Buzz Williams to Maryland. Someone to Texas Tech. And because you can never get enough, a little NIL talk:
1. Is Buzz Williams a Good Coach?
Maryland hired Buzz Williams, and reactions vary. To hear some tell it, Williams is a con man who always gets while the getting’s good. To others, he’s a program rehabilitator slowly climbing the rungs of the power conference world.
For whatever it’s worth…
Using kenpom end-of-season rankings, Williams’s Marquette teams were 43% better than the average Marquette teams of the non-Williams kenpom era. His Virginia Tech teams were 34% better than those of his counterparts. His Texas A&M teams were 31% better. Comparing him to other coaches on this carousel, only Will Wade’s career grades out better than Williams’s over a sample of eight years or more. By this incomplete metric, Williams outperforms Kevin Willard—the man he’ll replace—plus Niko Medved, Richard Pitino, Sean Miller, and even Ryan Odom.
You can say that Williams’s methods have a ceiling. Are we sure it isn’t his programs?
2. Is Texas A&M a Good Job?
Going off of that: How good can Texas A&M be? They’ve made five NCAA Tournaments over the last fourteen years—the combined Williams and Billy Kennedy eras. They’ve made three Sweet Sixteens since 1980—two under Kennedy, one under Billy Gillispie. Gillispie got them into the kenpom top ten, and Williams and Mark Turgeon got them into the top twenty, but they’ve never finished a season in the top five. Yet they’re an SEC school with a huge donor base, so…?
It’s easier to pin down what makes a good football school than it is to identify a basketball school by ingredients alone. For a long time—and maybe still today—shoe companies had a good deal to do with it. Certain coaches have made programs transcend their natural stature, to a degree and with a regularity not paralleled on the gridiron. Is that changing? I’m not sure. Auburn’s an “ingredients” school, and Duke’s an established power, and Florida’s a little bit of both. But Houston’s not either of those things.
Maybe the equation for a basketball ceiling, to the extent it exists, is some combination of coach and ingredients and fit, that last piece more a phenomenon in basketball than football. The problem for A&M is: Is anyone a better fit there than Buzz Williams? I’m not sure.
3. Fair Value and a Free Market
Dan Wetzel and Pete Thamel published a report this morning on the Deloitte clearinghouse, the “real NIL” enforcement body that will supposedly make sure players’ NIL deals—separate from the revenue-sharing payments they’ll be able to receive from schools, should the House settlement be approved—are legitimate. A quote from Bill Self:
“It’s hard to imagine how someone can [define] fair market value because to me, the fair market value is what a company or an organization sees that individual’s worth as.”
Yep.
There are some insidious parts to the House settlement, most notably that it backdoors in a theoretical salary cap limiting how much of revenue players get to share. NIL, of course, is how boosters will get around this limitation. But will they get around it? I’m no legal expert, but it would seem to me that they will, for the exact reason Self identifies: If a consenting party is willing to pay a consenting party a certain amount for a good or service, that certain amount is the market value.
This is good. College sports shouldn’t try to cap player earnings. The current status quo is out of control, but NIL is still new. There are still players graduating who started college in the pre-NIL era. Equilibrium has not been found. And the problem isn’t that players are earning too much. It’s that players are transferring more often than is optimal for college sports, specifically over the long term. Capping how much athletes can make won’t solve that problem. The things that will solve that problem have more to do with an increase in the number of credible college sports agents and some come-to-Jesus moments for boosters, moments of realizing what it is they really want to pay for: Continuity and competition.
Unless this clearinghouse is a shield, an intentionally toothless effort there to rubber stamp NIL payments and give concerned outsiders a big thumbs up, it seems like a waste of time. Thankfully, the market has a way of dealing with those.
**
