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.

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.

That being said, I think Calhoun has certainly earned his current salary through having success at the highest level.  Granted, not everyone thinks that way, and Coach Calhoun was not mentally equipped to handle a line of questioning on the subject without acting like the bitchy little diva that he is…but that has been covered in greater detail by more well-funded media outlets and I do not really have anything to add.

He has always been a great recruiter, although he will not have to actually recruit again as long as he stays at the program he has built in Storrs, CT.  He is also one of the best big game coaches in college basketball history.  I was at the Final Four when he beat Duke, despite having only a single player on his roster (Rip Hamilton) that could have started for Duke and probably only 1 or 2 other players that could have even made the Duke team.  It was absolutely wonderful to watch him coach that game…especially against Coach K, who has only ever won a big game when he had the clearly better team, and has lost many, many, many big games when he had the far superior team.  Sure, that kind of thing happens to every coach, but Coach K seems to lose more of those games than any other coach in college basketball today not named Rick Barnes.

I think that is the main difference between Coach K and Calhoun…their actual coaching ability when it matters most…but let’s talk about the main similarity between these two great coaches…they seem to get every single 50/50 call, and several others that they should never get, every single game, and they seem to never, ever stop bitching and whining at the refs.

OK, let’s get back to the Jim Calhoun hype machine after the 6 OT thriller against Syracuse.  In my opinion, the matchup was kind of like the Duke-UConn final I mentioned earlier…Johnny Flynn is the only Syracuse player that could start for UConn, and there are probably only 2 or 3 other Syracuse players that could even earn a spot on the UConn squad…and UConn lost the game…and Calhoun started his spin campaign immediately afterwards.

If you didn’t see the press conference, he publicly called out his team and started talking about their inability to win the game in the first 4 overtimes, despite playing their first team against what was essentially Johnny Flynn and 4 random dudes in orange shirts.  Incidentally – I found it VERY curious that Thabeet was involved in about 37,000 plays that involved his body bumping up against another player’s body when his feet were not on the ground, and it took until the 4th OT before he fouled out.  In fact, it took until the 4th OT before ANY Uconn player fouled out.  But, that is what we have come to expect from how the refs handle great shot blockers in big games – call only the fouls you have to call.

Anyway, in the postgame presser, Calhoun was practically begging the selection committee to give his team a 2 seed in the tournament…and I hope that the committee does not do it.  UConn is a fatally flawed team, in terms of being a legitimate threat to win the whole thing, especially with Kevin Dyson watching the proceedings from the sideline with nicer clothes than I have ever owned in my life, despite the fact that I bill clients upwards of $100/hour and he is a college student.  I also have a sneaking suspicion that his cuff links during the Syracuse game are worth more than at least one of the cars in my garage. 

In my opinion, a 2 seed is probably the only way that UConn can win the title this year.  It would provide Jim Calhoun with everything he needs to motivate his team to overcome many of the shortcomings that should have them watching the Final Four on T.V. with the rest of us.  If that happens, we might all have to watch Calhoun with that shit-eating grin on his face, knowing that his team overcame the disrespect shown them by the selection committee, a disrespect that did not exist until Jim Calhoun created it out of thin freakin’ air immediately after the Syracuse game in the Big East tournament.

So, if any of you on the selection committee are reading (after the way I have universally praised the selection committee over the years, I am sure they are), please don’t disrespect UConn by giving them a 2 seed, even though they probably deserve one.  That’s exactly what Jim Calhoun wants.

By the way – what a classy move by Calhoun to throw his players under the bus in the press conference.  Hey Jim, even novelty t-shirts think that was tacky.

Incidentally, we still have UConn as a 1 seed in our bracket over at RPIBracket.com.