The concept of advanced metrics certainly has its critics across the college basketball landscape. Basketball players, especially of the young and unpaid variety, are far from robots that perform exactly as their percentages suggest. We know this because Ohio State did not win the 2011 National Championship, Florida was not in the Final Four last year, and I am not filthy rich from winning gambling bets. It is clear that utilizing advanced statistics such as offensive ratings, offensive rebounding percentages and percentage of possessions must be balanced with what we see on the court, but advanced statistics can give us an in-depth look at a player’s potential.

We know Marshall Henderson scores a lot, but how does he fare when analyzing tempo-free statistics?

To preview the SEC season ahead, we are going to look at players who excelled in advanced and tempo-free metrics last year in an attempt to predict who will be a standout this season. If we know a player scored 14 points per game, we need to know how many times he shot the ball to know how efficient he was. And just because we know a player scored only four points per game doesn’t mean that he was inefficient, but maybe he didn’t see many minutes or play a large role in the offense. Advanced metrics allow us to take our analysis one step further and hopefully serve to make more accurate predictions. Allow us to present our 2013-14 SEC advanced metrics superstar awards (refer to Ken Pomeroy’s explanations page for help with definitions).

SEC Breakout Players

We are looking for players who were largely role players last year but could become major contributors this season. We are specifically examining players with fewer than 60 percent of minutes played last season. And the nominees are…

• Michael Carrera, South Carolina – Carrera was just a freshman last season, but his advanced statistical profile was solid. He had a good offensive rating (102.8) despite being a high volume shooter (25.4% shots and 27.0% poss.). The really impressive part, though? He placed in the top 25 in the nation in both offensive (16.0%) and defensive (25.0%) rebounding percentages. At just 6’5”, Carrera finds a way to come up with the ball.  Look for the Gamecock sophomore to become a centerpiece of Frank Martin’s second year in Columbia.
• Michael Frazier, Florida – A lot of points walked out the door in Gainesville, but Frazier remains. He saw limited action (43.7% minutes) and a limited role on offense (15.8% shots), but he had an offensive rating of 121.2 with incredible three point shooting (46.8%). Can he remain this efficient with an expanded role? His 63.3 percent effective field goal percentage gives us hope that he can.
• Jabari Brown, Missouri – Brown had a 113.4 offensive rating, a 51.6% effective field goal rate, and was part of a very crowded backcourt last season with the Tigers. The crowd has thinned quite a bit, so look for Brown to take a big step forward this year.

SEC Outstanding Rebounders

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1. Yesterday night was filled with exhibition games from many of the top teams in the country (Kentucky, Kansas, Michigan State, and Oklahoma State were all in action), but the most interesting news may have come from the Kansas post-game press conference where Bill Self revealed that Naadir Tharpe will not play in the team’s season opener after violating a NCAA rule by playing in a summer league game in Chicago. Tharpe played well in the team’s exhibition yesterday against Pittsburg State (yes, it is Pittsburg and it is in Kansas not Pennsylvania) putting up nine assists without committing a turnover so we know he can play well against schools that we have never heard of, but by missing their game against Louisiana-Monroe (Frank Mason will start in his place) his next game will be against Duke, a school that we have definitely heard of.
2. With the season a little over one week away most teams are in the process of fine-tuning their line-ups for the opening tip, but UCLA finds itself scrambling to rearrange its lineup after Travis Wear was hospitalized on Monday night for appendicitis. Travis, the more productive of the Wear twins (his brother David also plays for the Bruins), averaged 10.9 points and 5.2 rebounds per game and would probably be UCLA’s top inside player this season. We have no idea how long he will be out (it depends on if he has any complications), but a prolonged absence would create a big hole in the middle for a Bruin team that only has two other serviceable interior players–David Wear and Tony Parker–available at the moment. Fortunately, the Bruins have two exhibition games to adapt before they start the regular season on November 8 and have a very manageable schedule during the month of December.
3. We will have to wait two more weeks until North Carolina announces P.J. Hairston’s suspension, but at least we know how long Ole Miss has suspended Marshall Henderson for multiple behavior-related issues: three games, which will include the regular season opener (against Troy) and the team’s first two SEC games (against Auburn and Mississippi State). The suspension is the result of Henderson’s repeated taunting (or responding) to fans during the season including using his middle finger after Ole Miss lost in the NCAA Tournament as well as being pulled over by local police on May 4 and found to have marijuana and cocaine in his system. Although we find the split suspension a little odd it is good to see that it will have a bigger effect on the team as they are much more likely to be challenged in those SEC games than they would if he had sat the second and third games of the regular season (against Coastal Carolina and Mississippi Valley State). We hope that Henderson can find a way to control his behavior, but still keep that edge that made him such a dangerous player.
4. We usually do not make fun of a player, often a teenager or just beyond that stage, for their indecisiveness, but we might make an exception for Michael Chandler, who committed to Oregon yesterday. The commitment by itself (a 6’10” center from Northwest Florida State, who was forced to go to junior college after failing to academically qualify in 2011) is not particularly remarkable. What is remarkable is the fact that this is at least the fourth school that Chandler has committed to as his previous commitments were to Louisville, Xavier, and UCF before he failed to qualify academically. We hope that Chandler eventually finds his way into Division I basketball, but you will have to forgive us if we hold off in writing his committment to Oregon down in pen.
5. Tanking doesn’t relate directly to college basketball, but you will be hearing about it quite a bit throughout the year as NBA teams lose games in order to increase their chances of landing Andrew Wiggins, Julius Randle, Jabari Parker, or some other highly-coveted college player. So the admission by an anonymous NBA general manager that his team was tanking (known explicitly by everybody, but the players) is somewhat interesting. Obviously the story would be more interesting if it had not been anonymous, but then the GM would no longer be employed. Based on what was said in the story we can probably narrow down the list of potential GMs to a handful of individuals. As the NBA season progresses and a certain number of elite college players emerge we suspect that we will see the list of potential tanking teams grow.

Here we go… headfirst into another season heralded by our 2013-14 edition of Thirty Reasons We Love College Basketball, our annual compendium of YouTube clips from the previous season completely guaranteed to make you wish games were starting tonight. For the next three weeks, you’ll get two hits of excitement each weekday. We’ve captured what we believe were the most compelling moments from last season, some of which will bring back goosebumps and others of which will leave you shaking your head in astonishment. To see the entire released series so far, click here.

#19 – Where Loved, Hated, But Never Ignored Happens.

We also encourage you to re-visit the entire archive of this feature from the 2008-09, 2009-10, 2010-11, 2011-12, and 2012-13 preseasons.

October is here, and that means we are just weeks away from real, live basketball games. In order to prepare you for the first two months of the season, we’re going to break down all 12 non-conference slates over the next couple of weeks. Up next; the Oregon schools.

Teams are listed in order of which they will be played. Last season’s RPI in parenthesis. Potential opponents (one round in advance) are italicized. All times listed are Pacific.

Oregon

Dana Altman’s Oregon Team Is On The Rise, But They Have A Few Tests To Handle Before Pac-12 Play Begins In January. (credit: Alex Brandon)

Cream of the Crop: vs Georgetown (11), vs Illinois (40)

Oregon has managed to get two high profile, neutral site games on its non-conference schedule. The Ducks will face Georgetown on opening night at Camp Humphreys, South Korea, in a game to be televised by ESPN. The Hoyas finished 2012-13 with a 25-7 record and notched six victories over Top 25 opponents. Of course, the last time we saw Georgetown, it was getting dunked all over by Florida Gulf Coast in an NCAA Tournament opener. Oregon’s second marquee opponent is Illinois, who they will meet in Portland on December 14 at 6:00 PM in a game also televised by the ESPN family of networks. It looked as if this would be a return game for former Oregon State point guard Ahmad Starks, but his transfer waiver was denied last week by the NCAA. The Fighting Illini are still loaded at guard, with both Tracy Abrams and Joseph Bertrand returning.

Solid Names: San Francisco (167), Pacific (97), Cal Poly (164), @ Mississippi (48), UC Irvine (126), BYU (63)

Mississippi headlines the second group, and the Ducks and Rebels will meet December 8 in Oxford. The game will tipoff at 2:00 PM and be carried by ESPNU. Dynamite senior Marshall Henderson is back after leading Ole Miss with 20.1 PPG last year, and while the guard is currently suspended, he will likely be back by December. Outside of him, however, the Rebels are pretty thin, and a finish in the lower half of the SEC is likely. BYU presents a challenge for Oregon. The Ducks and Cougars will play December 21 in Eugene, and the team that won 24 games in the 2012-13 campaign is expected to compete with Gonzaga for the WCC title. Pacific is the only other team on Oregon’s non-conference slate with a double digit RPI.

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1. Yesterday we mentioned that SI.com‘s Andy Glockner was brewing up a firestorm with his series of articles ranking the top 20 current programs in college basketball. Such an endeavor has two verifiable truths: first, everyone loves lists; second, everyone loves to rip lists. With that in mind (and he’s well aware of those truths), his honorable mentions came out Monday, followed by his rankings of programs from #16 to #20 on Tuesday. In order, let’s welcome Gonzaga, Illinois, Michigan, Georgetown and Texas to the top 20. Of this group, we’re having the most trouble with the Illinois pick at #19. The Illini had a renaissance season under the tutelage of new head coach John Groce last year, but spent most of the previous five years struggling to regain its national relevance of the early-to-mid 2000s. We realize of course that Glockner is using historical and other qualitative metrics to make these determinations, but we probably would have had Pittsburgh, Marquette, Xavier and several others ahead of the Illini. Still, that’s nitpicky. What will really make or break this list will be how Glockner handles the top five (and the fans of the four runners-up will let him know it!). We’re excited to see the next group released later today.
2. As more and more people marry themselves to the idea that college football and basketball players are being exploited by their schools and the NCAA, we’ll continue to see analyses like one from Business Insider published on Tuesday. Their methodology for determining the fair market value of players at the top 25 revenue-producing football schools is quite simple, probably overly simple — just multiply football revenue by 47 percent (per the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement with its players), then divide by the number of scholarships (85). What BI found mimics the numbers we’ve seen elsewhere — at the richest athletic schools such as Texas, Alabama and Michigan, college football players are worth roughly a half-million dollars each annually in value. The same analysis is also easy enough to do for college basketball players. Louisville‘s hoops revenue of $42.4 million in 2012 is divided in half given the NBA’s rough 50/50 split with the players, leaving $21.2 million to be split 13 ways. The result: a Cardinals’ basketball player is worth $1.63 million to the university (if you buy into this methodology). This is the mistake that many of these gridiron-centric analyses don’t realize — while it’s definitely true that football provides more aggregate revenue to the schools, the players in college basketball are individually much more valuable. If you want to make the point most strongly, which is the better headline? Texas football players are worth a half-million each; or Louisville basketball players are worth three times that much?
3. While on the subject of football powers, the NCAA announced yesterday that Penn State would regain some of the football scholarships it lost as a result of the Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse scandal. In announcing the removal of those sanctions, the NCAA recognized that the school had made great efforts to change its culture of abuse but NCAA president Mark Emmert made it clear that other schools shouldn’t expect a reduction in their own penalties. That’s too bad, writes The Dagger‘s Jeff Eisenberg, who outlines four major recent (and fixable) misfires by the NCAA, two of which were focused on men’s basketball. The most well-known example, of course, was the NCAA’s “strict liability” punishment on Memphis for playing Derrick Rose in the 2007-08 season, even though the NCAA Clearinghouse had deemed him eligible to play before that season. The other is far less recognizable, involving the NCAA’s decision to rule that Old Dominion’s Donte Hill was ineligible for his senior season because he played eight minutes in a closed-door preseason scrimmage against Clemson back in 2010. We’re quite sure that we could probably come up with a dozen more of these if we spent the time on it, but Eisenberg’s list is a good place to start. It wouldn’t hurt the NCAA to consider more reductions (or commutation) of sentences based on additional facts, precedents and behaviors.
4. What’s a Final Four appearance worth to an MVC school like Wichita State? We’ll have to wait for the Business Insider analysis on that one, but it’s at least worth around $600,000 to its head coach, Gregg Marshall. The university announced his new salary on Tuesday, with a base of $1.6 million that kicks in this November and another raise to $1.75 million that begins next April. The long-underrated head coach will move into the top 25 or so highest-paid college basketball coaches as a result of this raise, which is a substantial financial commitment for a school living outside the Power Six or Seven hoops leagues. But Final Four appearances at schools like Wichita State tend to result in ironclad job security.
5. Believe it or not, but with the new practice rules in effect this season, schools will actually begin suiting up for real, live, full-on practices this Friday. As in 48 hours from now. One of the players who will definitely be there to play post-practice games of HORSE with his teammates is Ole Miss’ Marshall Henderson. As reported by Gary Parrish at CBSSports.com, Andy Kennedy expects the all-SEC shooting guard to be on the floor Friday. The controversial shooting guard reportedly failed multiple drug tests and spent much of the offseason “suspended” from the team, whatever that means, but let’s be honest with ourselves here. There aren’t all that many name-brand players who pass through Oxford, Mississippi — especially in roundball — so there was not much of a question as to whether Henderson would suit up this year.

Bennet Hayes is an RTC columnist. He can be reached @HoopsTraveler.

Whether you are a member of the media and present by necessity, or if you are simply a fan sitting on your couch after midnight (that witching hour when ESPNews suddenly equates to programming gold), you have all been dragged through that same presser. The one where the coach tells you about how happy he is despite the loss, “because his guys competed for 40 minutes.” The one where the winning coach still isn’t that happy, because “this game was just another one on the schedule.” And yes, here comes the moment when both coaches admit to knowing they “can’t get too up or down about tonight” because the college basketball season is most surely a marathon, not a sprint. Coachspeak is everywhere these days, and with the mounting media attention on even the smallest of college programs, it’s difficult to blame coaches and players for sticking to this unoriginal script. They may be boring us as fans and media, but they become sure to avoid the negative PR that can accompany even the smallest of verbal missteps. So what happens when we find a coach or player who doesn’t seem to have received this most banal of memos? We pay attention. And right now, there are no two college athletes (in their respective sports) that we pay attention to more than Johnny “Football” Manziel and Marshall Henderson.

Henderson’s on-court antics, by and large, captivated college basketball fans last season. His recent issues off the court have proven equally attention-grabbing, for all the wrong reasons.

The tales of Manziel and Henderson are far from identical, but both are prominent college athletes who have drizzled a little extra flavor on their public personas (both on and off the field/court). Each has experienced the boon in media attention, fans, and Twitter followers that comes with not only being a standout on the court, but a colorful personality off it. However, armed with the nation’s collective eye, both have also felt the flip side of the fame – the inevitable backlash that comes when you take that reckless behavior a step too far. Manziel’s discretions have been less serious than those of Henderson, particularly in the eyes of the law, but his most recent blunder— leaving the Manning passing camp early due to alleged misbehavior — has had no problems finding every major news outlet. Henderson’s trouble-making at Ole Miss had largely been limited to brash behavior on the court and some equally unfiltered commentary off of it (#whitegirlwednesday) — that is, until he was indefinitely suspended last week after being arrested for cocaine and marijuana possession.

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1. Over the weekend much of the college basketball world was focused on Georgia for the well-known Peach Jam event but it is not the only significant recruiting event of the summer. As those who have followed the recruiting scene know there are a myriad of events over the summer. One of the newly created events called “The8” will be played later this month and feature eight teams with top college recruits coached by current or former NBA players. We do not know who all of the coaches will be for the event, but it will include Chris Paul, Carmelo Anthony, Anthony Davis, and Kenny Smith among others. We are all well-aware of how AAU coaches can steer players to certain program so we would not be surprised to see these coaches guide their players to their former school although it probably will not violate NCAA rules since the coaches as former NBA players probably would not care about the type of payments that get AAU coaches to break NCAA rules and steer their players to specific schools.
2. It seems like with each new day another Marshall Henderson report surfaces that makes his return seem more unlikely. The most news that Henderson had clashed with police for various issues that would be considered minor–playing his music too loud and not wearing a seat belt–if it were not for his issues with more serious arrests. Obviously these are relatively minor issues that would get overlooked for the vast majority of college athletes. The issue with Henderson is one of his disregard for the law and the more incidents he has had (no matter how minor they might be) the worse it looks for him and the program. At this point we would surprised to see Henderson remain with the program and if he does he probably will be sitting out a significant portion of the season. Given all of Henderson’s problems it would probably be best for everybody involved if that was the case.
3. The issues surrounding P.J. Hairston may not move the needle like they do with the Marshall Henderson story for a variety of reasons, but at this point it seems like North Carolina will have to part ways with Hairston as a police report from Hairston’s June arrest indicates among other things that Hairston knowingly accepted the rental vehicle from Haydn “Fats” Thomas. The UNC administration has remained quiet on the issue and we guess they technically can do so up until the season starts in November, but even for a school that is involved in an academic scandal that should be of far greater concern from an institutional level than anything any other program has seen (Penn State excepted) the optics of this no matter the excuse look bad for the school. The NCAA is notorious for dragging their heels before releasing a judgement on eligibility issues so the onus is on the UNC administration to step in and sever ties with Hairston before the NCAA is forced to step in.
4. We still are several months away from the season starting, but we already are seeing signs of what might be one of the biggest stories of the 2013-2014 season: the 2014 NBA Draft. Obviously we love the college game for what it is, but this season will also attract a fairly new breed of college basketball fans–NBA fans checking out college basketball for the player who could be their franchise’s savior. Most of the attention leading into the season has been focused on Andrew Wiggins, but as fans will quickly realize there are quite a few more potential saviors out there. We just hope that the players themselves do not get caught up in the hype and let their games speak for themselves without feeling the need to show off for the scouts.
5. We usually do not cover programs like Mississippi Valley State (honestly do not know anything about it other than Jerry Rice went there) so when it gets mentioned in this space it is almost certainly for a bad reason. That is the case here as the school suspended head coach Chico Potts indefinitely with pay after he was arrested earlier this month for domestic violence. Potts, who went 5-23 in his first season as a head coach, will be replaced on an interim basis by assistant coach Marcus Thomas. The school says that it will keep Potts under suspension until it completes its review of the case. We are not sure what kind of budget Mississippi Valley State has to investigate these type of cases, but we suspect that if they are following that thoroughly we will not see a decision until the case is adjudicated.

1. The story surrounding Marshall Henderson‘s suspension continues to evolve with the latest news being that he was pulled over on May 4 for speeding (the article says “suspicion of speeding”, but we have no idea what that means). When the officer approached the car he smelled marijuana and Henderson handed him a bag containing marijuana and a subsequent search revealed a small amount of cocaine. Additional details around the traffic stop remain unclear, but it appears that Henderson was only issued a citation for not having insurance and somehow was not cited for possession of drugs. We are not clear on the drug laws in Mississippi, but it appears that an individual would not be prosecuted if the amount of cocaine was less than one-tenth of a gram so perhaps Henderson was able to escape the school’s radar for the time if they were not informed of this part of the citation.
2. However, as Andy Katz notes the Mississippi staff tried to address Henderson’s substance abuse issues at least six weeks ago as when they reached out to former basketball star turned drug abuse speaker Chris Herren to help get through to Henderson. As you might have guessed the call was never returned and Henderson continued his downward spiral in some course leading to the announcement of his suspension yesterday. It appears that Henderson has finally spoken with Herren so it appears that at least that line is open to Henderson. We voiced our opinion on how the media (and the public) handles issues around substance abuse in particular when combined with race, but we just hope that Henderson is able to get his life together even if that does not involve a significant basketball career.
3. The next round of criticism of the NCAA is set to begin with USA Today‘s analysis of the the NCAA’s 2011 tax return. Among the interesting aspects of the document the one that will probably get the most attention is the Mark Emmert’s compensation package totaling $1,674,095, which is primarily base compensation ($1,201,159), but also includes retirement/deferred compensation ($234,300), undefined reportable compensation ($214,947), and nontaxable benefits ($23,689). Although the overall size of his compensation package is not that outlandish compared to many CEOs of public companies it will certainly raise some eyebrows especially given the political environment surrounding the NCAA now. As the article notes there were three other executives who made more than $500,000 that year. The other interesting aspect of the tax return was that it spent $9.5 million on legal expenses during the fiscal year. We have no idea what the breakdown of that was in terms of legal action against it or to pay for its legal counsel in ongoing cases, but we figure that with the momentum behind the Ed O’Bannon case that number may rise over the next few years.
4. One of the issues surrounding prep schools (aka basketball factories) is the concern that many of their players will not be eligible to play college athletics due to issues regarding their academic workload at these “schools”. Prime Prep, a school in Texas co-founded by Deion Sanders, appears to be one of those schools and yesterday the NCAA ruled that two of its graduates–Jordan Mickey and Karviar Shephard—were not academically eligible due to academic issues at the school. Mickey, a top-50 recruit who committed to LSU, and Shepherd, a top-100 player who committed to TCU, reportedly had been informed by the school that they would be eligible to play NCAA sports with their grades and the coursework they had completed. However, that appears not to be the case. Some people may point out that it is the student’s responsibility to make sure they are eligible, but realistically this falls on the school because you cannot expect a teenager, who is at most 18- (or 19-) years old to be able to navigate all the details of NCAA eligibility without the help of experienced adult. Both players will appeal the decision, but may have to sit out this season. It is worth keeping an eye on this because the school also has two players who are top-5 players in the next two graduating classes.
5. Last December, Mississippi State and Loyola (IL) played a game to commemorate the 50th anniversary of their historic NCAA Tournament game where the Mississippi State players had to sneak out of Mississippi in order to play an integrated team. Many view it as one of the key moments in sports in relation to the civil rights movement of the era (one that would eventually be overshadowed in the annals of history by the 1966 NCAA Championship Game). On Saturday, Leland Mitchell, one of the most prominent players on that Mississippi State team died at his home in Starkville. Mitchell, who had 14 points and 11 rebounds in the game before fouling out with over six minutes remaining in the 61-51 loss, and his teammates acknowledged that they did not understand the significance of the game at the time in the context of the larger social change that was happening around them. As Mitchell noted, “We were making history. We were ambassadors for the South, though none of us realized it at the time.”

1. A little more than a decade ago, a brash young rapper by the name of Marshall Mathers asked us if the “real Slim Shady” would please stand up and take responsibility for his actions. He could have easily been talking about another Marshall in present day — a bad boy Rebel from Ole Miss who plays the game with a certain, shall we say, modernist panache. The most polarizing figure in college basketball, Marshall Henderson, was reportedly suspended indefinitely by the school for a drug violation. According to Gary Parrish, there are legitimate concerns within the university whether he will be allowed to return to the team. Given that Henderson finds trouble nearly anywhere he travels both on and off the basketball court, it’s certainly no surprise that he’s finally run afoul of Andy Kennedy’s team rules. Could this mean that the gifted but certifiable shooting guard who averaged over 20 points per game last season could find himself at his fifth school in five years? Stay tuned on this one – like Mathers, Henderson isn’t one to stay quiet for very long.
2. Trouble just seems to stick to certain people, and at least lately, North Carolina’s PJ Hairston appears to be one of those unfortunate souls. Yet his school, an institution that outwardly takes its integrity very seriously, has been up to this point largely quiet on the ramifications of his June 5 arrest and subsequent revelations that he apparently has some unknown association with convicted felon Haydn Thomas. Athletic director Bubba Cunningham went before the media on Wednesday to discuss the matter, and the tone and general theme of his comments echoed the tried-and-true of the Carolina Way in recent years: Nothing to see at this time. Parroting Roy Williams’ statements from last week, the school does not plan on discussing or doing anything until all the facts are learned. For those of you unfamiliar with organizational theory and messaging, the last part is silent: …until we figure out how to mitigate and manage any possible fallout so that the outcome puts us in the best possible light. Thank you. At least one prominent writer thinks this is the correct play, at least until Hairston is back at school and enrolled in classes a little more than a month from now.
3. There are meaningful statistics and there are manufactured statistics. The difference between the two is sometimes difficult to discern, but the Wall Street Journal has provided us with a fantastic example of such a debate this week. We’ll have more on this later this afternoon, but the analytical premise in this article by Ben Cohen is that college teams with two top five NBA Draft picks in their lineups should be really, really good. Even accounting for the fact that the NBA Draft has moved from a model of demonstrated production three decades ago to one today of relative upside and potential, it’s a reasonably safe tenet. But to make the next logical leap and to assert that a team with those two draft picks has markedly underachieved relative to its peers (Cohen found 13 such two-high-draftee instances), well, that’s where Indiana found itself this week. The Hoosiers only made the Sweet Sixteen with Cody Zeller and Victor Oladipo in this year’s lineup, which when compared with Cohen’s cohort, ties 2002 Duke and 1984 North Carolina as the biggest underachievers in college basketball history. At least that’s the assertion of the piece — and it couldn’t be more wrong. This is a manufactured statistic, because what the analysis fails to tell you here is that there are a number of other talented players on each of those 13 other teams that had a significant effect on their season outcomes. Cohen also glosses over the regular season dominance of those Duke and UNC teams by suggesting that their draft picks had won titles in a previous year — true, but not relevant to that year’s team. IU head coach Tom Crean fired back in reference to the article, tweeting that the duo won 54 games in two seasons and have left the program in great shape heading into the future. Although we’ve consistently argued that Indiana was never as good as its ranking last season, we don’t think that the Hoosiers significantly underachieved relative to the overall talent it had on the floor, or the rest of the nation at-large. More on this later.
4. Kentucky’s Rupp Arena is without question one of the iconic buildings in all of college basketball, but its off-campus location, sheer size and affiliation with a downtown hotel and shopping mall has always felt a bit too sterile and dissociated when compared to the more intimate campus sites around the country. Regardless of that, the mid-70s building is vastly in need of an upgrade, and the Lexington Center Corporation board announced on Wednesday that it had finalized an architectural firm and a builder to provide a two-year facelift that will move the building into the 21st century, and essentially, make the place much cooler. The most interesting aspect from our eyes is that the building will become a stand-alone entity, no longer affixed to the hotel/mall complex, so we’re wondering what that will look like. UK fans, even in mid-July, wasted no time in offering up some advice on possible corporate naming partners (the “Rupp Arena” part isn’t going away). Our favorite: Makers Mark Rupp Arena, with the entire building dipped in blue wax (h/t Jen Smith of the LHL).
5. Finally, the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports‘ annual report on collegiate sports was released on Wednesday, and the headline that was blasted all over the country is that college athletics received a gentleman’s B with respect to diversity in hiring. Digging a bit deeper, though, and some unsettling numbers come to light. Most notably, a “major area of concern” is the steady decrease of black head coaches in men’s Division I basketball, now at 18.6 percent of all positions. This number reflects the lowest percentage in the sport in nearly two decades (1995-96), and is down significantly from an all-time high of 25.2 percent of all head coaches just seven seasons ago (2005-06). Whether this downward trend simply reflects variance in the data or something more sinister is unclear, but it is definitely something that the NCAA should continue to track and take seriously. Given that over 60 percent of D-I men’s basketball student-athletes are black themselves, initiatives to ensure diversity in recruitment and hiring are definitely worth pursuing.

Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

So much ridicule and scorn has been shoveled on top of the NCAA in recent months that it almost feels redundant to criticize at this point – like a Ferrari-wielding millionaire challenging his Prius-owning cousin to a street race, or the O’Doyle family ribbing Billy Madison through grade school, or USC fans simmering over Wednesday’s news of the congratulatory back slap Oregon received for illegal payments to a recruiting handler. The harsh tones of NCAA critiques have coursed through every contingent of college sports media at one phase or another this offseason, and today, after going down that path on several occasions myself, I’m just not feeling up to it. Sorry.

The punishments handed down to Self and Marshall will be forgotten by the start of the season (AP Photo).

But if you got me in the mood, I might be able to talk about how profoundly funny it was Wednesday to learn the NCAA had issued a public reprimand of Bill Self for a scoring table fist palm during Kansas’s third-round NCAA Tournament match-up with North Carolina that was so destructive he needed to be reminded of his unseemly game behavior three months after the fact. I can picture Self now, watching Andrew Wiggins do ridiculous free-throw line dunks from a comfortable lounge chair, smarting in the Kansas basketball offices while counting his nine Big 12 championship rings. “Ouch, that really hurt!” Self’s sideline demeanor was too publicly unbecoming – because coaches showing emotion during a game is a really bad thing; the NCAA says it, and so it shall be – and too tawdry for a coach who, by all accounts, is one of the purest and most morally pure sideline presences not just in college basketball, but any college sport.

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