Here’s a quick look at some odds and ends from each of the 2008 Final Four teams, while we’re busily getting ready for our preview later this week:

North Carolina (#1 seed East)

how they got here: blitzkrieged the East region pretenders (MSM, Arkansas, Wazzu, Louisville) by an average of 25.3 ppg

why they’ll win it all:  no other team has as much balanced offensive firepower as Lawson & Hansbrough

why they won’t:  ol’ Roy can’t win the Big One with his own players 

strengths:  offensive rebounding (#1 nationally) and FT shooting (76%) avoids long scoring droughts

kryptonite:  athletic defensive-minded teams such as Clemson & Virginia Tech gave them trouble – all three other #1 seeds fit the bill here

key stat:  Carolina is 22-0 away from Chapel Hill this season

Kansas (#1 seed Midwest)

how they got here:   without playing an elite team yet (seeds #16, #8, #12, #10)

why they’ll win it all:  no team has a better combination of explosive offense with shutdown defense than KU

why they won’t:  need we say it?  Bill Self teams play tight as a drum under pressure

strengths:  great shooting team (#6 nationally from two; #8 nationally from three) 

kryptonite:  teams that can turn them over can beat Kansas (Oklahoma St. and Kansas St. did just that); lucky for them, none of the remaining four teams are tremendous at causing TOs

key stat:  KU almost shoots as well from three (40.1%) as its opponents shoot from two (40.9%)

Memphis (#1 seed South)

how they got here:   handily, with three blowouts and one shoulda-been (vs. Miss. St.) but wasn’t because of poor foul shooting

why they’ll win it all:  they have an NBA-quality PG named Derrick Rose who gets off on taking over big games (witness his 19.4 ppg average against BCS teams this year)

why they won’t:  the Tigers aren’t as tested as the other three teams still standing; they’ve played three close games all season (2-1)

strengths:  athletic and long jumping jacks who lock up shooters (#8 nationally in FG% defense from two and #7 from three)

kryptonite:  that old Calipari bugaboo – 60.7% from the line is fine in blowouts, but not in close games

key stat:  one loss by four points – 39-1 would make this an all-time great team

UCLA (#1 seed West)

how they got here:   by allowing only 53.3 ppg in four Tourney games

why they’ll win it all:  experience – all but Love have seen the F4 at least once before (and thankfully, Florida isn’t around this time)

why they won’t:  prolonged scoring droughts are fine against Pac-10 foes, but won’t fly against offensive juggernauts such as the other three #1 seeds

strengths:  everything on the defensive end – steals (#11 nationally), blocks (#13), efficiency (#2)

kryptonite:  a poor shooting night (<40%) against an athletic team dooms the Bruins, no matter how good their defense is

key stat:  12 – Howland wants to get his gold C while the Wizard of Westwood is still alive

We felt a little bit like we jumped the gun on Digger/Bilas when we noted that our own bracket ended up with three #1 seeds and a #2 seed, but we still felt that the likelihood of four #1 seeds making the 4 was almost nil, considering that it has never happened before.

We are now prepared to eat crow.

Moving on… is this the best Final Four ever, at least in terms of the quality of teams? Clearly we’ve never had four #1 seeds before, so that’s a great starting point, but how about the fact that the four teams have combined for a ridiculous record of 143-9 (.941) this season? Of those nine losses, only three of the Ls came to teams that were not in the NCAA Tournament this year (Washington, Oklahoma St., Maryland). We need to do some further research on this, but we have to believe this is the first time ever that the top four preseason teams in the AP and Coaches’ polls made the F4. All we can say is that whoever wins this year’s F4 will have definitely earned it.

Now on to the games today…

We have to give major love to John Calipari for somehow convincing his 37-1 team that they were an underdog at the South Regional. The way they were corralling loose balls and attempting to de-Shaqproof rims (mostly Joey Dorsey), it was clear that this team felt slighted. As Vegaswatch pointed out before the Sweet 16, Memphis became publicly undervalued in the last couple weeks of the season, which manifested itself in the Tigers getting unfavorable odds despite the fact that they spent much of the season at #1 in the country. We’re not sure how much life Calipari will get out of playing this card considering the two immolations of Michigan St. and Texas this weekend, but if Derrick Rose and others keep playing like this, it may not matter. Still, UCLA represents an old nemesis of John Calipari (UCLA won 50-45 in the E8 in 2006) and Memphis as a program (UCLA won the title 87-66 in 1973 over what was then called Memphis St.).

As for Kansas-Davidson, we were anxiously awaiting the Kansas collapse along with everyone else (you could have gotten 1:10 odds against Stephen Curry missing that transition 3 with 1:15 remaining), but it looked to us that Davidson finally reached a tipping point where NBA-level talent finally trumped a hardy group of very skilled players who have reached their full potential. Still, with that said, Davidson ended up willing itself into a last-second attempt to win the game. Far be it from us to question the strategy of a #10 seed that damn near made the F4, but we would have loved to have seen Davidson run a penetrate-and-kick/reversal play to get Curry the final shot rather than letting him try to create something himself (not his strength). What a tremendous run for this Davidson team, though – they represented the essence of the Tourney Cinderella better than anyone since the George Mason run a couple of years ago.

Today SI’s Grant Wahl published his annual January synopsis of the eight teams that he feels have sufficient chops to win the national title in April. He likes to point out that in the eight previous years of doing this article, he’s been correct in seven of them (the one miss: 2003 with Syracuse). FYI, here is a spreadsheet of his Magic Eight picks for each year since its inception. Looking at the document with the caveat that we generally like Wahl’s work, in the last eight years the only true “gotcha!” champion was that Cuse team, which raises the question of just how difficult it is to pick eight top-tier teams in the hopes that one of the group cuts the nets down.

The short answer is not very. Had Wahl simply chosen the top eight teams in the AP poll for the correlating January week, he would have nailed six of the eight champions during this period. The only other team he would have missed (besides 2003 Syracuse) would have been 2000 Michigan State, and Wahl would be the first to tell you that the reason for MSU’s relatively low ranking at that point in the 2000 season was completely because of Mateen Cleaves’ foot injury that kept him out of the lineup until conference play. After all, MSU was the preseason #1 team in America that year.

What we think is considerably harder to do is to pick Final Four teams three months ahead of time. The truly elite teams (champions) almost always rise to the top, but with the knowledge that there will inevitably be upsets and great-looking in January will be off the map by March, we figure that if you can consistently pick half of the F4 that far ahead of time, then you’re probably doing something right. Well, it turns out that in the eight years of Wahl’s M8, he’s nailed sixteen of the thirty-two F4 teams for a success rate of exactly 50%. Using our AP ranking measurement mentioned above, he would have gotten fifteen right (47%) by sticking with the poll. So at least he’s beating the chalk.

Which brings us to our analysis of his M8 teams for this season. Here are his eight selections:

• Georgetown
• Indiana
• Kansas
• Louisville
• Memphis
• Tennessee
• UCLA
• Xavier

Perhaps getting a bit full of his record (or taking a huge gamble in an attempt to look really smart on April 7), this year’s selections omitted the UNC Tar Heels, who are currently 17-0 and the #1 team in both major media polls (#2 in the blogpoll). We can’t figure this one out.

Grant, what are you thinking?

Does Wahl really believe that Xavier (or Dayton, as he claims he almost chose) has a better chance of cutting down the nets than UNC? Is he willfully encouraging hordes of Carolina-blue hatemail upon his inbox? Is he simply trying to up his hit page stats ? We have no idea, but let’s see what his justification is for leaving off one of the four teams that has shown itself to be head & shoulders above the rest of the country this year, and quite possibly a juggernaut.

Carolina just doesn’t defend as well as the other three.

That’s it? While he’s right (they don’t), there is still time for significant improvement on that measure, and it’s not like they’re piss-poor (#31 nationally as of today). But more importantly, the Heels also are one of the very best offensive teams in the country, and that alone should indicate they’re worth a look as one of the eight teams most likely to win the national championship. We just don’t understand his reasoning here. If you don’t think they’ll win it all, that’s fine; but to make a claim that they’re not one of the eight most likely to do so… that’s just criminal. Moving on…

As for his 2008 selections, no Wazzu, no Michigan St., no Duke and no Texas A&M is fine – each of those teams has a major flaw or two. Had we produced a M8, we would have definitely taken UNC over Xavier and probably replaced Tennessee with Michigan St. We may have also left Louisville off because we don’t know where their outside shooting is coming from and who will be injured next, but we’re not sure who we think is a marginally better choice, so we’d probably end up leaving them. But really, no major beefs other than the UNC omission.

FWIW, since it’d be fairly disingenuous to rip Wahl’s picks without providing our own for review, we’re sticking with the F4 selections we made for STF at the beginning of the season – UNC, Indiana, UCLA, Gonzaga. The only one we’re currently nervous about is Gonzaga, simply because they haven’t taken off with the return of Josh Heytvelt like we thought they would. There’s still time, though.

Update:  we sent this link to Wahl, and he responded in an email that he thought we had mischaracterized his article in the sense that he never claimed to be picking the eight teams most likely to win the national championship.  He said that if that were the case, UNC would have been #4 on his list; however, his intent was to eliminate one of the “Big Four,” so as to make things interesting and avoid the appearance of playing it safe.  We thought the intent of the M8 was to create a pool of teams from which he “guarantees” the champ will come – if that’s the case, we still don’t really understand the UNC omission.

News from around the basketblogosphere…

• A couple of late summer transfers to report today. It appears Kenny Cooper is leaving Oklahoma St. to be closer to home (Louisiana) and Anthony Gurley (Massachusetts) is leaving Wake Forest for the same reason.
• Our new friends over at Plissken at the Buzzer put together a well-thought out and detailed analysis of the Pac-10’s non-conference schedules in an effort to determine how it will ultimately affect their postseason chances.
• Lion in Oil reports that the Final Four will embrace the BasketBowl approach to squeeze more fans into “distant view” seats on the final weekend beginning in 2009.
• Gonzaga’s Josh Heytvelt of psychedelic mushroom fame is set to return to the team after paying off his debt to society (no, it did not involve organic farming).
• NC State’s promising freshman Jonny Thomas is out for the season with a knee injury.
• Goodman reports Greg Monroe is down to his final eight schools (Duke, Georgetown, LSU, USC, Baylor, UConn, Texas, Kansas), and that KU’s Darrell Arthur is fully recovered from his stress fracture.
• Fluff Pieces. Parrish writes about Capel’s rebuilding project at Oklahoma, DeCourcy writes about Willie Kemp’s expected role at Memphis alongside Derrick Rose, and Goodman writes about Donnie Jones returning home to coach at Marshall.
• Shawn Siegel‘s teams that won’t make the NCAA Tournament (#144 – #72) are up, with some interesting comparisons to the preseason rankings from 2006.
• Finally, we have to mention that we’re excited to see what the combo of Ken Pomeroy and Baseball Prospectus can come up with in their new blog called Basketball Prospectus, which will focus exclusively on college hoops from a statistical bent beginning this fall.

Thanks to everyone who took a few moments to look at our post from yesterday – NBA Draft Picks by School (1949-2006). There was an overwhelming response, and we appreciate all the commentary and advice, which is how we learn how to manage this thing a little better day-to-day.

First, let’s address a couple of the points we heard from you via email, msg boards and commentary.

• The “modern draft” refers to the era in which the NBA began using a round-by-round system. Even though there was an NBA Draft in 1947 and 1948, the round system did not begin until 1949, which is why we decided to start there.
• Following up on that point, we also chose to only review the first two rounds of the NBA Draft during this period. The current version (two rounds) began in 1989, and after a cursory review of the “extra” rounds – which totaled as many as twelve over this era, we realized very quickly that the vast majority of the players drafted in rounds 3+ never saw action in the NBA. For that reason, we decided to focus solely on the first two rounds.

Now, on with the data. We promised a breakdown by round and by decade, and we’ll deliver on half of that promise today. We also have sliced the first round into a “Top 10” and “Top 5” pick column, just for kicks. See Table B below.

Table B. NBA Draft Picks by School & Round Taken (1949-2006)

Notes: this table is sorted by the 1st Rd column, and is limited to schools with six first round picks since 1949. The yellow shading refers to the highest value in that column.

Observations:

Super Six. Remember what we were saying about the so-called Super Six yesterday? Well, these six schools – UNC, Duke, UCLA, Kentucky, Indiana and UCLA – take a larger piece of the action the higher up the draft board we go. They collectively comprise 13.4% (149 of 1115) of the all-time first-rounders, 14.8% of the top 10 picks (86 of 580), and 17.6% of the top 5 picks (51 of 290). In other words, more than a sixth of the top 5 picks in history came from one of the above six schools.

With Studs Like These, How do They Ever Lose?

Blue Heaven. The school with by far the most first-round picks, the most top 10 picks, and the most top 5 picks clearly resides in Chapel Hill. Let’s put this in perspective. UNC has had more top 5 picks than all but ten schools have had first round picks. It accounts for 6.2% of the top 5 picks in history all by itself, and dominates each of the above categories. That’s unbelievable. Nobody can ever say that Carolina hasn’t had a surplus of talent. Maybe that criticism of Dean Smith “only” winning two national titles at UNC has some legs after all.

Who doesn’t belong? Notre Dame, and again, Minnesota, seem to be the extreme outliers here. Was Digger Phelps really so bad of a coach that the Irish can produce twenty first-rounders (fifth on our list) and five top 5 picks but ND has only been to one F4 in its history? Guess so. We still can’t figure out Minnesota either. The Gophers are behind only UNC, Duke, UCLA and Kentucky in all-time top 10 picks. All we can guess is that Whitey Skoog, Ed Kalafat and Dick Garmaker must have been tremendous players back in the day. Also, a tip of the hat to Alabama and Missouri for producing a combined 27 first-rounders with nary a F4 to show for it. Nice work, gents.

Digger Must Have Been Even Worse as a Coach

We have a lot of good, but not great, players. The second round is always a fascinating hodgepodge of players who may have been fine collegians but were undersized, overslow or otherwise fraught with concerns about their transition to the League. Nothing says slow like Indiana, who coincidentally leads the way with 22 second round picks. Of course, Arizona follows up with 20 and UCLA with 19 second-rounders, so maybe that theory is a little half-baked. Nevertheless, it was cool to see the schools that consistently produce top talent vs. mediocre NBA talent (in the eyes of the GMs, at least). For UNC, it’s first round or bust, mostly (81% of its draftees went in the first round); for a school like LSU, either you’re drafted in the top 5 (8 of its 12 first-rounders) or you’re likely to end up in the second round (11 of the remaining 15 picks). One other neat example is Utah, where 9 of its 10 first-rounders went in the top 10 picks – maybe praying to Joe Smith (not the former Terp) or whatever it is that they do out there for a high NBA pick only works if you’re taller than 6’9 (e.g., Andrew Bogut, Keith Van Horn, Tom Chambers, Bill McGill).

Evidence that Penn St. Basketball Exists

Who is missing? Several schools with some solid history, including Marquette (5 first-rounders and 14 (!!) second-rounders), Pittsburgh (4/4), Xavier (4/6), Gonzaga (3/3) and UTEP (3/8), didn’t make our cut. Just for fun, the BCS schools with the least successful draft histories belong to… South Florida (only one second-rounder) and Penn State (two second-rounders). USF we understand – they’re new to the Big East and all – but Penn State? – that school has been in the Big 10 for almost fifteen years. That’s pathetic.

Coming Next: the final installment will take a look at draft picks by decade, so we can see how things have trended over the years. Which schools have consistently supplied talent to the NBA and which have long since passed or are rising fast? View Part III here.

A lot of piled-up news to get to today…

• The biggest story: Brandon Rush tore his ACL, withdrew from the NBA Draft, will have surgery this week, and will likely be ready to play at KU next season. The 07–08 Jayhawks just got a lot better.
• Florida A&M’s coach Mike Gillespie was placed on paid leave after his recent arrest on misdemeanor stalking charges. Wait, the FAMU coach is white??
• Apparently Glen “Big Baby” Davis has slimmed his way to 280 lbs for the NBA Draft workouts… begging the question, why wasn’t he using this regimen throughout his career at LSU?
• Greg Oden and Kevin Durant were asked to join Team USA – size up your bronzes now, boys.
• Dane Bradshaw wrote a book (“Vertical Leap“) about his senior season at Tennessee, which of course presupposes that Vol fans can actually read the thing.
• In an espn.com piece by Pat Forde, we learned that Arkansas is actually paying three head basketball coaches at the same time. Does George Steinbrenner run the Hawgs now? Nah, just the very recently retired Frank Broyles, another senile 80-year old.
• After years of vile homerism, John Feinstein commits treason in Monday’s Washington Post – Coach K’s dark angels are already moving into the DC area on a seek-and-destroy mission. A must-read for all Duke haters.
• Oh, and Maryland fans hate Duke also. We particularly enjoyed the Jon Scheyer portion.
• Some industrious UCLA fans paid homage to uber-scrub Michael Roll in an epic video.
• Finally, we reserve a moment of silence for the Charlotte Coliseum, the site of many outstanding ACC Tournament battles as well as the 1994 Final Four. It will be destroyed on Sunday.

Reviewing today’s ESPN article on the ten programs to watch during the next decade, it crystallized a trend that we’ve been noticing and tracking over the last couple of years. Sure, the traditional six superpowers – Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, Indiana, North Carolina and UCLA – were all on that list, and why wouldn’t they be? Any “down” period will not be tolerated very long by their alumni and fans, which ultimately means that these schools will always provide just enough resources at their programs to be considered elite. But what really struck us as interesting is that Florida, Ohio St. and Texas – all traditional football powers – were ranked in the top seven to watch in basketball. Throw in USC as an a school in “others receiving votes,” and we’re left with four of the giants in college football also being considered as major players for the next decade in basketball. When did this shift happen?

Ten years ago, or even twenty, what football-first schools could we have said this about? Probably Michigan in the 90s, and perhaps Oklahoma in the 80s, and if you want to go way back, undoubtedly Notre Dame in the 70s. But who else? Using Final Four participants as a rudimentary barometer of program success, we find that only five of the forty F4 participants (12.5%) in the 1970s could be considered football-first schools (Florida St. – 72; Michigan – 76; Notre Dame – 78; Arkansas – 78; Michigan St. – 79). Moving into the eighties, we don’t see much improvement, with only six of the forty teams (15%) in the F4 focusing foremost on football (Iowa – 80; LSU – 81, 86; Georgia – 83; Oklahoma – 88; Michigan – 89).

Things began to change a little during the 90s, as more SEC and Big Ten teams who traditionally considered basketball as a nice little diversion before spring practice began pouring resources into the sport. Eight of the forty F4 participants (20%) were teams from traditional football schools (Arkansas – 90, 94, 95; Michigan 92, 93; Florida – 94; Michigan St. – 99; Ohio St. – 99). Cut to this decade where through eight seasons football school participants have already made up eleven of the 32 F4 participants (34%) – Michigan St. – 00, 01, 05; Florida – 00, 06, 07; Wisconsin – 00; Oklahoma – 02; Texas – 03; LSU – 06; Ohio St. – 07. This is a definite trend over time, and it is no accident.

As the traditionally football-focused schools have figured out that there is a benefit, both financially and in terms of program cache, in having a successful basketball program in addition to their gridiron brethren, schools such as Florida, Texas, Ohio St. and USC have started making inroads in basketball. In fact, over the last two seasons, the football schools have outmanned the traditional basketball schools in F4 representation four to three (with little guy George Mason thrown in for good measure). Since the athletic department budgets at these collegiate goliaths, driven by football, are pushing nearly $100M/year, there is no shortage of top-rate facilities and resources available at these places now. The idea that Florida or Ohio St. could have a better practice facility than that at Kentucky or UNC sounds ridiculous, but that’s become the reality in today’s NCAA. How much have things changed? Look no further than Billy Donovan’s decision to stay at a football school as second banana to Urban Meyer rather than going to Kentucky and become a veritiable deity this spring. We should expect more of this in the future.