We Have Seen This Kind of Thing Before.

Here they are, in order:

• North Carolina
• Kentucky
• Louisville
• Indiana
• Kansas
• Arizona
• Illinois
• Duke
• Maryland
• Ohio State
• Wisconsin
• Syracuse
• UCLA
• Michigan State
• Arkansas
• UNLV
• Xavier
• NC State
• Wake Forest
• Pittsburgh

So, let’s do some of that world-famous research that folks have come to expect from us here at MackOnSports, vice just spouting off at the mouth, which we still do most of the time…we just like to have a fact or two in our hip pocket to back up our arguments…we have found that in addition to helping us win most of our arguments about sports, it also has the added bonus of making us much more annoying to those who are on the losing end of those arguments.  So, it really is a no-brainer on every level to do some research.  Anyway, here are a few numbers that just kind of jump out at us:

• National Champions, Last 5 Years
  • Top 20:  3
  • All Others:  2
• National Champions, Last 10 Years
  • Top 20:  7
  • All Others:  3
• Final Four Teams, Last 5 Years
  • Top 20:  12
  • All Others:  8
• Final Four Teams, Last 10 Years
  • Top 20:  25
  • All Others:  15
• National Championships, All Time
  • Top 20:  47
  • All Others:  20

Now, let’s go ahead and take a slightly different look at the haves vs. the have nots.  Instead of looking at the program’s value, let’s just go based on what the experts would tell you are the most prestigious programs – basically the “Big Five” and the next 4 teams that are knocking on the door, in terms of prestige.  This list had 10 names on 10 days ago, but Memphis will have to earn their way back onto the list.  Here they are, the “Big 9”.

• UCLA
• Kentucky
• North Carolina
• Indiana
• Duke
• Kansas
• UConn
• Michigan State
• Louisville

Now, let’s look at those same stats from before:

• National Champions, Last 5 Years
  • Big 9:  3
  • All Others:  2
• National Champions, Last 10 Years
  • Big 9:  6
  • All Others:  4
• Final Four Teams, Last 5 Years
  • Big 9:  11
  • All Others:  9
• Final Four Teams, Last 10 Years
  • Big 9:  20
  • All Others:  20
• National Championships, All Time
  • Big 9:  40
  • All Others:  27

So, what does it all mean?  I guess it just means that the rich get richer and the poor get left out…and they get more and more left out with each passing round of the tournament each year.

We have been very consistent with our bemoaning the fact that the NCAA Tournament has become a big business – it easily screws 4 or 5 smaller schools out of making the tournament every single year.  Hell, it even made us so angry that we started a second web site (www.RPIBracket.com) just to see how much the selection committee disregarded the objective data about a team’s tournament worthiness and favored the big conferences and schools over the little guys.  We have chronicled their 2009 performance here:  http://www.mackonsports.com/blog/2009/03/16/money-grubbing-101-or-how-to-screw-the-little-guy/

The heart of the problem is that the same relatively small group of teams are always going to be well represented in the Final Four and have a preponderance of the national championships, regardless of how the selection committee does their job.  And we think it is only going to get worse.

Take a look at those two lists again – the Top 20 programs financially and the “Big 9” in terms of prestige – and answer one question: how many of the next 10 National Champions will not be on one or both of those lists?   Only time will tell the answer, but I think it will be 2 or less.

Without further ado, here are the random thoughts:

Jim Calhoun is in BIG Trouble.  For those of you that have not followed Jim Calhoun’s coaching career as closely as I have – or more appropriately, as closely as I have been forced to do by being born and raised in Connecticut – I will try to give you a good translation using my Jim Calhoun decoder ring.  First things first – Calhoun is a diva…a whiny bitch diva.  Teenager actresses that use personal shoppers think Calhoun is a diva.

Jim Calhoun is also of the opinion that he has never done anything wrong in his entire life, despite the fact that his teams have often been bounced from the NCAA tournament by inferior competition.  Sure, he’s no Rick Barnes in that regard, but who is?  More on Rick “Long Flight” Barnes later.

So, let me break out my Calhoun decoder ring.  When Calhoun, who has never publicly admitted any wrongdoing whatsoever, says that “mistakes may have been made”, he is saying something more along the lines of “I hope we win it all this year, so I can just retire and leave this turd sandwich for my successor.”  I have heard multiple experts intimate that the probable punishment will be a minimum of a one-year post-season ban as well as the loss of multiple scholarships for multiple years.

The thing that gets me most excited about this is how smug Calhoun is – like the NCAA would never come after him.  He couldn’t handle someone asking him a question about his salary without acting like a 4-year-old; how do you think he will handle the press conference immediately following the official announcement of the NCAA sanctions against UConn basketball?

Geno Auriemma is Still an A-Hole.  How in the world is it that the least likable person in men’s college basketball and the least likable person in women’s college basketball coach at the same school?  One thing is for sure – these two guys deserve each other.  I promise this will be the last reference to women’s basketball in this post.  I don’t normally quote guys that I consider annoying hacks, but Colin Cowherd actually summed it up best:  “I like women.  I like basketball.  I don’t like women’s basketball.”

Kentucky Got Their Man.  Many people with a much larger readership (despite most of them having far less skill) than myself have already covered this through and through, and I really have nothing to add.  Suffice it to say that Kentucky needed to hire a guy from a very short list, and Coach Cal is on that list.  Much like Indiana a year ago, Kentucky did the absolute best they could do under the circumstances.  I think Kentucky will be restored to prominence before Indiana, but I would not make any bets as to the first of the two to win a championship, because…

Calipari No Longer Has an Excuse.  Here is the kind of analysis you have come to expect from us here at MackOnSports – a little off the beaten path, easy to dismiss at first, but the more you think about it, the more you know we are probably right.  Coach Cal has kind of gotten a free pass for losing to lesser teams in the past because people think he is somehow overachieving just by getting close, since he is at a traditionally second-tier program, like UMass or Memphis.  It was absolutely inexcusable for John Calipari to get outcoached by Mike Anderson this year, and even more inexcusable that my 4-year-old son could have outcoached John Calipari in last year’s tourney final.  It’s true – I just asked him to say “foul everyone” and he said it just fine.  At first, I was very confused why Coach Cal was not utterly vilified in both instances, and then it dawned on me…it was because he was at Memphis.  The standard thinking was that it was an amazing feat every year when he was able to get the recruits he was able to get and roll through Conference-USA and make a splash by going deep in the tournament – after all, he was at Memphis.

Well, that train has officially left the station.  Coach Cal wanted to be front and center, in the spotlight, with everyone in the tent watching him…and he got what he wanted.  I just hope he realizes that this high-wire act does not come with a net.  I think, through his past performance, he has earned himself something longer than a 2-year window for success like his predecessor, but I also think that he absolutely needs to win a national championship within the contract he just signed or history will prove that this is not the incredible hire that everyone thinks it is now.  I don’t think there is any chance that it will be a bad hire by any stretch of the imagination, but some pretty special things need to happen for the hiring of Coach Cal to live up to the hype.

Of course, if he runs into some problems with understanding the NCAA’s rulebook, as he did at UMass (for which he also, inexplicably, gets a free pass), then it goes down as one of the worst hires of all time…especially since everyone knows that the UConn mess is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the NCAA getting tough on schools that deal with agents. 

SIDEBAR:  The fact that an agent, or anyone who is currently working for an agent, or has ever worked for an agent, is allowed to have any contact with an athlete before his college career is over and he has declared for the draft is an abomination.  The fact that these scumbags have so infiltrated the system that coaches, rather than call the NCAA as soon as they see an agent, are working hand-in-hand with them…that is just plain disgusting.  The fact that UConn is apparently growing their own agents as well as players is something even worse. 

I am in the middle of pulling together some facts for a separate blog post on this.  Here’s a little something to whet your appetite: a direct quote from Seth Davis on the Steve Czaban show earlier this week “Agents are to college basketball what steroids are to Major League Baseball.”

I think there is going to be one more big-name coach and big-name program that gets caught in this thresher, and they will get hammered even worse than what happens to Calhoun and UConn.  I am afraid that it is going to be someone that thinks because of his stature and current employer, he is above the law. 

Roy Williams Tarnished His Legacy in My Book.  Everyone is praising North Carolina and Roy Williams for finally starting to play up to their potential and fire on all cylinders in the tournament.  As a dyed-in-the-wool Tar Heels fan, I can only take the opposite approach.  In my opinion, Roy Williams has chosen greatness over immortality this year.  The fact that he lost games to Boston College, Wake Forest, Maryland and Florida State is absolute inexcusable.  This year’s North Carolina team not only had the opportunity to go down in history as the greatest North Carolina team ever, they could have, if they had a coach that was not notorious for orchestrating a couple of inexcusable losses to inferior competition every single year of his career, made a legitimate run at a perfect record and basketball immortality.

Plus, it seems like the times when the Heels most need him to be coaching, he is not…and when they most need him to keep his hands to himself, he is messing with stuff.  The fact that he was incapable last year of stopping the bleeding in the first half against Kansas with superior athletes at every position tells me all I need to know about Roy Williams.

Texas Should be Looking for a New Coach.  Speaking of losing to inferior competition, Texas Coach Rick Barnes has inspired me to come up with the First Annual MackOnSports March Madness Awards at the end of this tournament…just so I can give the Rick Barnes Award to the coach that turned in the worst coaching performance to lose to an inferior team and go home early.  And because Texas ended up as a 7 seed, someone other than Rick Barnes is going to win the inaugural award, which is just a shame.

Before the Texas-Duke game even started, I was almost willing to give Rick Barnes a pass for the stone cold lead pipe loss that was about to happen.  Then, I actually watched the game.  Let me first say that I absolutely hate the words “eye test” and everything that they represent…but I was amazed while watching that game how athletically superior Texas looked to Duke.  As in, it looked like a college team playing a high school team.  Every player seemed at least a few inches taller and 15-20 pounds heavier.

As I started to think about it more and more, it was no great surprise to me, because that’s kind of how Rick Barnes seems to work.  His teams always have great athletes, and they always go just as far as their athleticism will take them.  As soon as they get to a game that involves proper execution, minimizing mistakes and coaching, they are doomed every time.  The main problem is that based on the level of competition in the tournament each year, Texas is going to be looking at a run to the Sweet Sixteen at least 2 out of every 3 years, and for a traditional football school, that is probably going to be just fine, and Rick Barnes is going to keep making a lot of money to not coach.

I am still a very bitter Kevin Durant fan.  Rick Barnes had 2 of the 10 best players in the entire tournament (Durant and D.J. Augustine) and he could not make the Sweet Sixteen.  Furthermore, his offense can best be described as a bunch of great athletes running around when they should probably be standing still and standing still when they probably should be running around.  But, he is not alone…

Where Have All the Good Coaches Gone?  Is there anyone else that has noticed that the Rick Barnes offense seems to be the norm rather than the exception?  The closest thing I have seen to a well-planned and executed play is an occasional high screen and a few plays at the end of a half or the end of a game.  Other than that, there a bunch of dudes trying to take someone off the dribble, and if that doesn’t work, they pass it to someone else that tries to do the same thing.  If they are able to get by their man, they get a short shot, or dump the ball to where the defensive help came from.  And what the hell is going on with every team launching 20 three-pointers a game?

Sure, some of this is tongue-in-cheek, and it is not quite as bad as I am making it out to be, but there is a lot more improvisation and a lot less coaching going on than there used to be.  I think this will probably end up being its own post in a couple of weeks when I am missing college hoops and looking back on the season.

They Are Who We Thought They Were.  Some of these are going to be repeated in my March Madness Awards next week, but they bear mentioning here as well.  And by “we” I mean myself, in the capacity of the co-founder of this blog and as the twisted mind behind RPIBracket.com. 

• Arizona.  A team that, through their performance over 4 months, did not even earn a spot in our bracket, at the first sign of adversity, despite having 3 future NBA players in the starting rotation, curled up in the fetal position, sucked their thumb and crapped their pants.
• Michigan State.  They were a number one seed in our objective bracket, based on the data about their performance over the entire season, and they are in the Final Four.  What a surprise…to everyone except me.
• Louisville.  It is not Louisville’s fault that their schedule was one of the easier ones in the Big East…and it was not their fault that UConn and Pitt washed out of the Big East tournament early, but not playing enough of those tough games certainly ended up hurting them, that’s for sure.  To a lesser extent, I could say the same thing about Louisville that I said about Arizona above…which is kind of funny, since Louisville is the team that embarrassed Arizona so badly.  To be fair, Louisville just kind of got flustered and committed a bunch of mental mistakes and turnovers, whereas Arizona full-on took a gigantic stink dump in their collective drawers.  Of course, all of this was loosely predicted by our bracket, which had MSU as a 1 seed, Louisville as a 2 seed, and Arizona in the N.I.T.
• Blake Griffin.  This might be the NBA draft lottery with the most riding on it since the 1985 Patrick Ewing lottery.  Not since that draft has there been such a precipitous drop between the #1 player in the draft and everyone else.  I am hoping for Blake Griffin’s sake that a team with a statistically small chance of winning actually wins the #1 overall pick and he gets to go to a team with a fighting chance.  The saddest part of all for me is that Blake Griffin wants to win every bit as badly as Tyler Hansbrough wants to win, but Blake is probably going to be stuck with the Kings, Clippers, Grizzlies, Wizards, Thunder or T-Wolves…while Hansbrough might last until the mid-late first round and end up with a contender.  Actually, could you imagine if Minnesota wins the lottery?  This would be their stable of young front-line players: Kevin Love, Al Jefferson, Rodney Carney, Shelden Williams and Blake Griffin.
• Siena.  We had them as a 6 seed in our bracket, and we had Ohio State as an 8 seed, so the data showed that Siena should have a decent chance to beat the Buckeyes.  Plus, it did not hurt Siena’s case that Thad Matta is the coach at Ohio State.  How the heck can he concentrate on coaching when he is trying to find his next job?  It was also not a surprise to us that Siena gave Louisville their toughest test aside from Michigan State.
• North Carolina.  It seems that the Tar Heels finally started to hit their stride with a healthy Ty Lawson and what seems like about 7 other dudes that can stick a dagger in the other team’s heart on any given night or any given play.  And is it even fair that they can rotate Hansbrough, Deon Thompson, Ed Davis, and Tyler Zeller down low?  It’s a shame that they were one coach away from making a run at immortality this year.

Wasting time berating his players during timeouts.  Does Billy think for one second that a Kentucky basketball player does not know he messed up when he made a 40-foot balloon pass in the offensive zone that turned into an easy transition bucket for the opposition?  How does Coach Gillispie not know that he should be coaching instead of acting like a jerk, making a point that absolutely did not need to be made?  Bear in mind that this occurred when the Kentucky lead, which had been 20 at one point, was 6 points…and it was a T.V. timeout (i.e., a free opportunity to provide some extra coaching for your team that just turned a 20-point lead into a 6-point lead). 

Kentucky players picked up their dribble and got trapped on 6 out of 7 possessions.  This happened with no fewer than 3 time outs taking place between the first instance and the sixth instance.  Do you think the players of a top flight college basketball coach would do that a second time, much less a sixth time, during the final 7 minutes of a tournament game in their own gym?

Billy Gillispie was standing up on the sidelines wringing his hands during play.  While I was watching this, I was at first reminded of Jerry Tarkanian’s towel.  Then, as I started to think about it more and more, it occurred to me that for some reason, it was endearing with Tark, whereas Gillispie looked like the geekiest 6th grader in school contemplating exactly what level of rejection is about to befall him as he works up his nerve to ask a girl to dance for the first time…or maybe an alcoholic just trying to get to the end of his workday and taste that sweet first drink of the night.  It was, without a doubt, the least confidence-inspiring thing I have ever seen a college basketball coach do at any time.

Players dunking with an insurmountable lead at the end of the game.  Ahead by 9 points, Patrick Patterson executed a dunk with 20 seconds left on the shot clock and under 30 seconds left on the game clock.  When your coach is a punk, I guess you can’t really expect your players to behave any other way.

Kentucky is better than their coach will ever be.  They need to cut their losses, pay Gillispie whatever it takes to make him go away for good, and call Bobby Knight.  If you want to still be considered a top 5 program, get yourself a top 5 coach.  Your current coach had a nice run down there in College Station where the expectations were easy to exceed…he does not have the intelligence, intestinal fortitude or coaching skills to achieve success at a top flight college basketball program.

By all means, if you want to have a future of partying in the streets every March and watching the games on T.V. every April, then you have your man.  If you would like to restore your program to its once-proud traditions, then you need a coach capable of matching the big boys (Calhoun, Calipari and Self) in the big games.  Gillispie has proven time and again that his big game coaching ability is somewhere between Division II and YMCA.

FOOTNOTE

You will note the absence of Rick Pitino, Tom Izzo, Billy Donovan, Roy Williams and Mike Krzyzewski from the list of “big boys” in this article.  That is because the only time I have seen any of these coaches win a big game is when they absolutely, without question, had the better team…but they usually lose several big games every year, and one in the tournament almost every year, to inferior competition…that does not make you one of the big boys in my book.  Sure, they are some of the big-time coaches, and any program would be lucky to have a guy that can recruit players and assistant coaches like those guys, but in the biggest games of all, they have never, ever been capable of making a team exceed their capabilities…only reach them.  Obviously, The General, if and when he returns to coaching, goes on the list of big boys.