NCAA Basketball

Anyone following the Henry-Kansas basketball drama this week has been thoroughly entertained.

Kansas coach Bill Self has to be scratching his head now wondering, 'What just happened here?' Self and his staff had successfully lured Xavier and C.J. Henry, the offspring of former 1980s KU basketball standouts Carl and Barbara Henry, into the Jayhawks' fold after breaking their previous commitment to Memphis in April.

All was right in the slimy world of big-time college recruiting.

Among the many criteria the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee uses to select and seed the 65 teams for the NCAA Tournament, the most statistically irrelevant is the "last twelve games" criteria. The NCAA has finally seen the light and eliminated the last twelve games from the toolbox.

There are many reasons for the stat's uselessness. There is little statistical correlation to how a team finished their season, and that team's performance in the NCAA Tournament. It is generally misleading, especially in the power conferences where TV scheduling emphasizes that the projected top teams play each other later in the season while the teams expected in the lower half face each other.

For a rather wild day, it looked like things were going to get even weirder than they usually do in the college basketball offseason. Even before the summer recruiting began. In the end, it was a lot of noise but no change. Xavier and C.J. Henry are still going to Kansas for the 2009-10 season, not reversing field to go to Kentucky to be with John Calipari.

Xavier Henry is one of the top-5 high school players in the country. He had already switched his commitment from Memphis to Kansas, but since he could not sign a new National Letter of Intent (NLI) he is not actually bound to Kansas until he shows up on the campus and signs the scholarship papers. His older brother, C.J. Henry, is a walk-on with the New York Yankees paying his way following a failed baseball career.

The rumors started swirling over the weekend that Lance Stephenson, the ultra-talented guard out of New York, was visiting and would commit to Cincinnati. Tuesday, the news broke and was confirmed elsewhere that Stephenson is indeed committing to the Bearcats. Whether official word will come before or after his July 15 court date regarding his misdemeanor sexual assault charge is undetermined.

While teams have been scared off from recruiting Stephenson for plenty of reasons (the sexual assault, meddling father, attitude questions, academics, NCAA eligibility relating to an online documentary on Stephenson), Cincy coach Mick Cronin seems willing to take a chance on Stephenson -- assuming the NCAA clears him to play.

I have no proof that the people in the NCAA that evaluate appeals were laughing and giggling their way through Kelvin Sampson's appeal of his sanctions. I like to think they were. Most people had a good laugh when they found out Sampson was appealing. Not surprisingly, Sampson had his appeal officially rejected today.

Essentially the appeal by Sampson came down to two arguments. The first was that the committee misinterpreted the evidence that was the basis of the penalties. That is, all those excessive phone calls at Indiana, the three-way calls, the "mistakes" that were made. The committee just looked at them the wrong way. The 100 plus phone calls were simply individual mistakes and not reflective of a pattern.

The other claim was that the enforcement staff that investigated and brought the charges before the committee were biased against him. Of course those past violations from Oklahoma that were almost the same as what happened at Indiana should be ignored. To say nothing of how they factored into the harsher penalties on Sampson

The NCAA upheld the penalties handed down by the infractions committee that effectively banned him from coaching in the NCAA for five years. Hopefully Sampson will finally let it go.

He may be done in college basketball, but he still has a coaching future.He is an assistant in the NBA, and has always been a players' coach. His basketball acumen has never been questioned. Just his ethics.

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal published an investigation that found just 26 major league baseball players and managers have college degrees. Twenty-six! That's out of a pool of a potential 1,042 players and managers. You want that in percentage terms, that's 2.5 percent. A staggeringly low percentage, even if you pull out all Latin American players (who don't have the same collegiate opportunities) from the equation. Yet, I defy you to find an article that utilizes this fact to make an argument that baseball players need better educations.

The same would hold true for tennis, hockey and golf. As a society, we don't care about the education of our athletes in those sports. In fact, what are the only two sports that we seem to care about when it comes to the education of athletes? Football and basketball. Which just so happen to also have the largest percentage of minority athletes. That's got me wondering, isn't our society guilty of racial paternalism when it comes to sports?

In case you've never seen the video, the President of the United States can't bowl. He should declare any alley he visits a major disaster area. Then again, after First Brother-In-Law Craig Robinson thought the other day about the pathetic ways of Barack Obama whenever he rolls a ball toward a set of pins, he told me with a playful frown, "I mean, bowling isn't even a sport, so why bring it up?"

Why, indeed? Except for bowling, this President is becoming the Commander In Chief of all things athletic. Just take it from Robinson, the older brother of First Lady Michelle Obama. Robinson also is the miracle worker of a basketball coach at Oregon State when he isn't the unofficial head of the Barack Obama Fan Club.

Jeff Jordan, most famous for being Michael Jordan's son, has decided to hang up the high-tops -- at least as far as competitive play goes. The 6-foot-1 incoming junior has decided to stop playing basketball and stay at the University of Illinois to concentrate solely on his academics.

Jordan, a player who won over the Illini coaches with his heady play and strong work ethic, was set to be a part of the Illinois rotation this coming season. He, unlike his Dad, was not an offensive threat, concentrating more on being a defensive stopper. Illinois head coach Bruce Weber offered some kind words for their now dearly departed.

Could the NBA and its minimum age requirement really be guilty of hypocrisy?

It certainly appears that way to Oklahoma coach Jeff Capel and some other Big 12 coaches after watching the most recent NBA Finals and seeing which NBA players were pushed as the faces of the league throughout the season.

The straight out of high school players, who are the type of players the NBA no longer wants to be associated with, are now carrying the torch for the world's best pro game.

"If you follow the NBA, if you look at the guys who are promoted as the face of the NBA, you are talking about Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Dwight Howard, Kevin Garnett," Capel said. "Those are four that jumped right out and none of those guys attended college and I don't think it hurt them."

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Kevin O'Neill has gained a reputation as the guy always looking for the next job. He was building a winner at Marquette and then bolted for Tennessee. He was in the midst of trying to make Tennessee less of a football school when he bolted and took the Northwestern job. After a 30-56 mark for the Wildcats, O'Neill left for an NBA assistant job.

He returned to the NCAA to be Lute Olson's assistant at Arizona but then became the interim coach when Olson took ill and missed the 2007-08 season. Apparently, O'Neill was lobbying to get Olson's job permanently and he was not asked back to Olson's staff for the next season.

So USC athletic director Mike Garrett has decided on O'Neill to stabilize and bring respectability back to its program. It's an odd hire because O'Neill has never been known as a stabilizer or someone who stays put.