The Lessons of Hoosier Hysteria

The NCAA Tournaments are the Golden Goose, but their future depends upon the Cinderella stories.

Tipoff

Notre Dame men’s basketball head coach Mike Brey recently spoke with Mike DeCoury of Sporting News about the upcoming constitutional convention the NCAA is convening this fall. The NCAA organized the convention in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling from this past summer that challenged the way the college athletics organization views the concept of amatuer athletics. Brey had a simple message for the convention attendees: don’t cook the Golden Goose. Brey, who comes from a small state and has spent the past two decades living in the basketball-obsessed state of Indiana, should know a thing or two about the soul of the sport.

For the longest time, Indiana high schools from all corners of the Crossroads State were lumped into one large tournament. Small high schools and big ones alike competed for a chance at the state championship. This is the magic element that produced the true story that inspired the movie Hoosiers and made heroes of small-town kids like Larry Bird, the “Hick from French Lick,” as well as other icons of the game like Oscar Robinson, Glenn Robinson, Shawn Kemp, and many, many others. All of these players and their various high schools had one shot to win the famed Hoosier Hysteria, Indiana’s single-class high school basketball tournament. It was with great remorse to many that the Indiana State High School Athletic Association moved to a divisional structure in the late-90’s. Some of the magic was lost in the process. The NCAA, based in Indianapolis, faces a similar fate as it ponders its future amidst new rules around name, image, and likeness and football-driven conference realignment.

The NCAA men’s basketball tournament provides the bulk of the annual revenue for the organization. The current contract, which ends in 2034, pays out nearly $1 Billion from its TV partners each year. As realignment and other changes threaten the very existence of the NCAA, the tournaments - for both men and women - face an uncertain future. Brey is right; allowing the small schools to compete for the Final Four and National Title is what makes March Madness such an iconic sporting event. Imagine a scenario where Gordon Hayward never had a chance to sink that famously-missed shot at the end of the 2010 National Title game in Indianapolis because Butler, a member of the Horizon League at the time, had to play in the Division I-B tournament. Keeping all 32 conferences together for the sake of the tournament is worth the effort and it would preserve the Golden Goose. 

The Mixtape

The Field of 68 team puts out lots of great content each week. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights.

• Memphis head coach Penny Hardaway is going to be in the news a lot this season. After being considered for head coaching positions in the NBA, Penny decided to return to his alma mater for another year to coach a Final Four contender. Check out the Stock Report below for my thoughts on the Tigers season. The story you have to hear, though, is the time Penny was shot in the foot! Coach Hardaway joined Antonio Anderson for the Beale Street Bullies podcast to share this incredible story.

• Speaking of great stories, two guys that have some to share are Hoosier legends AJ Guyton and Steve Alford. The two of them were on the House of Hoosier podcast and shared some of their favorite Bobby Knight stories. The Hoosier legends shared the burden of living up the standards set by Coach Knight and dealing with attrition to the NBA.

• The latest episode of Floyd Street’s Finest with Jeff Greer featured new Louisville Director of Basketball Operations Taylor Barnette. The two discussed Barnette’s background, the rocky road for the program over the past couple of seasons, and what the Cardinals will look like moving forward.

Coming Soon: The Field of 12

The Field of 68 media network is excited to welcome a brand new network, the Field of 12, a podcasting network focused on college football. In addition to the B1G Show with Joshua Perry and Christian Hackenberg, we are excited to launch two new shows:

The Trevor & Bryce Show

Former Oklahoma quarterback Trevor Knight and former Baylor QB Bryce Petty have set aside their rivalries and are here to talk Big 12 football.

Ted & Yogi’s Pac-12 Adventure

Ted Robinson and Yogi Roth have brought their podcast over to the Field of 12 for a third season. They’ll focus on Pac-12 football.

Four Point Play 

Each newsletter throughout the summer, we’ll check in with one of our podcast hosts and see what they’re up to in addition to producing compelling content for us at The Field of 68.

This week, we check in with Jeff Goodman, former ESPN and current Stadium and Field of 68 insider, and host of the Goodman & Hummel podcast (Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you access podcasts).

1. You have been a men’s college basketball insider for a long time. Nobody has better connections in the world of college ball than you. I thought it would be fun to focus on the past, present, and future of college hoops. Let’s start with the past. How did you end up as a sports journalist and college basketball insider?

• It is something I knew I wanted to do. I interviewed James Worthy when I was 15 years old. I went to Arizona, which is where I picked up my college basketball interest. Boston, where I grew up, is not really a college basketball place. I lucked into it, really. I started with recruiting. That’s where I got all my relationships with coaches. Coaches would call me about all these recruits. A couple of years later, Fox bought Scout, where I was working. I begged the guy at Fox to let me write one column a week about college hoops. That was $50 a week. The coaches were all calling me for info about recruits but then I was calling them to write my column, so I sort of lucked into it. I was breaking news right out of the gate. 

2. Let’s turn our attention to the present. This upcoming season has a lot of huge storylines. There’s Coach K’s final season, the first season for new coaches like Hubert Davis and Tommy Lloyd as well as experienced coaches in new places like Chris Beard and Porter Moser. There are promising freshmen like Chet Holmgren as well as experienced returners like Kofi Cockburn. Of course, the fans will (hopefully - get vaccinated!) be back in the stands. What storyline are you looking forward to covering this upcoming season?

• For me, the biggest thing is being back out and covering games in person. I was able to do that in the “bubble” a little at Mohegan Sun. I covered a game with my daughter in person, Merrimack vs. Wagner, and then went to Indianapolis for the NCAA Tournament. It wasn’t the same. I hate to say this, but the atmosphere just wasn’t the same. It was better than having no tournament, but it wasn’t the same for the coaches, the players, or the media. I am hoping for a normal college basketball season where I can talk to the kids, have a meal with coaches, and so on. That’s the biggest thing for me personally. There are so many storylines to this season. Coach K’s swansong, that’s the biggest story. Can Coach K get these freshmen to the Final Four this season? Then you go down Tobacco Road a few miles and Roy Williams isn’t there anymore. That area of the country is going to be front and center. For Kansas and Arizona, does the NCAA come down on those two programs this year or continue to drag their feet? Is Kentucky going to be relevant after a disaster last season? Is Chris Beard and Texas going to be relevant again? I have the Longhorns at #2 in my preseason poll. There are just a ton of great storylines this year.

3. Now let’s turn our attention to the future. College athletics faces a number of headwinds. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled 9-0 against the NCAA this past June and put the idea of amateurism up for debate. Several states as well as the NCAA quickly moved to pass name, image, and likeness (NIL) policies. New professional options are available for the top high school recruits, such as the NBA’s G-League Ignite team and the Overtime Elite league. On top of all that, conference realignment is back again with Oklahoma and Texas on the move to the SEC. As you think about all these big changes, which one do you think will have the biggest impact on college basketball in 5 or 10 years? 

• I would say NIL. That is going to change the game in so many different ways. We’ll see what happens. The NCAA certainly wasn’t prepared for this. I’m not convinced the NCAA is going to be around in 10 years. The current contract for the NCAA Tournament ends in 2034. NIL is the game-changer the NCAA was not prepared for. Ultimately, it is going to be something that completely alters the state of the game in terms of giving kids something they were not privy to in the past. The NCAA did not want it. Now can they handle it? Schools are going to ask, ‘why do we need the NCAA?’ Realignment is not going to change things fundamentally for college basketball. Look at the Big East. It survived when we thought it was going to be ravaged. The one-time transfer rule (where transfers no longer have to sit out) will allow players to play right away. But NIL is going to be the undoing of the NCAA, ultimately.

And one!

4. We’ve been very serious in our discussion, so let’s close this out with a little fun. A little over a year ago, you and Rob Dauster launched Field of 68. About to launch the Field of 12.Give me your best Dauster story and feel free to bring the dirt.

• He almost left me for dead in Augusta, Georgia. We were leaving the gym around 11 p.m. or 12 at night. I’m allergic to bees and didn’t have my Epi-Pen with me. We were down in a place where I didn’t know the hospitals. I get stung and end up getting something over-the-counter at the grocery store. After that, it’s killing me at this point. It’s burning. We were supposed to meet Terrance Olgeslby for food and drinks. We go to the store and get medication. I told Rob I didn’t feel good and was going to the hospital. He asked me to drop him off with Terrance. He went out and had some beers. If I died, it was on Rob’s conscious. Maybe it wasn’t a bee sting, but I went to the ER and about a half hour later I realized it was not going to kill me, no thanks to Rob.

Stay tuned for upcoming episodes of the Goodman & Hummel podcast with Jeff Goodman. We’ll be ramping up in September as the preseason starts in a few weeks.

Stock Report: American Athletic Conference Edition

Now that the NBA Draft is over and transfer decisions are mostly made, we take a deeper look into a conference. Which teams are rising, which are holding steady, and which might be taking a step back heading into the season?

Rising: Memphis

• Head coach Penny Hardaway made a big splash in early August when one of the top high school players, 6’10” Jalen Duren, announced his commitment to the Tigers. Duren is a physically developed young man that looks like an NBA player right now. While he does not excel in any one area, he has skills, strength, and explosiveness enough to be one of the top players in college basketball next season. On top of committing, he announced his intention to forgo his senior year of high school at Florida’s Montverde Academy to begin playing college ball this fall. ESPN and others that follow recruiting closely have suggested that Duren may have surpassed his former AAU teammate Emoni Bates, a 6’9” forward from Michigan that was featured at the age of 15 on the cover of Sports Illustrated, as the best prospect in the high school class of 2022. The latest buzz is that Bates will join Duren in Memphis at the end of this week when he announces his own commitment. That pair, Duren and Bates, would give Memphis one of the most talented freshmen duos since Zion Williamson and R.J. Barrett played for Duke in 2019. The rest of the roster is not so bad, either. Senior forward DeAndre Williams, the projected frontcourt starter alongside Duren, is a Swiss Army knife that might be the best passer on the team. Wings Lester Quinones and Landers Nolley are both excellent shooters and will help space the court. Senior guard Alex Lomax will be expected to handle point guard duties after leading the team in assists despite coming off the bench in all but 4 games last season. The defense has been among the best in the nation the past two seasons. The question is whether Penny can get this team to score enough to justify the preseason hype. Many in and outside of Memphis will be talking about the Final Four for the Tigers this season.

Holding Steady: Houston

• Speaking of defense, that’s the name of the game in Houston under head coach Kelvin Sampson. Each of the past 4 seasons, the Cougars have boasted a top 25 defense based on KenPom’s adjusted defensive efficiency metric. They have also had one of the slowest styles of play, ranking in the bottom 30 based on tempo last season. Expect more of the same this upcoming season. Former American Athletic Conference Player of the Year Quentin Grimes is off to the NBA. In his place, Sampson has reeled in a pair of transfers, including former Texas Tech sharpshooter Kyler Edwards and Cal State Bakersfield’s Taze Moore. With this combo, Houston looks to return to the Final Four and should be competing with Memphis and others to get there. If there is one thing the Cougars could improve, it is limiting looks from the 3-point line. In 3 of their 4 losses last season, the opponent made 10 or more 3-point field goals (in the other loss, a road game at TCU, Houston shot a season-worst 4-21 from beyond the arc). The new guards will have to learn their defensive assignments quickly while contributing enough on offense to maintain a safe margin for error.

Falling: Southern Methodist

• Few teams were derailed by COVID quite as severely as the SMU Mustangs. The team played an abbreviated schedule of just 17 games last year, thanks in large part to a 2-week pause in January that preceded more than a month of missed action beginning in early February. Without any prep, the Mustangs lost to Cincinnati in the AAC conference tournament and then to Boise State on a heartbreaking last-minute turnover in the NIT. In the offseason, head coach Tim Jankovich saw all but 3 regular contributors from the roster remain in Dallas. Leading scorer Kendric Davis, a diminutive point guard from Houston that has been twice named an All-Conference player, is back for another season. Around him will be a host of transfers, primarily, including Marcus Weathers, a wing from Duquesne; Zach Nutall, a guard from Sam Houston State; and Tristan Clark, a forward from Baylor. There are a number of solid Division I starters and role players on this team, but the sum of the parts does not look like it will keep the Mustangs in the postseason hunt for the upcoming season. 

Rising: UCF

• It was a tale of two seasons for head coach Johnny Dawkins and the UCF Knights last year. At one point, they dropped 8 of 9 games but finished by winning 7 of their final 9 before falling to Memphis in the AAC conference tournament. Dawkins will look to build off of that hot stretch and get his team back to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since Tacko Fall was patrolling the post in 2019. UCF will hold onto nearly every player that contributed last season. The Knights will have a number of excellent options at the guard spot and wings between seniors Brandon Mahan and starting point guard Darius Perry. In the post, senior big man Cheikh Mbacke Diong will patrol the middle and collect as many rebounds as possible. Dawkins likes to spread it out and attack with a bunch of wings and guards. He will have the personnel to run a roster that will resemble the 2019 squad. If all goes according to plan, UCF should be back in the NCAA Tournament picture with a consistent effort throughout the year.

Holding Steady: Wichita State

• Wichita State was a surprise winner of the AAC regular season and was awarded with an 11 seed in the NCAA Tournament. Then-interim head coach Isaac Brown took over a tough situation, replacing Gregg Marshall amidst a probe into allegations of abusive behavior last summer. Brown showed that he can coach this past year and was rewarded a 5-year contract in late February. Brown relied on a number of grad transfers to patch holes in the roster last season. One of those players, starting point guard Alterique Gilbert, has moved on. Rising junior Tyson Etienne is poised to spend more time on the ball, a place where his offensive skills could come in handy. The Shockers were an above-average offense last year in spite of Gilbert’s poor shooting. While Gilbert was a skilled point guard and steady defender, putting the ball in Etienne’s hands more often could be a worthwhile tradeoff. Look for Wichita State to remain in the hunt in the AAC.

Falling: South Florida

• If you are looking for a coach on the hot seat, Brian Gregory’s chair would be one to watch. After a disappointing run at Georgia Tech, Gregory has yet to steer the Bulls to the NCAA Tournament. The future looked bright following a 24-14 record and CBI Championship in 2019. Since then, the Bulls have been below .500 and are looking at a tough season in a multi-bid conference. Offense has been the biggest challenge for the Bulls. USF ranked in the bottom 50 in the nation in both 2-point field goal percentage and free throw percentage. To make matters worse, the roster has suffered the most attrition in the conference and will return just 25% of the minutes played by the roster last season. I hate to make this all doom and gloom, so let’s focus on one potential bright spot. UNC Wilmington transfer Jake Boggs, a 6’7” wing from Charlotte, North Carolina, shot nearly 44% from 3-point range last season. Expect to see him shoot early and often this year.