The decision by Illinois to fire Bruce Weber (his press conference reaction here) was probably the most speculated on move this season, but when the school did so it was met with swift reaction. The most notable was Michigan State coach Tom Izzo who said that he and his wife shed tears over the firing although we aren’t clear if they were actual or symbolic tears. The firing was also probably the most significant so far this season as it opens up one of the premier jobs in the country, which could lead to a cascade of movement on the annual coaching carousal.
After putting up with three seasons of relatively futility this was supposed to be a glorious March for Verdell Jones, but those dreams came to a crashing halt as he tore his right ACL during Indiana‘s win over Penn State. The loss of Jones, who finishes his career at #23 on the all-time scoring list at the school, appears to have hit the Hoosiers hard and will make their path through the South Region even more difficult. The Hoosiers have the talent to cover up for Jones over brief periods of time, but the experience he gained from his 103 starts will be hard to recreate late in games.
Over the next three weeks you are going to be seeing plenty of video of Christian Laettner, but the one thing you would see or hear mentioned much is that the Duke great will appear in court this week along with his former teammate Brian Davis in the ongoing case regarding loans they took out on real estate investments. Looking through some of the names involved in this case (including Johnny Dawkins) this could turn into a college basketball media circus as more details come out.
While Weber garnered the majority of the headlines over the weekend, two more coaches were fired over the weekend. At Nebraska, Doc Sadler was fired after going 12-18 this season leading Tom Osbourne, the school’s athletic director, to decide to move in a new direction. Meanwhile, Tulsafired Doug Wojcik, who was the school’s all-time leader in wins, citing a 35% decline in season ticket sales among the reasons. To us, the biggest reason for his firing and the one that probably most directly impacted season ticket sales was the lack of a NCAA Tournament appearance in seven seasons despite a 139-89 record including two 25-win seasons.
We tried to keep the selection of NCAA Tournament teams out of this Morning Five, but Miami and Durand Scott would not let us. Late on Friday, the school announced that the NCAA had declared Durand ineligible for taking impermissible benefits. The time of the suspension, the third for the Hurricanes this season (all for different players), could not have come at a worse time for the team as they were just about to play a game against Florida State, which they lost. Although we cannot definitely say that they would have made the NCAA Tournament had they won that game, they were one of the first four teams left out and a win over a team that would have been a #5 seed at worst probably would have put them over the top. Instead, they are let with nobody to blame, but themselves (and possibly their former head coach).
The Bruce Weber era at Illinois is over. So what comes next for the Fighting Illini? As Loren Tate points out, In a lot of ways this group is in trouble next year. Everything from a depleted up-and-coming junior class to this group’s 3-point shooting talent leaves a lot of doubt for the 2012-13 season. The job should draw the attention of some high-profile names, but the new head coach will have a tough hill to climb.
Speaking of Weber’s fate, there’s one big-name coach in the conference who isn’t pleased about how it all went down. Michigan State coach Tom Izzo held nothing back when voicing his displeasure about Weber’s firing after the Spartans’ win over Iowa on Saturday. “My wife and I shed a tear this morning over it,” Izzo said. “And it was half for Bruce and half for my profession.”
Bruce Weber was not the conference’s only casualty on this Black Friday. Nebraska‘s Doc Sadler was fired on Friday, after Nebraska finished tied with Penn State for last place in the conference this year. It was the Cornhusker’s debut season in the Big Ten, but athletic director Tom Osborne made it clear he wants to see the program head in a different direction.
One positive that really emerged at the end of Iowa‘s season was the strong play of senior Matt Gatens, whose career came to an end on Friday in Indianapolis. Gatens scored just 10 points in the game, after being bothered by the Spartans’ defense throughout and not taking his first shot until 10 minutes and 37 seconds were left in the first half. He finishes sixth all-time on Iowa’s scoring list with 1,621 points after averaging 15.7 PPG this year.
If you’re drawing up a game plan to beat Wisconsin, how much energy would you typically pour into defending Rob Wilson? From this point forward, probably a little bit more than before. The senior, who averaged 3.1 points per game entering Friday’s quarterfinal, dropped a cool 30 against Indiana to power the Badgers to the semifinals. “Needless to say we had a player who was in a zone,” said coach Bo Ryan. Ya think?
Here’s a breakdown on how things went down in the Big Ten tournament’s first day of action:
Matt Gatens led Iowa to a big win over Illinois (Andy Lyons, Getty Images)
Iowa 64 – Illinois 61
The skinny: It’s been a tough season for Illini fans, and now (some would say thankfully) it is over. Myers Leonard was a force down low for Illinois, scoring 18 points and grabbing six boards, but Brandon Paul struggled his way to four points on 2-11 shooting. Meanwhile, Matt Gatens continued his solid senior season with 20 points to lead the Hawkeyes, but it was his defense on Paul that really was the difference in this contest for Iowa. Head coach Fran McCaffery complained earlier this week about Gatens not being included on the all-Big Ten defensive team, and the senior looked every bit an elite-level stopper in this match-up. All-Big Ten freshman Aaron White had 13 points and 9 rebounds including a key offensive board with about 40 seconds left after a missed free throw by Roy Devyn Marble that helped seal the game for Iowa.
Up next: The #8-seed Hawkeyes will face #1-seed Michigan State at noon today. Iowa only played the Spartans once this season, falling 95-61 in a game at East Lansing on January 10.
This is the end of the road for Bruce Weber at Illinois. Well, not quite yet, but it sure feels that way. All that’s left is the formality, writes Yahoo!‘s Pat Forde from Indianapolis. It seemed the only way for the amiable coach to keep his post with the Fighting Illini was for the team to rattle off a miracle run to win the Big Ten Tournament. But it won’t be so, after the Illini dropped their first-round game to Iowa on Thursday. “It’s very hard,” Weber said. “I’d be lying to you. I’m not sure why or what, but I’ll talk when it’s all … when it all settles down.” There are only two questions remaining and they are related: first, whether Illinois plays in the NIT; and second, how much longer Weber roams the sidelines in Champaign.
If there’s anybody feeling as down in the dumps as Weber today, it’s certainly Northwestern fans. They have endured what seems like a lifetime’s worth of hardships this season alone with all of the season’s close losses. And Thursday, with an overtime loss to Minnesota, it looks like another season of NCAA Tournament hopes are down the drain for the Wildcats. Northwestern was forced to lean too heavily on JerShon Cobb and John Shurna, and it will likely relegate them to their fourth straight NIT.
Indiana is a trendy pick in Indianapolis to at least reach the championship game on Sunday, largely thanks to the huge contingent of Hoosiers fans that made the trek north, but how are their title hopes affected by the loss of Verdell Jones III? The senior guard suffered a sprained knee in the first half of Indiana’s win against Penn State and the Hoosiers will have to figure out how to move on without his more than 25 minutes and nearly 8 PPG.
Minnesota pulled out a nice win against Northwestern, but how much farther can the Golden Gophers go without much size down low? Without the presence of Ralph Sampson III on the block, Minnesota relies much more on its backcourt. It’ll be an interesting match-up against Michigan on Friday, because the Wolverines are not a great interior team in their own right. If anything, it might leave Minnesota fans wondering what might be if they had the big man down low.
Wisconsin has been one of the most steady Big Ten teams over the last decade or so, but Jim Polzin of the Wisconsin State Journal points out that much of that success hasn’t transferred to the Big Ten Tournament. The Badgers will try to avoid their fourth straight one-and-done appearance in the tourney on Friday against Indiana. Wisconsin hasn’t even held a lead in a Big Ten Tourney game the last two years. “We’ve talked about it, that nobody on this roster has won a Big Ten tournament game,” Josh Gasser said. “So it’s definitely in the back of our minds that we want to go down there and have a little chip on our shoulder and hopefully come out with a few wins.”
Bill Hupp is the RTC correspondent for the Big Ten Conference.
Conference Tournament Preview
After a thrilling regular season, it’s on to Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. Despite being a three-seed, OhioState has to be considered the favorite given how well they ended the regular season. If either MichiganState or OSU wins the Big Ten Tournament, they will get strong consideration for a one-seed. Teams like Wisconsin, Indiana and Purdue can all improve their NCAA Tournament seeds with strong showings this weekend.
Northwestern is the only clear bubble team in the conference, and as such is under the most pressure to string some wins together. If the Wilcats can beat Minnesota in the first round, they’ll face a Michigan team that they only lost to twice this season, though both losses came in overtime. Two wins in the Big Ten tournament should make them a virtual lock for their first-ever tournament birth, but it’s much easier said than done with this level of competition.
Just eight years after essentially getting kicked out of the Big East for its poor on-field performance and attendance numbers Temple will rejoin the conference. Yesterday, the Big East announced that Temple would be returning to the conference for football this coming season and other sports the following year. The move ensures that the Big East will have eight football teams for the coming season and gives the Big East another very strong basketball program. In addition, it should create an even more interesting dynamic between Temple and Villanova now that they will be in the same conference.
One of the big storylines of the opening week of the NCAA Tournament will be that of Detroit, which features the father-son combination of Ray McCallum Jr and Sr. Most college basketball fans are very familiar with their story, but if you need a refresher before next week’s onslaught, this column is a pretty good place to start. Between the father-son combo and the school’s former coach (some guy named Vitale) the school will be getting plenty of publicity as long as they stay alive.
One player who will not be part of March Madness is Arizona‘s freshmen guard Josiah Turner, who was suspended indefinitely by the school after violating unspecified team rules. The suspension is Turner’s second this year as he missed a game earlier this season against Florida. Turner, who came in as a highly touted recruit, has averaged 6.8 points and 2.4 rebounds per game in 29 games this season. Even with him the Wildcats would have been hard pressed to make a run in a weak Pac-12 conference, but as a local writer points out Turner’s absence is a big blow for the team right now.
There have been plenty of columns on Bruce Weber and his imminent firing at Illinois, but most have focused on where he faltered. Michael Rosenberg takes a decidedly different approach choosing instead to focus on the decision to fire Weber and how it reflects on the current state of college athletics. Rosenberg compares Weber to Illinois legend Lou Henson and points out some small changes to history that would have led to Weber keeping his job. While we do find Rosenberg’s take interesting, it is worth pointing out that those small changes are essentially what makes history, which will most likely be demonstrated again over the next four weeks.
Last year Charles Barkley‘s inclusion on the Selection Special on CBS created quite a bit of discussion among college basketball fans as Barkley, who is fantastic analyzing basketball games appeared out of his element discussing some teams and their resumes to that point. This year, Barkley will not be involved in the show, but will continue to be involved in the studio analysis. Both Barkley and CBS/Turner state that the move isn’t necessarily due to a lack of trust in Barkley, but instead a move to highlight his strengths and frankly a good move in our opinion.
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Yesterday the NCAA announced that it would be opening up a bit more by releasing its full seeding list going from #1 to #68 for this year’s NCAA Tournament. They will release that information during a special show immediately after the regular Selection Special and will reportedly discuss why certain teams were left out. If the NCAA holds true to its word, the people at ESPN might as well move their bracket analysis back an hour because everybody should be watching this on TruTV instead.
ESPN.com is full of columns by former athletes, but few who have reached the level of athletic greatness that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has. In a recent column on ESPN.com, Abdul-Jabbar opined on the current state of the UCLA program in light of the Sports Illustrated article detailing some of the issues within the program. Like many former UCLA greats, Abdul-Jabbar appears to be disappointed with the turn the program has taken, but believes that it can experience a rebirth by focusing on the ideals of his mentor, the late John Wooden. It seems to be a bit idealistic, but perhaps if the school can get some of its living legends more involved with the program it can regain its form.
Baylor already made news this season with their uniforms when a recruit reportedly turned down the school because of their uniforms (a claim he later refuted). Now the school has decided to unveil a new and rather unique uniform for the NCAA Tournament. While Baylor is not the only school to choose to wear uniforms of this design they do appear to have the most shocking color. We are just hoping these uniforms do not do anything to our HDTVs (assuming the Bears are on long enough to leave an impression).
In the 13th annual All-Glue team, Seth Davis selects seven players who you are certainly familiar with, but for the most part are not the reason that you watch the game. Instead, these are the players that inevitably make the little plays that lead the to the play that the star gets on SportsCenter for. Looking back through the previous members of the team, the one thing that stands out is that very few of them ended up with significant NBA careers, but almost all of them left a significant impact on college basketball.
Illinois fans might be itching to fire Bruce Weber, but they might reconsider their stance now that the family of Jabari Parker has come out and said that firing Weber would make it more difficult for the school to land Parker. While we many families have made ridiculous statements about recruiting this one appears to be legitimate. As the family says, Parker’s recruitment has been a prolonged courtship and bringing in a new partner into the arrangement could make it difficult to finalize anything in a relatively short period of time. In the end, it would probably be wise for Illinois to ignore this and take the hit of potentially losing a superstar player who would probably be one-and-done for a chance to move the program in another direction if it deems such a move necessary.
We’ve spent the last couple weeks prognosticating and projecting the Big Ten Tournament bracket for this upcoming weekend in Indianapolis, but we now finally have something concrete to work from. The field has been set, and it’s just a matter of a few short days before things get underway. Below are the preliminary matchups with a few things to keep an eye on:
First round on Thursday:
#8 Iowa vs. #9 Illinois (11:30 AM ET on BTN)
#5 Indiana vs. #12 Penn State (25 minutes later, BTN)
#7 Northwestern vs. #10 Minnesota (5:30 PM, ESPN2)
#6 Purdue vs. #11 Nebraska (25 minutes later, ESPN2)
Will the Big Ten Tournament be kind to John Shurna and Northwestern's NCAA Tournament hopes? (Charles Cherney/AP)
Second round on Friday:
#1 Michigan State vs. Iowa/Illinois winner (12:00 PM, ESPN)
#4 Wisconsin vs. Indiana/Penn State winner (25 minutes later, ESPN)
#2 Michigan vs. Northwestern/Minnesota winner (6:30 PM, BTN)
#3 Ohio State vs. Purdue/Nebraska winner (25 minutes later, BTN)
We’ll talk about the semifinals and championship game once we reach that point, but there’s plenty to talk about in the first two days for now.
On Friday, Seth Davis published a series of scouting reports on teams from coaches within their own conference. While none of the analysis will be groundbreaking to those who follow the sport closely it is interesting to see how brutally honest some of these coaches are. For example, a Big East coach said of Connecticut, “The Huskies don’t run offense. I mean they literally don’t run a fricking offense.” We are assuming the coaches know many of these things about their own team, but we would be interested to know if any of the players and/or coaches read these comments and try to make a change based on them. We doubt it, but we imagine that at least a few of them will read these comments and be affected by them at least subconsciously.
If you are the coach du jour this March, you might be wise to consider the tale of Chris Lowery, who in 2007 was one of the hottest coaches in the country and then was fired by Southern Illinois on Friday. Lowery, who has two years remaining on a contract that is scheduled to pay him more than $5 million with a buyout of approximately $1.5 million, took the school to the Sweet 16 in 2007, but finished just 145-116 in eight seasons there. We are not sure where Lowery goes from here, but the hot rumor right now is that Southern Illinois plans to go after its former coach Bruce Weber if (more likely when) he is fired from Illinois.
After going through hundreds of resumes Air Force decided the best option for their next coach was their current coach and on Saturday they announced that they were removing the interim label from the title of Dave Pilipovich to make him their new head coach. Citing a desire to establish continuity for the team and his win over a San Diego State team that was ranked in the top 15 at the time (and leaving out his 1-5 record in his other games), the school opted to retain Pilipovich who will have his first head coaching job after working for 26 years as an assistant.
It takes a special kind of dumb to get kicked off the team with one regular season game remaining in your college career, but apparently Ty Walker is. The 7-foot tall center was dismissed from the Wake Forest team with just one regular season game remaining in his college career for an undisclosed violation of departmental policy. Walker’s troubles in college have been well-documented and his decline from one of the top recruits in the country coming into college to a guy who gets kicked off the team just before his college career is over could be a case study in how not to become a professional basketball player.
It seems like every year we link to a piece on Lenny Cooke, a high school legend who was famously destroyed at ABCD Camp in 2001 by some kid named LeBron. This year’s installment/update comes from The New York Times and takes a look at what has gone wrong in Cooke’s life. While you could probably write a similar story about many high school athletes, few carry the brand-name appeal to people of a certain generation (like the one of the two editors here) as Cooke. For those of you who are not familiar with Cooke’s story, it is essentially similar to the one that is told in Hoop Dreams except that Cooke was considered more of a sure-fire NBA prospect than William Gates ever was.
Tonight’s Lede. On the first night of March, the college basketball slate did not disappoint. It was another packed night around the country, featuring some important Pac-12 action and bubble teams blowing opportunities in home games. We also have our first conference tournament final matchup set, as VMI and UNC-Asheville both completed 20-point victories to advance to the championship of the Big South Tournament. There was much quarterfinal action in other tournaments as well. But first, we highlight a crazy finish in the ACC that left the home team stunned and the visitors in a familiar place — victorious after a game-winning shot…
Your Watercooler Moment. Another Seminole Game-Winner.
The previous two times, it was Michael Snaer. On Thursday night, it was Ian Miller. For the third time this season, Florida State converted a game-winning three-point bucket to give the Seminoles a dramatic win. Virginia led 58-47 with under five minutes to play before the ‘Noles made a late surge that culminated in Miller’s buzzer-beater. This result also has major implications in the ACC, as FSU avoided a three-game losing streak to clinch the #3 seed in the upcoming ACC Tournament. Virginia, meanwhile, is in a bit of trouble after this loss. The Cavaliers now drop to 8-7 in the ACC, tied with NC State, Miami, and Clemson. Despite still being ranked in the Top 25, UVA has to start getting a bit worried about its NCAA Tournament status. The Cavaliers are 21-8 overall but don’t have a particularly strong overall profile, with just one top-40 win that came over Michigan in November. They have the #226 non-conference strength of schedule that includes a bad loss to TCU early in the year. They have an RPI of #39 that will be falling as well — not exactly lock status anymore. Virginia should be alright going forward if it can get a win at Maryland in its season finale, but a loss in that one on Terrapin Senior Night will definitely spell some worries for Tony Bennett’s team.
Tonight’s Quick Hits…
Kentucky Won’t Let Up. Throughout the grueling conference season, nearly all teams end up slipping up at least once along the way. Trap games, long flights, three games in a week — there are plenty of excuses that teams use for poor performances. But John Calipari’s team has played at an elite level the entire season. UK, which leads the country in scoring margin, hammered Georgia from the start on Thursday night to remain undefeated in the SEC heading into its season finale in Gainesville this weekend. Don’t expect a letdown from this team in that one.
No Howland Hangover. Just one day removed from the Sports Illustrated article that shed light on Ben Howland’s loss of control over the UCLA program, the Bruins did not seem at all distracted on the court. UCLA dominated Washington State for a 32-point victory, led by Lazeric Jones’ and Tyler Lamb’s combined 34 points and 10 assists. How crazy would it be if this team shut everyone up and made a run in the Pac-12 Tournament to win the conference and advance to the NCAA Tournament? It’s certainly possible, given the Bruins’ talent and the overall weak state of the Pac-12. Read the rest of this entry »
