At any rate – we are about the sports and about the analysis and about trying to do a good job with it, not about generating as much traffic as possible to the site…although it would help if some of you bastards clicked on the ads once in a while!  I kid…

So, I believe I mentioned something in paragraph 1 about analysis.  So, here it goes. 

What no one is talking about right now is WHY none of these teams are in the tournament.  How on earth can 5 of the Top 10 or 15 (arguably – that is a fight for a different day) programs in the history of college basketball all be missing from the tourney in the same year?  Well, the answer is simple – coaching.  Well, I guess just throwing the word “coaching” out there is not sufficient.  Don’t worry – we will provide plenty of detail later.

Before I get deeper into this, let me just let you know that IU and Tom Crean get a free pass…for last year, for this year, and for at least one more year.  What Kelvin Sampson did to that program is just a disgrace.  Nothing more to say about that – I don’t think anyone but Kelvin Sampson’s family was surprised by what a piece of junk he turned out to be at IU.  But the fact remains that he took one of the Top 5 college basketball programs of all-time and turned it into a laughingstock.

So, let’s take a quick look at the coaching functions that are relevant here, as regards the remaining 4 programs (UNC, UConn, UCLA, Arizona) – recruiting, preparation and in-game coaching.

First, you have got to recruit guys with character.  Once you have either built (in the case of Jim Calhoun) or inherited (in the case of the other 3) a program of this stature, your ability to recruit talent is a forgone conclusion.  It comes along with the logo on the sweater.  Sure, there will be years when you do not have a “Top 5” recruiting class and years when you do…but you are always going to be able to recruit top athletes to your program.  This fact is so engrained into the consciousness of analysts that they often describe a top program’s recruiting class by using the school’s name as a descriptor.  For instance: “Ben Howland did a great job recruiting this year.  There are really some guys on that list with UCLA talent.”

The problem here is that talent and character do not go hand-in-hand.  In fact – for all of these programs, you can assume that the talent is going to be there.  You have teams of scouts bringing you film on kids and any fool can see the talent.  Your only job as a top flight college basketball coach is to recruit character and instill discipline.  That’s it. 

Now, if you are a good enough coach, you can get by without it.  John Calipari is a prime example.  I think he will eventually mellow out in this regard and start recruiting character at Kentucky (he better), but he wanted to make a big splash and that is why he is probably working 18-hour days trying to keep it all together with four blue-chip freshmen all playing significant roles in the lineup, all with at least a small history of character issues.  What Calipari has done this year is easily the best coaching job in college basketball over the past 20 years…by a WIDE margin.  But that kind of thing is not sustainable at a top flight college program, because it only takes one miss when you are recruiting talent and not character. 

Enough about Coach Cal.  Well, one more thing – his performance this year has earned him a seat at my table of great college basketball coaches.  In case anyone is still not clear on this, there are only 2 criteria – how often do you lose games you are supposed to win, and how often do you win games you are supposed to lose?  Of course, both of those have to be looked at along with overall success.  For instance, if you build an NBA team at Kansas an win an NCAA Championship with them, then inherit an NBA team from Matt Doherty and win another national championship, then build your own NBA team again and win a national championship a few years later, then you still get credit.  Sure, just about anyone can coach those kids once they are playing as a unit, but someone had to get them there, so we can reluctantly give Roy Williams some credit and give him a seat at the table…but he’s getting the last steak left on the plate.  Am I still bitter that he absolutely botched the Kansas game in the 2008 Final Four and then botched the opportunity for an undefeated season when Carolina was head and shoulders better than every single team they played last year?  Damn right I am. 

OK – back to rest of these guys and recruiting character.  First of all, you have the police blotter character, and that usually just won’t fly at any of these programs.  Usually, even one of those guys on a team is too many, but if you get more than one, they always end up in cahoots and doing something stupid together, like stealing laptops from their fellow students (Marcus Williams).  It’s possible to have one of those guys on your team, but you need a few really good character guys to balance it out.

Where you can really get into trouble is having lots of guys with small character flaws all playing on the same team.  For instance, the 2009-2010 North Carolina Tar Heels.  There is no excuse for a team with a front line of Ed Davis, Tyler Zeller and Deion Thompson to miss the tournament…unless they have a coach that cannot elevate them above their questionable character.  I am not talking about criminal behavior anymore, I am talking about character in big moments and tight spots throughout a season of basketball games.  You are either born for the bright lights or you are not, and it is not always readily apparent until the bright lights are on.

Well, as it turns out, none of those 3 Carolina players are built for the bright lights.  They are all going to play in the NBA, and might even all be great role players there, but having them all on the same team and playing significant minutes in college over the course of an ACC schedule is a bona fide disaster.

I guess the main problem is that most of the top flight recruits have been able to do whatever they want on a basketball court for years and years…they just have too much size, talent and determination for the guys they are playing against.  But when they get to college, and they have to rely on heart and character as much as athleticism and skills, that’s when some of those blue chips turn into cow chips.

The next area of coaching where some of these programs have fallen down this year is in preparation.  Sure, it would be easy to point to the fact that all of these programs have lost a lot of players to the NBA over the past 12 months…but that is only part of the story.  I have seen all of these coaches out-prepared by lesser-known coaches just about all year long, and there is no excuse for it.  In fact, the only possible explanation is that these coaches are either not working hard enough or not working smart enough.

When you are essentially the CEO of a small corporation and the only job of that corporation is to win as many games as possible, it’s kind of inexcusable to not be prepared for each and every game.  When you throw in the fact that your bosses have provided you with some of the best facilities in the entire country, teams of people to help you, and endless reams of digital evidence of the strengths and weaknesses of every opponent, it becomes an absolute joke. 

The sad part is that every one of these guys had to know that this season was going to be a challenge, and had to know that being able to tip the scales in their favor 3 or 4 extra times throughout the year would potentially make the all the difference…and they still all lost multiple games to what could be considered the dregs of their conferences.  They did not lose those games, and could NEVER lose those games based on talent, only based on preparation…

And on our third area of coaching where these guys have fallen down.  In order for UCLA to lose to 3 games against the worst 3 teams in their conference, with superior talent in every one of those games, it cannot only be about preparation.  Ben Howland is being outcoached.  Sure, it’s kind of tough to state it in such plain terms like that, since all of these things kind of tie themselves together.  For instance, I saw Roy Williams out-prepared and outcoached by a minimum of 7 lesser coaches this year alone.  Now, that is a remarkably prevalent pattern with Roy over his entire career, but you cannot discount the character issues here as well.

I think it might even be safe to say that if playing at Carolina, or UConn, or Arizona, or UCLA and having the potential to make millions of dollars is not enough to motivate you, then maybe you are not able to be motivated.  Perhaps missing the tournament and suffering one heartbreaking loss after another to inferior teams might wake one of these 4 teams up, but I doubt it.  Seriously, if you look at the schedules and results for all of these teams (IU, too), there are very few blowouts on there.  They were in each game and competing, just did not have the intestinal fortitude to win the game down the stretch.  They either did not have the character, were not well enough prepared, or we not coached properly…or some combination of the three.

In my opinion, I think it all starts with character, and all of these teams have serious character issues.

1.  I Think Gus Johnson’s Act is Getting Tired Already.  For starters, I love Gus Johnson.  When he is doing a game, and it is getting more and more exciting with each passing moment, and he is getting more and more out of control with each passing moment…it probably does not get any better than that in the current sports landscape.  But Gus, can you please reserve that kind of behavior only for moments that deserve it?  When a team trailing by 19 goes on a 5-0 run to cut the lead to 14 points with the other team’s 2 best players on the bench, we don’t need you acting like something exciting is happening, or even ABOUT to happen.  Seriously, doing that kind of thing is not only starting to cheapen what you bring to the table, it is starting to grate against people.

2.  Roy Williams is a Solid Division I Men’s Basketball Coach.  That’s it.  Sorry, but that’s all you get from me, Roy.  You had a team with a legitimate shot at being one of the truly special teams in NCAA history, and you coached them to losses against Boston College, Wake Forest and Maryland.  Granted, you had a little bad luck with Marcus Ginyard going down for the year and with Tyler Zeller being an absolute moron, but you absolutely do not get a free pass for losing to those 3 teams when they don’t even have one player that can start for your team.  You will notice that I have given you a free pass for losing to BC in the ACC Tournament, because Ty Lawson was a spectator and you had already pissed away any chance at real greatness your team had.  Don’t get me wrong, as a huge Tar Heels fan, I like that Roy has kept the magic going…I like the recruits he keeps getting (although an argument could be made that Dean Smith is about 95% responsible for every recruit that comes to Carolina)…and I like the assistant coaches he is able to attract.  But I have never, not one single time in his entire tenure in Chapel Hill, seen him elevate a team beyond its potential.  Not once was there a Tar Heel team that we thought had Sweet Sixteen potential and he took them to the Final Four.  Sure, it’s kind of difficult when you have Final Four potential just about every year, but can we please stop treating this guy like he is one of the top coaches ever?  He just took a team that could have easily been regarded as one of the best 3 or 4 teams in NCAA history and turned them into just another National Champion.

3.  I am Starting to Turn the Corner on Tom Izzo.  Michigan State exceeded their ceiling under the guidance of Tom Izzo.  The mere fact that this happened during the 2008-2009 season puts Tom Izzo on a better “historically great” footing than Roy Williams.  I think Izzo might just be the real deal.  Anyone who has been following the blog knows that in order for me to think a coach is the real deal, he has to elevate his team on a regular basis…not merely meet expectations but exceed them.  And that is EXACTLY what Michigan State did this year.  I am not ready to put Izzo up there with the all-timers yet, but I am suitably impressed with his coaching this year.  To add to his legacy even more, some of his former assistants are starting to make some noise.  Look at what Tom Crean has done and continues to do.  Everyone knew it was going to be a down year for Indiana, but no one knew how bad until the roster started to take shape…a member of the Indiana baseball team, an equipment manager, and a couple of guys that I think I recognized from my local pickup game Sunday mornings at the Indy JCC were all getting minutes as the season progressed.  That team went 1-17 in conference and was competitive in a lot of those games, and they never quit or gave up on one single game along the way.  Crean is a good one…and if he continues to coach his players to exceed their capabilities year after year, he will one day be mentioned with the all-time greats, like I think his mentor Tom Izzo might be as well, based on his performance and the performance of his team this year.

That’s it.  Just a few thoughts that were swimming around my head at one point during the last few weeks of the college basketball season, at least enough so that I thought enough to write them down.

There you have it.  My NCAA notepad for the 2008-2009 season is officially empty.  Well, I think I feel a blog post coming on that is kind of a cautionary tale to Kentucky about their recent hire.  They can ill afford any kind of violation or investigation, and the NCAA is going to send a message very soon that they are going to come down hard on people that bend the rules.

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.