After last night’s four-point win at home against Wake Forest they’re 8-3 in the ACC, 21-4 on the season, and ranked 25th at KenPom. They might be pretty good. It’s tough to tell, though, because they’ve drawn about the easiest possible conference schedule and a back-loaded one at that.

• Duke? Haven’t played them yet. Travel to Durham on Sunday for their lone meeting.
• Maryland? Haven’t played them yet. Get them in Blacksburg a week from Saturday for their lone meeting.
• Wake Forest? Beat them in Blacksburg last night. Don’t face a return trip to Winston-Salem.
• Clemson? Beat them 70-59 in Blacksburg on February 6th. Probably Virginia Tech’s best win of the season. Don’t have/get to play Clemson away.
• Florida State? The Seminoles beat the Hokies 63-58 in Tallahassee on January 16th. They don’t travel to Blacksburg this year.

Virginia Tech play five games against the other ACC teams (currently) with winning* conference records. Their other 11 games give them two against North Carolina, two against NC State, two against Virginia, two against Miami, two against Boston College, and a road trip to Atlanta to face Georgia Tech to close the regular season.

Now, if Virginia Tech loses their three remaining road games and the home game against Maryland, they’ll finish 9-7 in conference and will not be an especially good team and clearly not an accomplished one. But what if they beat Maryland at home and win at Boston College to finish 11-5 in conference, 24-6 on the regular season. I suspect they’ll receive appropriately tepid credit for going 13-1 against the 337th strongest nonconference schedule, but the soft ACC schedule isn’t their doing.

Is it fair to penalize them for not getting to play any of the upper division conference teams more than once? Given the number of poor-to-middling major conference teams this season and the paucity of compelling at-large cases from mid-majors, it’s likely a question of seeding rather than making or missing the tournament (and even this assumes a successful close to their season) but this brings me to my compromise position on NCAA Tournament expansion: It’s fine to expand to 96 teams but only if every conference commits to a full round-robin league season that crowns a true champion and forces at-large teams to have succeeded (to some degree) against their peers rather than succeeding in buying home games in order to make the field.

For the record.

New Mexico State transfer Herb Pope is having a huge season for Seton Hall this year. He’s averaging 14 ppg, 12 rpg and nearly 3 bpg. “He’s the best rebounder in the country,” one GM said. “He’s the DeJuan Blair of this year’s draft.”

Through 9 games this season, against the nation’s 335th toughest schedule, Herb Pope is averaging 16.7 OR%/22.3 DR%. In 36 games last season, against the nation’s 9th toughest schedule, DeJuan Blair averaged 23.6 OR%/27.8 DR%.

Pope’s rebounding numbers are good, but far from extraordinary. In a few minutes, off the top of my head, I can point to the heavy-of-heart, congested-of-chest Cole Aldrich at 14.6/23.3, LSU’s underrated Storm Warren at 18.8/23.9, Kenneth Faried is at 16.1/34.7, and Wake Forest’s Al-Farouq Aminu at 17.8/21.6 as comparables to Pope so far this season. I’m sure there are more, all of whom have likely played a more difficult schedule than Pope and Seton Hall.

There were no rebounders (who were also draft prospects, sorry John Bryant) comparable to DeJuan Blair last season. That’s why certain parties rated him so highly going into the draft. That so many GMs overlooked Blair’s obvious value does not mean they can find comparable value this year either by looking for it or declaring someone inferior to be comparable.

Bill Self:

“I really thought that Sherron and Cole would be scoring more points right now. It’s just not playing out that way. We’ve had different guys step up. When we’ve been poor offensively, we’ve had some individuals make some plays.”

It would be foolish to look at individual stats at this early stage of the season, against the level of competition Kansas has faced and attempt to draw any conclusions about how Kansas’s points will be distributed in the conference and post-season but if Xavier Henry and the Morris twins can score at anything approaching their current rates with anything approaching their current efficiency then we might well look back and say Kansas was underrated entering the season. It’s not great he made just one of six field goal attempts and scored only seven points yesterday against UCLA but there are a few compelling reasons not to worry.

1. UCLA made a concerted effort to keep Aldrich from scoring and, despite their lack of talent, the Bruins have some decent size and played commendably hard while executing the game plan re: Aldrich.
2. Even if Aldrich, say, does a great a job of sealing his defender off on the high side and makes a good, hard back-cut for an alley-oop, he’s not not going to score if Tyshawn Taylor throws the alley-oop pass at Aldrich’s ankles.
3. Aldrich is far better at feeding the low post from the high post than either Marcus or Markieff Morris both of whom are benefiting not just from the attention Aldrich draws but also his passing.
4. Aldrich has improved both his recognition of where the double-teams are coming from and where to pass out of them. This is a positive development both for the Kansas offense and his future professional career but will not benefit his individual numbers.

Seth Davis:

I’m still waiting for Cole Aldrich to break out and have a really big scoring game. So far his season high is 18 points against Memphis. He only scored 7 points on 1 field goal against UCLA Sunday night.

Davis is clearly grading Aldrich on a steep curve here as the 18 point game against Memphis, the best defensive team* Kansas has played this season, doesn’t count. The Memphis and UCLA games are the only times Aldrich has played more than 24 minutes in a game so far. I bet he’ll have a really big scoring game or two before the season ends but even on those nights, he’ll be hard pressed to make a bigger impact offensively than he does defensively.

*Memphis could be a legitimately good defensive team but it’s to early to feel comfortable in making any definitive judgments.

Kansas has the deepest team in the nation. They are quick and athletic. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, Self doesn’t press. I’ve been bitching about that since the day he set foot in Lawrence, but there can be no further excuse. Why in the world wouldn’t you want to 1) force the other team out of their game 2) exploit your open court abilities and 3) increase the tempo??? (I stopped at three question marks only because I figured you would get bored with 3 million of them!

This is, of course, what one writes* the morning after Kansas allowed Memphis 55 points on 63 possessions, held the Tigers to making 43.3% of their two-point attempts, 24% of their three-point attempts, forced turnovers on 20.6% of Memphis possessions, and sent them to the line just 16 times. Credit to Manley in that “bitching” is, if not the best, the most polite categorization of complaint about Self’s defenses in Lawrence. End of season national ranks in defensive efficiency for the Jayhawks, 2004-2009: 13th, 18th, 2nd, 1st, 1st, 7th.

*What one gets paid to write??? He’s right, multiple question marks are kind of fun.

Kansas will, I predict, finish in the top 5 in the nation in defensive efficiency again this year, with Cole Aldrich being a reason almost co-equal to Self knowing what he’s doing. There’s no substitution information in the game’s play-by-play so this is an estimation…Memphis took 30 two-point attempts. Cole Aldrich blocked five of them. Cole Aldrich played 30 minutes (75% of the game). Assuming Memphis’s two-point attempts were evenly distributed (almost certainly not true, but what are you going to do), Cole Aldrich blocked 22.2% of Memphis’s two-point shots while he was on the floor and grabbed (again, estimated) 25.2% of the possible defensive rebounds. Add Aldrich’s offensive performance (18 points on 10 shots, 0 turnovers) and one begins to understand why he is not just a certain (barring injury) All-American but a genuine national player of the year candidate.

Aldrich’s offensive production last night stands out in relation to his teammates, perhaps to an exaggerated degree. Aldrich only got to touch the ball on the possessions where Kansas got into its offense* and the Jayhawks, in general, didn’t look half bad. Marcus Morris was reasonably productive himself in the post against the undersized Memphis defense.

*Kansas’s offensive efficiency last night was at 65% of its efficiency in the home opener against Hofstra (0.905 v. 1.391) but the offensive efficiency on non-turnover possessions was at 81.6% of the rate against Hofstra (1.36 v. 1.667), a difference that could just be down to difference in quality between the two defenses plus the difference between a home game and a neutral-court game.

Memphis admirably compensated for the lack of their size by pressuring the ball and playing the passing lanes. In his on-court interview at the end of the first half, Self accurately diagnosed the Jayhawks’ primary offensive problem as being “sped up” by Memphis’s defense. The accurate diagnosis didn’t lead to a cure, especially with Sherron Collins absent for significant stretches of the second half due to cramping, but the Jayhawks did not suffer a complete system meltdown they simply failed to get into their offense consistently against a good, aggressive defensive team.

As Kansas hasn’t scheduled another competitive game until their December 6th trip to UCLA, it will be awhile until the effort to correct this inability to initiate offensive sets can be fairly judged but I’m not worried. In no small part because there is every reason to believe that, even if the Kansas offense is of variable* quality and efficiency this season, the Kansas defense will provide exemplary resistance on a consistent basis.

*Though I’ll go ahead and predict they don’t turn the ball over on a full third of their possessions again this year.

• Evan Turner made a strong inducement for me to include him on The All-American Page once I figure out what exactly is going to go there.
• North Carolina’s going to be good, as any big man with a pulse should thrive in Roy Williams’ offense and Carolina has plenty of big men who expect to surpass The Chenowith Threshhold of Desire, thus the Tar Heel backcourt will determine whether the team’s merely good or better than almost everyone else. After one game, it remains a work in progress. Positive sign: Larry Drew II set a new career high in points. Putting things in perspective: He scored seven points. Dexter Strickland turned the ball over five times in his collegiate debut. Patience is advised.
• Luke Winn has 10 observations better than any that appear in this post.
• Rush the Court offers four snazzy recaps of their own.
• Congratulations to Jim Boeheim on win number 800.
• It’s not John Gasaway’s primary point in this fine piece on Renardo Sidney’s eligibility purgatory but there’s little wrong with college basketball that can’t be blamed on immature and/or short-sighted adults.

*At least for those of us who didn’t stay up for Murray State’s worthy challenge to Cal.

If the Carolina Blue jacket design doesn’t give away the market for this book* then John Grisham’s foreword does, wherein he disposes of Roy Williams’ 15 years as the head coach at Kansas in a single sentence between paragraphs about Williams’ years as an assistant at North Carolina and his return six years ago to become head coach there. It would be a shame, though, if Kansas** fans, fueled by some ridiculously long-standing grudge, avoided the book.

*This isn’t a criticism. There’d be little point to publish a Roy Williams autobiography that focused on his years at Kansas at this point.

**I presume Carolina fans need no encouragement to devour the volume under consideration.

The chapter (Yes, singular. His decision to turn down the North Carolina job in 2000 and his decision to take the job three years later get a separate chapter.) on Williams’ 15 years at Kansas won’t be enough for anyone who, like this reviewer, would read an entire chapter that just covered the 1991 Southeast Regional Final or wonders why there isn’t an Alonzo Jamison* autobiography available for purchase but it builds on the admirably honest and revealing opening chapters to demonstrate what makes him both a wildly successful and extremely frustrating (in his rare moments of failure) head coach.

*I’d also like to know what caused Williams to give up on the 1-3-1 halfcourt trap that, with Jamison at its point, brought so much delight to my adolescent self.

Williams’ effort, during his year of graduate school at North Carolina, to construct and run a university-wide All-Intramural championship team reveals perhaps the most fundamental aspect of his personality: hard work and winning are not separate things and both the pride he earna from his successes and the crushing disappointment he feels in defeat derive from this conflated vision of how the world should work.

He’s still (sort of charmingly) proud of this accomplishment on its own merit and as an example of the tangible virtue of effort and desire. In the context of this long-ago All-Intramural championship, Roy Williams can certainly outwork his competition and this effort will lead directly to victory.  In the context of major college basketball, effort and desire cannot insure victory, other coaches work hard, other coaches want to win, some other coaches cheat* and the National Championship is decided through a competition with a high degree of inherent variability. No amount of hard work and virtuous effort can insure a season-ending victory. There’s little doubt that Williams has found greater peace after winning two national titles at North Carolina than he felt without a title at Kansas but one suspects he’s still irked that his hard work, though it essentially guarantees victory over 80% of the time, can still be second-best on a given day for reasons out of his control.

*Any Kansas fan who followed the unsuccessful recruitments of Maurice Evans, Mike Miller, Quentin Richardson, or Baron Davis will appreciate that, in Williams’ telling of the recruitment of Sam Perkins while an assistant at North Carolina, he gives almost equal weight to signing Perkins as to catching, turning in, and seeing coaches from the University of San Francisco punished for breaking NCAA rules in their recruitment of Perkins.

This overriding belief in how things should be allows Williams to succeed with a unique style of play (Who else runs an extreme up-tempo offensive system that prioritizes getting high-percentage two-point shots?) but it also limits his ability to make adjustments one the rare occasions when his team’s hard work and preparation fail to overwhelm the opposition. First at Kansas and now at North Carolina, Williams has shown a greater ability than any other coach in the country to get his team to play the way he wants them to play. This focus, coupled with top-line talent, has been wildly successful but does not allow time to prepare a backup plan. Great satisfaction* can be taken from letting opponents know what’s coming and daring them to stop it. Except that, sometimes, opponents will stop it and, with all energy having been put into perfecting the best way to play, there is nothing to which Williams can turn with confidence.

*In which Williams, to his credit, readily admits he partakes.

In contrast to the emotional honesty and the sound explanations for why things work most of the time, the book offers little in the way of self-analysis regarding any of the disappointing NCAA Tournament losses that came to define Williams’ public persona prior to the 2005 National Championship victory. Little tactical self-analysis, that is. Williams is not shy about describing the pain and disappointment of those losses in terms of his feelings for himself and his feelings for his players. His confirmation that he allowed a one-handed Jerod Haase to play 11 minutes (0 points, 4 turnovers) in the three-point loss to Arizona in 1997, which kept his best Kansas team from advancing beyond the Sweet Sixteen, simply because he couldn’t say no to a player to whom he felt so close may provide some closure for Kansas fans. On the other hand, that the only tactical mention of the “point zone” is in reference to its succesful use in Kansas’s comeback from 19 down with a minute left in the first half to beat UCLA 85-70 in Allen Fieldhouse in 1995* may encourage the Jayhawk-inclined reader to pick at the scabs caused by its extremely unsuccessful and seemingly interminable use in that same Arizona game or in the 2002 National Semifinal loss to Maryland. Tar Heel partisans may find reading about the 2007 Regional Final loss to Georgetown or the 2008 National Semifinal loss to Kansas a similar experience.

I found comfort in that bit of parallelism. Roy Williams has two national championships now, he has the job he’s always wanted (one for which his personality and talents are somewhat better suited than they were for his previous job), but he’s fundamentally the same person. This book makes clear that, were he not who he is, the hard work of his life: what he demands from himself, his players, and his coaches would not amount to what it has thus far. Sure, there are elements of Roy Williams’ personality that he’s reluctant to acknowledge or appear more transparent than he perhaps believes. That’s true of all us and most of us have the benefit of not having to be ourselves in public. Were he disingenuous or phony, the underlying structure of his successful system would crumble. It has not. It’s unlikely to and he will continue to win basketball games until he decides he doesn’t want to anymore. Unfortunately for the rest of the college basketball world, Williams thinks that Dean Smith retired too soon and wants not to make the same mistake.

*In my experience, the loudest the Fieldhouse has ever been. Louder than the 150-95 win over Kentucky. Louder than when Mike Maddox tried to fight Jevon Crudup after Crudup slammed Patrick Richey into the basket support in 1991. Louder than the #1 vs. #2 game against Missouri in 1990. Louder than the 100th anniversary game.

1) University of Kansas Men’s Basketball (specifically the centrality of Cole Aldrich’s defense to the success thereof)

2) Praising teams that win road games

3) John Beilein

4) Criticizing teams that don’t win road games

5) Complaining about the lack of full home-and-home conference schedules and how this has caused regular season conference title to be devalued to the point of near-meaninglessness

6) Other (to be determined)

Welcome. Games begin tonight, further content is in the pipeline, and everything is subject to change.