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

Watching under-performing forward Tarik Black walk away from his final year of eligibility at Memphis (and jump to Kansas) hurt. It was a shot – not lethal or even multi-wins-altering, but a shot – at Memphis’ very bright outlook in 2013. Waving farewell to hyper-talented if half-bloomed wing Adonis Thomas, who declared for the NBA draft after an underwhelming sophomore season, was another blow. The departures were starting to pile up, and the Tigers, populated with a quality three-man returning backcourt though they were, needed something to balance the scale. Michael Dixon’s reported commitment does more than that. If the rumors are true — and as of Wednesday afternoon, after ESPN’s Jason King got text message confirmation from Dixon denying what Memphis fans were no doubt all too ready to assume, that’s really all we have right now; rumors — the scab-picking losses of Black and Thomas and gives Josh Pastner another dynamic backcourt scorer to put Memphis in tip-top shape right as they dive into a new league, the AAC.

The possibility of having more speed, quickness and play-making flair to Memphis’ backcourt could shake up the inaugural AAC title chase (US Presswire).

This is all really encouraging stuff (again, to reiterate: nothing is official just yet) for Memphis fans, and I would like to perk up and say I agree, that it’s just as rosy and auspicious as it all sounds, but alas: the hard news. Dixon can only play for the Tigers this season if his appeal for an NCAA waiver is granted. If something seems curiously wrong here and if you are wondering why Dixon should have to sit out another season after being kicked off the Missouri team last year after being charged with sexual assault, your concerns are valid. They also have a simple answer. Dixon, you see, didn’t play in any games last year, but was enrolled in classes to begin the fall semester. That academic involvement could push Dixon’s highly-anticipated return – and after averaging 13.5 points and posting a 122.7 offensive rating in 2012, with the chance to enter a Memphis backcourt that would almost immediately join the likes of Louisville and UConn in tier of elite AAC guard posses, who doesn’t want to see Dixon skip the procedural one-year transfer penalty? – to next season, which wouldn’t challenge Memphis’ likely status in the preseason Top-25, or even really raise questions about the Tigers’ ability to jump headfirst into the Conference USA-reduxed AAC. In the event Dixon can’t play upon arrival, Memphis would still be formidable, still be picked to finish in the top half of its new league and still almost surely earn Pastner his second consecutive NCAA Tournament birth. But you can bet your bottom dollar the Tigers want Dixon around, this year, with this team. Read the rest of this entry »

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

In professional sports, the offseason is when most teams proactively set out with clearly defined roster goals, scour the personnel grapevine and come up with intricate ways to improve their respective outfits within the limiting constructs of salary cap barriers. Teams dangle mid-level exceptions and veteran minimum deals in the hopes of discovering that year’s market inefficiency. LeBron James goes on national television, announces his decision to join the Miami Heat, generating millions of dollars for local Boys & Girls Clubs charities in the act, and immediately transforms into some variation of demonic NBA anti-Christ. That is, in its most polarized narrative rendering, the very essence of free agency – player movement, buzz, flash, improvement, cost-cutting, not-five-not-six-not-seven-championships-type stuff. It’s a complex system that involves a tsunami of minor contingencies and rules, each sport offering its own unique guidelines to control the same underlying concept: free player movement.

Landing Black, after landing Wiggins, makes Kansas the Big 12 frontrunner in 2013-14 (AP Photo).

College sports are different. The nomadic tides of inter-team player voyages is much easier to follow, the stipulations and legislative jargon more streamlined and simply understood. There are two primary ways teams go about acquiring new players. The first is the transfer, which is complex only when coaches and players make it so – but the idea is simple. A player leaves one school, finds a new one, and begins his career in a new and hopefully more personally gratifying location. The more common mechanism underpinning the constant churn of the player-eligibility cycle is recruiting. First year players replace last year’s first year players, moving up the ladder and burning eligibility along the way, right up until the clock runs out and careers come to a screeching halt. Kansas used both avenues to improve its perennially dominant basketball program this offseason. If you live under a rock, or somehow happened to gloss over the fact that the best high school prospect of the past decade announced his college choice last week, the name Andrew Wiggins probably remains something like an ethereal, distant, fairy-tale concept. If you’re up to snuff on even the most nebulous outer fringes of  the college hoops news cycle, the name should ring a bell. Wiggins did announce his intention to play his (assumed) one season of college basketball at Kansas, and on Monday night KU learned its bullish offseason fortunes were only just beginning.

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1. Perhaps feeling green with envy that Louisville’s Rick Pitino (championship, tattoo, Derby) and Kentucky’s John Calipari (recruiting, NCAA) were receiving all the offseason college basketball attention, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski got himself back into the conversation this week with his comment to SI.com‘s Pete Thamel that he is considering a return to coach USA Basketball’s men’s national team again in 2014 (Worlds) and 2016 (Olympics). We’re kidding about the jealousy bit — sorta — but coaches gotta coach, and everyone has trouble stepping away from doing the thing they love most. Mike DeCourcy writes that the numerous Duke haters who simply cannot endure anything associated with the four-time national championship head coach miss the point — Coach K (and certainly Jerry Colangelo) made the concept of preparing and competing for Team USA cool again. Prior to their involvement, players showed up and expected to win simply because, well, because they thought they could. Miserable performances in the 2002 Worlds (sixth) and 2004 Olympics (third) led to the system we now have in place, and for that Krzyzewski should absolutely be lauded and celebrated by every American who cares about USA basketball.
2. It certainly doesn’t have the ring or cachet of its predecessor at the Garden, but the inaugural AAC Tournament is beginning to look a lot like the old Conference USA Tournament (and the old Great Midwest Tournament; and the old Metro Tournament) in that it may be headed to Memphis. Don’t get us wrong, the city of Memphis has a tremendous local fan base that loves college basketball and will fill the FedEx Forum with their beloved Tigers now in the new league. But can we liven this thing up a little bit in its first go-round — how about slotting in the top four seeds into the conference semifinals and leaving it at that? A semifinal round of Louisville, Cincinnati, Memphis and Connecticut next March wouldn’t be awful, and we’ll even allow you to throw in Temple in place of Cincy if the Bearcats falter. Deal?
3. We’re a big believer in second chances, especially when someone who has done wrong can show that they’ve learned from their previous mistakes. Still, we believe there should be limitations to those reprisals, and we’re having a little trouble swallowing the Zay Jackson story at Murray State. You remember Jackson — he was the Racer guard who rather infamously ran over a man with his car in a Walmart parking lot last September — according to Andy Katz’s report earlier this week, after serving 49 days in jail for hit-and-run, MSU’s athletic department has decided to allow him back on the team. The school apparently (?) did not have a protocol to deal with situations like these, but how about a protocol of redemption and common sense? Again, we support the concept of a second chance. The young man served his time and by all indications hasn’t caused any problems since his release. But wouldn’t this be a situation where both parties would be better served by shaking hands with each other and walking away? Wouldn’t Jackson want to have a fresh start at another school? Does Steve Prohm really want to endure the endless mocking and jeering his team will suffer as a result of this decision? At a minimum, how about ensuring that Jackson can keep his nose clean for an entire year (just school and practice) before allowing him the privilege of playing college basketball again? Poor form here, we’re afraid.
4. Depending on whom you ask, the voluminous and growing number of transfers is destroying the integrity of the collegiate game or finally shifting the balance of power back to the producers of all that money flowing to the schools — the players. But the coaches still have several dirty tricks up their sleeve when needed, and the power to “block” transfers from alighting to certain schools is one of the more nefarious ones. Sometimes the notion derives from a misguided but legitimate attempt to protect “trade secrets,” but more often it just seems that the coaches are vindictively limiting the players simply because they can. Vanderbilt head coach Kevin Stallings’ blockage of freshman Sheldon Jeter from transferring closer to his hometown school of Pittsburgh has the look and feel of exactly that. Pitt and Vandy are not in the same league, nor are they scheduled to play next season; in fact, they haven’t played in over two decades. So what’s the deal here? Why on earth would Vanderbilt care if a mediocre freshman wanted to play closer to home for the rest of his career — what possible reason could Stallings have other than “because he can.” Remember, college athletics is about the student-athletes.
5. Remember the San Diego/Brandon Johnson bribery incident a couple of years ago? That’s OK, nobody else does either. For something that supposedly destroys the very integrity of a sport by its very existence, it sure seems as if incidents like these are quickly reported and summarily swept right on under the rug so as to not get in the way of moving right along. As this FBI narrative reports, Johnson was convicted of point shaving during four games in the 2009-10 season, and he was ultimately outed when the criminal enterprise that had recruited him was investigated for drug trafficking. The FBI report states that “tampering with sports events strikes at the integrity of the games; this kind of betrayal is not merely disappointing—it is criminal and worthy of prosecution,” but the greater public has largely not seemed to care all that much. They still attend and watch games, fill out brackets, and enjoy all the other accessories of being a college sports fan. Maybe we’re all so ambivalent to scandal that we’ve become accustomed to it — as a sort of new normalcy. Oh hey, IRS. How’s it going?

1. It appears that Eddie Jordan never did directly claim to be a Rutgers graduate although his methods of saying so may be interpreted as being deceptive. Yesterday, CBS released the biography that Jordan had provided the school as part of his application. It does “absolve” Jordan of a majority of the blame and does point out that even if Jordan is not a college graduate he understands semantics well enough to utilize the phrase “alma mater” to his advantage when applying for a job there. The bigger question is why Rutgers a school with access to its own records did not bother checking into the statement a little more closely.
2. One of the most painful aspects of conference realignment (outside of having to reorganize our microsites) was the loss of traditional rivalries due to heavier conference schedules. One of the bigger non-conference rivalries that appeared to be on the chopping block was Memphis and Tennessee. Now it appears that fans of those two schools may be getting an early Christmas present as the schools appear to be on the verge of continuing their series. There are still several issues to work out before the deal is finalized, but moves like this help restore our faith in the idea that schools are about more than just making money.
3. One of the many issues that people have been advocating for reform at the NCAA level is the idea of multi-year scholarships rather than the one-year renewable scholarships that can be pulled by schools without any penalty to the school. The latest such example of the downside of this appears to be former St. Louis freshman Jared Drew who after redshirting his freshman season was told by the coaching staff that his scholarship would not be renewed as he did not fit with the direction they were going in. We have no idea if there were other issues going on in the background (academic or disciplinary) that may have led the school to make that decision, but with nothing stated or public it appears that the new coaching staff simply felt that they could get better players. Perhaps some news will come out explaining another reason for why Drew was let go, but at this time it makes St. Louis look bad and probably will not help them on the recruiting trail.
4. Even though gambling is still illegal in much of the country so this only applies to a very small part of the country and for the rest of the country it can just be viewed as an interesting academic exercise in statistics Andy Glockner took a look at some of the post-Andrew Wiggins decision championship odds and found some intriguing values. The odds on the teams listed all appear to be pretty good values, but the one that sticks out the most to us would definitely be Louisville. For a defending champion to be returning that many key pieces and have one of the best college basketball coaches ever and still have 12-1 odds to win the title seems off even if their in-state rival has what many media members are hyping up as the greatest recruiting class ever.
5. Dick Vitale may be a controversial figure for some, but there are two things about him that nobody can argue about–his love of college basketball and his passion for raising money for cancer awareness. With his 8th Annual Dick Vitale Gala he is expected to cross the $10 million mark in funds raised for cancer research. As you would expect the guest list for the event is pretty impressive and is projected to break last year’s record of $1.8 million raised. We wish Dick the best in his work in raising money for research, but more importantly we wish anybody affected by this devastating condition(s) the best in what they are going through.

Despite the fact that there was no postseason at the end of the tunnel thanks to the academic sins of those who came before them, UConn put together quite a remarkable season that should have Huskies’ fans excited about the future of their program. The year started with question marks on everything from who would play in the frontcourt to whether interim coach Kevin Ollie would become Jim Calhoun’s permanent successor. It ended with Ollie as the team’s head coach for the future and the squad winning a mildly surprising 20 games, including a 10-8 mark in Big East play, en route to somewhat of a feel-good story for coach and program. Let’s go deeper inside UConn’s season:

Preseason Expectations

The Huskies were one of the easier teams in the conference to predict but our scribes at the microsite proved at least slightly more accurate than the coaches as we pegged the Huskies to finish 8th, which is where they finished (the coaches pegged them 9th). The expectations were easy once it became clear that the team was going to play hard all season for Ollie. Many figured that their issues in the frontcourt and no prospect of the postseason would put the Huskies near the bottom of the conference. But they also understood that in Shabazz Napier, Ryan Boatright, and DeAndre Daniels, there was enough talent in place for UConn to compete with most every team if things went well — which is pretty much exactly what they did.

Shabazz Napier Was A Big Reason UConn Stayed Competitive This Season

The Good

First things first, this season could have just as easily gone off the rails if the Huskies couldn’t stay motivated, so head coach Kevin Ollie deserves major kudos for the job he did with his new team and apparently the school agreed because midway through the season UConn removed the interim tag from his position. Not only did Ollie keep the team motivated (they only lost two games by more than 10 points and one was to that Louisville buzzsaw), but he helped the squad become an above-average team on both ends that was truly only hampered by its inability to rebound and defend the post. He has also already proven his recruiting chops and should continue to be a more-than-capable replacement for Calhoun. Napier (17.1 PPG, 4.6 APG, 4.4 RPG, 44.1 FG%) became a more judicious shot-taker, an excellent free throw shooter and one of the best floor generals in the conference, setting the stage for what should be a tremendous senior season. Boatright (15.1 PPG, 4.4 APG, 42.9 FG%) also saw an uptick in his numbers, although that had something to do with his more prominent role in the offense and an increase in shots attempted. If he can cut down on turnovers and improve his three-point shooting a bit, there will be little doubt which team has the best backcourt in the conference next season. But the man who showed the most improvement was sophomore forward DeAndre Daniels. A non-factor in limited minutes as a freshman (3.0 PPG, 2.1 RPG, 34.1 FG%), the Huskies were counting on the uber-talented sophomore to make a leap and he didn’t disappoint, averaging 12.1 PPG and 5.5 RPG while shooting better than 46 percent from the field and turning into one of the better shot-blockers in the conference. Without Daniels, the Huskies would have been lucky to win 15 games this season.

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Coming off a Sweet Sixteen appearance last season, hopes were high for this season’s version of the Cincinnati Bearcats. Unfortunately, after a hot start in the non-conference portion of their schedule, some of their weaknesses were exposed in conference play and a clear inability to score consistently held the team back as it finished 22-12 and 9-9 in the Big East before losing in the Second Round of the NCAA Tournament to Creighton. It was a relatively disappointing season after coach Mick Cronin had raised the bar in the 2011-12, but let’s dig a little deeper and see just how disappointing it really was.

Preseason Expectations

Both the conference coaches and the esteemed group at this microsite saw the Bearcats’ finish last season and promptly pegged Cincinnati to finish fourth in the conference this season. Mick Cronin’s career was starting to take off following an impressive run to the Sweet Sixteen, and heading into this season, he boasted one of the league’s most experienced and talented backcourts in senior Cashmere Wright and junior Sean Kilpatrick, and an influx of junior college talent and improving underclassmen were supposed to prove serviceable in the frontcourt following the departure of do-everything big man Yancy Gates.

Mick Cronin’s Team Fell Well Short Of Expectations This Season

The Good

Although it didn’t look particularly exciting at the beginning of the season, whoever put together the Bearcats’ non-conference schedule this season might have legitimately influenced the program’s chances of making the NCAA Tournament. The team finished the non-conference slate 12-1 with good wins over Oregon, Iowa State, and Alabama, and their only loss was a one-point defeat versus New Mexico. The Bearcats ended the season on the bubble and you better believe that two wins and a close road loss to good NCAA Tournament teams helped make a difference.  There is something to be said for how consistently good Mick Cronin-coached teams are defensively.

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Although we are less than a month removed from Louisville’s win over Michigan in the National Championship game, it certainly isn’t too soon to look ahead to what the 2013-14 season has in store. With this past Sunday the deadline to declare for the June NBA Draft, we now have a much better idea who the top teams in the country should be once the ball is tipped again in November. In looking at the top of our Post-NBA Draft Deadline Top 25, there are three teams bunched together separated by just three votes — in fact, Louisville and Michigan State are knotted together at the top. It isn’t all too often that a team wins it all, graduates its starting point guard, has its best frontcourt player leave for the NBA, and is still perhaps the top team in the nation, but that’s the case for Rick Pitino and his Cardinals. With Russ Smith and Chane Behanan returning, Louisville will be the early favorites to win the AAC — the ACC, keep in mind, doesn’t come for UofL until 2014. Michigan State received good news on Sunday when Adreian Payne announced he would be returning to East Lansing for his senior season. Payne’s return, coupled with the return of Gary Harris — the Big Ten Freshman of the Year — and Keith Appling, make the Spartans a legitimate championship contender next season. Lastly, there’s Kentucky. Did you really think Cal & Co. weren’t going to be up there? They may not be ranked #1 at this point, but with a downright scary recruiting class incoming boasted by the Harrison twins and Julius Randle — perhaps the top Class of 2013 recruit — the Wildcats’ expectations are sky high. Despite not finishing in the Top 25 and losing at Robert Morris in the NIT, Kentucky will enter 2013-14 as a top three team in the RTC .

The usual Quick ‘n Dirty after the jump…

Quick n’ Dirty:

Whether it is through an exceptional recruiting class, or an impressive finish to the 2012-13 season coupled with a strong nucleus returning, the following four teams surged upward — and for good reason.

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It can be difficult to wipe away all of the good will earned from a program’s first NCAA Tournament berth in 20 years, but coach Stan Heath and his South Florida Bulls did their very best to try this season. Coming off a season in which they won two NCAA Tournament games and went 22-14 including a 12-6 mark in the Big East, Heath’s Bulls were picked to finish eighth in a preseason poll by the conference coaches. Instead they stumbled out of the gate in non-conference action and ended up losing 10 straight conference games at one point to finish a disappointing 12-19 including an abysmal 3-15 mark in conference play. Let’s dive right in to exactly how the Bulls managed to regress so badly:

After An NCAA Tournament Appearance, Stan Heath’s Club Took A Few Steps Back This Season (AP)

The Good

In a season when you only win three conference games, there just isn’t that much that can be written about the good parts of South Florida’s season. But since the space needs to be filled, it is worth mentioning that junior Victor Rudd continued to improve into a solid two-way player and senior Toarlyn Fitzpatrick capped off four years of service to the Bulls with a solid if unspectacular senior season. The valuable experience and flashes of potential from freshmen Zach LeDay and Javontae Hawkins should give Bulls’ fans at least a small modicum of hope that the near future will be better and there was that victory early in the conference slate over eventual regular season champion Georgetown even if it did come when the Hoyas were playing their worst basketball of the season. There were brief instances where the defense that got South Florida into the NCAA Tournament returned, as the Bulls defended the three-point line very well and showed flashes of excellent team defense. But eventually their lack of depth and scoring ability really hindered their ability to win the low-scoring slugfests they were able to win the year before.

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1. We will start off today by offering our best wishes to ESPN analyst Digger Phelps who revealed that he had surgery and will be treated for bladder cancer. Most of America knows Digger for his work on ESPN including his matching tie and highlighter combinations, but he was also an outstanding coach at Notre Dame from 1971 to 1991 as he was able to knock off the #1 team in the nation seven times during that stretch (a record he shares with Gary Williams) including ending UCLA’s record 88-game winning streak. We do not know much about the stage of the cancer and subsequently the prognosis, but we wish Digger the best as he continues to undergo treatment.
2. In what might end up being the biggest early-entry decision this year, Doug McDermott announced that he will be returning to Creighton for his senior year. There have been several players with more NBA-level talent than McDermott who made early-entry decisions over the past few weeks, but none of them will have as profound an impact on their school, conference, and the national landscape as McDermott will. The Bluejays will be losing some key pieces (Grant Gibbs and Greg Echenique), but McDermott’s return should make them competitive in the new Big East and a dangerous team in the NCAA Tournament. We are not sure how much McDermott will help his NBA Draft stock by returning, but as Andy Glockner points out the move to the new Big East should give McDermott the ability to showcase his skills against more high-level talent than he had in the Missouri Valley Conference.
3. The other notable early-entry announcement yesterday came from Baylor where Cory Jefferson announced that he would be returning for his senior year. Jefferson, who showed a dramatic improvement last season, is essentially the polar opposite of McDermott as a NBA prospect in that he is a ridiculous NBA-level athlete, but his offensive game is very limited. We are not sure that Scott Drew is the best person to work on that–at least based on what we have seen from him in terms of in-game adjustments–but an extra year of college basketball should give Jefferson enough time to round out his game to make him a better NBA prospect and a probable first-round pick although with how deep next year’s NBA Draft could be Jefferson needs to continue his upward trajectory to ensure himself a first-round spot.
4. One of the things that we always have a hard time understanding is the hype surrounding transfers. One example of this is Hunter Mickelson, who is transferring from Arkansas to Kansas. Mickelson was a highly recruited 6’10” Arkansas native who tried to get out of his letter of intent when the coaching change at Arkansas occurred, but was not released by the school only averaged 5.4 points and 3.5 rebounds per game last season in just 16.6 minutes per game. His 2.3 blocks in 17.1 minutes per game as a freshman was impressive, but we are not quite buying the hype on Mickelson yet even if his block per minute numbers compare favorably with what Jeff Withey was able to do (see Jesse Newell’s excellent analysis for a more detailed breakdown of what Mickelson brings to Lawrence). Like Mickelson, Jabari Hinds was a highly touted prospect coming out of high school, but struggled during his two seasons at West Virginia before eventually finding himself on the bench late last season. Now Hinds appears to be headed for Massachusetts where as Jeff Eisenberg points out he could benefit from playing against lower-level talent. Perhaps the most perplexing case of all is Tarik Black, the Memphis big man who put up unremarkable numbers–8.1 points and 4.8 rebounds–last season yet finds himself being heavily recruited by Duke among others. As Gary Parrish points out some of this is supply and demand. At this point there are not many big men who have proven they can play at a high-major level so now there are “at least 20 other high-major programs are all lined up and working like they’re the last 25 dudes in a bar with just one moderately attractive girl”. The part that Parrish leaves out is that the one “lucky” dude/program has to wake up the following morning next to the moderately attractive girl.
5. With all the movement in the coaching carousel there will inevitably be a few recruits who change their minds about where they want to go to school (see Mickelson above). Two of the bigger moves in the coaching carousel this season were at UCLA and Rutgers both of whom were involved in some recruit movement yesterday. In the case of UCLA they released Allerik Freeman from the national letter of intent he signed last November when Ben Howland was still the coach at UCLA. We are not sure if this decision was mutual or if Freeman was the sole driving force, but given how quickly this went down we would be surprised if Steve Alford was not ok with having an extra scholarship available. On the other end of the country and spectrum was Rutgers who picked up its first recruit of the Eddie Jordan era when junior college guard Craig Brown committed to the school. Rutgers obviously has a very long way to go to be a national-level program again and picking up a junior college guard will not turn many heads in New Jersey, but the speed with which Jordan picked up the commitment is impressive.

1. If you are a Minnesota or UCLA fan dreaming about having Shaka Smart coach your team you can wake up now because that is nothing more than a fantasy as Smart announced that he will be staying at VCU with a new extension. When comparing the two potential destinations UCLA would have been a much more desirable destination than Minnesota except that the current athletic director at Minnesota was the person who hired Smart at VCU when he was a relative unknown. Although VCU fans have to be thrilled with keeping Smart he also makes out quite well thanks to the threat of his departure as his annual salary is expected to go up from $1.2 million to $1.5 million per year with the extension running through 2023.
   
2. He is not nearly the hot commodity that Shaka is, but Josh Pastner has also announced that he will be staying at Memphis. We are not quite sure why he felt the need to make this announcement because we are not sure which better position (USC? #DausterForUSC) there is out there that would want Pastner as he has not exactly overwhelmed us with his success. Honestly if the Tigers had not won a game in the NCAA Tournament this season we would have questioned whether the administration there should look at moving in a different direction. Instead, he wins one NCAA Tournament game and gets an extension, which is still be worked out. It will be several weeks before details of the extension are worked out, but it might say something about the financial state of college athletics that a guy coaching at one of the best programs in the country can get an extension off of a two-point win over a WCC bubble team.
3. One (former assistant) coach who is on the move is Chris Collins. As we mentioned yesterday morning the Duke assistant was the frontrunner for the Northwestern opening and last night the school made it official. Collins will stay with the Blue Devils until the end of their NCAA Tournament run with Nate James being promoted to assistant coach at Duke to fill the void left by Collins. As we said yesterday Collins has the pedigree (not only from the Krzyzewski tree, but also from his father Doug), but as Jeff Eisenberg points out many of Krzyzewski’s disciples have been unsuccessful when they are not by his side.
4. If you thought the NCAA’s mess handling the Miami case was going to stop being ugly, you would be wrong as the school is now accusing the NCAA of having another investigator work with Nevin Shapiro’s attorney. They also accuse the NCAA of other “unethical” behavior including use false statements to convince other witnesses to confess to offenses that they otherwise would not admit to. At this point the case has gotten so messy and damaging to the reputation of the NCAA that if we were the NCAA we would seriously consider dropping it because any punishment handed down would likely be laughed at by the public and member institutions given how sloppily the case has been handled thus far.
5. The Marshall Henderson story has been rehashed by nearly every media outlet in the country by now, but the thing that gets left out of most stories is the question of why we as college basketball fans are willing to put up with Henderson’s antics and background when the public shuns African-American players with similar problems. The article focuses on how Tyrann Mathieu was treated by the media and his program for offenses that if you compare them to what Henderson has been convicted of seem fairly tame in comparison. A few people will see this article as an attempt at trolling, but to us it seems like a question worth discussing as it pertains not just to sports, but society in general.