Nothing regarding Pitt once more. Off for the week and Black & Gold is all the Pittsburgh papers care about at the moment, and in New Jersey they don’t care about covering college basketball unless they know the teams are winning.
So despite my general disgust when sports columnists mail it in with a “…” type column, I’m just going to get a couple things out that have nothing directly regarding Pitt.
Stanford Coach Walt Harris is looking for an offensive coordinator. Guess, Stanford is giving him enough of a budget to afford one.
College Football coaches are raising their voices against the dangerous proposals to make their poll votes public. Transparency for all, except them. Right. Truth is they don’t want people finding out that they barely have time or inclination to pay attention to other games outside of their next opponent or perhaps their conference.
The banner on top of the latest SI, blairs “College Hoops Bounce Back.” There’s an article on how college basketball is having a “rennaissance” (subs. only). Personally, I don’t think it ever went away. If pressed though, my feeling as to why some might think that is the large number of great non-con games that took place. That meant a lot of great games earlier in the season, rather than waiting for conference play to begin. There were great games on weekends, during the week. Match-ups even I, in my limited free time to watch sports (as opposed to yet another Elmo video demanded by my daughter), made me interested and intrigued.
Television has certainly noticed the difference. At a time when the Nielsens for many major sports are declining or flat, college hoops ratings are up 12% on CBS (compared with this time last season), 10% on ESPN and 25% on ESPN2. “In our world double-digit growth is more than significant. That’s a major change from one season to the next,” says Burke Magnus, who has coordinated ESPN’s college basketball programming for the past five years. The ratings are up despite a proliferation of games: The ESPN family plans to televise 303 men’s games this season, including 18 that have been added on Wednesday nights in place of locked-out NHL games. And that doesn’t take into account the 510 additional games available on ESPN’s Full Court satellite and digital-cable packages for the most addled of hoopheads.
Meanwhile, thanks to prodding from the TV networks and the NCAA tournament committee’s increased focus on strength of schedule, coaches now have more incentive than ever to arrange the kind of marquee intersectional matchups that fans want to see. Back in the 1980s John Thompson’s Georgetown teams would load up on cupcakes like St. Leo and Hawaii-Hilo. Now even notorious Syracuse fraidy cat Jim Boeheim is willing to take on Oklahoma State and risk an early-season loss. (The Orange fell to the Cowboys 74-60 on Dec. 7.) “I’m finding more teams are willing to play anybody,” says Mike Aresco, the senior vice president for programming at CBS Sports. “We’ve never had so many good nonconference games, like Kansas-Kentucky and Connecticut-North Carolina [on Feb. 13], scheduled in January and February.”
Three of the most electrifying games this season have been No. 16 Gonzaga’s takedowns of No. 8 Georgia Tech, Oklahoma State and No. 14 Washington, prime contenders, respectively, for the ACC, Big 12 and Pac-10 titles. Such matchups might not have happened in years past. “As a coach you control a certain number of games, so you’d better do something to show you’ll schedule the way the committee wants,” says Zags coach Mark Few. “In the end you’ll be rewarded, either by getting into the tournament or drawing a high seed.” Even better, the tournament committee’s recent changes to the Ratings Percentage Index — which will reward teams more for road wins than for home wins — should only increase the willingness of powerhouses to venture into the lairs of other heavyweights, as Georgia Tech did on New Year’s Day when it dropped a 70-68 overtime thriller at Kansas.
Of course Pitt missed out on that — again — with its schedule.
