Unverified Voracity Wishes It Was Rocky And Arid
"A fertile ground for dangerous upstarts lately." That's the accurate, expected, still painful knife Doctor Saturday gently slips between Michigan's ribs in his latest premature assessment, this of the UConn team that will inaugurate Michigan's luxury boxes and possibly clock year three of the Rodriguez era on the head before it can even kick over some MAC team's sand castle.
The assessment doesn't exactly live up the DocSat's foreboding tweet, which said he would be the first person to jump on the bandwagon of a "serious contender in the Big East." That sounds bad. It's not quite that bad in the final analysis, though:
The Huskies are a couple playmakers away from standing out as a conference favorite, and one of those guys may emerge on one side or the other. Unless they come up with more firepower on both sides, though, the existing talent level makes it hard to forecast anything better than 8-4. That's not a breakthrough, exactly, but it is a more generous guess than they've ever gotten before at this time of year.
UConn suffered through a series of painfully close losses before a breakthrough-ish game against Notre Dame launched them on a four game win streak. Syracuse, USF, and South Carolina were the other victims. In any case, UConn returns a crap-ton of starters from an 8-5 team that saw the breaks go against it last year. I don't think they'll end the year #2, but the specter of that Utah game has been duly raised.
Hypothesis damage. It's not like losing Manny Harris is going to help the team, especially if it continues to shoot zero point two percent, but I can't be the only person who has glanced at Harris's relatively meh efficiency numbers (47.7 eFG, basically equivalent to Novak) and thought that replacing him might not be the mountain it appears to be.
Here is a chart that slaps that idea in the face and tells it to sit in the corner. Presenting the top ten Big Ten players in John Hollinger's comprehensive PER stat:
RK | PLAYER | GP | MPG | AST | TO | USG | ORR | DRR | REBR | PER |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Evan Turner, OSU | 28 | 35.4 | 22 | 15.5 | 26.8 | 6.6 | 24.8 | 15.7 | 31.3 |
2 | Robbie Hummel, PUR | 27 | 30.3 | 12.9 | 6.5 | 19.6 | 6.5 | 21 | 13.7 | 28.31 |
3 | Draymond Green, MSU | 32 | 25.4 | 22.6 | 12.8 | 18.1 | 10 | 22.1 | 16.1 | 25.85 |
4 | Damian Johnson, MINN | 34 | 25.5 | 18.6 | 10.7 | 16.6 | 6.8 | 12.5 | 9.6 | 25.36 |
5 | DeShawn Sims, MICH | 32 | 32.1 | 5.2 | 8.4 | 23 | 12.7 | 18.6 | 15.6 | 25.2 |
6 | Manny Harris, MICH | 31 | 36.1 | 17.3 | 12.1 | 24.4 | 6.8 | 15.4 | 11.1 | 24.76 |
7 | JaJuan Johnson, PUR | 32 | 31.1 | 4.6 | 11.4 | 19.7 | 9.3 | 18.1 | 13.7 | 24.66 |
8 | John Shurna, NW | 33 | 36.3 | 12.7 | 9.9 | 21.8 | 6 | 16.1 | 11.1 | 23.68 |
9 | Zack Gibson, MICH | 32 | 10 | 6.8 | 13.5 | 15.1 | 12.1 | 16.2 | 14.1 | 23.66 |
10 | Trevon Hughes, WIS | 31 | 32.5 | 14.2 | 10.4 | 23.5 | 4.6 | 13 | 8.8 | 23.3 |
One-grunt observations on the three bolded folk: obvs, guh, wha?
Okay. I think that Michigan playing super small at all times skews this towards the players on the team who actually haul in rebounds. Still, this is one statistical measure that passes the sniff test—check out the top of the national leaderboard for Enter Samhan, Some UNI Guy, and Argh Running 40-Footer—that disagrees with the various Kenpom measures that declare Manny Harris a prolific but inefficient scorer.
Also… holy jeez maybe we could have figured out a way to put Gibson on the floor a bit more.
(HT: Inside The Hall.)
Money money money. Bleed Scarlet shouldn't feel too bad about missing USA Today's most recent FOIA rampage, a January database of revenue and expenses at public division I schools. It seems like the entire blogosphere whiffed on. I certainly hadn't seen it.
Anyway, this perked my ears up:
The vast majority of sports programs — even those that purport to support themselves — receive significant financial backing from their institutions to operate. Of the 99 institutions in the table below, all but four — Louisiana State, Ohio State, and Purdue Universities, and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln — reported receiving at least some revenues in the 2007-8 fiscal year from one of four categories of “allocated” revenues: student fees, direct state or government support, direct institutional support (general fund money), or indirect institutional support (facilities, energy costs, etc.).
Eh? Really? No Michigan? A quick zip over to the database provides an answer. It is not earth-shaking:
As of 2008, six hundredths of a percentage point of Michigan's athletic department funding comes from the university. This is not a one-time fluke, as direct support went from zero in 2005 to about 30k the next year and 50k the year after before landing at its current totally insignificant amount. What is it? I asked SID Bruce Madej:
This is how we are required to report when we receive funds to pay for work study students who assist us during the year.
That mystery solved.
Now let us ask the eternal question: why does Eastern Michigan have a football program? 86% of athletic department "revenue" comes as a subsidy.
Etc.: Hidden in the night game announcement is a two-year break in the M-ND series in 2018 and 2019, which an mgoblog user picked out and MVictors confirmed was a new development. DocSat on the "cult of the bracket."
March 23rd, 2010 at 11:43 AM ^
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March 23rd, 2010 at 11:54 PM ^
I actually happen to be a student worker in the Athletic Department at one of these schools (Purdue). So I can only answer for Purdue, but the answer to your question is yes. Purdue's Athletic Department does not use work study. I qualified all 3 years so far and the dept has rejected the use of it and has just employed me as a regular worker. I was shocked at first because they could just get something like half my wage paid by the government (if I understand correctly), but I believe the bragging rights to say they recieve absolutly no money from the university is perhaps their rational, and possibly it may mean more work and burocracy for the accountants and payroll people to deal with. So no it is not due to interpretation of reporting. Hope this helps. In case anyone cares I work in the Athletic Ticket Office (Anyone need GOOD tickets???? haha)
March 23rd, 2010 at 10:07 PM ^
With the thrill of the unexpected, though, comes the unavoidable tradeoff of a certain kind of justice for obviously superior teams -- such as, say, Kansas, which defeated rival Kansas State three times en route to the Big 12's regular season and tournament championships, only to watch the Wildcats move closer to the national championship because their inexplicable lapse against an inferior opponent came at a more convenient time in the season -- whose otherwise brilliant campaigns can go up in a blink. (The classic football example is the 2007 Patriots, arguably the greatest team in NFL history, whose perfect season was extinguished by a six-loss team that not only lost to New England in the regular season but finished three full games behind the champion of its own division.) For all the BCS' faults, producing an "unworthy" champion has never been one of them, as opposed to the occasional Villanova, N.C. State and Arizona in the basketball tournament; the Series' sins have always been at the opposite end, of leaving obviously worthy contenders out of the mix rather than letting stragglers in.Seems he's making the same point that I was making after the Kansas loss...that the Tournament as it is situated is as exciting as all get out, but not the fairest way to determine a championship...something any playoff should consider (and though it wasn't the point of the previous topic, one I think Brian's system takes into account).
March 23rd, 2010 at 11:03 PM ^
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