I do like the usual schedule, where baseball’s Opening Day precedes the Final Four and we just seamlessly transition from one season to the next. I don’t love the seam. Not bad to have a break, though, I guess, and I wonder how big the college basketball/MLB overlap is in fandom. Very convenient for the calendar, and lots of nostalgia in each, but how much does that mean?
Kansas Is King
For the second time in the Bill Self era, Kansas is the national champion. I was surprised to learn he’s the first to pull it off twice at the school, and it feels a little odd to be tossing Bill Self’s name around in the best-active-college-basketball-coach conversation, but aside from probably Mark Few, if we’re being reasonable (which we don’t have to do), is there anyone clearly better? You could argue in favor of Rick Pitino, and there are a few others out there, more on the fringe, of whom you could make a case, but it’s hard to argue with a guy who’s perennially as successful as Self is, especially now that he has the two titles. Has he cheated? Probably. He’s certainly benefited from cheating. But it’s near-impossible to know who hasn’t in college basketball, and it’s unlikely anyone else in Self’s territory on the list hasn’t been a party to some bags being dropped.
Kansas’s consistency as a program is their biggest strength, and is something you need if you’re going to win titles in a sport with a postseason as random as this one. Kansas’s median finish in the KenPom rankings (our best proxy available for how good teams actually are) over Bill Self’s tenure is 7th. Their average finish is 8th. Their worst finish is 27th (last year). They’ve finished ranked 1st twice. Aside from the number of times finishing ranked 1st, I’m not sure anyone can best those numbers. Duke and UNC and Kentucky have all had far worse seasons than a 27th-in-KenPom season. Villanova had some bad years as they rose, and were rather mediocre in 2019 as they came off that last title. Gonzaga only really hit the accelerator in 2017, having been a good program but not a great one prior to that year. Is there a better program than Kansas? Is there a better coach than Bill Self? Again, it’s probably Gonzaga, but besides them…no? I don’t think so?
For those wondering at home after yesterday’s post, Kansas stayed at third in KenPom after the slightly underwhelming performance, finishing the year behind Gonzaga and Houston. Best power-conference team! And the national champion. Because if you put yourself in the running often enough, odds are that you’ll break through now and then.
As for the game itself: Kansas was only a +240 underdog on the live moneyline I saw at halftime. That implies better than a 25% chance to win, even with the large vig that comes with live odds. We knew they were the better team, and while there was doubt, they didn’t blink, and they quickly took the game right back. In the end, it was North Carolina needing an improbable comeback to make it close again at the end. What a comeback that was—there’s plenty to praise about the performances last night from just about everybody involved, when context is considered—but it wasn’t enough. Because Kansas was, by the somewhat arbitrary measure of who wins the NCAA Tournament, college basketball’s best team again, at long last.
The Big 12 Rocks?
It was the Big 12’s second straight national championship in men’s basketball, and it could well have been the third straight, had Kansas had the chance to take care of business in 2020. (They were maybe 25% likely to win the title that year, but that was also likelier than the rest, and Baylor was also a contender!) The Big 12 hasn’t been the best conference in college basketball every single year in this recent stretch, but it’s got strength at the top, it’s got depth, it never has more than a few pushovers (if that), and within the next few years it’ll add a program that’s been in the top twenty for the last five years, two programs with numerous runs of success in recent memory, and a fourth that has demonstrated upside and hasn’t been completely terrible at any point under its current coach. It’s a great men’s basketball league, even with Texas and Oklahoma leaving (and they’ll be missed on this front).
It’s a good time to take this zoomed-out look at the Big 12, because Bob Bowlsby announced today he’ll step down as conference commissioner later this year. I’m not sure what exactly to think of Bowlsby. The conference held together against improbable odds this past summer, when even ESPN was trying to tear it apart. The conference also let Longhorn Network derail its stability for years on end, and has a shaky football future, which means it has a shaky future, period. It’s one thing to be the Big East—an explicit basketball league. It’s another to be what the Big 12 appears it’s going to be—something akin to the recent Pac-12 in football, but excellent at basketball. It’s another thing still to be that Pac-12-with-good-hoops in such a football-focused area of the country. If only TCU or Baylor had been put in the 2014 College Football Playoff. Would TCU have won it? This, of course, brings us back to Bowlsby. A conference championship game would have helped most had it come earlier.
It does still seem that the most stable, healthy, lucrative place for Iowa State in the long term is the Big Ten. Iowa State and Kansas joining the Big Ten makes all the sense in the world in a vacuum. In a vacuum, 16 is a stable number, the geographic cohesion remains, and neither school compromises the league significantly academically, meaning it makes sense for all parties involved, except in the area of media revenue, though a continued shift from cable to streaming could change that. Media revenue remains a hurdle, and as such a big question. Iowa State and Kansas do not bring revenue to the table in the way Oklahoma and Texas do (yes, Oklahoma brings a lot of revenue to the table, go look up which athletic departments make the most money each year).
The other big question, and the reason I added “in a vacuum” in the previous paragraph, is what happens elsewhere in and around the national landscape. The ACC remains a better fit for Maryland culturally than the Big Ten. Rutgers is probably a better fit in the AAC than in the Big Ten. On the other side, North Carolina and Virginia each have a Big Ten ethos to them in terms of their self-perception academically. Meanwhile, what’s to stop another power from rising in the Big 12’s open football landscape? BYU has a lot of wind in its sails demographically. Baylor has become a basketball power—can they do the same on the gridiron? TCU was quite good at football for quite a long time. And Oklahoma, of course, proved that even in a four-team playoff setup (which will still probably die after 2025, though details remain up in the air), you can remain a national power without being one of the best teams in the country as long as you can thoroughly, consistently dominate your conference.
In other words, a lot can happen. And if we’re going to be dreamers about it, Iowa State could even rise to be the new standard-bearer in football. It’s very unlikely, but it could happen. And meanwhile, the NCAA withers. As so often is the case, we end this speculation with a big we’ll see.
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Going to watch the Bulls play the Bucks tonight while I try to catch up on the MLB offseason. That one, as regular readers know, got away from us. See you tomorrow, likely with some baseball thoughts.
