College basketball – timing is ripe for new arenas

Our class conversations and lectures on the financing of professional stadiums/arenas have led me to investigate basketball arenas of a perennial powerhouse basketball conference, the SEC. I looked at the following factors: 1. age of arena, 2. number of luxury suites, 3. Number of seats, and 4. naming rights of arena. Below you will find my results of each arena.

 

Arena	School	Age	# Luxury Suites	# of seats	Naming rights
Rupp Arena	KY	30	0	23,000	none
Beard – Eaves	Auburn	38	0	15,043	None
Bud Walton Arena	Arkansas	14	0	19,200	Sort of
Coleman Coliseum	Alabama	39	0	15,043	None
Colonial Center	S. Carolina	4	41	19,000	Colonial Life
Pete Maravich Assm	LSU	34	0	13,472	none
Tad Smith Coliseum	Ole Miss	40	0	8,700	none
Thompson – Boiling Arena	Tennessee	19	0	24,535	none

Given the above information, I think it’s obvious that new arenas are just a matter of time. Schools of the SEC are sure to follow South Carolina’s lead and build luxury suites, sell naming rights, and make arenas more fan friendly. Universities will simply not be able to afford to pass up the lost revenue that new facilities will generate. A large portion of these arenas are several decades old and in a conference were each schools is looking to one up the other. College football started this trend about a decade ago and now the time is here for a new era in college basketball.

Athelets still getting the short end of the stick and trips

Student athletes go to class, they practice endless hours, they have no time to work (earn money), they make millions of dollars for their university, and in the case of McElrathbey (who is the legal guardian and care taker of his eleven year old brother), is unable to except any financial assistance to help with the care of his younger brother. The NCAA has to throw out their cookie cutter mentality and realize that not every circumstance is simply by the book. http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2006/09/ncaa_redux.html

Want to go on a summer tour through a university? Then understand the following options: 1. Don’t play college athletics, 2. wait until your sophomore year and hope your coach wants to take you overseas without the incoming freshman, 3. Don’t bring in any freshman for a year, or 4. go on a Labor Day tour that leaves on a Friday and plays that afternoon, eat, go back to hotel, sleep, get up and play again, eat, go back to hotel, sleep, get up and maybe get some free time (hope for good weather), sleep, then get up and leave for home. Foreign summer tours were a great experience for college athletes in the past and hopefully they will once again be a great educational opportunity in the near future. The short time a player has to travel during the Labor Day weekend is primarily a reason to get a jump on practicing and once again the athlete receives more pain than gain. http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/columns/story?columnist=katz_andy&id=2575778 

NCAA’s new policy on APR (Academic Progress Rate)

As a general rule, a new coach has four years to start winning and most lately the tolerance window for turning a program around is more like three years. If this is not pressure enough; how would you like to walk in Tubby Smith’s shoes? A twenty win season at KY could still get you fired. Sure he gets paid a lot of money, but if your not winning the SEC Tournament and going to the Final Four every year, your probably not long for the Bluegrass. Tubby has a record of 241 wins and 74 losses in 10 years at KY and there are at least five websites petitioning for him to be fired. Since being hired ten years ago, KY has won a NCAA National Championship and dominated the SEC. Now factor in the new APR requirements; a division I basketball team with thirteen scholorships has to maintain a 92.5% score per year out of a possible 4 points per athlete. This means that a squad of thirteen players could receive a maximum of 52 points and can drop to no less than 49 points (because the NCAA rounds up the points this translates to 3 points per year) before they are penalized. So a player that does not make the grades for one season or does not pass at least 12 hours cost the team a point, a player that is a turd and has to be kicked off cost the team two points (1 for leaving school and 1 for not returning), the player that comes for one year and gets home sick or leaves for the NBA cost the team a point. In this scenario the team would fall below the 92.5% requirement and be subject to penalty.

For an APR example from the NCAA click on the following site: http://www.ncaa.org/wps/portal/newsdetail?WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT=/wps/wcm/connect/NCAA/NCAA+News/NCAA+News+Online/Division+I/Sample+APR+calculation+-+2-14-05+NCAA+News&TITLE=Sample+APR+calculation+-+2-14-05+NCAA+News

I am all for academics, but this has made it even tougher for coaches to recruit and bring in the kind of talent necessary to keep their jobs. The top talent such as blue chippers that are looking to go straight to the NBA will be avoided by NCAA coaches and most likely end up at a prep school. The points will become too valuable to waste on a top talent. Balancing all of the areas of coaching in the NCAA has always been a tough task and with the new APR it just got a little tougher.

NCAA Basketball Coaches

My blog will be about the ins and outs of coaching basketball in the NCAA. I will be talking about everything from scheduling wins to the new APR academic requirements.