TCU did not beat Kansas last night, and this is fine for TCU, who is just getting healthy again, but it does take some air out of what we’re about to say.
That was a telling atmosphere.
Specifically, there was a stretch in the second half which made TCU look like a nationally powerful athletic department. It wasn’t just the game, either. In fact, it largely was not the game. Which is why the loss doesn’t matter much here.
We were past the ten-minute mark on the clock when it began.
It did start with the basketball team. TCU had just surged to tighten the score once more, putting Kansas on its heels and making ESPN throw a foul trouble graphic up on the broadcast. It got bigger from there. In the ensuing TV timeout, the school brought its men’s tennis team onto the court to celebrate its recent indoor national championship, fresh off the plane. Then, as action resumed, the situation jumped. There was a roar from a crowd, and as we all shot our eyes around the screen at home, there was no fight to be found. Instead, cameras showed Max Duggan walking in to sit courtside, clad in a tuxedo, fresh off receiving the Davey O’Brien award as the country’s best quarterback this fall.
I know tennis is not the biggest college sport, and I know TCU isn’t newly good at it. But watching a recently totally–irrelevant mid-major basketball team hang expectedly with one of the titans of the sport, and watching the Playoff-appearing quarterback march in wearing black tie apparel, and watching a national championship trophy or plaque or whatever get waved around the free throw line as both those things happened…it was impressive. It was all impressive. It was like a recruiting highlight reel, but for an athletic director rather than an athlete. To take things back to the tennis: When a school is having success in a lot of sports, it’s a sign of a well-functioning athletic department. Things are going well at TCU. Things are clicking at TCU. Tennis may have been the harbinger.
TCU is an odd duck as far as power conference colleges go. It’s a private school, and it’s in a city, and it’s medium in size, with an enrollment only around ten thousand, half that of Baylor an hour south. It was a power conference school for most of its history, but it wasn’t in a powerful power conference for most of those years, and after the 1930s, it was less and less competitive. Had it not managed to get good at football precisely at the time the Big 12 was looking for a new Texas school to replace A&M, the power conference spot could have gone to a number of other schools in the state, from SMU to Rice. Instead, it went to TCU, and after years of growing pains, the school has found its legs in a hurry this year.
The private power conference schools aren’t few in number, and they aren’t small in stature. USC is private. Miami is private. Northwestern, Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Duke might not be much on the football field, but they hold cultural power, and one of them has one of the most successful college basketball programs in the country. There are others. Comparisons are there for TCU, but because of its specifically medium size and because of its football focus and because of its absence of scandalous identity, one we’d like to look at is Notre Dame.
One way to describe TCU’s position, as a school, is that it’s what would happen if you moved Notre Dame to a big city in fertile recruiting territory and removed the history of success but also lessened the academic barriers. You’re left with a bit of a strange beast. Is it capable of being one of the best athletic departments in the country? You wouldn’t think it. But Notre Dame, arguably with bigger hurdles, is good at a whole lot of sports. This breaks down a bit when you get to the donor base. Notre Dame’s endowment is an estimated nine times bigger than TCU’s, reflecting nine times as much donor power. But donor power needs to be directed, and donor power needs to be managed productively, and donor power needs to be stoked. Notre Dame might have nine times the endowment of TCU, but TCU has twice the endowment of the University of Alabama. And Alabama is not hurting for resources.
With the Big 12’s natural powerholders both leaving after this next school year for the SEC, a power vacuum is arising. It’s not necessary that someone will fill it. Plenty of leagues operate without a natural top dog. But looking at the competition, an argument could be made that TCU could be that conference power. It’s in the best recruiting territory. It has a well-functioning athletic department. It might have the most money. TCU could be that conference power for the Big 12, and once you become a conference power, you’re only a few well-timed wins away from being a national power. It’s very easy to see ourselves looking up in a decade to find that TCU is the king of college sports.
This is all focused on what could go right. We’re talking about upside here. Plenty could also go wrong. We aren’t trying to say that TCU will take over college sports. We’re merely saying that it could, and you can see how, and it’s not so easy to see how with most other schools. Kansas will not rule college sports. Duke will not rule college sports. Penn State will not rule college sports. But TCU could.
Is Kansas the Best Team in the Country?
Fran Fraschilla talked up Kansas as a potential number one overall seed in the NCAA Tournament, and it was a fair thing to say. Odds are good that Houston will lose one more game. Odds are good that Alabama won’t win the SEC Tournament, and that they could even be gone by Saturday, when the field really gets locked in. Odds are good that Kansas is already past Purdue and UCLA, at least in our method where we consider likely future results. Odds are good that Kansas won’t itself win out, but it’s believable, you know?
I said this on Twitter, and I may have said it above as well, but last night’s game did not feel as close as it was. It felt like a comfortable Kansas victory. It was not comfortable. TCU had a great chance to force overtime at the end. Given it felt that way…was it actually comfortable? Were the Jayhawks, playing on the road against a team capable of beating almost anyone, playing with a thin roster and a starter in foul trouble, playing two days after a taxing battle with another national power, comfortable?
We’ve been pondering a lot this year the idea that consistency is just as important in the NCAA Tournament as being good. It’s six games, after all, and not all good teams are created the same. Maybe Kansas, winning games like last night, makes up for their lower ceiling than Houston and Alabama with a much, much higher floor. Maybe that floor was higher than what TCU was throwing at them. Maybe they knew it. Maybe we all knew it too.
Iowa State Goes to Austin
It’s rematch time tonight in Texas, and we’ll be there for it.
There are a lot of reasons this game won’t have the intensity of the last one. Iowa State’s gone cold, settling into that territory where they’re an NCAA Tournament lock but they aren’t competing for a conference title. Texas has gone cold enough, falling to status as a decided underdog against Kansas in the aforementioned Big 12 race. Caleb Grill is questionable, still getting his back healthy. Does that mean it will be gentle? Of course not. Gabe Kalscheur presumably hasn’t come around on Tyrese Hunter over the last few weeks. But don’t expect it to be as dramatic as the last meeting.
Still, it’s a big opportunity for the Cyclones. There’s a difference between being a team who almost always wins at home and a team who can beat some of the best on the road. Texas is one of the best teams in the country. Maybe not the five best, but ten? Fifteen? Definitely fifteen. They’re going to be favored to reach the second weekend in the tournament. Knocking them off would say a lot about this team, and restore hope that Iowa State themselves could maybe be a second-weekend team without needing much luck.
There’s talk about the need for the Cyclones to finish games, and it’s true, but I think the broader theme is that they just need to keep their heads. Kansas State wasn’t a bad loss, but Oklahoma State was, and Texas Tech was, and even in the West Virginia game there were a lot of headless chickens wearing cardinal and gold at the end. Iowa State has a veteran roster. It needs to play like it. Win or lose, that’s the thing to watch, because that’s what’s going to matter in March, and that’s what, in the long term, we need T.J. Otzelberger to be able to get out of a team like this one.
Tom Ricketts Did a Good Job
Tom Ricketts spoke at length yesterday at Spring Training, and he didn’t say a whole lot. This is good for the Cubs. You don’t really want your owner making headlines, especially if he’s an owner whose headlines tend to be antagonizing.
One thing Ricketts did do was give lip service to the luxury tax approach you would like your owner to have: “Obviously, you want to be careful going over the CBT because there are penalties. Some of them are merely financial, but over time they become draft pick slots and those kinds of things. So you want to be thoughtful about it.”
Merely financial.
That’s what you want to hear.
What If: Lonzo Ball Edition
We are very hard on the Bulls front office when we even talk about the Bulls, which is rarely. But. It’s worth wondering what this team would be if Lonzo Ball hadn’t gotten hurt. It wouldn’t be a title contender, but could it be a few moves away?
The problem with the Bulls, as we see it, is that the franchise is asking Zach LaVine to be a superstar when he isn’t good enough to be that number one guy for a title-winning team. DeMar DeRozan is a great veteran player, but he’s not going to carry the load and he’s not being asked to carry the load. LaVine is, and that’s a bad guy to ask to do it. It’s like asking Kirk Cousins to win you a Super Bowl. I don’t think Lonzo Ball would’ve changed that flawed design, but he might have created a path to being more like last year’s Celtics—a well-rounded team better than the sum of its parts. Without him, the pressure really lands on LaVine, and LaVine just isn’t good enough to make that work. The more he’s asked to do, the worse the situation.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but I guess the summary is this: I don’t think the Bulls could’ve won a title with their design had Lonzo Ball stayed healthy. I don’t know if the Bulls are at fault for Lonzo Ball still not being healthy. But I do think the design looks less stupid when I remember Lonzo Ball was once part of it.
**
What’s happening today in our world:
College Basketball (the big ones)
- 7:00 PM EST: Tennessee @ Texas A&M (ESPN)
- 7:00 PM EST: Baylor @ Kansas State (ESPN2)
- 8:30 PM EST: Marquette @ Creighton (FS1)
- 9:00 PM EST: Iowa State @ Texas (LHN)
- 9:00 PM EST: Indiana @ Michigan State (ESPN)
NHL (playoff implications, which is all of them)
- 7:00 PM EST: St. Louis @ Carolina (ESPN+)
- 7:00 PM EST: Montreal @ New Jersey (ESPN+)
- 7:00 PM EST: Anaheim @ Tampa Bay (ESPN+)
- 7:00 PM EST: Detroit @ Washington (ESPN+)
- 7:30 PM EST: Toronto @ Buffalo (ESPN+/Hulu)
- 8:00 PM EST: Los Angeles @ Minnesota (ESPN+)
- 8:00 PM EST: Vancouver @ Nashville (ESPN+)
- 8:30 PM EST: Vegas @ Chicago (ESPN+)
- 9:00 PM EST: Philadelphia @ Edmonton (ESPN+)
EFL Championship (promotion/relegation-impacting games, which again is all of them)
- 2:45 PM EST: Burnley @ Millwall
- 2:45 PM EST: Blackpool @ Blackburn
- 2:45 PM EST: Birmingham @ Norwich
- 2:45 PM EST: Sunderland @ Rotherham
- 2:45 PM EST: Stoke @ Swansea
