J.D. Crabtree: Good evening Carter,
Come and gone like an overmatched mid-major in an Elite 8 game, our college basketball season amidst a pandemic ended last night. Our champion being a bunch of grown men from Waco, the Baylor Bears.
You and I are interested in discussing several facets of the college game, whether it be the macro trends or the women’s tournament or the final matchup last night, so we have a challenge ahead to bring a thoughtful discussion to the table.
I will start us off by highlighting that through all the ups and downs of a sport played by pretty young dudes we were left with chalk at the end. Gonzaga and Baylor were 1a and 1b starting the season and freight-trained their way (one’s path harder than the other’s) to a national title game even under a survive-and-advance format. We can blast “One Shining Moment” all we want, but they are who we thought they were.
I’ll hold for now but I want to highlight the obvious theme: upperclassmen everywhere.
What do you make of the Gonzaga-Baylor powerhouses this year? Even with the one freshman. phenom outlier, Jalen Suggs, does this further hammer home the model more teams need to somehow replicate?
Carter Pearson: Hello, friends. So excited to be here.
For me, this was the perfect type of NCAA Tournament — lots of early upsets, then a heavyweight fight at the end. Baylor spoiled it by kicking the crap out of Houston and Gonzaga, but that’s what happens when you bring a knife to a gunfight. Drew Timme’s facial hair should’ve known better.
Are either of these things replicable? I think Baylor’s team structure is more replicable by other programs than the Zags.
First — the guards — we’ve seen this before from Villanova over the years. Whether it was Lowry, Allen Ray, Rady Foye and Mike Nardi (!) from 2005 or Brunson, Booth, DiVencenzo from 2017, there have always been guard dominated college basketball teams that go far in the tournament. Those teams were incredible and that’s the closest analog I’ll see for Baylor.
Baylor also built the team through transfers, which will is already the de facto way that a lot of school are building their rosters. Davion Mitchell, Adam Flagler, MaCio Teague and Tchamwa Tchatchoua all started their careers at other schools.
Other schools are already following this blueprint. 3 of Arkansas’s best 6 guys were transfers. And as the transfer portal becomes fully operational and no one has to sit a year, you’re going to see a lot more of this from the Tier 1B schools. And it makes a lot of sense — the kids get a chance to play for a winner, rehab their draft stock. And coaches get older guys who have experience and talent, but aren’t chomping at the bit to leave for the draft. It’s a win win for everyone except the blue bloods, who keep seeing their 8 month rentals get beat up by grown ass transfers.
So, yeah, I guess, uhh, watch out for Arkansas next year.
Onto the Zags — this is replicable, but only by the blue bloods. It hurts my heart to say that UNC and Kansas are the closest. But, Gonzaga is simply the best college program in the country. Now that Suggs came, a stream of one and dones are coming to Spokane because they play like an NBA team. There’s space and they run lots of pick and rolls with backside action to get shooters open.
Weirdly, I think the big recruits (looks like Chet Holmgren aka White KD is next) are the easy part. The key is keeping the Timme/Kispert tier of players around for a long time to provide stability around the one new star. Jalen Suggs was amazing, but even after making that shot, he still looked like a freshman for the first half last night. He was too amped up. Timme, even in a loss, was mostly steady. If they can keep that infrastructure in place, we’re looking at Duke-west out in Spokane, as Duke-east flounders between shooting guards who can’t shoot and centers who can’t catch.
What’s your biggest takeaway from these teams?
JD: My biggest takeaway from these teams is that my college basketball stance is getting more and more justified over time, so at minimum I will die happy.
I am flabbergasted, and secretly in love with the direction as a Tennessee fan, that Kentucky continues to weaken their brand with the short term talent bait every year. We’ve got a relevant blue blood selling out in style of play, player association with school choice, and program stability in order to keep chasing that ’11-12 Anthony Davis high at all costs. It’s the sports equivalent of a junkie, Cal doesn’t want to restart any foundational processes. It is obvious and weird to observe. I know you have some qualms of how Duke has built its roster post-Scheyer years but maybe it is worth it for a Zion-RJ Barrett five month rush. I don’t know.
Baylor is my vision of the perfect team capitalizing on perfect growth. Find a ton of players that are going to peak as Juniors, whether that be out of college or early in their careers via the transfer market, and work towards your championship window. There wasn’t a lot of lottery potential on that roster (if anyone gets close to it it’s because of postseason success) so they resorted to the best basketball you can play in ’21: lots of 3s, aggressive half court man-to-man, driving backcourts, heat-seeking frontcourt rebounders (aka not back-to-basket).
Having a freshman lottery pick try to get his 20 points every night via deep 2s might feel cool at times, but don’t let that normalize. Like most things in life, a slow grind yields the top outcome.
Gonzaga is a really solid program of course, but that loss is probably creeping into Mark Few’s thoughts. This was his team to win with. He’ll have others there that might end up better, but it just makes you wonder when you can’t get it done with the team you built for. He had talent, experience, and even COVID to slow the more talented teams from developing and he couldn’t get over the top. It’s a brutal measuring stick for college coaches, I am curious if him jumping to a Power 5 is more in the cards now.
Let’s discuss the state of college basketball. Do you like where it is today? Where it’s headed tomorrow?
CP: I think that college basketball is in an okay position for now, but is slowly dying outside of the Tourney. Between the G-League, Overseas, and that weird new high performance training thing Kevin Ollie is leading, there are so many ways for elite athletes (and various hangers on) to make money early, that the sport is in long term trouble.
You can’t succeed long term if 45 out of the top 100 are choosing to play elsewhere. At that point, you’re a hell of a lot closer to the MLS than college football. And most people don’t give a shit about the MLS when they can watch the Premier League.
Am I too pessimistic?
JD: I don’t think so. And I hope this is another huge slap in the face, the evolved form of wake-up call, to the NCAA who has had decades of control on being the middleman to professional sports.
It’s always been the elephant in the room as players have been forced to go to ONE SEMESTER of college before turning professional. This has become increasingly ironic as AAU and high school power programs have become savvy and getting their top guys top exposure. Basically the NCAA is trying to have their hand in everything, spreading too thin. I am torn because I do love to see a Baylor team form and conquer the competition, so I don’t want the NCAA to necessarily crumble.
They need to think fast because there are lottery guys going straight to the G League now, that means less 2003 Carmelos taking the NCAA tournament by storm.
The MLB – NCAA relationship is one of the stronger ones in sports. Either go straight out of high school and get in the farm, or choose a college and the education and not be able to declare till your Junior season.
However, I am interested in the cons that could arise from all these alternative routes players can now go. Is there a way for some of these amateurs to get burned? Too soon to know?
CP: You only have to look back to the 90s and 2000s to see everything that can go wrong. I’d say typically there are 8-10 high schoolers a year who are ready to be on an NBA roster. Everyone else should go to college or the G-League.
Jonathan Abrams wrote a great book filled with successes and cautionary tales if anyone is curious about that. Or just Google “Lenny Cooke” if you want a short version.
The MLB comment is interesting in that 1) a basketball minor league can pay people a better wage (approx 100k) and 2) no one gives a shit about college baseball. Maybe an exaggeration, but it’s super niche.
So — even if college basketball steadies the ship a bit, they’re still trending towards something that’s niche for 85% of the year, and then a gambling holiday for 4 weekends. That’s not ideal for an “amateur”organization.
One curveball — the new rules that allow for image monetization. If these top recruits keep coming in with 400k Instagram followers, maybe they make enough money in college for two years that it becomes a better option than the G-League or Lithuania.
Basically — college basketball needs to find a way for over 90% of the best high schoolers to go to college or it dies a slow death.
Any final thoughts? I’m about at the end of my college basketball knowledge.
JD: While history does repeat itself, the NBA has evolved more than any other major sports since the ’90s/2000s. I think there is now an abundance of information that is being passed to each player’s camp for years leading up to a decision day. In addition (and in conjunction?) the amount of AAU and exposure-based basketball is putting Top 100 kids against each other every weekend. So there is no more judging a Kwame Brown dunking on a bunch of future accountants via grainy video as the sole evaluation bar.
The angle I am getting at is that I think it has flipped a bit, where it might be harder to actually misjudge your talent level now. We live in the Information Age!
I still do believe there are 5-10 guys that could make the NBA leap each year, but the conversation and gaps are much clearer than two decades ago. It is still not an exact science, as will no amateur to pro ever be, but basketball is eliminating a lot of the wide-ranging outcomes that are often depressing.
SO, how does this relate back to college = reasonable expectations of players trending in the right direction.
Everyone knew RJ Barrett was a 1 and done. We know the conversations between Duke and his camp were crystal clear on their joint mission. I believe there are going to be more 2/3 and done relationships in the college game, which I consider great progress rather than flaunting around the diploma angle for guys who are going do 4-5 semesters max. Monetize them like you said. Johnny Juzang should be making some serious coin while also being the big man on campus at a blue blood university. And that last point still matters, a lot of these guys are 20 years old and it is simply more fun to play a rivalry game and be Big Man on Campus rather than being in Central Europe away from their family and friends. No amount of buckets can replace a Day Party and a mountain of white claws.
Moving along.
I thought the women’s tournament and season took a positive step back in the limelight. Paige Bueckers helps the game, we gravitate to stars in sports leagues. I am ready to be proven wrong on this take but it felt like there was a drought of NCAAW stars once we got past the Taurasi/Bird/Candace Parker/Seimone Augustus/Maya Moore era. Hopefully we start to see more household names again.
Finally, the NCAA season was robbed of the big non-conference matchups and early season tournaments. This is the star power exposure channel they can’t afford to lose in order to keep the average fan engaged for five months. It is a win-win-win-win-win for every stakeholder involved, and we will remember why we love these games once we see a non-pandemic season next year.
And that is all for college basketball talk, baby.
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