Bush/USC?

There are many others, but those are a few off the top of the dome.  Why do things seem so inconsistent?  How does the NCAA decide to investigate, and when they do so, what are the criteria they use to make their findings?  Do they use generally agreed upon principles of auditing, quasi-legal doctrine, administrative law, or something else they make up as they go along?  How are penalties assessed and what are the mitigating factors that they consider in making those decisions?  Is every single case a uniquely-judged “case-by-case” situation, making it all but impossible to draw generalizations about how the NCAA rules enforcement folks will act in a given situation?  Or is that ultimately the point — to make it so confusing and inconsistent that any school can get in serious trouble for nearly anything (or the perception that you can)?  Now that we think about it, we already go through this seemingly every year in terms of what the NCAA Selection Committee wants to see on NCAA Tournament bubble teams’ resumes — it shouldn’t surprise us that things out of this shop often seem wildly arbitrary and inconsistent.

So here’s the point of this post.  Memphis announced today that it had learned what the NCAA’s response to its appeal in the Derrick Rose SAT scandal was, but according to some bylaw borrowed straight from the Soviet playbook, the school is not allowed to make the response public nor can it/will it (?) discuss these findings.  Memphis is undoubtedly doing some grandstanding here, but it doesn’t change the absurdity of the NCAA’s rule keeping their logic and reasoning secret.  So we now sit in Act III of theater of the absurd while we wait for someone at Memphis to leak the information contained within the document (which can only be viewed on a secret, read-only website administered by the NCAA — sadly, this is not a joke), or for an enterprising news organization to force the NCAA to release the document under open records laws in Tennessee (as recently occurred in a Florida State cheating scandal).

Does the NCAA not understand that operating in this manner in no way engenders public trust and faith in the fairness and equitable nature of the system?  Do they not see that, regardless of the strength of their argument on the merits, John Q. Fan reads this and can only conclude that the NCAA is hiding the ball so as to get its way in the end?  Are they too dense to realize that a simple and consistent application of rules and policies are the first step toward removing much of the thinly-veiled cynicism that those still following big-time college sports have for it?

RTC Applauds RC Johnson's Audacity

It would be hilarious if it weren’t so pathetic.  Kudos go to Memphis Athletic Director RC Johnson for telling the world that the NCAA has responded to his appeal, but sorry, we’re not allowed to tell you what they said or the logic they use for agreeing/disagreeing with it.  That’s incredibly rich, and it gets exactly the right message across.  Memphis is going to pay for this anyway — the NCAA has already cornered itself on the strict liability argument — but at least they’ll go down lobbing shots across the bow at the absurdity of it all.

Ed. Note: the previous posts in this series (Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Atlantic South, Deep South, Mid-South, Lower Midwest, Upper Midwest, Mountains and Southwest) are located here.

It’s time for the tenth and final installment of our RTC 2009-10 Impact Players series, the group of cool, wet Pacific states known as the Northwest Region.   Each week we’ll pick a geographic area of the country and break down the five players who we feel will have the most impact on their teams (and by the transitive property, college basketball) this season.  Our criteria is once again subjective – there are so many good players in every region of the country that it’s difficult to narrow them down to only five  in each – but we feel at the end of this exercise that we’ll have discussed nearly every player of major impact in the nation.  Just to be fair and to make this not too high-major-centric, we’re also going to pick a mid-major impact player in each region as our sixth man.  We welcome you guys, our faithful and very knowledgeable readers, to critique us in the comments where we left players off.  The only request is that you provide an argument – why will your choice be more influential this season than those we chose?

Northwest Region (AK, WA, OR, northern CA)

• Matt Bouldin – G, Sr – Gonzaga.  As anyone in Spokane or among Gonzaga’s growing national fan base can tell you, most of the talk about Gonzaga this off-season has concerned itself with what the Bulldogs have lost.  Understandable, as the excellent Zag firm of Daye, Heytvelt, Pargo, and Downs are a tough bunch to replace, to say the least.  Consider also that Gonzaga is bringing in something like 37 freshmen onto this year’s squad, and one can easily conclude that Mark Few finds himself with his most interesting coaching predicament yet.  With such an inexperienced squad, what’s the one thing Few needs most?  A savvy, intelligent senior leader.  Enter Matt Bouldin, a 2010 preseason Wooden Award nominee to absolutely nobody’s surprise.  Check these stats from last year:  49.1% from the field, 42.3% from three-point range…but only 13.6 PPG.  Even with several other offensive options on his team, you’d expect a shooting guard with those percentages to average more than 13.6 PPG.  But, this means that when Bouldin does shoot, it’s usually a good shot in terms of shot selection, something coaches will tell you is one of the real keys to winning at this level, and an incredibly difficult thing to teach.  Mind you, those percentages are up from his sophomore season even though he registered more attempts as a junior.  Without a doubt, Bouldin’s touches and minutes will increase this season, despite leading last year’s team with 31.7 minutes a game.  He might need to get to the line a little more this year, but with his ability to take care of the ball, Coach Few should have no apprehension adding this to Bouldin’s responsibilites, if he chooses.  Bouldin’s 2:1 assist-to-turnover ratio was third in the conference (behind two of his teammates!) and is exceptional for a shooting guard.  So go ahead, feel sorry for Gonzaga if you must.  We know what they lost, and we know Portland might be a fun pick in the WCC.  But with a coach like Few, a leader like Bouldin, and a non-conference pressure-cooker like the one Gonzaga has in store, if Portland so much as twitches, Gonzaga will take them down.  And look at their NCAA Tournament history.  Except for 2007, Gonzaga does best when they get a 10-12 seed and nobody’s looking.  Mark Few is spectacular when it comes to keeping numerous talented players happy and, perhaps better than anyone in the country, instilling in all of his players an immense pride in the name on the front of the jersey as compared with the one on the back.  When you watch Few’s Gonzaga teams, you can almost feel the love the players have for that uniform.  Matt Bouldin possesses this pride just as much as any of his Wooden-list predecessors like Morrison or Dickau.  We guarantee you — he will not go quietly.

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Tough day in Lexington.  Not only did the former head coach turned Little Lord Fauntleroy (more on this later) sue his former employer for the entire value of his contract ($6M), but the Memphis Commercial-Appeal released a letter from the NCAA alleging two major violations at Memphis while under the dominion of current wundercoach, John Calipari.

One allegation involves providing free travel on the team plane for an associate of a player (valued at $2,260), but the much more serious allegation in our view is the one that accuses a Memphis player (presumably Derrick Rose) of pulling the old switcheroo with respect to his SAT examination.  Put more directly, Rose is accused of having someone else take the test for him.  The names are redacted, but see the relevant allegation from the NCAA letter below.

It goes without saying that academic fraud is something that catches the NCAA’s attention, especially when it involves a superstar player capable of nearly leading his team to a national title in his freshman season.  The letter doesn’t present the NCAA’s evidence, but you can rest assured that they wouldn’t come at Memphis with these allegations if there wasn’t a considerable evidentiary basis for it.  If Rose is in fact later deemed to have been ineligible during the 2007-08 season, Memphis’ record 38 victories and its F4 appearance could be vacated.

Calipari isn’t specifically named in the NCAA letter, but reports indicate that he has been called to Indianapolis to discuss these allegations on June 6th.  What’s striking is that this isn’t the first time that a Calipari player has had his entrance exam score called into question.  Doneal Mack was a former Florida recruit whom the school refused to admit based on his ACT score rising “too sharply from one test to the next.”  Of course, Calipari welcomed him to Memphis with open arms, and Mack has been a productive bench player in his three seasons with the Tigers.

And of course Kentucky fans are all too familiar with Eric Manuel’s sad tale of academic fraud from the late 80s which ultimately led to some of the darkest days in the program’s history. You have to wonder if the school’s frustration with Tubby and then Gillispie has opened the door to another era of the ‘anything goes’ mentality in Lexington.  After all, it’s been a generation since Eddie Sutton was run out of town; most of the students at UK weren’t even alive yet for that particular abomination.

One thing’s for sure about this whole mess.  Calipari is starting to remind us a little of Elijah Price in “Unbreakable” – bad shhtuff seems to follow him around wherever he goes, but nothing ever seems to get pinned directly onto him.  Whether this is something Kentucky fans are worried about is up for debate, but this has to be a tad unsettling for Kentucky fans over the age of 30. (or maybe they’ll queue up another YouTube video of John Wall, who incidentally pled guilty to B&E today, and say wtf)

—————————-

Now, back to Gillispie.  As we said above, he’s suing UK for $6M based on his firing without cause (sucking, apparently, doesn’t count).  What’s incredible is that, while Gillispie is battling the university over dollars, he continues to prance around Lexington area bars as if he were still the king of the castle.  From Matt Jones’ KSR blog over the weekend…  phenomenal.

Normally, a mid-year resignation at a mid-major school wouldn’t inspire us to blog about it, but normally, 71-yr old coaches with 798 wins on the resume aren’t taking over mid-majors on an interim basis either.

CBS Sportsline reported today that, after Jessie Evans’ stepdown at the University of San Francisco, Sutton will be taking over as the interim coach of the USF program, effective immediately. USF has gotten off to a moribund 4-8 start this year, losing five of its last six games.

We really can’t figure this one out at all. How did USF even know that Sutton was available? Why is Sutton available? Didn’t he retire from Oklahoma St. two years ago? How effective can a 71-yr old coach with absolutely no ties to a program or region be? Did he already blow through the millions OSU paid him? We’re sitting here scratching our heads.

The only thing we can think is that Sutton is attracted to some of the great do-your-own-thing bars down in the Tenderloin district – the Bambuddha Lounge comes to mind – and with SF being a veritable parking nightmare, the likelihood of yet another embarrassing Sutton DUI is minimal. Or maybe Sutton was wanting for some of the cross-cultural delights that Baghdad by the Bay has to offer? We figure the dude’s totally gonna be rocking leather niprings at next year’s Folsom Street Fair.

Update: Apparently Sutton took the USF job sight-unseen, having never stepped foot on the campus. Sutton stated that he returned because he’s given up drinking and that he wanted to win 800 games before he retired.  Evans’ status is one of a leave of absence, with no further information given as to his future at the school.

Yesterday the NCAA released its latest graduation rate figures for all D1 athletes who entered school in the classes of 1997-2000. Unlike the federally-mandated graduation rate, the GSR (Graduate Success Rate) is more realistic for athletes – it gives each player six years to complete his degree and it does not count transfer students against a school (reflecting the reality of athlete puddle-jumping for playing time in D1).

Here are the NCAA’s key findings:

The latest GSR figures show that 77 percent of student-athletes who began college from 1997-2000 graduated within six years. That four-year graduation rate is unchanged from last year’s data and up from 76 percent two years ago.

The Graduation Success Rate for men’s basketball rose from 55.8 percent in 1995 to 63.6 percent in 2000, a 7.8 percent increase. Football increased from 63.1 percent to 66.6 percent for teams competing in the Bowl Subdivision and from 62 percent to 64.7 percent for teams competing in the Championship Subdivision. Baseball increased from 65.3 percent to 67.3 percent.

Gary is Too Busy to Worry About Graduation Rates

Since the NCAA doesn’t provide a sortable database of team information (or at least we can’t find it), we decided to quickly throw together some tables showing how the BCS schools performed in this cohort. Gary Williams should be especially proud of himself. Seriously, Gary, the best you can do with those Juan Dixon/Lonny Baxter teams is zero?!? Not even ONE player???

Thoughts.

• At the high end, Florida St. at 100% makes us wonder if any of these stats are credible. Then again, Florida is also at 100%, and these numbers are around 2000, so maybe there was a hanging chad issue or something. We’re also amazed that Eddie Sutton’s band of merry criminals men led the Big 12.
• At the low end, Jim Calhoun at UConn, Lute Olson at Arizona, Tim Floyd/Larry Eustachy at Iowa St., Ron Jirsa/Jim Harrick at Georgia, and the seediest of all, Clem Haskins at Minnesota, join Gary Williams in the dregs of their respective conferences. What a list of slimy characters there.
• The Pac-10 is surprisingly low, given that Stanford, Cal, UCLA and USC are all great schools. Especially Stanford – how can Mike Montgomery justify graduating only 2/3 of his players? Guess he doesn’t have to at this point – or does he? And the SEC is surprisingly high, with Alabama, the Mississippi schools and South Carolina doing well.

We may have more thoughts on this later, but we’re heading for the airport at the moment, so it’ll have to wait.

Ron Wellman’s decision to elevate Dino Gaudio to the head coaching position at Wake Forest has been universally lauded by the hoopsnascenti over the last couple of days as a great hire. Nobody will dispute that this decision makes sense in terms of continuity for the program, the players and the university. But if you’ll indulge our playing of devil’s advocate for a moment, we ask the question – is this a good hire from a basketball standpoint?

This is a significantly tougher question to address, largely because Gaudio will be evaluated on games yet unplayed. We can point to his unimpressive records at Army and Loyola as evidence of coaching mediocrity; or, we can just as easily dismiss those situations as tantamount to coaching graveyards, where only the truly special of the business can succeed.

So we thought it could be interesting to see how elevating an assistant from within a program tends to work out, historically speaking. We took a look at all the mid- and high-major programs the last three offseasons (2004-06) that elevated an assistant from within its shop to the head coaching position. FYI – there have been six such examples in 2007 – Butler (Brad Stevens), Frank Martin (Kansas St.), Randy Peele (Winthrop), Jeff Reynolds (Air Force), Bob Nash (Hawaii), and Dino Gaudio (Wake Forest).

In 2004, there were four such instances. Three of those new head coaches have gone on to great success at their programs, and the fourth had a solid first year at his before moving on up the ladder the following offseason.

• Mark Fox – Nevada (following Trent Johnson) : rode Nick Fazekas to an 81-18 record the next three seasons, including two NCAA second round appearances. Contrastingly, his predecessor Johnson has largely struggled over on The Farm.
• Doc Sadler – UTEP (following Billy Gillispie) : Sadler continued the Texas Western renaissance for two seasons there, going 48-18 with one NCAA and one NIT appearance.
• Sean Miller – Xavier (following Thad Matta) : Xavier has continued to flourish under Miller, going 63-32 with two NCAA appearances, including the can you top this game vs. Ohio St. in the second round of 2007 that XU should have won.
• Chris Mooney – Air Force (following Joe Scott) : in his only season at AF, he was 18-12 (a slight drop from 22-7 the year prior) before taking a new job at Richmond.

Can Mark Fox continue his Reno Magic w/o Fazekas?

In 2005, there were only two instances. Here too both could be fairly qualified as successful transitions.

• Dave Rose – BYU (following Steve Cleveland) : in two seasons, Rose has taken the Cougs to one NCAA appearance and one NIT appearance, going 45-18 over that period.
• Andy Kennedy – Cincinnati (following Bob Huggins) : Kennedy enjoyed a 21-13 season in his only at the helm after Thuggins was fired, but what’s most telling is the utter collapse in the season after Kennedy was released by UC. The Bearcats were an atrocious 11-19 overall and dead last in the Big East (2-14) in 2006-07. Great decision there.

Last offseason there were four instances, and in a weird coincidence, two of those assistants were coach’s sons who had been formally groomed to take over the program. In one case, the new coach far exceeded his predecessor; in the others, it was largely status quo.

• Sean Sutton – Oklahoma St. (following Eddie Sutton) : Sean’s first year at the helm for the Pokes was up-and-down. OSU started strong, winning 16 of its first 17 games, but limped into the finish with an overall record of 22-13 (6-10) and losing in the first round of the NIT at home. This was still an improvement over his dad’s final season (17-16) (6-10), however.
• Tony Bennett – Washington St. (following Dick Bennett) : this was the feel-good story of the year, as son Tony updated his dad’s offense and took the Pac-10 and nation by surprise, going 26-8 (13-5) – a fifteen win improvement – and making the program’s first NCAA tournament since 1994.
• Ben Jacobson – Northern Iowa (following Greg McDermott) : this very solid mid-major program had its first non-NCAA appearance in four years during Jacobson’s first season at the helm, as his team sputtered to a pedestrian 18-13 campaign in the very competitive MVC.
• Fred Hill – Rutgers (following Gary Waters) : Hill’s first season is one he’d like to forget, we’re sure. The Scarlet Knights were 10-19 (3-13) and battled with Cincinnati for the distinction as worst team in the Big East all season long. Waters’ final season ended at 19-10, which was a cause for celebration with Rutgers basketball.

Tony Bennett is the Model for Gaudio

Obviously, it’s tough to draw a persuasive conclusion from this sample size, and we also realize that every situation involves different factors. Nevertheless, we find it striking that in seven of the ten instances above, the assistant coach who was elevated either outperformed his predecessor or kept the program at the level of success it already enjoyed (or not enjoyed, as with Oklahoma St.). In two cases, there was a slight dropoff from previous levels, and in only one case of a single season sample there was a significant decrease.

The problem with analyzing Gaudio’s situation at Wake in this light is that status quo means that he’ll be regularly finishing in the cellar of the ACC. With the recruits he has arriving one year from now, he’ll be expected to significantly outperform what Prosser accomplished during the last two seasons. Put another way, Deacon faithful will be satisfied with nothing less than challenging for the ACC title and annual NCAA appearances – much like the first four years of Prosser’s tenure. This is a high bar, but if the recent history of Gaudio’s peers is any indication, he may have a great shot at clearing it.