Author Archives: johngasaway

Why ADs will soon speak tempo-free

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If ADs were better briefed, maybe they wouldn't say every new coach will play "up-tempo" ball.

If athletic directors were better briefed, they wouldn’t say every new coach will play “up-tempo” ball.

I know from personal experience that fans on occasion will harass the last few remaining holdouts among Division I coaching staffs who do not as yet use reliable information. I’m willing to grant a special exemption that will allow you to continue such harassment if it occurs with respect to your own beloved team, but as a general question of methodology this type of censure has now more or less crossed the line into “Wear the ribbon!”-variety bullying.

At a certain point it becomes a question of simple autonomy. I say let a few paleos track rebound margin in peace, and focus instead on the wide-open vistas provided by those coaches’ bosses. In terms of familiarity with accurate information, athletic departments in 2013 are about where coaching staffs were in 2003.

Courtesy of my ESPN colleague Dana O’Neil, here is what currently constitutes state of the art in terms of performance measurement for new head-coaching hires:  Continue reading →

Calipari, Coach K and Self hoard talent like robber barons. Izzo’s Izzo.

Another draft, another June, another Calipari recruit.

Another draft, another June, another Calipari recruit.

Tonight Kentucky (ranked No. 1 in the nation), Michigan State (2), Duke (4) and Kansas (5) will get together in Chicago for what is being billed as the greatest concentration of college hoops talent under one roof since…take your pick. (The 2008 Final Four? The 1979 national championship game? Anytime Oscar Robertson is indoors?)

Blue-chippers will indeed be lurking under every set of Beats in the United Center this evening, but before we get to counting those noses let’s acknowledge one curious analytical note. Tom Izzo is a bold iconoclast on this whole “winning requires NBA talent” thing.  Continue reading →

The fouls outside and the pictures in our heads

Ah, Marcus Thornton and the 2009 SEC, truly the golden age of college hoops. Wait, what?...

Ah, Marcus Thornton and the 2009 SEC, when the game was “open” and offenses “flowed,” truly the golden age of college hoops. Wait, what?…

We now have three days of the 2013-14 season under our belts, more than enough hoops to hand out some awards:

Player of the Year: Trevor Cooney, Syracuse (an effective FG percentage of 112.5 is quite good)
Coach of the Year: Tom Izzo, Michigan State (the “forfeit” line was precious)

Congratulations, everyone. And as for that whole business about the rulebook and the number of foul calls we’ve seen this season, here’s one admittedly subjective tour-guide’s quick narration of the still shifting terrain. Continue reading →

The decline of college basketball is nothing compared to the decline in the quality of complaints about the decline of college basketball

"Dr. Naismith shot the ball clumsily. After a promising beginning, the sport is now broken."

“Dr. Naismith shot the ball clumsily, and overall quality of play in basketball has fallen off dramatically. After its promising beginning yesterday morning, the sport is now broken.”

My ESPN colleague Jay Bilas is one of the brightest guys I know, meaning he agrees with me about 95 percent of the time. (How I define “bright.”) And while it’s true he and I disagree to some extent on just how “broken” college basketball truly is in 2013, I have to concede that Jay has history on his side on this one….

Continue reading →

Dumb NCAA rules harm athletes with normal bios too

Bravo, NCAA, for vigilantly protecting college athletics from unsavory elements like these Georgia Sports Leagues thugs.

Emmert to Colgate: “Not on my watch!” Bravo, NCAA, for vigilantly protecting opponents of mighty Colgate (KenPom No. 306) from the unfair advantage provided to Nathan Harries after he played three Georgia Sports Leagues games against fearsome opponents like these guys.

By now you’ve heard the outcry over the NCAA’s initial — though perhaps not final — ruling that Colgate freshman Nathan Harries is ineligible to play basketball this season. After graduating from high school, Harries served a two-year mission as a Mormon before playing in three Georgia Sports Leagues games this past summer at the Dunwoody Baptist Church outside Atlanta.

I’ll get to all that in a second, but first a note to aspiring writers. This is a pretty fair lede: Continue reading →

Should we look past Marcus Smart’s numbers if they’re good?

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PP

Pistol Pete gets a bonus year to cheer on Smart.

Marcus Smart was announced as a unanimous first-team All-American selection this week, and the AP’s writeup included the following paragraph:

The 6-foot-4 Smart, who won the Wayman Tisdale Award as the country’s top freshman, said he’s coming back also to improve on his 1.3-to-1 assists-to-turnover ratio and his 40 percent shooting from the field, including just 29 percent from 3-point range.

To those who say this seems like a fairly lengthy to-do list for the presumptive national POY, the stock response is that we need to look past stuff like that when it comes to Smart. Continue reading →

Longform from Sinatra to “Snow Fall”

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April 1966: "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold."

April 1966: “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”

Last week Twitter buzzed with praise for Tim Layden’s highly praiseworthy Sports Illustrated longform piece on thoroughbred trainer Jeff Lukas, who was critically injured in 1993 when he was run down by one of his horses. Purely as a piece of writing Layden’s piece can be placed comfortably alongside the best of SI’s illustrious longform past. (A past that, to its credit, SI has made easily available with a marvelous searchable archive.)

The timing of Layden’s feat makes it all the more impressive, for at the moment longform is in danger of being suffocated by esteem. A new longform piece in 2013 signals not only a moral imperative for the reader to be duly impressed, but also a rare and precious opportunity for eager web developers to trick the thing out with every mouse-over gimmick that can possibly make your laptop slow down and wheeze. It is unclear whether the genre can survive either the moral imperative or the technological excess unscathed. Yet somehow Layden transcended his post-“Snow Fall” moment, a moment that, to be sure, is not entirely or perhaps even substantially the fault of “Snow Fall” itself. Continue reading →

Could the Big Ten’s pace be normal this year?

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TWBH

For a few years now this Big Ten graduate has kept a bottle of bubbly on ice to be opened only when the league is no longer the nation’s slowest major conference. At the time I started my tradition, I fancied that I was following the ritual started by veterans of the 1972 Miami Dolphins, who drink a toast each year when the last remaining undefeated NFL team loses a game. The only difference here, of course, is that Bob Griese and Larry Csonka get to sip their sparkling wine annually, while I’ve never tasted mine.

At least last year was notably suspenseful: Continue reading →

An American Stonehenge: Weird university abbreviations on the Great Plains

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Adolph Rupp of UK and Phog Allen of KU holding a ball that for some reason says "KU vs KU." It's all so confusing.

Phog Allen of Kansas (KU), Adolph Rupp of Kentucky (UK), and a very confusing ball. Maybe the inscription referred to the fact that Rupp was a KU graduate. Maybe UK used to be called KU. Or maybe it had something to do with Bronze Age pagan rituals and the summer solstice.

At 345 of Division I’s 351 member institutions, the commonly accepted abbreviation of the school’s name preserves the sequence of the words being abbreviated. Take for instance the case of two Big Ten flagship universities in adjoining states that each begin with the letter “I.” “The U of I” denotes the University of Illinois, while “IU,” indubitably enough, refers to Indiana University.

Basically this is a proven system of human discourse, but try telling that to the brazen abbreviation-inverting iconoclasts sprinkled thinly across our nation’s Great Plains. Out there between the Mississippi River and the Rockies, all abbreviation heck breaks loose. Continue reading →