Carolina March

The New ESPN Contract and Certain Teams' Desire to Exit Stage Left

2012-05-12T12:55:31Z

Earlier this week the ACC and ESPN announced an extension of their television deal that was already in place for the next eleven years. We'll now be in the hands of the Worldwide Leader through the 2026-2027 season; there are four-year olds who will eventually be playing ball under this contract. The windfall from this is $3.6 billion over fifteen years, compared to $1.86 billion over twelve. Count the fact that it will be split amongst an extra two schools (and that the ACC front office takes a share), and that works out to an increase of over four million per year per school.

Naturally, this immediately led to rumors of FSU jumping ship for the Big 12.

Now, Florida State has denied these rumors, ironically to the very reporter who started them in the first place. Said reporter, shockingly, still wants to believe. The logic behind the rumors is based on simple math and over-entitlement:

Schools like Duke, Boston College and Maryland all will receive $17 million a year now. That's a good chunk of money for anyone's athletic program, but particularly for one that either sends one of its major revenue sports to the postseason a year, or none.

Of those programs, only Duke had one of its two major revenue sports end up in the NCAA's postseason this past year: the men's basketball team.

Boston College and Maryland neither made it to the NCAA men's basketball tournament, nor did their football teams qualify for postseason bowls this school year. As things stand right now, it's rather difficult seeing all three of the ACC schools being able to send both their football and men's basketball programs to the NCAA postseason this coming year. It's possible, but tough to see this early in the preseason.

As for schools like FSU, the same $17 million will be awarded to them, too. In rather rarefied company, FSU is the only ACC school that has had each of its major revenue sports reach the NCAA's postseason in each of the last three seasons. While the football program hasn't reached a BCS bowl in a half-dozen years, still, the added expense of having to shuttle players, staff and administrators to bowls and postseason tournaments has been costly.

Last year, FSU budgeted $750,000 for its football bowl experience. This coming budget cycle, the school is proposing setting aside $1 million. The better the recruiting and the more football coach Jimbo Fisher and his staff begins to meet expectations, the more those expenses likely will rise.

Basically, Florida State wants more money for all the heavy lifting it did over the last three years. Now, they're not exactly offering to chip some back in for say, 2004 to 2008 when they failed to make the NCAA tournament in basketball, had twelve football wins vacated, and in their one bit of success, hurt the conference by upsetting a more prominent Virginia Tech team in the inaugural ACC Football Championship, but bygones. It's all "What have we done for you lately?" with Seminoles fans.

Meanwhile, the Big No-Longer 12 is also close to a new ESPN deal, one that is rumored to provide about $20 million per school per year, a decent chunk more than the ACC. And suddenly everyone's stopped being offended by the Longhorn Television Network and started seeing dollar signs in their eyes; why wouldn't the Seminoles want to jump ship to a conference that just drove four members into other conference's arms?

Let's think about what's changed in the two years since ESPN last inked a deal. Nationally, there was a tidal wave of realignment, and new agreements signed with every major conference but the Big East and the SEC, the latter who will soon renegotiate it. ESPN is involved in all of them, giving Fox Sports only second--tier rights to the Big 12 and CBS some rights to SEC football and Big 10 basketball. The ACC has been one of the more stable conferences, adding two schools in what was the least football-oriented expansion in their history.

On the football field, the last two years have brought an 0-3 record in BCS bowls, no team finishing in the Top 10, the worst defeat in BCS bowl history, a 6-11 bowl record, and two schools sanctioned by the NCAA. On the basketball side of things, despite being among the worst the ACC has been in as long as I can remember, the conference produced the fourth most-watched basketball game ever on ESPN and spurred the company to start its first college-team focused blog.

And that's before we get to the elephant in the room: a college football playoff. The details are still being hammered out, but we're most likely looking at four teams, either 1-4 by BCS ranking, or the top four conference champions. An under either scheme, how many ACC teams would have made the tournament in the 12-team era? One. Virginia Tech in 2007-08. A college football playoff isn't going to reduce the power of the conferences, but it's going to concentrate it in the hands of the ones that send teams to the biggest games, and that's not the ACC right now. The only way this conference gets a team in is with a school with at most one loss, most likely out-of-conference at that. FSU's best chances to do that are with the ACC; they're going to hop over to the Big 12 and set themselves against the money of Texas and Oklahoma every year? Good luck with that.

Listen, we've been a year away from the Seminoles' return to dominance for eleven years now. Maybe it'll happen in 2012, I don't know. But basketball is driving ESPN's interest at the moment. Hence the demanding of third-tier rights, which is more important in the hardwood where games spill across multiple nights and the inventory is that much greater. The ACC was good to get the money they could now, before the college football bubble bursts, and if it pales to what the Big 12 and SEC will be getting, well, the product needs to be better.

(A good comparison of the various conference contracts is available here, for interested parties. The Pac-12's seems built like an escalating NFL contract, which makes me wonder if they'll ever see the headline money figure.)

I Want to Hear from the Other 14 AFAM Professors

2012-05-08T02:50:53Z

UNC wrapped up its internal investigation of the African and Afro-American Studies department that was instigated by Michael McAdoo's unnoticed plagiarism on Friday. It's definitely a good news/bad news situation. Good news: there doesn't appear to be any specific favoritism involving athletes. Bad news: there was rampant shenanigans going on, including between 52 classes on record where the professor never or only rarely showed up in class, grades changed after the fact, signatures forged, and dodgy independent studies. Good news: the problem had actually been resolved before the investigation began. Bad news: this was apparently because the long-term administrator, Debbie Crowder retired in 2009, after which the problems mysteriously stopped. Crowder declined to speak with the investigators, and there's really nothing they can do.

The damage is surprisingly small. The chair of the department, Julius Nyang'oro (also the professor who missed McAdoo's paper swiping) was either extremely negligent in running his department or actively abetting his administrator in subverting the educational process. He is retiring effective July 1, 2012. The other fourteen tenure or tenure-track professors all appear to be unaware of what was going on; there are nine aberrant courses taught by professors other than Nyang'oro, and the class roll signatures for all nine were forged.

And to be honest, it's the response from those fourteen professors that I'm going to be most interested in, at least the ones who already have tenure. Because if I was a member of that department's faculty, I would be pissed. The department has been drawn through the mud, it's perilously close to being viewed as a joke. Reputation is an academic's livelihood, and I'd expect everyone associated with AFAM at UNC to take a hit. And I'd really like one of them to speak out.

And not with standard, vetted talk of a disappointment and the like. I believe those fourteen professors take pride in their work and teach as rigorously as any other academic on campus. And their department is making headlines like this. If I were them, I'd be pitching a fit. I'd be cracking down. I wouldn't stand for this.

To quote the conclusion of the report:

While presenting this report in as careful and impartial a manner as possible, we cannot conclude without emphasizing the acute dismay that we, as UNC-Chapel Hill faculty, felt as we uncovered the practices summarized here. We regret that we cannot assign with complete confidence the responsibility for the unprofessional and in some cases professionally unethical actions uncovered by our investigation. We are convinced that, in many instances noted in this report, the educational experience of some students as well as their access to faculty instruction and consultation was compromised for a period of several years, which could extend before 2007, he start of the period examined in our report. The evidence we reviewed indicates that between 2007 and 2011 the vast majority of courses offered in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies were not compromised in the ways outlined in this report. Yet the unprofessional or unethical actions noted in this report risk damaging the professional reputations of the faculty in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies as a whole.

It's time someone spoke out.

Football, Brains, and Whether People with Brains Should Be Watching Football

2012-05-04T15:36:42Z

I came to the NFL a Lawrence Taylor fan. Taylor was the most famous football player to come out of Chepel Hill since Choo-Choo Justice, and his would naturally be the first name to penetrate the awareness of a five-year old Tar Heel fan. When he went pro, I became a Ginats fan. It was a shallow fandom, of course. I answered the phone one morning to a friend of my fathers claiming to be Bill Parcells; I had no idea who Parcells was. But I like watching football with my dad, and I liked the Giants.

One of the first football plays I remember came in 1985. It was a Monday Night Football game, probably one of the first I was allowed to stay up late for, as the Giants were playing the Redskins. Lawrence Taylor came tearing through the Washington line, and brought down quarterback Joe Thiesmann. Theismann didn't get up; his leg had been broken in multiple places, and he'd never play professional football again.

I have never played organized football at any level. My experience is limited to neighborhood pickup games in the backyard going back to before Taylor ended Theismann's career. I'm built like a stick, and it was never going to be the game for me. We had a regular flag football game every Saturday in grad school, in addition to a decade of intramural play, and I always loved that. I'm reasonably quick and pretty tall, and love the sight of a well-thrown spiral falling gently into my hands a step ahead of the other guy. I want the interception, the open field. No one in flag football wants to be on the line "blocking" or whatever the rules allow. Yawn.

I've considered the possibility that my own aversion to pain and that play in 1985 has given me a different outlook on the game than most fans. Watching a game, I want to see the long pass to the open wideout streaking down the sideline, or the running back breaking into the open field. I'm not looking for the big hit. Sure I want our linebacker getting to the quarterback, but once that happens it becomes a solved problem, the end of the play. I want that opposing quarterback to get up after the play with no ill effect, for the entire tableau to play out again.

But that's what most people view the game, I think. Or used to. "True" football fans have always mocked the dilettantes who only cheered the quarterbacks guys who carried the ball. The insufferable Gregg Easterbrook has wrapped himself in the flag of the "Unwanted Pro" for years, and the deification of the left tackle didn't become conventional wisdom until Sandra Bullock spoke Michael Lewis's words to moviegoers in 2009. For all the talk that the NFL can't survive without the bone-shattering hits, that the sport is the modern-day gladiator fights in Rome, I'm not sure that's the case. I wasn't running around my backyard as a kid with thoughts of putting my friends into traction.

All of this thinking has been brought to the forefront by Junior Seau's seemingly inexplicable suicide at the age of 43. He killed himself with a gunshot to the chest, the same manner in which former Chicago Bear Dave Duerson ended his own life a year earlier. Unlike Seau, Duerson left a note, requesting Boston University study his brain. That came two years after Chris Henry's accidental death, which resulted in the finding he'd developed chronic traumatic encephalopathy from his years of playing football. He was 26.

I'm supposed to be writing something about Quinton Coples for the mothership's Jets blog. Nothing significant, just my impression of him; something to assure the fans that his performance drop-off last season wasn't a "character problem." (For the record, I don't think it was.) The internet makes me an expert on Coples' mental state, you see, despite only being in his presence a couple of times, always in the company of fifty thousand other people cheering for him to bring down the opposing QB.

Instead, I find myself worried about Coples. I remember that terrifyingly huge fraternity Omega brand on his arm.This is a kid who isn't afraid of pain. This is someone who is going to pursue his opponent to the ends of the earth, oblivious to the cost to his own body. Junior Seau was never on the NFL injury report for a concussion. He played through the pain; he got back on the field. He did everything demanded of him.

Last September I came to believe we're in the midst of a college football bubble. A lot of that was based on the scandals erupting in Chapel Hill and elsewhere, but the NFL's struggle with concussions was a big factor as well. Now you have Malcolm Gladwell calling for the abolishment of the sport at the college level, and while I'm shocked that it's coming from a sloppy thinker who advocated a win-at-all-costs mentality in middle school girls' basketball, the attention is going to snowball from here. Fans are making passionate arguments on whether we need to walk away from football.

I'm not sure I can. I couldn't to this gig while shunning the sport, but I can walk away from this at any time, and spew random thoughts elsewhere on the internet. But I don't want to give up football. I want to change it, to make it safe, but I don't know how. It's never been safe; we've just gotten better at hiding the damage. I should walk away from the sport, but I can't. I can't give up that perfect spiral gently falling into outstretched hands. Not yet, at least; It's just so damned pretty. I get closer every day though.

Quinton Coples Drafted 16th by the New York Jets

2012-04-27T22:18:21Z

North Carolina continues to send its alumni to the Big Apple, as defensive end Quinton Coples was drafted 16th by the New York Jets last night. There had been a lot of talk earlier in the evening that the Carolina Panthers, who had the ninth pick, were interested him, but they instead chose Boston College linebacker Luke Kuechly; Coples instead was the second defensive end (after Bruce Irvin) and fifth defensive lineman taken overall.

Coples will be expected to contribute quickly, and Jets fans seem pretty excited by the pick. Despite his versatility, Rex Ryan has been quoted as wanting to keep him on the line, and this may indicate a change in their defensive scheme. He seems pleased with the pick, and doesn't see a problem with Coples' drop-off in play his senior season. The Jets were fifth in the NFL in overall defense, and particularly strong against the pass, so I don't know how likely a change in defense might be.

Coples will join both Hakeem Nicks and Marvin Austin, both on the Giants, in New York. He's the first Tar Heel to be drafted by the Jets since Leon Johnson and Rick Terry were both taken by the team in 1997. Overall, there were only three ACC players drafted last night — Coples, Kuechly, and Virginia Tech running back David Wilson with the New York Giants' final pick.

With Coples off the board, Dwight Jones becomes the Carolina pick most likely to be drafted. Patriots fans, at least, appear interested, so look for him to go late in the evening or possibly Saturday.

UNC's Role in the Firing of Seth Greenberg

2012-04-23T23:32:49Z

Virginia Tech ended the tenure of Seth Greenberg abruptly this afternoon, with a press conference from athletic director Jim Weaver only hours after he informed the coach. The change had been in the works for awhile, but only in the attract sense. Virginia Tech had already decided they would not renew Greenberg's contract after this season, but the decision to emote him immediately wasn't broached until Tuesday, and apparently finalized on Thursday. Greenberg was only informed a few hours before the official announcement today.

So what brought about the accelerated time table, and how does UNC factor into this? Well in addition to some rather odd criticisms Weaver had of Greenberg, like a lack of "a family environment" in the basketball program, he mentioned that VT had lost numerous assistant coaches in the past few weeks, and did not want to hire new ones if they were going to part ways with their head coach. And the number one destination for ex-Hokie assistants? Alabama-Birmingham.

UAB, of course, hired away UNC assistant and JV coach Jerod Haase last March, replacing former Indiana coach Mike Davis. In addition to tapping Bobby Frasor to be his director of basketball operations, he hired two members of Greenberg's staff, assistant coach Rob Ehsan and director of basketball operations Jeff Wulbrun. Both were in only their first season in Blacksburg, and their connection to Haase was tenuous. Wulbrun coached Haase at California for one season before the latter transferred to Roy Williams' Jayhawks, while Ehsan had been a six-year assistant for Gary Williams at Maryland.

Greenberg had also lost associate head coach James Johnson to Clemson, despite reportedly matching the Tigers' salary offer, and the remaining assistant John Richardson was in talks with Old Dominion. Not counting Richardson the Hokies had lost six assistants in four years.

All this being said, and despite Jim Weaver's confidence in the interest in the position, I foresee this coaching search to be a disaster on the order of N.C. State's search following Herb Sendek's departure in 2006. I'm not sure anyone would want to work for a man who just deep-sixed the previous occupant in such a ham-fisted manner, especially with the long climb the Hokies will need to get out of the ACC cellar. Between this and the fact that Wake has still not fired Jeff Bzdelik, this might be the best day Boston College basketball has had in many months.

UNC's assistant coach opening remains unfilled, but the interest is a great deal higher.

Mike Krzyzewski Will Fix College Basketball By Giving Mike Krzyzewski More Power

2012-04-17T22:47:04Z

I had a second post on amateurism and college sports to write today, but will put it off to discuss... Mike Krzyzewski's thoughts on amateurism and college sports. Eamonn Brennan reported that the Duke coach and personification of evil was asked how to fix college basketball on an Oklahoma City radio program, and responded thusly:

"First of all college basketball doesn't control college basketball," Krzyzewski said. "The NBA controls college basketball. They are the ones along with the players union that sets the rule. College basketball just reacts to what the NBA does to include the early entry date. College basketball put out April 10. Well, that date doesn't mean anything. April 29 is when guys have a chance to put their names in the NBA draft.

"I think one of the main things that has to happen is college basketball has to have a relationship with the NBA," he said. "There should be someone in charge of college basketball who on a day-to-day basis sets an agenda for our great sport. We don't have anything like that. As a resolve we don't have a voice with the NBA or the players union and that's just kind of sad."

From there both Brennan and the radio hosts moved on to discussions about the one-and-done rule, where Krzyzewski was very diplomatic about not saying anything bad about Austin Rivers. And Krzyzewski has in the past complained about the one-and-done rule, saying "Once you come to college, I think you have to stay two years." But note that in this particular interview he's not complaining about athletes leaving after one year.

No, Krzyzewski is mad that the NCAA set a (ridiculously early) deadline for players to declare for the NBA draft, and the NBA declined to follow suit. As a result, players are spending the same amount of time they used to in making a life-changing career decision at the expense of college basketball coaches having next year's lineup in flux for an extra few weeks. Recruiting becomes a little difficult, as the coach has to wait out Mason Plumlee's Hamlet imitation.

There's a trend about Krzyzewski's suggestions to reform college basketball — they all direct more power in the process to the coaches. You rarely hear him argue that one-and-done is a bad rule because players should be free to go pro whenever they'd like; no he's typically arguing for a mandatory two or three year stint once teams set foot on campus. Somehow if high school basketball associations passed a similar rule — say that all seniors must declare their college intentions by January because those announcement ceremonies were interfering with exams or something — I don't think Krzyzewski would stop recruiting just to appease their partners at the lower level. He'd low them off and recruit as he damn well pleases.

Now make no mistake about it — college basketball is a job to most of these students, even if their NBA hopes are limited. Basketball is paying their way through school, dominating their social life, and preventing them from having summer jobs and the like; it, at this point in time, is their livelihood. And to limit their decision to change their circumstances, by going pro or just going elsewhere, solely to make a coach's job easier, is a pretty lousy thing.

Now I think there is something college athletics could do to circumvent the one-and-done rule, although they won't like it. More on that tomorrow though.

Should Universities Offer Majors in Football?

2012-04-17T04:38:00Z

I've been taking a brief respite from Carolina sports with the end of the basketball season, while I try to gather my thoughts on the past season and some larger problems with college athletics. Of course, it's a little hard to enjoy the vacation when Tar Heel athletics are popping up in editorials in the New York Times.

There's always been a tension in Chapel Hill over the commercialization of college sports. Dean Smith often criticized the NCAA for allowing beer commercials to be aired during college broadcasts. William Friday, UNC law grad and former president of the UNC system founded the Knight Commission to reform college athletics and is the leading critic of the professionalization of college sports. Nor is it a surprise that Taylor Branch, author of the Atlantic Monthly article on the NCAA that kicked off an ongoing discussion last fall about paying college athletes was a Carolina grad as well. UNC is the kind of place that would organize a lunch discussion about modern college athletics, and invite Joe Nocera, a New York Times columnist who has also criticized the current system to attend.

The result, however, was an editorial built around this quote from that lunch by Deunta Williams, one of the players suspended in the NCAA investigation of the football team:

Williams, however, had his own set of complaints. Athletes, he said, could only take the classes the athletic department wanted them to take. Coursework couldn't interfere with practice, of course. It was always better that the classes not be too difficult - otherwise, there might be eligibility problems. And one other thing:

"All the freshman football players take Swahili as their language requirement," Williams said. Why? Because the athletic department tutors are strong in Swahili. (In fact, 7 of 25 freshmen football players took Swahili in 2006, Williams's freshman year.)

Not mentioned in the piece was the fact the the chair of the department that oversees Swahili classes at UNC resigned his position over a plagiarism scandal involving another football player, or that the department came under criticism for enrolling Marvin Austin in a 400-level course the summer before his freshman year. Elementary Swahilil courses are, for some reason, 400-level classes.

Nocera sees the uptick in the study of Swahili as a sign of how universities are failing their athletes. "With their phony majors and low expectations, they send the unmistakable message to the athletes that they don't care what happens after their eligibility expires. It's a disgrace." His solution is to allow players to essentially major in football.

He puts it more artfully than that, analogizing it to dance majors, who spend four years studying dance, despite an equally small chance of making a living from the art as football players have of being paid to work on Sundays. But that shows a pretty big unfamiliarity with universities, I think.

First of all, such majors do exist, to some extent. There's a reason "Sports and Exercise" and "Sports Management" are among the most common majors for BCS football starters. I doubt you'll ever get a sport as blatantly defined as a major to the extent that dance is, though. Universities are slow to accept any new field of study, even one as lucrative as business.

The second point though, is that UNC is a liberal arts school, and even if such a football major existed, there is still the General College to be satisfied, and that includes a language requirement. So the players would still probably be taking Swahili, or another easy language. (Among the folks I knew, Portuguese was supposedly the easiest course to fulfill the requirement, and sure enough Art Chansky is annoyed because Williams got it wrong — his freshman year 7 new football players took Swahili while 12 took... Portuguese) So do the dance majors, and everybody else. And many students hated it.

But whatever you think of the merits of a liberal arts education, I don't think the answer is to shuffle athletes off to special classes though. Hold folks to a higher standard, or pay them, or sever big-time athletics from education entirely, but don't think that small tweaks and new majors will shift things in any meaningful ways. As long as there's excessive amounts of money and rabid alumni, there are going to be problems, and it will take a bigger restructuring to fix the system.

(For another perspective on the same talk Nocera saw, try this. Don't believe for a second that the tutors being proficient in Portuguese and Swahili is an unfortunate coincidence though. They're easy classes. There's nothing wrong with that; lots of non-athletes are taking the same courses because foreign languages don't interest them and they want to lighten their course load, but that's what they are. And I, for the record, took French 3 and 4. My GPA suffered for it, and ten years down the line, my French is horrible.)

Everybody Calm Down, James Michael McAdoo Is Staying at Carolina

2012-04-06T01:13:26Z

In the good news we've all been waiting for, James Michael McAdoo announced today that he would return for the 2012-13 season. From the UNC press release:

"I've had several discussions about my future plans with my family and Coach Williams and have decided to return to UNC to continue playing for the Tar Heels and continue my education," says McAdoo. "I love being at Carolina and really enjoy competing with and being around my teammates and am excited about what we can do together next season.

"Every young basketball player wants to have as much information about his future and understand what others in the game think about him. It's been interesting to learn the information that Coach Williams has gathered, but I am ready to continue as a Tar Heel. I'm enjoying my time in Chapel Hill and am excited about the future for my team and me."

Although he averaged less than sixteen minutes a game, he will be the most experienced member of the Tar Heels' frontcourt, and as someone projected to go as high as seventh in this year's draft, their most formidable offensive weapon. This is a reason to be excited. Unfortunately, the national media has lost their minds. Case in point:

UNC just released statement that James Michael McAdoo is returning. That makes the Tar Heels Final Four contenders.
— Jeff Goodman (@GoodmanCBS) April 5, 2012

Keep in mind, UNC will still be very thin in the paint. They'll be relying on a lot of freshmen. Their options at the point guard are Dexter Strickland, who would really rather be on the wing, and freshman Marcus Paige. And neither of them will be taking the court anytime soon, as Strickland is still rehabbing his ACL and Paige will spend the next six to eight weeks healing a stress fracture.

This team is going to start the year at roughly the level the 2010-11 team began with. They'll have slightly less talent, and slightly more experience. Unfortunately, it looks like they're also going to start at the same level of hype. It's a pity; I was looking forward to Carolina starting the year as an underdog for once.