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@wufpup76 Ah, thanks. I had heard VT hit a three at the end to win, so I must have heard wrong.
@wufpup76 A 2 would have sent it to OT, since VT only won by a point.
Anyone else think the Virginia Tech 3 that won the game in the women’s game looked like a 2? It seemed pretty clear from the replay that the foot was on the line.
I find this entire ranking by ESPN a joke. From their opening paragraph, describing the rankings:
Which coaches are doing the best job right now?
We’ve been thinking about that question this offseason, looking for the best way to quantify the answer. Luckily, we’ve got ESPN Forecast. Last week, we asked a panel of nearly 100 ESPN writers, editors, broadcasters and researchers to rate college basketball coaches on all aspects of running a program, on a scale of 1-10. (The crucial distinction here is that the prompt was not career-oriented. This isn’t about legacy. It’s all about the present.) We compiled their scores and ranked the names, and now comes the fun part: The big reveal.
Yet if you then just peruse the rankings, a lot of it relies on past achievements and perceptions and has little to do with what a coach has done recently. Otherwise how would you explain #45 Mike Brey, a perfect example:
Brey is a lot like Thompson: Save 2013-14, his teams are almost always good if not great, and almost always fall short of expectations in the tournament.
It’s just a list for ESPN to drive conversation and page views, which is what ESPN mostly does anyway.
Of course, given it’s a ranking done by 100 people at ESPN, it’s no wonder this list mostly hinges on reputation. ESPN also fails to explain what they mean by rating a coach on all aspects of running a program, so it’s impossible to determine exactly what criteria went into this list.
@Adventuroo, I think you need to redefine your definition of obscene. Almost 1 billion in cash reserves is almost paltry these days for an organization as large as the NCAA when you look at the corporate world. Apple alone has around 130 billion in the bank. Granted, Apple is king when it comes to cash reserver. Microsoft is believed to be a distant second at 77 billion or so. Google and Facebook are in the neighborhood. 1 billion just isn’t what it used to be.
I realize this has no bearing on the topic at hand, but the mention of cash reserves made me thing of it and I thought I’d throw it out there just for comparison’s sake. Of course, for a non-profit organization that doesn’t pay it’s main money generators, it is a lot.
On the topic of BC, it should be noted that BC has exactly zero recruits in the 2014 class. This was very likely the nail in the coffin that did in Donahue.
Don’t forget that their number one business is to drive eye balls to their respective sites. So while they need to retain some credibility by being mostly accurate, generating a bit of controversy doesn’t hurt their main goal. I would imagine this applies more to ESPN than others, as ESPN has always been more in the business of promoting and ginning up viewership that necessarily being truthful.
Would Sid be around if he only beat the other teams on the Tobacco Road each season (and only once each)? No, he wouldn’t. As much as we say that we’d rather beat Carolina and lose all the rest if that was the only option, it’s not the only option and we wouldn’t tolerate being that putrid year in and year out. Yow still would have told Sid to resign as soon as she made it to campus, taxes or not (and how she could have known about the tax issue until it became public, I don’t know).
As far as Bzzz, there’s little evidence Wake is on an upward trajectory. Yeah, they got lucky this year and beat us, Duke, and Carolina, but we then crushed Wake later in the season. Nothing makes me think Bzzz has setup Wake for sustained success. As evidence, look at all the horrible things Wake does the Bzzz is constantly clapping about. K, Roy, and Gott wouldn’t be clapping if one of their teams did those same things.
While I wasn’t watching the ESPN feed of the Duke/Clemson game, in the highlights on the front page of espn.com today the sports center anchors do openly question the calls, asking how that was a foul on Hood and not a foul on call. So ESPN certainly isn’t speaking with one voice today.
In my opinion, it was a foul on Hood, a clear body check on the reply shown on the ACC Network feed (don’t know why ESPN didn’t show it). I think a foul should have been called against Duke on Hall, however, watching the play live my first reaction was that he tripped over his feet. I’ve even watched the highlights on ESPN and live it still looks like that to me, although the still photos make it clear there was a foul. Even so, I’d just expect a foul to be called when a play goes flying like that. It was certainly interesting the whistle was swallowed there.
On a different note, I was surprised to see Tennessee is the 4 seed in the SEC tournament. The SEC must be really weak this year, outside of Florida.
The officials did add .3 seconds back to the clock after their review, although Bilas had no idea why.
Actually 13OT, the league did no such thing in baseball. It’s actually worse than you stated. State and UNC were not scheduled to play so the teams agreed to play one non-conference game to ensure they played each other at least once this year.
RE: TV driving conference expansion.
Like most things, it’s complicated. I see it as this. Everyone says they don’t like it, but then people watch the new games anyway (I haven’t looked at the numbers to prove this, so this is a hunch). As a TV exec, you pay attention to what people do, not what they say (Netflix is actually both the perfect anti-example and example of this. They put out shows like House Of Cards that were initially refused by TV, but then they also base their decisions off of what people are watching on Netflix).
The further questions is, why do TV execs benefit from conference expansion and are willing to pay out more money? One answer is that it’s live sport TV. It’s pretty much the only thing people are willing to watch live any more and are willing to watch the commercials. In the age of DVRs, the value of live TV has gone up. Therefore, more money for it.
Of course, this puts more demand for live sports. So the TV execs fight over the rights to the conferences. And if you’re a conference, you realize you can make more money by having more games to offer. Regardless of the actual quality of the games. The money comes from quantity in the short term, not quality. Therefore, conference expansion happens to have more games to offer. Now the deals command ever greater money. If you’re a TV exec, you also don’t complain so long as you can afford to pay the most (ESPN), because while expansion drives up the cost of the deals, you now have less partners to negotiate with. So ESPN can lock up the rights to most of the conferences by negotiating with 5 or 6 organizations instead of 10 or 12. And make no mistake, ESPN wants to own it all. The reason ESPNU and ESPN3 exist is so ESPN has someplace to show live games they have the rights to, since they can’t put them all on ESPN and ESPN2. This isn’t driven by ESPN really wanting to make money here, it’s to keep out competition. If ESPN doesn’t air the games they can get hit with antitrust lawsuits for hoarding. A small rival of ESPN actually did bring suite before ESPN launched ESPNU for this very reason.
Now back to the argument of the games being crap as rivalries are broken. ESPN doesn’t care. They now own the rights to all the games, so they can start to dictate what games they’d like to see and create the matchups that make them money. This was all detailed in a great New York Times series of articles last year. Think about where the ACC-BIG TEN Challenge came from. Think about why does Alabama play Virginia Tech in football to begin the season? Why did NC State play South Carolina? Behind the scenes you’ll find ESPN pulling strings to get games they can hype and make money on. ESPN doesn’t need to do this for a lot of games, so in basketball they just focus on the top and let the rest fend for themselves. And they make boatloads of money doing this.
And that is how conference expansion happens and makes lots of people money while destroying rivalries and seemingly leading to a worse product.
A bit of a digression, but worth telling I think.
I’ve always loved these posts. These are my favorite of the the posts here.
choppack1 – if the bubble days are back, at least it’s not for the same reason as the Herb days when it was play a weak OCC schedule and then hope you won enough conference games. It will be simply because the Wolfpack isn’t winning against a decent to hard schedule. I for one am thankful it appears we won’t be sweating the bubble because our schedule was too easy.
Here’s the link to the announcement on theacc.com:
http://www.theacc.com/#!/news-detail/NC-State-Warren-Voted-ACC-Player-Of-The-Year_03-11-14_neqit7
^ That should work, Shownuff.
I have no problem with Paige winning most improved player. Everyone expected TJ to be good this year, the question was how good. Not everyone expected Paige to play at the level he has. I think it actually means TJ is more likely to get POY, since I some voters will give most improved to Paige so they can say they gave him something and then vote for TJ for POY.
Warren gets player of the week, in the very last week.
http://www.theacc.com/#!/news-detail/ACCMBB-Players-of-the-Week-Announced_03-10-14_m6fvxk
Parker is rookie of the week.
It’s entirely possible that he’ll get snubbed again when the seasonal award is announced on Tuesday
POY gets announced tomorrow, per this article:
4-12, 6-12, and 6-12 counts as bad to me
Well, can’t argue with that. Guess it just hasn’t been the dumpster fire that VT and Wake have been, so I hadn’t noticed.
Here’s how the coaches see it in total 1st,2nd,3rd votes
Parker 42
Warren 41
Paige 40
Fair 39
Brogden 35Note that Parker was a unanimous selection. So one person opted not to select Warren to the first team all ACC but instead placed him on the second team. Wish I knew who that was.
Doesn’t Johnson win in a cakewalk? Of course, the situation that lead to his hiring set him up for disaster from day one, but they went from a middling team to putrid and have stayed there.
You could also clearly argue Bzdelik. Walks into a situation with a decent team and immediately they drop to the bottom and have stayed there, even with some improvement this year.
Gregory has kept GT about where they were, so neither good nor bad. Donahue I don’t feel can be argued as a bad hire. At the time he was hired it looked like an amazing hire, but the potential has never materialized. Brownell has Clemson playing well and in the best position they’ve been in in a while. If he fixes their schedule to go from horrible to okay they might even get themselves over the bubble in future years.
These are all just observations from watching brief snippets of these teams play this year and looking at records. I haven’t done the work to produce hard evidence for my feelings.
I caught something on the news about Notre Dame’s coach being named coach of the year … and turns out it’s true.
http://www.und.com/sports/w-baskbl/spec-rel/030514aaa.html
The link above is that Coach Moore was named ESPNW’s ACC Coach of the Year.
But the ACC picked Muffet McGraw as it’s coach of the year.
Let’s not also forget the ACC did us no favors with the February schedule. One home game sandwiched between five road games? In this month we’ve been down to Miami and up to Syracuse (which was a well documented travel nightmare), to Chapel Hill (at least that one wasn’t much of a trip), to Clemson and we still have to travel to Virginia Tech. We only got Wake at home.
6 games in 22 days with extensive travel for most of them. Even if some of them we just take a bus to, it wears on you. All teams typically struggle on the road, but it’s even harder when that’s all you get for a month.
In an earlier comment by FergusWolf it was suggested that some teams strengthened their schedule by playing Notre Dame, but isn’t this the result of the agreement between the ACC and Notre Dame that Notre Dame would play so many ACC teams a year? I don’t believe these count as conference games, since in Football Notre Dame is still independent, but maybe I’m remembering wrong. I believe we play Notre Dame in 2015. All of this is from memory, so perhaps I’m wrong, but the point is that I believe these teams had Notre Dame put on their schedule for them, so that shouldn’t be a credit given to them for creating a hard(er) non-conference schedule.
The same goes for teams like FSU playing Florida, Clemson playing South Carolina, etc. These are the rivalry games that are played every year, they just happen to span conferences. Our rival just happens to be in conference, so we don’t get the benefit of one non-conference game always being scheduled for us every year. I believe some of these games might even be legislated to be played every year.
