ACC, meet your future: The Big East in 2009.
My unplanned multi-day ACC festival continues! Yesterday I pointed out that the 10 programs that constituted the “other” teams in the pre-expansion league — Boston College, Clemson, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Maryland, Miami, NC State, Virginia, Virginia Tech, and Wake Forest — haven’t been very good at basketball over the past eight years.
Today I want to flesh out the “Who cares?” objection to that line of critique. So: Continue reading
ACC teams besides North Carolina and Duke used to do well in the NCAA tournament. But it’s been a while.
Every year we expect an ACC team besides North Carolina or Duke to finally break through, for lack of a better term, and certainly Miami seemed to fit that bill last year. The Hurricanes won the regular-season championship outright at 15-3 and took the ACC tournament title as well.
Maybe Jim Larranaga’s success in 2012-13 can provide a blueprint for the ACC’s non-Carolina and non-Duke programs. Certainly a blueprint is needed. That No. 2 seed the Canes got last year stands out in historical terms. Florida State received a No. 3 in 2012, but otherwise no ACC team not named “North Carolina” or “Duke” has secured anything higher than a No. 4 since Wake Forest was on the 2-line in the 2005 tournament.
And with the conference’s performance once again earning the wrong kind of headlines, this seems an appropriate moment to reflect on a rather weighty question:
What in the world happened to the rest of the ACC these last few years? Continue reading
I think I see a trend.
Depicted here in all its scintillating glory is Division I’s median free throw rate (FTA/FGA) from 2002-03 through last night, courtesy of Ken Pomeroy’s vault. As is plain from the upside-down 1929 line, the FT rate has been notably robust over the first 12 days of the 2013-14 season.
What this suggests for the season as a whole is still an open question. As Ken pointed out last week, turnovers have dropped more or less in lockstep with the jump in the free throw rate, meaning I could show you a really cool graph with the TO rate dipping about as dramatically as the FT rate has spiked. Maybe both developments will regress toward their respective means as the season unfurls, or maybe we’ve embarked on a new era of low-turnover high-free-throw ball. At this point it’s anyone’s guess. Continue reading
Oregon’s 1939 national championship team, the “Tall Firs,” went 6-8, 6-4, 6-4 across the front line. I would have dominated back then.
Just 35 programs can claim to have won the national championship in men’s basketball, and one of them isn’t even in Division I anymore. Continue reading
You don’t have to have a Ph.D. from Illinois like Dr. John Giannini to wonder how folk wisdom influences perception.
People will say certain things during this college basketball season that are said every year. Certainly there really are some things that are true each year, but coaches, announcers, and writers don’t expend precious time saying “The baskets are 10 feet high this year,” or “made free throws are worth one point.” Instead the annual statements I refer to are phrased as considered judgments based on what’s been observed that particular season. “Parity,” for one, or “there are no great teams,” or possibly even “more blown calls than ever before.”
Still another considered judgment that recurs quite often is that we’re seeing a decline in the overall quality of play in college basketball. I suppose the interesting question is whether this can ever be true under normal circumstances. Obviously when the NFL uses replacement players during a strike, or when major league baseball tries to keep things going during a world war, there is likely to be a decline in the quality of play.
In the case of college basketball in particular, there are what appear to me to be conflicting attitudes toward defense. The underlying dynamic goes roughly like this…. Continue reading
Some ACC guy in 2004 — was this The Best Conference Ever?
Today I have a piece at Insider considering the new-look ACC’s claim to being “the best conference in the history of the game,” as Mike Krzyzewski memorably put it. Specifically I look at just how good the league can reasonably expect to be starting next season when Louisville arrives (and Maryland leaves for the Big Ten).
I’m not at liberty to divulge any conclusions I reached as a result of that particular effort, but as part of my daylong festival of Greatest Conferences, I thought I’d cover some of the other candidates for this particular title from years gone by. Continue reading
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
Not just yet.
It’s far too early in the season to look at individual statistics, blah blah blah, let’s look at individual statistics.
We’ll start with the group that’s played a whopping three games. Relatively speaking, Kentucky’s 2013-14 season is ready for its commemorative coffee table book. Continue reading
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
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
John Gasaway 