Never read the Twitter replies. Never read the Twitter replies. Never read the Twitter replies.
Heacock Is Staying
We begin with the biggest news in the sporting world, which is that Iowa State defensive coordinator Jon Heacock is expected to remain in Ames after Notre Dame explored hiring him to the same role. It’s always a little unclear how important coordinators are. Some are massively important. Some can be replaced. At the very least, though, with things generally going well for the Iowa State football program, this is probably a good thing for the Cyclones. Continuity right now is good.
College Football Expansion Holdups
A story early this week was how the College Football Playoff won’t be expanding as soon as was hoped this past summer. A story today is that the ACC is, generally speaking, pretty against expansion overall in the immediate future.
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said today in strong terms that his league wants other issues to settle down before getting into expanding the playoff, and I’m not sure how much sense that makes. Yes, things are roiling right now within college sports, with NIL changes, transfer changes, the coronavirus, on and on and on. But who’s to say they won’t still be roiling in a year? And what, exactly, does that have to do with the playoff? If the entire structure of the NCAA is up in the air, as Phillips says, why should we think that’ll be resolved in the next year? Clearly, he knows more than I do about that, but it doesn’t fully add up.
Eventually, of course, if an expanded playoff can make everybody more money, it’ll happen, and when it does, I’m curious if Phillips will still be speaking about the safety of players playing as many games as the eventual champion and runner up will play. What’s Phillips’s real motivation? To be completely honest, I’m not sure. I understand that ACC is probably spooked by the possibility of two Group of Five leagues getting auto-bids ahead of them, but the disagreement seems broader than those two points. Maybe it really is the conference realignment and the possible realignment of the NCAA as a whole. Maybe we will know more about that in a year. But that feels like a box of chaos that’s still opening up, not one that’s winding itself back closed.
In the meantime, it sure doesn’t sound like we’ll have a 12-team playoff in 2024. We might not even have one in 2025. After that, something will have to happen, because the contract will be up, but whatever it is, it’ll be fine. All of this is fine. Might changes to the playoff make the sport slightly more or less exciting as a whole, or dramatically change a day or two of the calendar? Yes. But they’re not going to completely upend the thing. Really, I’m more just looking for an explanation of Phillips’s thought process, partially because I’m curious if the cold feet are tied to the ACC looking painfully weak on the gridiron this past season. Clearly, there’s something I don’t get here.
We Are All Free Agents. Except for Athletes.
As the conversation continues around this week’s lockout meeting between Major League Baseball and the MLBPA, one of the big headlines is MLB’s reticence to shorten the time period between a player reaching the major leagues and becoming a free agent. They’re willing to work on enticements to get teams to call up top prospects faster. They’re willing to lessen the draft benefit of fielding a really bad team. But they aren’t willing to let players become free agents sooner, and their justification for that is that they claim it will hurt competitive balance, as the “rich” teams go after free agents the “poor” teams won’t pay.
There might be some truth to this narrative. After all, certain teams do make less money than other teams. It’s not as simple as, “The Pirates choose to not pay guys.” But there’s an element of that simplicity that’s probably true as well. The Pirates don’t have as much money as the Yankees, no, but they also have more money than they let on. All these teams have more money than they let on. That’s why it costs so much more to buy an MLB franchise than it used to—it’s a great investment for your pocketbook.
As the Tampa Bay Rays keep demonstrating, you don’t need too much money to consistently win a lot of games if you’re good enough at winning games, and while shortening the service time before free agency could change that, you could still do things like the Rays did with Wander Franco earlier this offseason and extend your young guys early in their career, giving them higher immediate earnings and better long-term security in exchange for a team-friendly deal (Atlanta’s done a lot of this as well). So yes, there are some logical fallacies to MLB’s “concern” here.
The bigger issue, though, is a moral one. In nearly every profession in America, you get to agree on who employs you and what they pay you and certain other provisions. You don’t get to name your job and name your salary, but you do get the chance to explore the open market and find the job that will take you that best fits your needs. In professional sports, you don’t get this luxury. In baseball, specifically, if you enter the professional ranks through the draft and you don’t like the organization that drafts you, your options are either to quit or to wait for six years after you even make the major leagues (almost always a multi-year process, if you even ever do make it). If you want to be an accountant, you can go find the best place to be an accountant that’ll take you. If you want to be a baseball player, you effectively have just one employer—Major League Baseball—and your experience within that is hugely out of your control. Reasonable disagreements can be had on how bad, exactly, this is, but it should at the very least unsettle us a bit, especially given how widely the effectiveness of franchises’ minor league systems varies in realms of both development and health. Get drafted by the wrong team, you can wind up hurt bad enough you never even make the majors. And you can’t quit, unless you’re willing to quit the sport altogether.
Would you like to go back to a world where star players stay with one team their whole career? Me too. I like the sound of that. But the way to do that isn’t conscription. It’s incentivization. If that’s important for the league from a marketing standpoint, set aside revenue at the league level to be given to players who’ve stayed with their team for certain durations. At ten years, you get a big bonus. At fifteen years, you get a huge bonus. At twenty years, you get a massive bonus, and maybe free Dippin’ Dots in the luxury boxes post-retirement.
As with the ACC thing above, I’m not sure I really get MLB’s reticence here. If the pool of money being given to free agents doesn’t change, adding more players to that pool won’t hurt teams’ bottom lines. The market will adjust. This is what makes me think it really is about competitive balance or marketing, which then makes me think the small-team owners have way too much power. Canceling a section of a season in large part because the Cleveland Guardians want to get an extra year of José Ramírez on the cheap is phenomenally dumb. I’m guessing I’m missing things.
What Is Oregon?
In sports that aren’t undergoing existential negotiations right now, Oregon took down UCLA on the road last night in overtime, bringing the Ducks’ résumé to one which includes a win at UCLA and a loss at home to Arizona State, plus a winning record in the Pac-12 and a 32-point defeat in Portland at the hands of BYU. Weird team. But we don’t focus on all weird teams, and there are plenty of weird teams to choose from. Why are we focusing on Oregon?
Well, partially because it was the most noteworthy result last night. Seton Hall lost on the road to DePaul, but DePaul gets to win a few home games here and there. That’s in its rider. But we’re also talking about Oregon because Oregon might matter.
Part of this is Oregon. Oregon can clearly be a very good team. Told before the season that they’d beat UCLA in Los Angeles, we’d be impressed but not surprised. This team could be good, and if they end up finding their way into the NCAA Tournament (they’re probably projecting to land around the middle of the NIT, so they aren’t too far out of the picture), they could be a good team on a low seed line, bringing back unpleasant memories for Wisconsin fans and, further back in that decade, Oklahoma State and Saint Louis fans.
Part of it too, though, is the Pac-12. After tomorrow’s trip across LA to play USC, the Ducks get four straight home games against teams not expected to crack the NIT’s bottom bubble (here’s our latest NIT Bracketology, from before the games on Wednesday). After that, they take the mountain trip, then it’s two more home games against mediocre and bad teams before going to Arizona, where one game will be against a bad opponent. Even if Oregon loses to Arizona and loses all the remaining games against USC and UCLA and just splits the altitude road trip, that’s a 13-7 conference record, which would likely make them the fourth seed in the Pac-12 Tournament, meaning they’d most likely get a game against what currently appears to be an NIT-bound team (Stanford, perhaps) before getting a free play against Arizona. The Pac-12’s decrepit state beyond the top five or six teams (its tippy-top is still solid, don’t take this as Pac-12 hate, please) opens the door for a team to make a run. That team could be Stanford, who grabbed a nice win in Pullman yesterday after taking down USC on Tuesday. It could also be the Oregon Ducks.
Iowa State’s Postseason Prognosis
We promised earlier in the week to dig into Iowa State’s overall outlook, so we’re doing that now. The Cyclones, who we generally expect to finish Big 12 play around 8-10, were projected to land as an NCAA Tournament 7-seed in our bracketology on Wednesday. By and large, that means that if they can just split their remaining league games, beat Mizzou at home, and not do anything noticeable in the Big 12 Tournament, they’ll exit Selection Sunday with a good chance to make the second round. Steal one somewhere, the projection maybe changes to a 6-seed, and the Sweet Sixteen becomes a rather realistic goal, or the Elite Eight with some help.
This is a good, good spot for T.J. Otzelberger’s team to be right now. They performed outrageously well in the nonconference portion of the schedule, and now they get to enjoy the cushion they’ve created.
Still, it’s a little dangerous.
A risk exists for Iowa State of having a very bad non-conference strength of schedule ranking when this is all said and done. ISU scheduled six bad teams in its thirteen nonconference games, and that doesn’t include Kennesaw State, who’s the best they’ve ever been and also expects to wind up with a losing record despite playing in the Atlantic Sun. To make matters worse, Oregon State is much worse than expected, as is Missouri, and there’s significant risk of Memphis, Creighton, and Iowa all missing the tournament (this isn’t an intended slight to Iowa—the Big Ten can just eat teams alive). That leaves only Xavier as a reliably good piece of the nonconference menu, and Xavier won’t be enough to hold the NCSOS number aloft.
Overall, that probably won’t matter. But if Iowa State slips here a bit (certainly possible—the Big 12 can eat teams alive), it could hold them out of the tournament. Outlying factors do that sometimes. It’s a legitimate risk.
So, while Iowa State doesn’t need to beat Texas tomorrow, they could probably use that victory.
What will it take to get a win? Texas struggles plenty when it comes to scoring the ball, but not as much as their final scores imply. They play a very slow-tempo game, and their own defense is ferocious, which is something for which they don’t get enough credit. It’s very much a Chris Beard team, and the way to beat them is to either go into the muck with them and win in the muck, or to play a clean, prettier game that rises about the muck. That latter one might work for Gonzaga. For Iowa State, the solution is probably to win in the trenches. Knock-down, drag-out guard play. Rattle the Longhorn ballhandlers more than they rattle you. Make just enough baskets to survive.
We’ll see. Should be a fun one, provided you’re into bloodbaths.
The Weekend Slate
Biggest games of the weekend:
Big Ten
Michigan goes to Illinois tonight, trying to get on track while Illinois tries to keep winning for long enough to become the prohibitive Big Ten favorite. Mostly trap games elsewhere. No marquee action beyond this one.
Big 12
Iowa State/Texas is probably the big one, though West Virginia does go to Kansas tomorrow as well. West Virginia would love to start climbing closer to lock territory, and this is a free play for them.
SEC
The SEC, true to form, has a big one, with Tennessee going to Kentucky. More quietly, Florida tries to avoid an 0-4 conference start, playing at South Carolina. Both of those are tomorrow afternoon. Alabama plays at Mississippi State later tomorrow.
Big East
Seton Hall plays at Marquette tomorrow. Pirates trying to bounce back after last night’s disappointer. Marquette trying to stay hot and grab what’s about 50/50 to be a Q1 win.
ACC
Man, this league stinks. Notre Dame plays at Virginia Tech, Wake Forest plays at Virginia, Florida State plays at Syracuse—lot of bubble action, I guess.
Pac-12
Oregon goes to USC, as we mentioned. That’s a late one tomorrow night.
WCC
BYU goes to San Francisco tomorrow, also in the late-night slot. Good late-night slot tomorrow.
AAC/MWC/A-10
Cincinnati visits Wichita State on Sunday, Wyoming goes to Utah State tomorrow, the A-10 has a couple decent ones (Davidson at Richmond, VCU at St. Bonaventure) tonight.
The Rest
Murray State plays at Belmont tomorrow evening in the first matchup between those two of the year. Murray’s 13-2, Belmont’s 13-3, both are projected to finish OVC play with three or fewer losses, and that league plays eighteen games. Just a great one all around.
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Enjoy the weekend, Go Cyclones, watch out for Ducks. May next week bring better news on the lockout front.
