Links galore plus bonus BCS rant

The Old Spice Classic has announced the addition of Georgetown to their 2008 field. Rexrode notes this means MSU could potentially end up playing up to six teams from Fox Sport’s preliminary preseason top 20 in the nonconference season.

Donovan Kirk is off the board; he’s verbally committed to Miami of Florida. UMHoops notes the likelihood of the big man becoming a Spartan had declined after Izzo got commitments from both Sherman and Nix.

The Toledo Blade has a nice piece catching up with A.J. Granger. After a brief pro career, Granger has returned to his hometown in northwest Ohio and is working for a recruiting/hiring company. Regarding the 2000 championship team, he says this:

“I THINK WHAT made us successful as a team [at MSU] was we had a core group of guys that weren’t superstars when they showed up to school their freshmen year and we had a coach [Tom Izzo] that was extremely committed to driving people to get better. We grew over the course of four years to get to that accomplishment.

“It takes a lot of work to mesh and gel to play at that level to be very efficient at it, to always know what your teammates are doing on the floor. We were afforded that opportunity and I think that’s why we had the success we had.

“Our starting five played together for three full years before we won a title.

“I remember being on the floor in the championship game and Florida’s guys started yelling at each other and calling each other out. We just looked at each other and started smiling because we knew we had the game won because they gave up on each other and we didn’t do that.”

There are other ways to build a championship team, but what Granger describes is what Izzo is trying to do again. Going into the 2010 tournament, Lucas, Allen, Summers, and Morgan will have played together for three years . . .

Did anyone know that MSU runs something called the “numbered fast break” (see the last paragraph)? Maybe we should take up a collection for $39.95 to buy this Tom Izzo DVD and learn more.

Yet Another Basketball Blog has updated its super-fantastic, make-me-green-with-envy coaches rankings. The system elegantly rates coaches based on three components: recruiting, regular season performance (i.e., player development), and NCAA tournament performance (relative to regular season performance). Two parts have been posted at YABB. Highlights from part 1:

• Izzo is one of five coaches to have made the NCAA Tournament in all of the past 10 seasons. The others are Williams, Krzyzewski, Self, and Barnes.
• Izzo has the highest rating in the nation for exceeding expectations in the NCAA Tournament over the past 10 years.
• Izzo has an overall rating of 2.84, good for 10th in the country. The rating figure translates to the expected number of wins in the NCAA Tournament. On average, Izzo is expected to just about make the Elite Eight.
• Bill Carmody and Ed DeChellis are the two lowest-rated recruiters among BCS conference coaches who have coached at least four years at their current schools.

Part 2 of the ratings look at coaches on a conference-by-conference basis. Matta, Izzo, and Ryan rank 1-2-3 in the Big Ten, but they’re pretty bunched up, with respective ratings of 2.90, 2.84, and 2.70. Izzo relies on tournament performance, Ryan relies on regular season performance, and Matta’s pretty balanced across all three components. Pretty scary group of coaches, considering Smith, Painter, Beilein, and Crean don’t register an overall rating due to not having coached enough seasons in the Big Ten yet.

Finally, I can’t resist ranting about this Chicago Tribune article on Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delaney’s rationale for resisting movement toward a college football playoff system. This is a college basketball blog, so I’ll use this hook to justify including this item:

When people heckle Delany about his refusal to give up the Rose Bowl, he has been known to reply: “OK, then how about asking the ACC to give up its conference basketball tournament?”

File that one under “faulty analogies.” Last time I checked, the ACC wasn’t using the tradition of their conference basketball tournament as a rationale for eliminating the NCAA Tournament. I’m pretty sure if push came to shove, the folks at UNC, Duke, and Maryland would take the NCAA Tournament over the ACC Tournament.

There’s also this beauty from Fox Sports President Ed Goren:

“Five teams go back to campus as champions,” Goren said. “If you go into a different system, you have one winner and everyone else goes home a loser.”

First response: When did college football become pee wee soccer, where we want as many winners as possible?

Second response: This illustrates why we’re stuck with the current bowl system. Ultimately, college football is actually too popular for its own good. Fans of most Division 1 football teams will traverse great distances to watch bowl games which decide just about nothing besides which team’s fans get to buy t-shirts that say “20__ _______ Bowl Champions.” Only two teams are really playing for something. That makes the other 30+ bowl games pretty much equivalent in nature.

If you had a playoff system, the teams that didn’t make the playoffs would suddenly realize how meaningless their bowl games were and the games would then be reduced to the equivalent of the NIT–something even die-hard fans of the teams participating in it can’t quite take seriously.

From a philosophical perspective, a sports’s postseason games should fulfill two purposes:

• Determine a champion–i.e., “the best team.”
• Entertain fans of the sport.

To some extent, these two goals compete with one another. The NBA goes to one extreme–systematically determining a champion that is more often than not truly the best team in the league, with a relatively low level of drama along the way. NCAA basketball goes to the other extreme–proving entertaining, do-or-die games at the expense of some of the best teams getting upset early in the tournament.

The BCS system manages to do neither thing well. There’s almost always controversy as to whether the teams competing for the championship are the most deserving, since there’s no objective standard as to who gets to compete in the one postseason game that matters. And the college football postseason isn’t all that entertaining since only one of the 30+ games counts for anything besides mere bragging rights.

In the end, I guess the current system has managed to make college football as popular among the fans of major college teams as it is. But the system (which has been cemented in place for at least another year) detracts from the sport’s appeal to a broader audience. The closest comparable system for determining a champion in the sports world is boxing–where some guys no one has ever heard of set up match-ups they think will be competitive and financially rewarding.

This probably won’t be the last rant on this topic. The BCS system is perhaps the primary reason I just can’t get as excited about college football as I do about college basketball . . .