Yes, Trey McGowens has officially signed with Pitt. I was amused at the press release on the matter.

McGowens is rated as the fifth-best prospect in the state of Virginia and the 88th ranked recruit in the nation by 247Sports. He jumped to No. 80 in the Rivals Class of 2018 rankings upon his reclassification. McGowens received offers from more than 40 Division I institutions including Clemson, Connecticut, Georgia Tech, Kansas State and Marquette before deciding on Pitt.

McGowens is Pitt’s highest rated recruit (according to Rivals rankings) since Steven Adams (No. 5) and James Robinson (No. 59) in 2012. He is the Panthers’ first Rivals Top 100 commitment since Damon Wilson (No. 100) in 2015.

It highlights both how aggressive a tack Pitt is taking in announcing a big recruit, and the impact of Jeff Capel immediately. By some degree, it also drives home that Kevin Stallings wasn’t exactly lighting it up in recruiting for however brief his time.

Speaking of which…

This was a tremendously interesting article on the myths that have arisen over college basketball coaches having less time then ever to win.

In that spirit, one point that’s been suggested is that Wright would never even have survived this long if he’d been hired by the Wildcats 10 or 15 years later than he was. Wright was hired at Villanova in 2001 and compiled just a 52-46 record over his first three seasons.

Surely, in today’s win-now-or-else culture, a three-year start like that would result in a pink slip, right? To get answers, I looked at every major-conference head-coaching hire since 2000, a total of 200 personnel selections by athletic directors over the course of 19 hiring cycles. Here’s what I found.

Since 2000, 35 percent of head coaches hired at major-conference programs have eventually been fired from that same position. That number rises to 37 percent if we look only at hires made prior to March 1, 2017. (No coach was fired after his first season in his new position in 2017-18.)

If firings account for 35 or 37 percent of coaching outcomes, what happens to the rest? Well, as boring as it sounds, many coaches hired by major-conference programs over the past 19 cycles are still in the same job.

Other coaches move up and out, or at least out. From Bill Self and John Beilein to Brad Underwood and Chris Mack, the road from one major-conference head-coaching gig to another (or even to the NBA) is well traveled.

The rest of the coaching-tenure endgames are divided between cases where the incumbent agrees to “seek other opportunities” in an NBA front-office or assistant role, retires or transitions into some form of TV work. Firings are highly visible, always present and by definition newsworthy, but they represent a minority of major-conference head-coaching outcomes.

The average tenure for coaches is a little over 5 years at a major-conference program. Then he gets to the myth of “three years or less.”

…there hasn’t been any increase in short-tenure firings in recent years. Take Kevin Stallings.

Pittsburgh fired Stallings after just two seasons, and, to my knowledge, there was little or no reaction in the vein of “Look at how demanding the pressure to win now in college basketball has become.” Instead the common view seemed to be that the parting was necessary.

This type of reaction to a short-tenure firing is the most common response to what is actually a rare occurrence. Just 9 percent of major-conference hires since 2000 have been fired after three seasons or less, and, even among coaches who are fired, a mere 26 percent are let go after such a short time.

If anything, short-term firings tend to be less questionable on the whole. When Billy Gillispie and Donnie Tyndall were let go after just one season at Texas Tech and Tennessee, respectively, few if any observers saw such decisions in terms of an impossible-to-please athletic director.

He even cites a few more examples of coaches who were fired after 3 years. Again, they were doing horrid that no one thought were going to get get better.

True, the most telling exception to this rule is perhaps the example of Dino Gaudio, who was let go in 2010 after just three seasons at Wake Forest.

That firing was indeed held up as an abrupt and telling case study in unrealistic expectations, but the key words there are exception to the rule. Gaudio’s fate hasn’t turned out to be as paradigmatic as commentators feared at the time.

The fact that eight years later, that Gaudio’s firing is still the example cited by those who reflexively defend coaches is probably the most telling thing.

It’s behind a paywall, but this article on pace of play and upsets (especially in the NCAA Tournament) caught my eye.

But is that how college basketball works? In the extreme, one can imagine that it does. A long shot is more likely to win a one-possession game against a dominant team than a 70-possession game. But a one-possession game is merely a thought experiment and not possible in the real world. The slowest-paced game this season was a 52-possession affair between Davidson and Fordham on Jan. 14.

Anecdotally, however, one might question this line of thinking. While UNC has had a lot of success under [Roy] Williams, the Tar Heels were the victim of one of the biggest upsets of the season when they lost to Wofford in a 77-possession game on Dec. 20. On the other hand, Virginia lost just twice until its stunner against UMBC, finding a way to repeatedly win low-possession games against quality opponents.

But anecdotes only serve to activate one’s curiosity. To really understand the effect of pace on a team’s ability to avoid an upset is a project that requires quite a bit more time to thoroughly research than just a few days. However, I think I have a simple way to get a high-level idea of whether Williams is correct.

There is no better predictor of game outcomes than the point spread wagered on by gamblers around the world. I have point spreads from more than 13,000 games over the past five seasons. I also have the predicted point totals for each of those games.

If higher-possession games are less likely to produce upsets, then the projected total should give me some valuable information on the likelihood of the favored team to win. If there’s more variance in a lower-scoring game, then a 10-point favorite should win more often when the projected total is 170 points (a typical North Carolina game) than when it’s 120 (a typical Virginia game).

As it turns out, that is not the case.

…

The favorites in games expected to be low- and high-scoring won about the same percentage of the time. The lowest winning percentage is for teams in games that were expected to be about average in terms of scoring. Hardly the evidence we need to make specific claims that the slow pace of Cincinnati and Virginia contributed to their respective downfalls.

But that’s just for 10-point favorites. We could look at other spreads, like eight or 12 points, and we might find slightly different results. This would all get really subjective in a hurry. Instead, I ran a regression on the entire dataset to predict the chance that a favorite won based on the point spread and total. The output confirmed what we see in the table above.

Given the point spread and predicted total, the total tells me nothing about the favorite’s chance of winning. The only useful piece of information is the point spread. In other words, over the past five seasons, a 10-point favorite had the same chance of winning whether the game was expected to be high- or low-scoring. So it seems that playing a certain style doesn’t make a team any more upset-proof.

Obviously losses in the NCAA Tournament get magnified. Especially upsets like UMBC over Virginia. My theory on why so many believe that slower-paced teams are more prone to upsets, is because most people don’t like to watch slow-paced teams.

We (and, sure to some extent I’ll include myself) want to see a more up-and-down the court game. We want to see great shooting and excellent offensive sets that don’t take the full shot-clock. We don’t want to see the missed fouls because a team is committing so many that the refs quickly get weary of calling them and let more go. We want the game to be fun.