11.15.07

Story of the Night. We’re travelling so we saw next-to-nothing last night. From perusing the scores, though, it appears that we might have to consider dropping VCU on our next ballot despite a win (VCU 73, Houston 72), Mississippi St. not Clemson is the fraud (Clemson 84, MSU 82), the Gardner-Webb ride terminated (UConn 78, GW 66), Georgetown shook off the rust after W&M (Georgetown 74, Michigan 52), Stanford continued to impress with a road win (Stanford 71, Northwestern 60), Memphis and Oklahoma played uglyball in MSG (Memphis 63, Oklahoma 53), and Maryland (oh Gary!) escaped by the skin of its teeth (OT) at home again Northeastern (Maryland 74, Northeastern 72).

On Tap Tonight (all times EST). Pretty night light outside of MSG and Puerto Rico.

• Arkansas (-6.5) v. Providence (ESPNU) 5:30pm – great SEC/Big East matchup in Puerto Rico.
• Oklahoma (-13) v. Gardner-Webb (ESPN2) 6:30pm – we fear the bruises GW will have after this one.
• Temple (-5.5) v. Charleston (ESPNU) 8pm – where are John Chaney and John Kresse?
• UAB v. Florida St. (-3.5) 8:15pm – are any other CUSA teams worth a damn this year?
• Memphis (-8.5) v. Connecticut (ESPN) 8:30pm – GOTN – can UConn get its act together to give Memphis a game?
• Illinois (-3) at Hawaii 1am – upset alert! The Illini need to be ready for this game if they expect to win.

After 12 seconds of hand-wringing and almost twice as much debate, the first regular season Blogpoll is out. Make sure to tip your local bloggers for this public service. The complete ballots (we’re up to 11 bloggers now!) are located here.

Justifying Our Ballot. We moved UCLA into the #1 spot and dropped Kansas from there simply because we watched both teams play several times this week and just feel like something is off with the Jayhawks. Maybe it’s Brandon Rush not back yet, maybe we’re just seeing things. But for now, we think UCLA is the better team. Memphis and Indiana also impressed us more than KU, so we moved them ahead also (and we expect UNC to do so tonight). Similarly, we watched parts of all three Oregon games over the weekend and felt they were underrated at #10. Same goes for Duke (up to #13 from #20) and Stanford (#15 to #12). The only other teams we dropped were simply a spot or two in order to make room for teams we watched play and thought deserved the higher rankings. The first few weeks will be like this, as we work to adjust based on expectations v. performance.

Two Left Out. The two teams we voted for on our ballot who were left out were #20 Syracuse and #25 Gardner-Webb. What can we say, we’re a sucker for those kickass Orange unis. And we made a vigorous pitch for the inclusion of GW as a symbolic #25 (similar to what App St. got in the AP poll for football after beating Michigan), but nobody was listening.

Early Season Creep. Obviously, this early in the season there isn’t going to be a lot of movement unless someone loses, but we’re seeing a little bit of creep in either direction with a few teams. The top seven teams are the same, but clearly the bloggers took Michigan St.‘s exhibition loss to Grand Valley St. into account by dropping the Spartans from #8 to #13 (interestingly, we only dropped MSU one spot on our ballot). Oregon, Indiana, Duke, Stanford, Davidson and VCU were rewarded with slight bumps up the list, while Marquette and Mississippi St. were downgraded for, um, what exactly (it wasn’t us!)? NC State (grrrr…) and Southern Illinois entered the blogpoll in place of A-Sun upset victims Kentucky (who still shockingly had two blogpoll votes) and USC.

Where’s the Argument? We added the Standard Deviation column (Std Dev) this week to show where bloggers were having significantly disparate opinions on teams. A high number (> 5.0) represents substantial variance between how the bloggers ranked a team. A low number (< 3.0) represents consistency in the strength of the ranking. So here are the teams that bloggers are having the most trouble getting a handle on.

• Michigan St. (stdev = 7.39; range = 6 to NR)
• Stanford (6.04; 10 to NR)
• Indiana (5.53; 4 to NR)
• Gonzaga (5.52; 10 to NR)
• NC State (5.36; 12 to NR)

The top 4 are tight, though. Kansas has the lowest collective ranking among Memphis, UNC, UCLA and itself at #7 in one ballot.

• Memphis (stdev = 0.81; range = 1 to 3)
• Kansas (1.19; 2 to 7)
• UNC (1.21; 1 to 5)
• UCLA (1.60; 1 to 6)

It’ll still be a few more weeks before we get a good sense of who the favorites will actually be this season.

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

Here are the NCAA’s key findings:

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

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

Gary is Too Busy to Worry About Graduation Rates

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

Thoughts.

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

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

Ok, so thanks to an insightful UCLA fan, we realized that our exuberant reliance on NCSA data to justify our Athlademic Rankings posted last week was giving them way too much credit for properly vetting their data.  So to make sure we get it right this time, we spent the better part of today going through the 2007-08 US News rankings and the 2006-07 Sears Cup rankings ourselves.  Here’s the revised list, in Table A. 

Table A.  Athlademic Ratings – Division I (revised)

New Arrivals.  In addition to UCLA and USC, we also see the inclusion of Georgia, Texas A&M, Georgia Tech, Minnesota, Tennessee, Rutgers and Auburn onto our list – all driven by strong athletic programs.  High academic schools with relatively weak athletic programs, such as Army, William & Mary and Dartmouth, fell out of the top 50 due to the addition of the above programs. 

The Ivies strike a Nice Balance in Athlademics 

Ivy League Balance.   Speaking of Dartmouth, Keggy the Keg and friends are the only Ivy League school that didn’t make our Top 50.  The other seven did, with Princeton (no surprise there) leading the way at #16 overall.  Granted, the high academics of the schools drives their inclusion here, but we shouldn’t discount that these schools rate above many larger BCS schools in terms of the success of its athletic programs.  Cornell has the 55th most successful athletic program, but there are 73 BCS schools, which means Cornell, Princeton (#63) and Harvard‘s (#64) athletic programs  are outperforming bigger state schools such as Kansas (#66), Iowa (#68), and Connecticut (#82).

Big 10 – ACC Challenge.    As in, the Big 10 and ACC challenge the rest of the BCS conferences to keep up with it when it comes to athlademics.  We rated all 73 BCS conference schools, keeping those ahead of them in place, and Table B below shows the results. 

Table B.  BCS Conference Athlademic Ratings

Why is the Big East so bad?  There’s a pretty clear top tier of Big 10, ACC and Pac-10, a middle tier of the SEC and Big 12, and a bottom tier, where the Big East lurks like Gollum all by itself.  The Big East really gets killed on both sides of the equation – it has seven (of 16) third-tier academic schools, as rated by US News (more than the other 5 conferences combined); and seven schools that finished outside of the top 100 in the Sears Cup (Mississippi St. and Kansas St. are the only other two in BCS conferences).  This includes the dubious case of Seton Hall, who was the only BCS conference school of the 73 to not score a single point in the Sears Cup competition for 2006-07.  How is that possible?? 

Days Long Since Gone at The Hall

Haves and Have-Nots.  The Pac-10 is the greatest example of bifurcation within a conference.  It has five of the top twenty athlademic programs in America (Stanford, UCLA, USC, Cal, Washington), but it also only has five of the top fifty programs – its next highest ranked school is Arizona at #51.  Compare this with the Big 10, who has nine of its eleven members ranked in the top forty, with only Indiana (#53) and Iowa (#58) weighing it down.  Conversely, the Big 12 only has two of its twelve schools ranked in the top forty – Texas (#11) and Texas A&M (#23). 

Non-BCS Stars.  We already mentioned the Ivies, whose eight schools average a 29.9 rating on our list.  But who else steps up to challenge the BCS big boys as an athlademic school?  The Naval Academy (#28) and a couple of the smaller UCs (Irvine (#35) & Santa Barbara (#39)) lead the way.  One surprise inclusion is our Mormon friends at BYU, who used a strong athletic showing to come in at 39th on our list. 

You can do Better.  Not to harp on anyone in particular, but it makes no sense to us that football (read: revenue) schools like Cincinnati (#196 in the Sears Cup), South Florida (#133), Mississippi St. (#120), Kansas St. (#111) and Syracuse (#110) can’t do any better with their overall athletic programs.  Let’s throw in Villanova (#132) and Marquette (#127) for good measure – both schools are wealthy private Catholic institutions, which means they have the resources to spread around the non-revenue sports.  So what’s their excuse? 

Today is the final installment of the three-part series where we wanted to take a look at the NBA Draft broken down by school over the history of the modern NBA Draft (1949-2006). In Part I, we examined the raw numbers and made a rudimentary attempt at tying NBA talent to NCAA Tournament success. In Part II, we broke out the raw numbers by round selected, and then further sliced that data into an examination of “Top 10” and “Top 5” selections. Today we finish off the series by looking at draft selections by decade, hoping to see how things have trended over the entire era of the NBA Draft. See Table C below.

Table C. NBA Draft Picks by School & Decade (1949-2006)

Notes: this table is sorted by the Total Draftees column, and is limited to schools with a minimum of ten or more draft picks since 1949. The yellow shading refers to the highest number in that column.

Observations:

Consistency. The first thing that struck us as interesting were the schools that were fairly consistent in providing draft picks throughout the NBA Draft era. UNC, Louisville, Kentucky and St. John’s do not lead any particular decade, but each school has provided at least two picks per decade throughout. UCLA and Indiana have been similarly consistent over the entire period, but each also led a decade in picks (UCLA during the 70s; Indiana during the 80s).

Less Volume, but Still Consistent. Look at Big 10 stalwarts Illinois and Minnesota, along with Villanova and Utah. We’ve been clowning the Gophers all week, but surprisingly, they’ve consistently produced between 2 to 7 picks per decade – guess it’s easy to forget about Willie Burton and Joel Przybilla. The same is true for the Illini (between 2 to 7 per decade), Villanova (2 to 5) and Utah (2 to 5). Maryland, Syracuse, Ohio St., Marquette, Wake Forest, Temple, USC, Stanford, Memphis, Tennessee, Oregon, BYU, Mississippi St., LaSalle and Bradley are some of the other schools with at least one draft pick per decade.

The USF Dons Represent a Bygone Era

Whatever happened to…? The University of San Francisco, led by KC Jones and Bill Russell, produced fourteen draft picks from 1949-79, and only two since. Eight of Kansas St.‘s fourteen total draft picks were produced from 1949-69, but there’s only been one since 1989 (Steve Henson in 1990) – it even led the 1940s/50s with seven picks. And despite its recent renaissance under John Beilein and the proliferation of draft picks to come under Bob Huggins, West Virginia has only had one draft pick since 1968 (seven overall)! Another early producer Holy Cross (six overall) hasn’t had any picks since 1969; and Grambling (nine overall) hasn’t had any since 1978.

These Two Schools Have Come On Strong

Late Bloomers. The biggest examples of late bloomers have to be Arizona and Connecticut. Arizona’s first draft pick was in 1974, and it has produced thirty-three more since, good enough for sixth (tied with UK) all-time. Connecticut is even more shocking – the Huskies’ first pick was Cliff Robinson in 1989 (!!!), but it has produced twenty picks since (1.11 picks per year). Duke also has to be mentioned here. The Devils had good success in the early years (seven picks through the 70s), but have had thirty-two draft picks since 1980, twenty-six of those since 1990 (1.44 picks per year). They were second in the 90s with fifteen picks, and are currently tied with UConn leading the 2000s with eleven picks. No wonder they’ve been so good. Other late bloomers include Georgia Tech (22 of its 24 picks since 1982), Michigan St. (24 of its 26 picks since 1979), Georgetown (17 of 18 since 1980), Alabama (19 of 23 since 1982), Texas (15 of 17 since 1982), and Georgia (13 of 14 since 1982). After tonight’s draft, Florida could have as many as 14 of its 15 picks since 1984, but we already knew the Gators were a late bloomer. As a bit of an anomaly among the traditional powers, Kansas didn’t really begin consistent production of draft picks until the 70s (24 of 27 picks since 1972).

Coaches. The one trend we see with many of these late bloomers is how important coaches are to the talent level of a program. UNC, Louisville, UCLA, Kansas, Kentucky and Indiana have had great coaches throughout most of their histories. It makes sense that these schools have also been the most consistent at putting talent into the NBA Draft. But look at some of the other schools, particularly the late bloomers. Jim Calhoun has been responsible for every single one of UConn’s draft picks; Lute Olson has been responsible for all but five of Arizona’s draft picks (85%), and Coach K for 74% of Duke’s all-time picks. Bobby Cremins at Georgia Tech (79%), John Thompson at Georgetown (83%), and the Jud Heathcote/Tom Izzo reign at Michigan St. (92%) show just how important a single coach can be to a program.

Final Thoughts. This has been a fun experiment, and in only a few hours, we get to update all of our data with draft data from 2007. Something tells us that Florida and Ohio State’s numbers are going to be rising. Thanks to everyone for your thoughts and commentary. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming…

• Another 1-and-done: Georgia Tech’s Thaddeus Young is going pro, but will not sign with an agent.
• Matta needs to recruit another Thad Five – is Jamar Butler going League too?
• UCLA wasn’t counting on this. First Afflalo, now Darren Collison reportedly will declare for the NBA draft.
• Is anyone staying in school? Sean Singletary is also testing the waters.
• And finally, the WAC’s leading scorer last year, Utah St.’s Jaycee Carroll also declared for the draft today.
• At least someone is staying in college this year – Reginald Delk is transferring to Louisville. His brother, Richard, is also transferring but has not yet announced a destination.