Making sense of the expansion talk

The Chicago Tribune reports that the Big Ten's expansion timetable has moved up considerably. What was once presumed to require another year may take shape as soon as this summer.
If the league adds only one school, the domino effect will be relatively minor. But if it wishes to go the superconference route and expand to a whopping 16 members, watch out.


Plus One
The first option here, of course, is Notre Dame. If the Big Ten can finally get the Irish to abandon football independence, the conference won't need to do anything else.
A  more feasible one-school plan is Pittsburgh. I'm not buying the notion that Penn State would fear the Panthers' entry and would block it. They Are Penn State. They're not going to back down from Pitt, and they would like the (admittedly minor) reduction in travel costs associated with inviting a neighbor.
I can't see Syracuse flying solo to the Big Ten. The school, a charter Big East member, quashed the ACC's original expansion plan when it held its ground and declined to join two other Big Easters in the move in 2003.
Politically, Nebraska, Missouri and even Iowa State would have an easier time making the jump than other current Big 12 schools because they wouldn't be burdened by the politics of leaving behind another in-state school. (Translation: It's hard to imagine Texas going without Texas A&M or Kansas moving without Kansas State. Legislatures and/or higher educational governing bodies would almost certainly try to intervene.)

Five Alive
If volume becomes necessary and/or advantageous, you might as well go to 16 rather than stopping at 14. If Texas is bolting, you know A&M will insist on going along for the ride, too. Ditto for Kansas State and KU or the Oklahoma-Oklahoma State duo. Faced with the loss of four Big 12 brothers, Nebraska would have to lobby for inclusion in the Big 16. (Or whatever it would be called.)
Colorado would probably want to get comfy with the folks in Walnut Creek, Calif., home of the Pac 10.
The Big 12, which has had revenue-sharing issues in the past, would be imperiled at the very least. If it could continue, it would have to raid the Mountain West or really swallow its pride and court Conference USA.

Why

One of the major reasons behind all this chatter is the success of the Big Ten Network, which has earned mainstream support among Midwest cable providers and has secured a place on upper tiers of satellite outlets nationwide. If the channel had stagnated or failed, the league wouldn't really be in a place to spread its wings. 

Reason No. 2 is peer pressure. Everybody's doing it. The SEC created the first 12-team, made-for-championship-football league and the Big Eight expanded to the Big 12 a few years later. Now even the ACC is part of the first Saturday in December title game troika.

In the past five years, the Big Ten has concluded its season two full weeks before those three leagues, and the inactivity has become obvious. Nobody talks about the Big Ten after the third week in November, and the silence doesn't help teams competing for a spot in the BCS title game. The league has addressed the issue by moving the regular-season schedule back one week, but that won't generate buzz the way a championship game would. 

Give everybody their due

If it had gone in Monday night, Gordon Hayward’s attempt from just beyond halfcourt would have instantly become the most famous shot in college basketball history.

Don’t believe it? Consider the following:

• Distance.

Four NCAA championship games have been decided on field goals in the final five seconds; none of the four packed the shock value of a 45-footer.

Lorenzo Charles’ follow-up dunk of Dereck Whittenburg’s airball in Albuquerque in 1983 gave N.C. State a 52-50 win over Houston in the most memorable finish of the television era. Keith Smart’s 12-footer from the left baseline in the Superdome four years later made Indiana a 74-73 winner over Syracuse.  Newspaper accounts say someone named Viv Rouse made a tip-in with one second left to elevate Loyola of Chicago over Cincinnati 60-58 for the crown in 1963. Likewise, they say Herb Wilkinson scored with one second left in overtime as Utah repelled Dartmouth 42-40 in 1944.

They’d have all taken a back seat to Butler.

• Drama.

Butler (4,200 undergraduates) was the smallest school to play for the championship since Jacksonville in 1970.

It was the first team to seek the title in its hometown since 1972. The suitor that year was UCLA, which won it all for the sixth year in a row. Not exactly an underdog story.

Butler nearly became the first team since Texas Western in 1966 to win the NCAA championship without having been past the Sweet 16 in any previous season. As it was, the Bulldogs were only the third team since Memphis in 1973 to make the title game with no prior Sweet 16 appearances on the resume.

• Difference.

The perfunctory pregame greeting of the two head coaches provided an interesting moment. Mike Krzyzewski, 63, and Brad Stevens, 33, are 10,844 days apart. That’s the largest age difference among combatants in NCAA championship game history. (Phog Allen of Kansas, who was born 12 years before basketball was invented, had 10,577 days on Frank McGuire of St. John’s when the Jawhawks beat St. John’s for the championship on March 26, 1952).

Krzyzewski became the third-oldest coach to win the title. Only Allen (66 years, 4 months and 8 days) and UCLA’s John Wooden (64 years, 5 months, 17 days on March 31, 1975) were older at the time of victory.

If Hayward’s shot had gone in, Stevens would have been the second-youngest winner. Branch McCracken of Indiana was 31 years, 9 months and 21 days old when the Hoosiers won the second title in NCAA history on xx, 1940.

Krzyzewski was convening preseason practice with his second team at the U.S. Military Academy when Stevens was born on Oct. 22, 1976. Coach K won two NCAA titles before Stevens decided where he was going to go to college.

Here’s how great Monday’s championship game was: For at least a couple of hours, it made even the most ardent and absurd Duke foes forget about their irrational, immature hatred of the Blue Devils.

As Monday turns into Tuesday, the focus is likely to be on a game that even Tom Izzo said wouldn’t be that compelling rather than the tinfoil-hat assertions of a Duke-flavored conspiracy between CBS and the NCAA.

The Blue Devils, if you recall, had an easy road to Indianapolis as the No. 1 seed in the South region.

 Never mind the fact that Baylor was the bracket’s third seed and that the regionals were in Houston, a three-hour drive from Waco. If you recall, Duke defeated Baylor in the South final.

But wait. The Devils only won that game because of the bogus charge against the Bears that should have been a block on Brian Zoubek. If the striped charlatans had gotten that one right, or so it was alleged, Baylor would have been up by five and would have coasted. The Devils’ subsequent 3-pointer, which put them ahead, wouldn’t have been that big a deal.

Yes, please forget that Baylor regained the lead after that trifecta and that Duke claimed everything from there on. Surely that one block-charge call, ordered from the Park Avenue-NCAA cabal, was the difference-maker.

And Duke didn’t deserve that No. 1 seed in the first place. That, we were told, belonged to West Virginia.

Ignore the Blue Devils’ thorough semifinal domination of the Mountaineers before approximately 60,000 WVU backers (either real or temporarily converted) in a crowd of 70,000. 

Monday couldn’t have been real. Butler’s Brian Howard went to the bench with more than 14 minutes left after his fourth foul. Smells worse than a landfill in the parking lot of a paper mill, doesn’t it?

What? Zoubek picked up four fouls after halftime? Inconsequential.

Give it a rest. Two teams played a great game and Duke won by two when a 45-footer was a hair too strong off the backboard.

Duke hatred is an act of mindless convenience

After several years without the opportunity provided by the Final Four, the blogging and mainstream media communities have released their pent-up anger on the Duke Blue Devils. To me, at least, the level of contempt has reached high-water/lowbrow mark, and I'm not just talking about the insipid, unprofessional Indy Star illustration.


Some bloggers look as if they might be intelligent in their daily lives. Others are simply reading from the same playbook that untaxed minds have been writing for years.


So in the landfill that is the independent, empowered world of Everyman, it was refreshing to read this from SI's Stewart Mandel. Among the highlights: "One of the great sociological mysteries in sports today is why so many white basketball fans resent the fact that Duke has so many white players. Someone with a more advanced academic degree than mine might have to explain that one."


I don't have a more advanced academic degree -- B.A. will have to suffice -- but I've got a theory on why some white fans claim to hate Duke: because it provides cover. Such critics believe detesting Duke immunizes them against from future charges of racism that others may level at them. 
"I can't be a racist," they seem to say. "I hate Duke because they're disproportionately white. I must be progressive.
"Now join me as I revel in my faux kinship with people of color. Go Lions-Bears-Boilers-Bears-Mountaineers-Bulldogs!"


The university at large takes a huge and unjustified PR hit because its basketball team has "too many" white guys. Because most people are unwilling to check the facts, they assume that the entire student body is disproportionately white and -- of course -- contemptuous of others. Here's the deal about Duke: It is not a majority-white institution. No single racial group claims a majority of the populace. Whites are only the plurality (47 percent). 
In short, Duke has  one of the most diverse student bodies in all of American academia. 
This is so inconvenient. 

STUDENTS Enrollment (full-time) Fall 2009
Undergraduate		6,400
African-American Asian-American		10% 22%
Hispanic/Latino Caucasian Foreign N.C. Residents Other/Unknown		7% 47% 7% 15% 8%

McNabb deal reveals NFL's draft obsession

A six-time Pro Bowl quarterback was traded Sunday, and he didn't even bring a first-round draft pick in return. 
This says more about the NFL's fascination with the future than it does about Donovan McNabb. 
Think about this for a moment: 
** It's generally acknowledged that no single athlete is as important to his team as a quarterback is to an NFL franchise. 
** Upon announcing the trade, the Philadelphia Eagles acknowledged McNabb as the best QB in their history. 
** The Redskins wouldn't give up their first-round selection in the 2010 draft to get an obvious and immediate difference-maker, and they clearly didn't have to. 


The Skins have the fourth pick of this draft, and while the selection meeting, as it is called, is still the foundation for most teams, it doesn't offer the certainty of an established veteran. In case you're curious, here are the fourth overall picks of the recent past:
2009: Aaron Curry, LB, Wake Forest (Seahawks): Too soon to know. 
2008: Darren McFadden, RB, Arkansas (Raiders): 1 TD last year; 856 rushing yards in two seasons
2007: Gaines Adams, DT, Clemson (Bucs): Tragically, Adams is dead. A previously unrecognizable heart ailment took his life shortly after last season.
2006: D'Brickashaw Ferguson, OT, Virginia (Jets): Your guess is as good as mine. 
2005: Cedric Benson, RB, Texas (Bears): Chicago may have given up on him too soon; Benson revived his career with the Bengals in 2009.
2004: Philip Rivers, QB, N.C. State (Giants): Traded to Chargers for Eli Manning, Rivers has had a solid career. 
2003: Dewayne Robertson, DT, Kentucky (Jets): I'd never heard of him, either. Best statistical season produced four sacks.
2002: Joey Harrington, QB, Oregon (Lions): Hasn't played in a game since 2007. 
2001: Justin Smith, DE, Missouri (Bengals): A credible veteran performer. 
2000: Peter Warrick, WR, Florida State (Bnegals): Caught 79 passes as a 26-year-old in 2003. Hauled in 11 in each of the next two seasons and was done. 


I'd say that's about a 50-percent success rate. In light of that hit-or-miss quotient, would the Redskins have been out of line to offer the fourth pick for McNabb? I'd say no. And I'd say that even know I know McNabb is 33. That suggests he might not have more than four years left, but that might still make him more productive than half the people on the above list, all of whom were in their early 20s when selected. 


And it's not like the Eagles are being shouted down for not getting enough. The NFL ethos says you don't give up a sacred first-round draft pick for anything except another first-round draft pick. It says, essentially, that the hope for the future is inherently better than anybody's track record. 


And I don't get it. 

Geography and hiring coaches

Iowa's selection of Siena's Fran McCaffery on Sunday is not only a home-run hire for a downtrodden program; it's another blow to the notion that all choices must adhere to geographically based constructs. He's an "East Coast Guy" or a "West Coast Guy" is as not as silly or destructive as the rapper feuds that made headlines a decade ago, but it is generally a concept without merit.
In the summer of 1961, the University of North Carolina promoted a 29-year-old assistant coach to the top job. Said assistant was three years removed from his first gig in coaching, which included the direction of the golf team at the U.S. Air Force Academy, which didn't even have a campus much less a golf course at that point.
The young coach was born, raised and educated in Kansas. You know him as Dean Smith.
The hire worked out pretty well. It's just one example of how it's about how you get there, not where you're from.

As for McCaffery, he's got Midwest ties from 11 years as a Notre Dame assistant. His wife is from Minnesota. But that's not all that important. History says he'll turn around the Hawyeke program.

* As a 26-year-old, he coached Lehigh to the NCAA tournament in 1986.
* In 1999, he took the job at UNC Greensboro, which had lost 59 games in its three previous seasons. In his second year, the Spartans were in the NCAA tournament.
* When he took the Siena job in 2005, he had four scholarship players on the roster. The Saints are now three-time defending champions of the MAAC.

It's interesting to watch St. John's struggle to find a coach. The school has appeared burdened by the presumption that the next coach has to be a New York guy who can massage the seedy underbelly of the city's AAU crowd. Now comes word that the Johnnies are interviewing Steve Lavin, who is as West Coast as anybody can get. The guy lives two blocks from Venice Beach. But he'd be a great hire. I'm not sure it would be the best move for Lavin, who has a good thing going as an ESPN broadcaster, but ignorance of the geographic labels is the first step in the right direction for any school that needs to change its losing image.

Principal Skinner is out at BC

So Boston College has whacked basketball coach Al Skinner. In and of itself, that's not shocking. Coaches get fired for losing too many games all the time.

What's amazing about this story is that it lived underground for nearly a week. Gene DiFilippo, the athletics director, confirmed this morning that he and Skinner agreed to part ways last Wednesday and that all parties agreed to keep the dismissal hush-hush so that the coach could pursue the St. John's job without being dogged about BC. (If he had accepted the job and if word of his termination has gotten out, he would have been off to an impossible start on his new job.)
Staff reductions in mainstream media may have contributed to the story's secrecy. Blah. Blah. Blah. I get that. What's odd -- and somewhat encouraging -- is that the unlicensed, unfettered world of Twitter didn't let loose with some form of unsubstantiated gossip on the topic sooner. After all, BC says it began contacting other schools regarding Skinner's replacement last week. You'd think that somebody at some school would have blabbed to their teenage kid, who then posted the news on some social-networking site.
Top-secret stuff can have a lifespan of a fruit fly in many cases.

Doubts about Urban renewal

The new, mellowed-out, in-touch-with-priorities Urban Meyer is off to a great start, isn't he? In dressing down a reporter for accurately conveying a player's quotes, the Florida coach is already in mid-season paranoia. And it's March.
In at least one columnist's opinion, the failure of the beleaguered reporter's comrades to leap to his defense indicates the demise of modern, traditional media. That's a fair point. Access is more of an issue and more prized than ever.
Something else is at play more than ever: the idea that journalists report news; they don't make it. Getting involved in the fray in an age of YouTube and other do-it-yourself media forms would make immediate news and would subject the participant to charges of overstepping boundaries.
The mantra of reporting news and not making it has been around for decades, but it's really taking hold now. Witness the Associated Press' abstinence from the formula that determines the BCS national champion in college football.
With Everyman empowered, journalists are policing themselves at pretty high levels. And this brings up another question: How slippery is the slope of this mountain? If reporters can't exercise their expertise, how long before they are subtly discouraged from writing in-depth pieces that analyze their beats? If we assume there is still power of the press a decade from now, will any writing that might tend to turn up the heat on a coach and lead to his dismissal be shunned for fear that it's "making news"?