2024 Miscellaneous College Basketball News

[LouisEly]

Purdue lost to Nebraska.

Kansas lost to UCF.

Houston's the last remaining undefeated team and probably is going to be #1 next week.

Wide open this year.

[Underachiever]

2 hours ago, LouisEly said:

Purdue lost to Nebraska.

Kansas lost to UCF.

Houston's the last remaining undefeated team and probably is going to be #1 next week.

Wide open this year.

Houston lost to Iowa State on Tuesday. No more undefeateds. 1, 2, 3, 5, 9, and 11 lost this week when you add in Tennesee, Oklahoma and Marquette.

[MrTPlush]

It has been like this for years. Good teams lose on the road all the time. Then March comes and it is on neutral courts. That and the fact these teams can pull off an upset here and there...but they can't string them together. Thus, come late march into April it is rarely overly shocking.

[Jim French Stepstool]

Lots of wailing & gnashing of teeth among UWM fans (those which still exist) about their 7PM game in downtown Milwaukee tonight being moved to 2PM due to the weather. I'm not there, but I hear there are around 150 fans at the game. Not that they draw well anyway, but in a 10,000+ seat arena that's pretty ugly.

That was once a fun program to follow & I used to go to some of the games as my nephew was a HS teammate & pretty good friends with a former player. Don't know how much of this decision was theirs & what input the Horizon League had, but I don't see what this accomplished other than trying to "guess right" regarding the weather pattern within a 6 hour window. Either way, that school seemed to have a terrific chancellor & AD in the era just before & after the turn of the century and now seem to be stuck in a traffic jam at the corner of Apathy & Incompetence. Too bad.

[LouisEly]

20 hours ago, Jim French Stepstool said:

I don't see what this accomplished other than trying to "guess right" regarding the weather pattern within a 6 hour window.

It gave their opponents a better chance to get out of town safely instead of being stuck there.

[Jim French Stepstool]

1 hour ago, LouisEly said:

It gave their opponents a better chance to get out of town safely instead of being stuck there.

Theoretically yeah, but moving it to Saturday would've probably helped more in that regard. Except I'm sure CSU didn't want to do that as they have a noon Sunday tipoff at UWGB. I think that factored in.

[NeedMoreFans]

On 1/12/2024 at 3:16 PM, Jim French Stepstool said:

Either way, that school seemed to have a terrific chancellor & AD in the era just before & after the turn of the century and now seem to be stuck in a traffic jam at the corner of Apathy & Incompetence. Too bad.

They had Bo Ryan and Bruce Pearl as their back-to-back head coaches, so it's clear why they saw a lot of success under Bud Haidet. It's too bad Rob Jeter couldn't continue the success. I haven't followed UWM in a long time but still want them to see success.  It has been hard to see how far they've fallen. 

[Jim French Stepstool]

I thought Jeter was the obvious choice at the time, and a good one. He didn't sustain the same level, but may have been judged a bit unfairly since he immediately followed Pearl. He certainly was given a long leash-----8,9 years??

IMO they dropped the ball on two fronts: When they had the success under Pearl, they could've foreseen the upcoming changes in college sports where schools change conferences like we change our socks. I'm not a fan of the conference-hopping, but the Horizon was a strong mid-major league that had its' guts ripped out----Butler, UIC, Loyola & Valparaiso all jumped. The Missouri Valley would've been a nice target for them at that time.

Secondly, Paul Plinske would've been a terrific AD Hire, but as far as I can tell they showed little if any interest.

[Jim French Stepstool]

In the newest AP top 25 poll, Gonzaga is nowhere to be seen for the first time since 2016. That's 143 weeks' worth.

I actually thought it's been longer than that.

[Jimbo]

On 1/12/2024 at 3:16 PM, Jim French Stepstool said:

Either way, that school seemed to have a terrific chancellor & AD in the era just before & after the turn of the century and now seem to be stuck in a traffic jam at the corner of Apathy & Incompetence. Too bad.

Someone refresh my memory.  Didn't UWM have an issue with a previous AD and/or AD v Coach personality conflict?

 

[Jim French Stepstool]

4 hours ago, Jimbo said:

Someone refresh my memory.  Didn't UWM have an issue with a previous AD and/or AD v Coach personality conflict?

 

I know that after Haidet left, they went through four ADs in the span of about 4-5 years. That was around the time my interest started to wane so I'm not up on the details, but a couple of those guys seemed to be heavily in over their heads. The current AD has been there now for over a decade. It seems to me most of the discontent seems to be directed at the administration by the fan base. After they moved away from Rob Jeter, rumors are that they had TJ Otzelberger all but signed but the chancellor overruled the AD & gave the job to Lavell Jordan. Jordan lost over 20 games & left after one season. I believe the rumors because it sounds like the type of thing that would happen there. Otz is now at Iowa State, where he's gone 53-30.

[Jim French Stepstool]

In the top 25 poll that came out today there are two teams from the state of Wisconsin ranked among the top ten. I'm too lazy to dig into it but I'm guessing that's never happened before.

[Jim French Stepstool]

On 1/12/2024 at 9:22 AM, LouisEly said:

Purdue lost to Nebraska.

Kansas lost to UCF.

Houston's the last remaining undefeated team and probably is going to be #1 next week.

Wide open this year.

The beat goes on. Top five teams North Carolina & Tennessee lose tonight.

The Vols' loss was at home to South Carolina. Former UW assistant Lamont Paris has the Gamecocks at 18-3.

Might as well throw darts at the board when filling out brackets this year.

[Samurai Bucky]

Purdon't / Northworsten Round 2 tonight.  I think NW covers.  We'll see if Boo goes off.

[Jim French Stepstool]

6 hours ago, Samurai Bucky said:

Purdon't / Northworsten Round 2 tonight.  I think NW covers.  We'll see if Boo goes off.

He sure did. Terrific talent. But the bigger story was his coach "going off" in the closing seconds. I don't blame Collins when you look at the foul discrepancy, and the offensive foul that wasn't called.  But it was fun to watch. I guess he just isn't used to his team getting the short end of the stick late in a close game after playing at Duke for four years.

 

[Playing Catch]

Tangent:

Is there enough longitudinal data from which analysts like KenPom and BartTorvik have modified the home court advantages of teams individually? Or does it remain a generic, +6points for the home team (or whatever)?

Think about the Badgers-Nebraska tilt, where Nebraska is way better at home.

[Oxy]

49 minutes ago, Playing Catch said:

Tangent:

Is there enough longitudinal data from which analysts like KenPom and BartTorvik have modified the home court advantages of teams individually? Or does it remain a generic, +6points for the home team (or whatever)?

Think about the Badgers-Nebraska tilt, where Nebraska is way better at home.

I also thought of this this week...I tried to ask Bart a question on Torvik but something was screwed up on his FAQ questions thread.  And I can't post on Buckyville anymore😎.

[yourout]

1 hour ago, Oxy said:

I also thought of this this week...I tried to ask Bart a question on Torvik but something was screwed up on his FAQ questions thread.  And I can't post on Buckyville anymore😎.

I got the boot after reporting Los Venerables to the admin for a nasty personal attack before i found out he WAS the admin.

I have tried for parole several times without success.

Might have to set up another dummy gmail.

[Jim French Stepstool]

Never knew this was such a wayward home for former Buckyvillians😄. I was never kicked off but simply lost interest in posting there.

I don't know if there's a team-specific modification for home court, but I never paid much attention to the generic 6-point thing. Such a huge difference between playing, say, Duke on the road (or Nebraska for that matter) & travelling to play a MAC or Horizon League school on a Monday night. Of course, refs are only human, too. After what happened in the Purdue-Northwestern game w/the foul discrepancy & the revived talk about what Edey does or doesn't get away with, I'm looking forward to seeing how the zebras handle things in Madison on Sunday.

[Cool Hand Lucroy]

Figured this was the place to post the recent Dartmouth ruling on player unionization:

NLRB orders union election for Dartmouth men's basketball team - POLITICO

That article has a link to the full opinion.

Likely won't impact the B1G at the moment (at least not immediately) and there will be lots of appeals, but it's pretty clear the NCAA model is getting less and less sustainable. I think that's a good thing overall, but there will certainly be unintended consequences, and I think it's fairly likely college athletics as a whole shrinks as we move down the line (easy to imagine a situation where football and basketball players form unions, the school negotiates with them, and lots of non-revenue sports are left competing over small scraps of the pie). For now, I have little complaint about the idea that student-athletes are "employees," that they should be able to bargain about working conditions, and that schools, despite their protestations to the contrary, expect athletes to be athletes (often more than students), even at the lower levels of the NCAA. That's really all this ruling implies.

We're about to enter a wide-open space of negotiation and renegotiation in terms of college sports, and there'll hopefully be a lot of good conversation and discussion about how to envision athletics within educational institutions, how to balance revenue-generation with "the common good," how to continue to provide educational opportunities for non-revenue athletes and in women's sports, etc. while fairly (whatever that means) compensating football and basketball players. I suppose I doubt we'll get good conversation given the way this stuff always turns into a lot of yelling and nonsense, but this board's usually better than that.

Anyway, worth posting given the potential implications for CBB and college sports writ large. 

[Jim French Stepstool]

9 hours ago, Cool Hand Lucroy said:

Figured this was the place to post the recent Dartmouth ruling on player unionization:

NLRB orders union election for Dartmouth men's basketball team - POLITICO

That article has a link to the full opinion.

Likely won't impact the B1G at the moment (at least not immediately) and there will be lots of appeals, but it's pretty clear the NCAA model is getting less and less sustainable. I think that's a good thing overall, but there will certainly be unintended consequences, and I think it's fairly likely college athletics as a whole shrinks as we move down the line (easy to imagine a situation where football and basketball players form unions, the school negotiates with them, and lots of non-revenue sports are left competing over small scraps of the pie). For now, I have little complaint about the idea that student-athletes are "employees," that they should be able to bargain about working conditions, and that schools, despite their protestations to the contrary, expect athletes to be athletes (often more than students), even at the lower levels of the NCAA. That's really all this ruling implies.

We're about to enter a wide-open space of negotiation and renegotiation in terms of college sports, and there'll hopefully be a lot of good conversation and discussion about how to envision athletics within educational institutions, how to balance revenue-generation with "the common good," how to continue to provide educational opportunities for non-revenue athletes and in women's sports, etc. while fairly (whatever that means) compensating football and basketball players. I suppose I doubt we'll get good conversation given the way this stuff always turns into a lot of yelling and nonsense, but this board's usually better than that.

Anyway, worth posting given the potential implications for CBB and college sports writ large. 

My guess is no better than anyone elses' & probably worse than most as to how this whole mess plays out. But I think it's interesting that the focus in the article is on a lower-level (athletically) Ivy League school that, while in a conference of private schools, has an athletic dept that will almost certainly never finish in the black.

If there was a stipend that was a relatively modest amount that was given out evenly to revenue-sport athletes I could live with that. There was talk of that decades ago. But in an NIL-based world that's a pipe dream.

[Cool Hand Lucroy]

54 minutes ago, Jim French Stepstool said:

My guess is no better than anyone elses' & probably worse than most as to how this whole mess plays out. But I think it's interesting that the focus in the article is on a lower-level (athletically) Ivy League school that, while in a conference of private schools, has an athletic dept that will almost certainly never finish in the black.

If there was a stipend that was a relatively modest amount that was given out evenly to revenue-sport athletes I could live with that. There was talk of that decades ago. But in an NIL-based world that's a pipe dream.

Yeah, there's SO MUCH unsettled here, and we're looking down the road. I've heard a lot of "end of college sports as we know it" takes, and I think maybe that's true in terms of the "as we know it" part. Of course, conference realignment and basically doing everything in the service of football $$$ has been the driving factor, and this ruling is just part of that.

I think football and men's basketball are the two sports where athletes would be most interested in unionizing. MAYBE you could add men's hockey or baseball or women's volleyball or basketball to that mix.

Given that, here's an outcome I could reasonably see way down the line:

The NCAA splits or disbands and reorganizes. A new organization forms and governs football (maybe with two divisions) and basketball (because I think men's and women's hoops are likely to be bundled). You get something like 100 schools competing for a national championship, probably with a 32-team basketball tournament (perhaps with a series or play-in element to boost inventory for TV $$$).

Current D-2 and D-3 schools (and a lot of smaller D-1s) band together to form an NAIA-like organization. A lot of these schools either cut football or field very regional football conferences because there won't be cash available for an year-end championship since the current version of that relies heavily on NCAA money.

Essentially, you get a situation where college sports exist, but there aren't as many, and, at the lower-levels, things become very regional. You probably get a lot more club sports. In some ways, that's not a bad thing. Sports take up a lot of oxygen at colleges and universities, and maybe it's too much. Maybe some of that energy is better-directed into club sport models. In other ways, of course, something will definitely be lost if you can't go to a great Saturday WIAC football game.

Who knows? But it's a lot of interesting thoughts.

 

[Samurai Bucky]

2 hours ago, Jim French Stepstool said:

My guess is no better than anyone elses' & probably worse than most as to how this whole mess plays out. But I think it's interesting that the focus in the article is on a lower-level (athletically) Ivy League school that, while in a conference of private schools, has an athletic dept that will almost certainly never finish in the black.

If there was a stipend that was a relatively modest amount that was given out evenly to revenue-sport athletes I could live with that. There was talk of that decades ago. But in an NIL-based world that's a pipe dream.

One thing we need to keep in mind is Title IX.  I am fairly certain that there are very few women's sports that would be considered a revenue sport.  What happens then?  I'm sure Badger Volleyball is brining some good cash.

Here is an article from the NCSA about how head counts work in college athletics:  https://www.ncsasports.org/blog/athletic-scholarships-head-count-versus-equivalency.  It is a short and interesting read.

If college athletes get paid more than a scholarship and food stipend, tutors, housing, etc., I would like to see more of a commitment to the institution from the player.  Perhaps it can be called a contract.  If I am a QB and am receiving $1M above and beyond my scholarship / benefits, I need to stay for the entire four years.  If I leave early, then I do not receive the entire amount.  If I am a Kicker who receives $10,000 above and beyond, they would have to forego a certain percentage of their NIL money.

I think EA Sports is planning on paying each football player $500 to have their name and likeness in the EA Sports College Football game (https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/ea-sports-college-football-2024-lawsuit/)

I do not want to see the non-revenue sports go away.  I'm a big wrestling fan (real wrestling, mind you) and I'm sure that would be one of the first ones on the chopping block.  Did you ever want to go and watch Badger gymnastics?  Me neither, but it doesn't matter because gymnastics hasn't been reinstituted.

Baseball at Wisconsin?  Sigh...

It certainly is a mixed bag.  It will be interesting to see what happens.

[Jim French Stepstool]

14 hours ago, Samurai Bucky said:

 

If college athletes get paid more than a scholarship and food stipend, tutors, housing, etc., I would like to see more of a commitment to the institution from the player.  Perhaps it can be called a contract.  If I am a QB and am receiving $1M above and beyond my scholarship / benefits, I need to stay for the entire four years.  If I leave early, then I do not receive the entire amount.  If I am a Kicker who receives $10,000 above and beyond, they would have to forego a certain percentage of their NIL money.

 

I like that, a lot. A stipulation that may allow the athlete to leave if the coach leaves during his/her tenure could perhaps be hammered in. What's tricky is NIL money is, at least on the surface, not supposed to be coming from the school. How closely can that be monitored?

As the powers-that-be try to create some sort of reasonable framework, I see educrats, I see politicians, I see lawyers, and now I see the NLRB. And I see a lot of sports fans who preferred college sports to the pros having their patience severely tested.

[owbc]

The universities did this to themselves by running college sports as a for-profit institution. At every inflection point they have chosen money over integrity. 

Non-revenue sports...as it stands right now, getting those scholarships at Big Ten schools is basically something rich families do to compete with each other. So if you get rid of those scholarships, many people will stop wasting tens of thousands of dollars (or more) training their kids to be rowers or gymnasts or whatever. The sports will survive because they are Olympic sports, but clearly there will be less investment in them. Which may be a good thing because it might open it up to more people who want to try it. As it stands right now, they are Exclusive with a capital E. 

I knew some rowers when I was at UW-Madison 15 years ago...they were from wealthy families in California and most of them had zero passion for rowing. They would take a taxi from the dorms to the 5 AM rowing practice that they had to do every day but hated. Obviously no average student had access to any of their fancy facilities or equipment. I don't even want to think about what it is like right now. 

I'm guessing most people who are parents of kids under 18 that currently play sports wouldn't have many good things to say about the state of organized sports in this country.