Five things from this week
The NCAA, Dairy Queen and Texas Basketball's big recruiting win
The response to last week’s post… Wow. I’m blown away.
There’s a ton of new paid subscribers, and I sent all of that money directly to Bed Stuy Strong, a mutual aid group in my neighborhood. That felt good. Thank you all for sharing that so widely. (It even got picked up on B/R’s Team Stream, which is as reliable a traffic bonanza as it ever was).
At Streak Talk, I listen to my readers. And one reader suggested that—for the sake of privacy, let’s call him Dustin Rodd—during the offseason, new information is so incremental and can be grating to follow. A weekly round-up of Jayhawks-related news items could potentially fill that void.
And so, here is that. I’ll be listening off the line.
UT signs a five-star big man
Something I follow closely—whether on Instagram or by my active and ambient consumption of Rap Music—is basketball’s status in the youth culture. For the last decade, many sportswriters and data types have theorized that we’d see a drop-off in participation rates in football and that appears to be happening.
Enter basketball.
No single state’s cultural sporting landscape would be altered more by this phenomenon than Texas. Last year’s Rivals150 had 17 players from Texas, more than anyone else, and this year’s list has seven. In the past few years, I feel like some state-of-the-art hoops facility is going up in Texas every other week. If Shaka Smart can convince like, one of those players to stay home and compete for the nation’s most well-funded athletics program, he’s got a top 10 recruiting class on his hands. Earlier this week, Texas landed Greg Brown III, who is possibly the top PF prospect in the country.
Should the Jayhawks be worried about this?
In the recent past, Texas has had a lot of success signing big men—Kevin Durant, Myles Turner, Jarrett Allen and Jaxson Hayes, to name just a few. But I’m yet to get the sense that Smart has set his big men up for success in the Big 12. It’s incidental, perhaps, but it didn’t take Smart recruits like Allen or Hayes all that long to prove that they could be difference-makers at the highest level.
Brown is a different player than the centers listed above, and the Hudy effect is not to be ignored. But I’m curious to see where Smart uses Brown on the floor, because I’m yet to be blown away by the way he uses his star players.
Self, AD Jeff Long and Les Miles are taking paycuts
Gotta cover $350k+ in legal fees somehow! Thanks for reading.
The NCAA is going to allow players to get paid (but the details are confusing)
The NCAA is being dragged kicking and screaming into the modern era, and this week they revealed that they’re taking steps to figure out how a player compensation model would look. You can read this dense report (or the guidelines report they issued in October) but like most things relating to amateurism, I want Bill Self’s digest on it because he’s usually right even though he doesn’t typically elaborate. From Matt Tait’s report, here’s that:
In theory, it’s positive and I certainly hope it works out. And it may be good over time. But I just don’t think it’s a cookie-cutter deal where you can say, ‘Hey, this is really, really good for college athletics.’
It's still an unknown. And how it’s going to be regulated and monitored I think could be something that has far more unintended consequences than what we probably have thought through.
With so many top recruits deciding to enter the NBA’s development program for good cash—former UCLA commit Dashien Nix is the latest—the NCAA is flailing. Since its board members have never been creative enough to market the sport at large, and have long relied on latching onto Zion Williamson and others who are only in college as a formality, this is a scramble shoddily framed as a “pro-athlete” move.
Don’t buy it. There’s plenty of language in their disclosures to suggest that they’ll be fighting this the whole way. My read on Self’s comment reinforces this belief; the NCAA has no idea how they’re actually going to implement this, but know the tides have changed for good so they have to do something.
If you were an elite player that’s already on NBA Draft boards, would you take your chances letting the NCAA decide what you’re worth? Or do you just hit the free market as safely as possible, a la the NBA’s growing development portal? It’s not the NCAA’s specialty to look at things through the actual affected party’s eyes. KU is going to be fine, and college basketball is not over as we know it. But its ecosystem could completely change once we come out of this.
Will Danny Manning get the full buyout at Wake Forest?
First of all, we all need Danny’s agent. A $15M buyout clause in his coaching contract, coming out of Tulsa? Who were they negotiating against, and what kind of leverage could Danny possibly have had?
Manning is owed over $15 million dollars as part of his buyout.
It doesn’t matter. The Jayhawk legend is out of a job—WF hired Steve Forbes yesterday—and it appears that the school is going to fight over every last penny of that buyout even if it means they’ll end up losing. What a familiar situation for Jayhawk fans!
It’s fun to think about the potential Jayhawk Basketball Implications here. Danny doesn’t need cash—I have no idea if he has a non-compete as part of his buyout terms—and pre-Tulsa the most successful stretch of Danny’s coaching career happened at Kansas. Among KU fans, he’s a big man guru whose expertise has been sorely missed. With three-star big man prospect Gethro Muscadin inbound, and David McCormack on the brink of breakout, what kind of magic could Danny create if he came back to Lawrence? Udoka Azubuike’s 2019-20 season delivered a glimpse of what kind of impact a center can still have in college hoops. Have we hit the ceiling or is there more room there?
I wouldn’t be surprised if KU shook up its bench some, especially when considering the prospect of a settlement with the NCAA. If KU gets offered a multi-game suspension for Self and no postseason ban, I would bet that they would take it. So who would be the steward of the throne? I feel like Norm Roberts has earned it. But it’s fun to think about, relatively speaking, of course.
Jeff Long … wyd
Jeff Long went to Dairy Queen and posted earnestly about the importance of supporting local businesses during the COVID-19 outbreak. Many called him out on that, as you would expect. So, he rolled out the above tweet, and I gotta say I love the use of “chastised” here even though Long’s characteristic tweet obviously misunderstands the point.
When it comes to supporting local restaurants, I’m torn. Our local favorites need our support, and the most direct way and mutually beneficial way to do that is to order takeout or curbside delivery. My concern is about the human toll of your average food delivery. Who are you putting at risk in order to get your food? Instacart + Amazon workers are striking today and I support them. (The Raven’s own Danny Caine has been an important advocate.)
At any rate, Long’s post misunderstands pretty much everything. Does he really think people don’t understand that the franchise owner lives locally?! The Lawrence I know has always been proud of its local businesses. Long’s tone-deaf attitude is just the latest microcosm of his increasingly inept reign as AD.
Dairy Queen is great—shout out to Dairy Queen, because Blizzards and the dipped cones are eternal. But the big corporations are going to make it through this. Reader, I ask you—when you’re deciding whether you eat our or not—to think about this situation more than Jeff Long would. I think that is a good rule of thumb and more good will come out of it than harm.