The Dagger

Sometimes, in the mist of a rushed blog day, I can write without really completing the thinking process. Oh, don't get me wrong: I think before I write. I get to that first level of consideration. But it's that second level, the well-maybe-but-hey-maybe-not part, that blogging doesn't always allow for until a few posts or a day or a week down the line. So it goes.

Anyway, in my rush to proclaim the selection committee's sensibility over their abolishment of what I guess we can call the Last 12 Games Rule -- the idea that the final 12 games of a season were of more value to a tourney team's resume than the games that preceded them -- I probably didn't get to level two, thought-wise. It makes more sense to consider all games equal, sure. But don't we sort of want teams to peak late in the season, too? Shouldn't that at least be a factor?

Rush the Court argues that point effectively today:

The conventional wisdom is that this is a good thing, but we’re uncertain.  Think about it: all else being equal, would you want a team that started 15-1 but finished 4-8 getting into the Dance over a team that started 9-7, but finished 10-2?  We think that there needs to be some reward for finishing strong.  Basketball is a tournament sport, and teams are built to be working on all cylinders by the time tournament season rolls around, not in November and December.  Our general feeling is that committee members will still reward strong closers over strong starters, but it just won’t be officially sanctioned.  Let’s hope they do, at least.

I think that's right. Just as it was dumb for the selection committee to ignore a team's first 20 games because their last 12 were "in the toolbox," it's equally dumb to pretend that a team playing better down the stretch doesn't deserve more tournament props than one that's entirely faded. All games aren't exactly equal. Some do matter more than others. But what it seems the selection committee is doing here -- at least let's hope so -- is removing the explicit rule and replacing it with an implicit consideration. It's about being less rigid. It's about looking at each team's resume not merely through the prism of "top 50 wins" and "RPI" and "final 12 games" but as a dynamic story of a each team's season.

If that's the selection committee's goal, then it turns out I was right in the first place. They are being more reasonable.

Everyone is sort of wondering what Cincinnati (not "Cincinatti," remember) is doing. Why spend so much time and effort rehabilitating your basketball program's image -- including firing a pretty successful, if uncomfortably amoral, coach in Bob Huggins -- only to hop at the chance to sign Lance Stephenson, arguably the riskiest recruit of this decade? Why do that? Is it really worth it? (A different argument here is that, um, duh? Of course it's worth it. Even if Cincinnati gets in trouble down the road it's likely they'd only vacate wins or have some other toothless punishment forced on them by the NCAA. A better question is why wouldn't you take Lance Stephenson. But, like I said, different argument.)

That is the question Cincinnati coach Mick Cronin must answer. His attempt is, well ... I don't know if you'd call it the most convincing thing in the world. He lacks a certain Coach K inscrutability, doesn't he?

"We've done all our due diligence on the legal issue," Cronin, the Cincinnati coach, said during a conference call yesterday. "Obviously, we felt confident it's going to be resolved. With his amateur status, to my knowledge, we have no issues. We obviously think he's going to be cleared to play or we wouldn't have recruited him."

The problem for Cronin is that there's only so much "due diligence" he can do on the legal issue. I mean, he can't say whether Stephenson is guilty or innocent, can he? And if Stephenson IS innocent, Cronin can't be sure that a judge will agree, right? So what diligence is there to do?

Too often in sports we mistake "money" for "support." Sure, there are the big-time collegiate boosters, the guys who anonymously come out of the woodwork to pony up a million bucks when a certain troublesome coach needs a buyout, pronto. I get that this is how college sports work. And hey, many boosters are really big fans of their team that also happen to have tons of money with which to express that fandom. Nothing wrong with that.

But there's a fine line there, and it's when we begin to forget that money does not perfectly equate to fandom. Supporting a team comes in many forms. Some of them are financially agnostic.

It is in that spirit, then, that you'll probably read these figures in horror: UCLA is revamping Pauley Pavilion and with it their ticketing system, and if you want a frontcourt seat, you better be ready to pony up the dough. From the AP:

Courtside seats will require a $500,000 donation to the capital campaign, payable over five years, plus an annual donation of $17,000 per seat to the Wooden Athletic Fund. A one-time donation of $30,000 or more assures up to four seats mostly between the baskets in the lower half of the arena. Those tickets require annual Wooden Fund donations of $2,000 to $4,000 per seat, plus the face value of the tickets.

Hey, got a spare down payment on a house handy? Want to blow a bit of your kid's trust fund? Have a seat "mostly between the baskets in the lower half of the arena!" That sounds fun! And that doesn't even approach the half-a-mil necessary to get in those courtside digs. Eesh.

Again, this is how college sports work, and you won't see me pulling a William Jennings Bryan here any time soon; rich people should get to spend their money how they want, and if UCLA can draw $500,000 for a basketball seat, more power to them. But it is slightly disconcerting that price increases could price out long time fans, who, though they'd have the most "points" under UCLA's system, will again be subject to more mandatory donations than they might previously have bargained for. I wonder how John Wooden would feel about that.

This morning, Jason King wrote a excellent summary of yesterday's Henry family mischief, in which Charles Henry responded to some furor over his antics in a Kansas City Star story -- his claiming that his sons would both be one-and-done, his insistence that C.J. Henry was better than national player of the year candidate Sherron Collins, et. al. -- with this little bit of petulance:

“The guy that wrote that story betrayed my whole family,” said Carl Henry, who never claimed he was misquoted or that there were factual errors in the article. “He kind of made us look bad, like my kids are prima donnas and all I do is talk.” [Ed note: The reporter didn't have to try that hard.] Later in the interview, Carl Henry said: “So guess what? The kid may have a change of mind. That’s what I told Coach Self. If the kid has a change of mind, so what? So be it.”

As King writes today, Bill Self and Danny Manning had to fly to Oklahoma City last night to calm the Henrys down. That would be funny if it weren't so sad. Henry tells a Star reporter that he thinks his sons are better than Self's current players, and that Self better "get with the program." Then he mentions how he considered sending Xavier to Europe because "Xavier doesn't like to attend classes." Because learning stuff sucks!

Then, because KU fans don't like this sort of behavior around their basketball program, Henry threatens to take his basketball and go to Kentucky to play for John Calpari. And Self is the one mending fences? That's like apologizing to your girlfriend after she cheats on you. "No, no, I'M sorry. I should have known you were unhappy!" Gimme a break.

Now that the whole matter is settled -- Xavier texted a Kansas radio station with the message “I’m goin’ to Kansas and that's final.” -- we can all take a moment and reflect on this. Was there ever really any chance that Henry would take his sons to Kentucky? I say no.

Pictured: The NCAA Hall of Champions. Its newest member: logic.

If you watch a lot of college basketball -- even if you don't actually, even if you're just one of those who swoops in as the conference tournaments are finishing up -- you know that confusion surrounding the way the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Committee seeds the NCAA tournament is the biggest negative we deal with every March.

There's always something. Some team didn't get in because they're a mid-major, and they couldn't schedule teams to come play them, or some major conference team finished its season with a second place run in the conference tournament and anyway they played major conference teams and a tougher schedule all season and doesn't that count for anything anymore and sometimes you just want to throw up your hands and put every D1 team in the tournament, "Hoosiers" style, and see what happens.

One consistently lingering issue? How teams' resumes are interpreted temporally. By which I mean, how much wins in the beginning of the season count versus wins down the stretch. How much did your team improve at the end of the season? That stuff.

As far as completely baseless rumors go, Mike Krzyzewski to the Lakers was a pretty good one. It never made sense on any level whatsoever, especially because the Lakers already, you know, have a coach, but that didn't stop the speculation from gaining traction in recent weeks. We can put an end to the speculation now.

In a strongly-worded statement which doesn't leave much room for parsing, Mike Krzyzewski told reporters yesterday that he never plans on leaving Duke University.

"I'm not going to the Lakers. They have one of the great coaches in the game. I don't know where that rumor started, but there has been nothing done like that, and I'm not leaving Duke. Whatever you hear about anything like that, I will never leave Duke until I leave coaching."

So I guess he wasn't able to bring ACC refs with him to the NBA then?

I kid. This is a good thing for all college basketball fans, not just the ones who root for Duke. Love him or hate him, Mike Krzyzewski is college basketball. He's sort of like the coaching version of Dick Vitale. I don't like them when they're around, but I'd miss them if they were gone. 

This wasn't the first time the K-to-Lakers has been mentioned. In 2004 the team offered Krzyzewski a five-year, $40 million deal (when L.A. had temporarily parted ways with Phil Jackson) but were rebuffed by the Duke coach. There were serious talks back then, but this time around never got past the rumor stage. Even if it did, there was never much chance that Coach K was actually going to accept that (or the previous) offer. He was like the married man who thinks about having a fling before realizing he's not that kind of guy.

And Mike Krzyzewski certainly isn't an NBA guy. Overachievers don't populate NBA rosters. Players don't respond well to coaching. And how could Coach K possibly intimidate officials when some of them are already getting strong-armed by the mob? 

So, floorslappers of the world, rejoice. Your leader will be back on the sideline next year in Durham. Not that he was ever going anywhere in the first place. 

Last night, Lance Stephenson made the most recent batch of rumors about his never-ending, tenuous recruitment real. He chose to play basketball for the Cincinnati Bearcats, meaning I again have to go through a post where I struggle to not type "Cincinatti" instead of "Cincinnati." I don't know why I do that, but I always do.

Naturally, there are bigger issues at stake than my weird spelling tics. Chief among them is the theme -- common by this point -- that Doc Brown just screeched up in the Delorean and shuffled the Bearcats back to the future. After all, former University of Cincinnati President Nancy Zimpher devoted much of her energies to ridding the basketball program of the perception that it was willing to take on questionable recruits with negligible interest in academics. Part of these energies involved asking Bob Huggins to take his mock turtlenecks and go home. And so Cincinnati was clean and quiet, for a little while.

On June 1, Zimpher officially left the school to become president at SUNY. Already, the Bearcats are back in the game. With Stephenson, emphatically so. It's hard to emphasize just how questionable Stephenson is: there are already issues surrounding his eligibility (the NCAA will be launching an investigation into an MTV2 show about Stephenson's life any day now), his attitude, his pending sexual assault case, and so on. Throw in the usual risks you take with one-and-done players -- they don't show up for class in the spring at best; they aid in a complete and utter breakdown of your program at worst -- and you can see the stakes here. Cincinnati isn't just playing a risky bet. They're going all in.

It reeks of desperation, which, little known fact, actually smells like Bob Huggins's cologne. And so the circle of life is complete.

By now, you likely know the story of C.J. and Xavier Henry, brothers and fellow Kansas recruits primed to make the Jayhawks a force at the national level in 2009-10. C.J. is the older brother, who has yet to play a game since deciding baseball wasn't the key to his future (he had a minor-league contract with Yankees before he enrolled at Memphis; he is transferring to Kansas this season and will technically be a sophomore). Xavier is the younger of the two and is probably the more talented, given that he was the No. 8 overall player in the class of 2009.

That Kansas will have both players in 2009 bodes extremely well for a team returning stars like Sherron Collins and Cole Aldrich. That they will have to deal with Carl Henry, the boys' father, bodes well for anyone interested in seeing Bill Self strangle spectators. Because if this keeps up, that's exactly where we're headed.

From the Kansas City Star, some early prognostications from Carl:

Carl says both of his sons hope to be one-and-done at KU. “I don’t like stepping on people’s toes,” Carl says, “but I just know what I know. I watch them play, all the Kansas kids. I like all these kids, (Sherron) Collins, (Tyshawn Taylor), they’re good kids, man. But they’re not better than C.J. Everybody’s gotta be on board. The coach has got to be on board."

Oh man. This is going to be awesome.

Read the whole story, really, because it gets worse and because it's basically a microcosm of the current recruiting process surrounding most one-and-done players. That process? Player picks school, school bends over backwards to accomodate, player plays at school for one year, player leaves school with slumping APR and graduation rates and with possible NCAA violations. Woo! Basketball!

UPDATE: This one gets the all-caps bolded treatment: In an article by Yahoo!'s own Jason King, Carl Henry says "his sons are having second thoughts about becoming Jayhawks following an article in Sunday’s edition of The Kansas City Star. [...] The article has caused quite a buzz among Kansas fans, some of whom have criticized the Henry family on Internet message boards. Carl Henry said the scrutiny has caused his sons to reconsider their college options." That could merely be Henry fighting back at the hometown newspaper, or it could be something more. Who knows?

Either way, more later, especially if it escalates.

In case you were wondering, Kelvin Sampson still lurks among us. Oh, sure, he's an NBA coach now. Being fired from Indiana thanks to impermissible phone calls and getting slapped with a five-year show cause order by the NCAA will do that to a man. Sure, we hadn't heard from him in a few months. That stuff's all true. But his appeal of the NCAA's punishment was still alive, and thus he continued to crawl the shadows, releasing the occasional statement through a publicist revealing the sad and sordid fact that Kelvin Sampson, former collegiate basketball coach, had at one point decided to hire a publicist. His saga was not yet over.

It might well be now. Sampson's hope of returning to the collegiate sidelines -- and really, what's the rush; the NBA is a pretty good gig, Kelvin -- took a major blow today. The NCAA ruled against Sampson's appeal of the show causeorder today, officially ending Sampson's appeal with a rhetorical closed door in the face. Check this paragraph out:

The NCAA said its infractions committee upheld the violations found in the case, which prompted an overhaul at the storied program and led to Sampson’s departure after just 1 1/2 years. An NCAA spokeswoman said Sampson has used his only appeal, and the case is closed.

If only all things were so simple. Come to think of it, I just figured out why Sampson wants to go back to the NCAA. In college basketball, coaches are king. They're like little mini-dictators lording over their own worlds. They have immense power and influence, both within the locker room and out. Contrast that to an NBA coach, whose job is constantly in jeopardy and who is one highly-paid insubordinate player away from the bread line.

The only time a successful college coach can lose his power is when he screws up. Then, the one true collegiate dictatorship, the NCAA, has the power, and look at what they do with it. They're harsh, man. Now Sampson knows what it's like to be powerless. Now he feels weak.

It's enough to make a guy want back in the kingdom immediately, even if he has to live as a serf. It's cold outside the castle walls.