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Monday, January 25, 2016
Telling It All Podcast With Dylan Flanagan - State And Future Of United States Tennis, Australian Open Second Week
Topics Include: The State Of Tennis/ATP Tour Financing (1:00). The Future Of United States Tennis (7:35). The Advantages And Disadvantages Of College Tennis (14:15). Seven Empty Seconds As Mysterious As The Missing Audio From The Apollo 11 Moon Landing (16:35). Australian Open Men's Singles Second Week Predictions (16:45).
SoundCloud Podcast Homepage: https://soundcloud.com/ctellallsports
Sunday, January 24, 2016
Telling It All Podcast With Ben Goodman - AFC/NFC Championship Games, Mets Signing Yoenis Cespedes, Cavs Firing David Blatt, Australian Open Second Week
Topics Include: Broncos AFC Championship Game Victory Over The Patriots (0:30). Our Thoughts On The Panthers Dominating The Cardinals In The NFC Championship Game (11:40). Reactions To The Mets Re-Signing Yoenis Cespedes To A 3-year, 75 Million Dollar Contract (14:00). Second Week Preview of Australian Open Men's Singles (19:00). Super Bowl 50 Predictions For Broncos And Panthers Game (23:30).
SoundCloud Podcast Homepage: https://soundcloud.com/ctellallsports
Saturday, January 23, 2016
Telling It All Podcast - English Premier League, David Blatt Firing, AFC/NFC Championship Games, Oscars Nominations/Predictions
Topics Include: Can Leicester City Win The EPL Title (0:45)? The State of Manchester City and Manchester United (4:15). What Clubs Will Get Into The Top Four (9:30)? Discussion of the Relegation Battle (11:30). Reaction to the Cavs firing of David Blatt (14:50). AFC Championship Game Preview (22:10). NFC Championship Game Preview (26:35). Oscar Nominations/Oscar Predictions (31:30).
SoundCloud Podcast Homepage: https://soundcloud.com/ctellallsports
Telling It All Podcast - ESports Overview
Topics Include: Discussion on Call of Duty World League (1:10). Breakdown of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive StarSeries XIV/Dreamhack Leipzig (12:20). Halo Championship Series Overview (22:20).
SoundCloud Podcast Homepage: https://soundcloud.com/ctellallsports
Friday, January 15, 2016
Parity Galore In College Basketball
Kentucky lost to UCLA. UCLA lost to Monmouth. Monmouth lost to Dayton. Dayton lost to La Salle. La Salle lost to Drexel. Drexel lost to Division II Alaska Anchorage. By the transitive property, Alaska Anchorage is better than Kentucky (yes, I took the time to plot all of that out). Maybe Mikhail Prokhorov and the Nets should consider offering Alaska Anchorage head coach Rusty Osborne a 12-year, 120 million dollar contract instead of John Calipari.
College football has been dominated by a few schools over the past couple decades. Urban Meyer and Nick Saban have won 8 of the last 13 National Championships and continue to be greedier than Meryl Streep at an award show.
However, the college basketball world has become increasingly "flat" as Tom Friedman would like to suggest. Here is a Russell Wilson level cliche: any team can truly beat any other club on a given night in college basketball. Obviously, that is not to say that powerhouse programs like Michigan St., Kansas, North Carolina, and Duke are out of the title picture. Overall, though, the top of college basketball has never been so close to the middle tier of teams in the country, as the middle class of college hoops has improved while the top teams in the country all have significant flaws.
There are anywhere from 10 to 15 teams that could win the National Championship this April in Houston, and for the life of me, I cannot remember a year with this much game-to-game uncertainty. A little less than a month ago, Clemson shot 27.1% from the field in a 23-point loss to Georgia on the road, and yet they just started ACC play with victories against Florida St., Syracuse in OT, Louisville, and Duke. How do you explain Kentucky getting totally outplayed by Ohio St. at the Barclays Center, a Buckeyes team that was so bad earlier on in non-conference play that UT-Arlington came into Columbus and beat them? Everybody was high on Virginia's prospects for a run despite losing Justin Anderson to the NBA after they beat West Virginia, Villanova, and California in consecutive games, but the Cavaliers then lost to Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech in ACC play. Teams in the top 25 losing games left and right has now become an accepted occurrence in college basketball.
The top teams in the nation are not strong enough this year to win on their off nights, and now it is just about figuring out when that evening will come for each squad. College basketball is just about as predictable and consistent as Cuba Gooding Junior's acting career because North Carolina can "show you the money" and beat Maryland behind flawless games from Marcus Paige and Brice Johnson, but they can also have a Boat Trip like performance and lose to teams like Northern Iowa.
Looking back at some of the past NCAA tournaments, the highest aggregate seeding for the four National Semifinalists was 26 during the wacky 2011 tourney. Eventual champions UConn were a 3 seed and only received that spot because they won 5 games in 5 days in the Big East Conference Tournament after going a mere 9-9 in conference play. Butler was an 8 seed, the first eight seed to get to the Final Four since North Carolina and Wisconsin in 2000 and the first eight seed to get to a title game since Villanova won it in 1985 against Georgetown. Kentucky was a 4 seed, and cinderella darlings VCU were a 11 seed, at the time joining LSU in 1986 and George Mason in 2006 as the only double digit seeds to make it to the Final Four. I think we could definitely see something wild unfold this March once again, but hopefully at the end of it we will get a better title game than the 53-41 National Championship game stinker we got back in 2011 (the worst title game I have seen since UCLA never got close to Florida back in 2006).
Why does college basketball lack a more typical top-heavy nature this season, a sort of structure that gets Bernie Sanders so upset?
One explanation is that some of the non-perennial hoops powers have not lost a lot to the NBA over the past few years and their players have continued to develop their games as upperclassmen. Whereas Duke had to replace Jahlil Okafor, Justice Winslow, and Tyus Jones, five of the seven players that get double-digit minutes for Butler are juniors and seniors. People sometimes overemphasize the role returning starters and upperclassmen play in the success of a team because if a team struggled with them as freshman or sophomores, they are not going to be better with them as juniors and seniors. However, for the Bulldogs to bring back all-conference caliber players like Roosevelt Jones and Kellen Dunham, it levels out the playing field against some of the bigger programs in the country. Seniors Fred VanVleet and Ron Baker are the reason why Wichita St. has won 7 NCAA Tournament games over the past 3 years, Buddy Hield is a scoring machine for Oklahoma and has dramatically improved as a shooter over his 4 years in Norman, and Kris Dunn came back after having late lottery potential and is now a definite top 5 pick (Providence could get back to its first Final Four since the Rick Pitino-Billy Donovan combination got them there in 1987). All three of those guys are leading experienced and upper-class heavy teams, especially Hield with Oklahoma because they have a very short bench and four of their five starters are juniors or seniors.
At the end of the day, you need talent to win games. The need for experience in college basketball to achieve success is often a media narrative (I feel like Ted Cruz when he was attacking the New York Media at the debate in Charleston last night), but it is an advantage to have a supremely gifted player with more a better feel for the game than a freshman who is still trying to figure it out (look at the difference between Brice Johnson and Skal Labissiere).
Another explanation for the parity in college basketball is that transfer rates are at an all-time high, and players at lower-level schools are now transferring to mid-level and second-tier programs. While Duke, Kentucky, and Kansas continue to go after the nation's top recruits, teams like Oregon, Pittsburgh, and even Louisville, who missed out on some of the top freshmen they were going after and ended up with just one top 30 recruit, have looked to established players from smaller schools to bolster their roster. The influx of transfers into tournament caliber teams, particularly but not limited to power conference schools, have allowed teams like Iowa St. to compete with programs like Kansas. Despite Fred Hoiberg leaving to go to the NBA and pestering Bulls fans by not being able to figure out the best big-man combination between Joakim Noah, Taj Gibson, Pau Gasol, Nikola Mirotic, and Bobby Portis, nearly 14 percent of players still transferred in college basketball in 2014 (not all of them could go to Iowa St. anyway). Damion Lee, who transferred from Drexel, and Trey Lewis, who transferred from Cleveland St., and are now far and away the two best players on a Louisville team that ranks at the top of Ken Pomeroy's adjusted defensive rankings. Lee and Lewis are both really quick and Lee is absolutely fearless, especially when he starts to get into a grove from three.
Some of the non-traditional college basketball powerhouses, like Butler and Wichita St., have been able to offer playing time and larger roles to guys at bigger schools that were never given the opportunity to shine or never quite fit in with their team. Conner Frankamp went from 8 minutes a game as the 9th or 10th guy on Kansas in 2013 to a key part of a good Wichita St. team, and has given the Shockers a 43 percent shooter from three. Tyler Lewis, a former McDonald's All-American and top 50 recruit, never found his place at North Carolina St. and is now a really productive pass-first point guard for Butler. The same kind of story goes for Kuran Iverson, who left Memphis after two years to play for Rhode Island and have a bigger role. Dylan Ennis, who averaged nearly 10 points a game for a 33 win Villanova team last year, left the school to go to Oregon to handle more of the basketball with highly touted freshman Jalen Brunson coming to play for the Wildcats in the backcourt with Ryan Arcidiacono. Unlike in the past, where many players would sit and wait for their opportunity at a big-time school because they thought they could only be recognized by NBA scouts from a few programs, players know that getting onto the floor is the most important thing for their future. As Robert Sarver would say, millennials want instant gratification or else they move on (I say that half-jokingly).
Finally, the quality of freshman that came into college basketball this season pales in comparison to the past, hurting the top programs that have continually replenished their talent each year through strong freshmen classes. LSU's Ben Simmons (a player so good he gets shout outs from Barack Obama), Duke's Brandon Ingram (his wingspan is as long as Giannis and Kawhi), Henry Ellenson from Marquette, Diamond Stone of Maryland (had a 39 point, 12 rebound game in his first ever Big Ten contest against Penn St.), Caleb Swanigan from Purdue (forms a monster front line duo with A.J. Hammons), Arizona's Allonzo Trier (unfortunately is out with a broken finger), Dedric Lawson of Memphis, and Florida State's duo of Dwayne Bacon and Malik Beasley have certainly all stood out for their respective teams. However, equally as disappointing have been Kentucky's Skal Labissiere and Isaiah Briscoe (one NBA scout way too harshly eviscerated Labissiere recently), Cheick Diallo of Kansas, Chase Jeter of Duke (Coach K has no trust in him at all), Justin Simon of Arizona, and Antonio Blakeney of LSU.
Moreover, for whatever reason, it seems as though the destinations of the top recruits were more spread out in 2015. Ben Simmons went to LSU, Cuonzo Martin and California got two top ten recruits with Jaylen Brown and Ivan Rabb, Henry Ellenson, a Wisconsin kid, stayed home and went to Marquette, and Ben Howland and his slow pace, let me control my team's entire motion offense landed Malik Newman at Mississippi State. In 2013, all but one of the top 12 recruits went to Kansas (Andrew Wiggins and Joel Embiid), Duke (Jabari Parker), Kentucky (Julius Randle, Andrew Harrison, Dakari Johnson, James Young, and Aaron Harrison), Arizona (Aaron Gordon), or Florida (Kasey Hill and the biggest college basketball disappointment in a long time with Chris Walker) according to ESPN. The next year, half of the top 18 recruits on ESPN went to either Duke, North Carolina, or Kentucky (Okafor, Jones, and Winslow went to Duke, Justin Jackson, Theo Pinson, and Joel Berry landed at North Carolina, and Trey Lyles, Karl Towns Jr., and Devin Booker went to Kentucky). This year, of the top twenty recruits according to ESPN, seven of them went to schools that did not even make the NCAA Tournament in 2014, creating a diversification of talent in college hoops.
College football has been dominated by a few schools over the past couple decades. Urban Meyer and Nick Saban have won 8 of the last 13 National Championships and continue to be greedier than Meryl Streep at an award show.
However, the college basketball world has become increasingly "flat" as Tom Friedman would like to suggest. Here is a Russell Wilson level cliche: any team can truly beat any other club on a given night in college basketball. Obviously, that is not to say that powerhouse programs like Michigan St., Kansas, North Carolina, and Duke are out of the title picture. Overall, though, the top of college basketball has never been so close to the middle tier of teams in the country, as the middle class of college hoops has improved while the top teams in the country all have significant flaws.
There are anywhere from 10 to 15 teams that could win the National Championship this April in Houston, and for the life of me, I cannot remember a year with this much game-to-game uncertainty. A little less than a month ago, Clemson shot 27.1% from the field in a 23-point loss to Georgia on the road, and yet they just started ACC play with victories against Florida St., Syracuse in OT, Louisville, and Duke. How do you explain Kentucky getting totally outplayed by Ohio St. at the Barclays Center, a Buckeyes team that was so bad earlier on in non-conference play that UT-Arlington came into Columbus and beat them? Everybody was high on Virginia's prospects for a run despite losing Justin Anderson to the NBA after they beat West Virginia, Villanova, and California in consecutive games, but the Cavaliers then lost to Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech in ACC play. Teams in the top 25 losing games left and right has now become an accepted occurrence in college basketball.
The top teams in the nation are not strong enough this year to win on their off nights, and now it is just about figuring out when that evening will come for each squad. College basketball is just about as predictable and consistent as Cuba Gooding Junior's acting career because North Carolina can "show you the money" and beat Maryland behind flawless games from Marcus Paige and Brice Johnson, but they can also have a Boat Trip like performance and lose to teams like Northern Iowa.
Looking back at some of the past NCAA tournaments, the highest aggregate seeding for the four National Semifinalists was 26 during the wacky 2011 tourney. Eventual champions UConn were a 3 seed and only received that spot because they won 5 games in 5 days in the Big East Conference Tournament after going a mere 9-9 in conference play. Butler was an 8 seed, the first eight seed to get to the Final Four since North Carolina and Wisconsin in 2000 and the first eight seed to get to a title game since Villanova won it in 1985 against Georgetown. Kentucky was a 4 seed, and cinderella darlings VCU were a 11 seed, at the time joining LSU in 1986 and George Mason in 2006 as the only double digit seeds to make it to the Final Four. I think we could definitely see something wild unfold this March once again, but hopefully at the end of it we will get a better title game than the 53-41 National Championship game stinker we got back in 2011 (the worst title game I have seen since UCLA never got close to Florida back in 2006).
Why does college basketball lack a more typical top-heavy nature this season, a sort of structure that gets Bernie Sanders so upset?
One explanation is that some of the non-perennial hoops powers have not lost a lot to the NBA over the past few years and their players have continued to develop their games as upperclassmen. Whereas Duke had to replace Jahlil Okafor, Justice Winslow, and Tyus Jones, five of the seven players that get double-digit minutes for Butler are juniors and seniors. People sometimes overemphasize the role returning starters and upperclassmen play in the success of a team because if a team struggled with them as freshman or sophomores, they are not going to be better with them as juniors and seniors. However, for the Bulldogs to bring back all-conference caliber players like Roosevelt Jones and Kellen Dunham, it levels out the playing field against some of the bigger programs in the country. Seniors Fred VanVleet and Ron Baker are the reason why Wichita St. has won 7 NCAA Tournament games over the past 3 years, Buddy Hield is a scoring machine for Oklahoma and has dramatically improved as a shooter over his 4 years in Norman, and Kris Dunn came back after having late lottery potential and is now a definite top 5 pick (Providence could get back to its first Final Four since the Rick Pitino-Billy Donovan combination got them there in 1987). All three of those guys are leading experienced and upper-class heavy teams, especially Hield with Oklahoma because they have a very short bench and four of their five starters are juniors or seniors.
At the end of the day, you need talent to win games. The need for experience in college basketball to achieve success is often a media narrative (I feel like Ted Cruz when he was attacking the New York Media at the debate in Charleston last night), but it is an advantage to have a supremely gifted player with more a better feel for the game than a freshman who is still trying to figure it out (look at the difference between Brice Johnson and Skal Labissiere).
Another explanation for the parity in college basketball is that transfer rates are at an all-time high, and players at lower-level schools are now transferring to mid-level and second-tier programs. While Duke, Kentucky, and Kansas continue to go after the nation's top recruits, teams like Oregon, Pittsburgh, and even Louisville, who missed out on some of the top freshmen they were going after and ended up with just one top 30 recruit, have looked to established players from smaller schools to bolster their roster. The influx of transfers into tournament caliber teams, particularly but not limited to power conference schools, have allowed teams like Iowa St. to compete with programs like Kansas. Despite Fred Hoiberg leaving to go to the NBA and pestering Bulls fans by not being able to figure out the best big-man combination between Joakim Noah, Taj Gibson, Pau Gasol, Nikola Mirotic, and Bobby Portis, nearly 14 percent of players still transferred in college basketball in 2014 (not all of them could go to Iowa St. anyway). Damion Lee, who transferred from Drexel, and Trey Lewis, who transferred from Cleveland St., and are now far and away the two best players on a Louisville team that ranks at the top of Ken Pomeroy's adjusted defensive rankings. Lee and Lewis are both really quick and Lee is absolutely fearless, especially when he starts to get into a grove from three.
Some of the non-traditional college basketball powerhouses, like Butler and Wichita St., have been able to offer playing time and larger roles to guys at bigger schools that were never given the opportunity to shine or never quite fit in with their team. Conner Frankamp went from 8 minutes a game as the 9th or 10th guy on Kansas in 2013 to a key part of a good Wichita St. team, and has given the Shockers a 43 percent shooter from three. Tyler Lewis, a former McDonald's All-American and top 50 recruit, never found his place at North Carolina St. and is now a really productive pass-first point guard for Butler. The same kind of story goes for Kuran Iverson, who left Memphis after two years to play for Rhode Island and have a bigger role. Dylan Ennis, who averaged nearly 10 points a game for a 33 win Villanova team last year, left the school to go to Oregon to handle more of the basketball with highly touted freshman Jalen Brunson coming to play for the Wildcats in the backcourt with Ryan Arcidiacono. Unlike in the past, where many players would sit and wait for their opportunity at a big-time school because they thought they could only be recognized by NBA scouts from a few programs, players know that getting onto the floor is the most important thing for their future. As Robert Sarver would say, millennials want instant gratification or else they move on (I say that half-jokingly).
Finally, the quality of freshman that came into college basketball this season pales in comparison to the past, hurting the top programs that have continually replenished their talent each year through strong freshmen classes. LSU's Ben Simmons (a player so good he gets shout outs from Barack Obama), Duke's Brandon Ingram (his wingspan is as long as Giannis and Kawhi), Henry Ellenson from Marquette, Diamond Stone of Maryland (had a 39 point, 12 rebound game in his first ever Big Ten contest against Penn St.), Caleb Swanigan from Purdue (forms a monster front line duo with A.J. Hammons), Arizona's Allonzo Trier (unfortunately is out with a broken finger), Dedric Lawson of Memphis, and Florida State's duo of Dwayne Bacon and Malik Beasley have certainly all stood out for their respective teams. However, equally as disappointing have been Kentucky's Skal Labissiere and Isaiah Briscoe (one NBA scout way too harshly eviscerated Labissiere recently), Cheick Diallo of Kansas, Chase Jeter of Duke (Coach K has no trust in him at all), Justin Simon of Arizona, and Antonio Blakeney of LSU.
Moreover, for whatever reason, it seems as though the destinations of the top recruits were more spread out in 2015. Ben Simmons went to LSU, Cuonzo Martin and California got two top ten recruits with Jaylen Brown and Ivan Rabb, Henry Ellenson, a Wisconsin kid, stayed home and went to Marquette, and Ben Howland and his slow pace, let me control my team's entire motion offense landed Malik Newman at Mississippi State. In 2013, all but one of the top 12 recruits went to Kansas (Andrew Wiggins and Joel Embiid), Duke (Jabari Parker), Kentucky (Julius Randle, Andrew Harrison, Dakari Johnson, James Young, and Aaron Harrison), Arizona (Aaron Gordon), or Florida (Kasey Hill and the biggest college basketball disappointment in a long time with Chris Walker) according to ESPN. The next year, half of the top 18 recruits on ESPN went to either Duke, North Carolina, or Kentucky (Okafor, Jones, and Winslow went to Duke, Justin Jackson, Theo Pinson, and Joel Berry landed at North Carolina, and Trey Lyles, Karl Towns Jr., and Devin Booker went to Kentucky). This year, of the top twenty recruits according to ESPN, seven of them went to schools that did not even make the NCAA Tournament in 2014, creating a diversification of talent in college hoops.
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