Carrots for Character

Incentivizing and publicizing moments of good sportsmanship has to be part of the discourse, too, not just punishment.

Tipoff

Wendell Moore, Jr., Duke’s junior guard and team captain, stripped the ball from Clemson’s senior guard, David Collins. Moore had a clean path to the basket and ran right to the rim for a two-handed slam dunk. Collins, for whatever reasons in his mind at that moment, ran his shoulder into Moore’s hip while he was in the air, resulting in one of the most dangerous plays you can imagine in sports. Moore fell to the court completely prone and smacked the parquet with a loud smack as the referees blew their whistle. Moore, thankfully, was fine and went on to play the rest of the game while Collins was escorted to the locker room. It was one of the most dangerous plays in the game, striking a player from behind while in the air. What happened next gives us a model for how to get past the jarring sights of the past weekend.

Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski and Clemson head coach Brad Brownell met near Duke’s bench after the referees determined that Collins had committed a flagrant-2 foul and would be ejected. Collins came over to the Duke bench to apologize. Coach K even gave Collins a sort of show-hug to emphasize that he did not think that Collins was a bad person or something to that effect.

In light of the actions of Juwan Howard and the players and coaches from Michigan and Wisconsin involved in the postgame brawl from this past weekend, we can discuss who was at fault and appropriate punishment all we want. As Stu Douglass told me during an interview this week (see Four Point Play, below), no one was in the right. What Coaches K and Brownell did, though, is more than an example of good sportsmanship. It was a moment that should be publicized and incentivized. If we want to move past assigning blame in the wake of shocking moments, we need to highlight examples of players and coaches making the correct choices in the heat of the moment. Call it the sportsmanship award, Give money to favorite charities or a one-time bonus from the conference offices. Make those moments of good judgment part of the news cycle if we want to see how coaches and players should behave. 

The Mixtape 

The Field of 68 team puts out lots of great content each week. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights.

  • Wednesday night had it all. Providence’s blessed season continued with a 3-overtime victory over Xavier. It might have been the craziest game of the year. Kentucky held off LSU without Sahvir Wheeler or TyTy Washington. Duke overcame a tough test against Virginia and are poised to win the ACC regular season for the first time since 2010. That, Michigan’s impressive win over Rutgers, and more from Rob Dauster, Archie and Sean Miller.

  • Hop on the Muss Bus! Arkansas head coach Eric Musselman put on a shirt and joined Jeff Goodman to talk Momma Hog, Hog Nation, and the Arkansas season.

  • It was a pair of Hoosier legends on the House of Hoosier podcast. IUWBB’s all-time leading scorer, Tyra Buss, joined AJ Guyton to talk about her journey from Mount Carmel, Illinois (the one in southern Illinois, not the Chicago suburb) to Bloomington. The men’s team has been on a slide, but the women’s team is having another great season and is currently ranked 10th in the latest AP Poll. Buss and Guyton turned their attention to the current team and their outlook heading into the postseason.

  • Saturday’s big story was supposed to be the Top 16 reveal from the NCAA men’s basketball tournament selection committee before some other stuff happened on the court in Madison, Wisconsin. On After Dark, Jeff Prohm, Rob Dauster, and Jeff Goodman broke down the first reveal, who got snubbed, and who was overrated.

Four Point Play 

Every week, we’ll check in with one of our podcast hosts and see what they’re up to besides producing compelling content for us at The Field of 68.

This week, we checked in with Stu Douglass, former Michigan player and host of the Go Blue with Stu podcast (available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you access podcasts).

  1. We spoke last year about the amazing season Juwan Howard and the Michigan Wolverines were having. Howard would go on to win the AP Coach of the Year award, win the B1G regular season title, and reach the Elite 8 of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. A year later, there are discussions about him being terminated after this season. Is Juwan Howard the head coach in November?

  • Yeah, I believe so and I believe he should be. There won’t be much leeway in terms of these things anymore. He had that “spat” with Mark Turgeon last year and now this situation with Wisconsin. I think he is introspective enough to learn from this. I foresee him being the Michigan coach for a while.

  1. The year overall has been difficult for Michigan, going from preseason Top 10 team to on the bubble. How did the Wolverines get to this point and is it fixable in the offseason?

  • Definitely. Preseason rankings are… they annoy me to no end. It is an evaluation of a whole new team based on what happened last year. Those things should be taken with a grain of salt. We beat these ideas to death. This should not be expected that all these young guys are taking a while to learn how to play. They improved throughout the season, which is what you are looking for. There will be growing pains next season, too. The growing pains have been there for the player and for Coach Howard as well. It is easier to coach the team last year with all the talent. Coaches have to go through these things to learn and grow. I don’t think the alarms need to be sounded for what’s going on this season. It should have been on the table, the expectations for what happened this season.

  1. At this point in time, everyone has had their take on the situation, written their column, recorded their podcast, etc. Is there anything you think has been missing from the discourse around Juwan Howard that people should know?

  • You can’t see everything on the internet. I don’t know if there hasn’t been something that has been talked about. How do I put this? Nobody is in the right here. There has been a lot of finger pointing. There is no right. We need to stop looking at what led up to it, evaluate what happened, and keep moving forward. This will be a black eye for a while, but I hope we will be able to give people room to learn from their mistakes.

And one!

  1. Take us behind the scenes of being on a team. There are plenty of rumors about teammates fighting with each other and all sorts of stuff. Does fighting just happen in basketball from time to time or is it something that needs to be removed from the sport altogether?

  • It should never go to blows. We romanticize the 90’s in the NBA, but it is just immaturity. It is men being unable to control their emotions. Emotions do flare up. I have gotten into physical altercations with teammates before. We have to be able to control our emotions. It’s a bit of a “Catch-22.” You need those emotions to be competitive and keep pushing yourself. It’s always liable to cross the line. You need to channel your emotions, it’s a thin line we walk in sports. You have to learn from an early age how to channel your emotions in the right way.

Stay tuned for upcoming episodes of the Go Blue with Stu podcast with Stu Douglass.

Thursday Superlatives

Each week, we will shine a light on a team and an individual player that has captured the hearts of the world of college basketball.

  • Team of the Week: Texas Tech

    • Who needs Chris Beard? The 65 year-old fresh face, Mark Adams, has taken the Red Raiders to the top of the the AP Poll and Big 12 standings in his first year following an impressive 4-game stretch of games that includes wins over TCU, Baylor, Texas on the road, and a revenge game against Oklahoma. There may be a new coach in Lubbock, but TTU is still following the formula of forcing teams away from the middle while seamlessly integrating transfers such as 5th-year senior big man Bryson Williams, formerly of UTEP. Williams scored in double digits in each of the past 4 games.

  • Player of the Week: Keegan Murray, Iowa

    • It feels like forever since anyone outside of Iowa mentioned Keegan Murray. Overshadowed by so many other exemplary players in the B1G as well as the exploits of Caitlyn Clark, Murray has done nothing but produce. Murray has scored 21 or more points in each of the last 7 games, including 24 points against Ohio State in Columbus last weekend and then 28 at home against Michigan State on Tuesday night. Murray is now 4th in the nation in points per game and leads all major-conference players. Not bad for a guy following in the footsteps of Luka Garza. Garza and Murray, as it turns out, are the only players in the B1G that have 7+ game streaks of scoring 20 or more points over the past decade according to Jared Berson of ESPN Stats & Info.

Box Score

Basketball can be told through the numbers. We take a look at some of the numbers from the last week of college hoops.

  • 69. Everyone agrees that 69 is a nice number, but it is an important benchmark as well. Teams that score 69 points first go on to win 93.7% of the time since 2009. Virginia has been nearly unbeatable when reaching the nice number first, winning 141 of 142 such contests. (Evan Miyakawa)

  • 67. After defeating Santa Clara on Saturday night, Gonzaga extended its home winning streak to 67 games. None of the current seniors on the team have experienced a loss at The McCathy Athletic Center. The last home loss occurred on January 18, 2018 to Saint Mary’s. Gonzaga plays its final regular season games on the road this season, so the streak will extend into next season. (Warren Nolan.com)

  • 22. Iowa’s Patrick McCaffery wears jersey number 22. On Tuesday, February 22, 2022, he played 22:22 and shot 2-9 (22.2%) from the field. (Iowa Men’s Basketball)

  • 3. Since 2000, only three pairs of coaches and former assistants have been 1-2 as head coaches in the same AP Poll. Gonzaga’s Mark Few and former assistant Tommy Lloyd became the third pair, joining Ben Howland of UCLA and Jaime Dixon of Pitt in 2006 and Mike Krzyzewski of Duke and Quin Snyder of Missouri in 2001. (Jared Berson, ESPN Stats & Info)

Around the Rim

This section highlights some of the best writing on college basketball to hit the web. Consider these your extra credit assignments for spring semester.

If you are getting anxious to fill out a bracket, betting futures can scratch that itch. Dylan Kelly walks through the top contenders to cut down the nets this April to determine which is the best bet. A pair of blue bloods, Kentucky and Duke, are surprisingly good value at the moment. Kelly explains the situation.

It’s in our nature. As soon as a team has an embarrassing loss or one big win, we have sealed their fate in our minds. The problem is, a bunch of other teams are winning and losing key games down the stretch, too. Lukas Harkins goes deep into one of the most polarizing resumes to give us insight into their tournament chances. The metrics favor UNC. They have mostly beaten the teams they should defeat and in convincing fashion. However, the Tar Heels have often looked bad losing to the good teams. Harkins walks us through how the committee might view this polarizing profile, which can give us insight to how other teams might fare come Selection Sunday.

Awards season approaches as the calendar turns from February to March. Jonathan Wariner goes through the Player of the Year races in each multi-bid conference. Some of the leaders are obvious, such as Missouri State’s Isaiah Mosley, the Missouri Valley preseason Player of the Year. Others, such as the Big East, are a little more wide open. Wariner goes through his case for who could win each award.