Welcome to the new normal

Duke's GM will be the first of many in college hoops. Plus, Washington State's big day, Coach K on the future of college sports and Kyle Neptune's approach at Villanova

June 08, 2022

Turns out Name, Image and Likeness opportunities aren’t just for college athletes. Give it a year and most high-major programs will have employees tasked exclusively with organizing how it all can benefit students and the school. Tuesday saw the first hire to do just that. But that’s not the only college basketball news.

Let’s get to it!

STARTING FIVE

1. Duke sets the standard with GM hire

Jon Scheyer’s having a helluva spring. He took over for the winningest coach in men’s college basketball history and promptly secured the top recruiting class for 2022 and 2023. Tuesday, Duke’s coach may established the new operating template for college basketball by hiring Rachel Baker as the program’s General Manager.

The newly created role will help players “enhance their personal and professional skillsets.” Or, as the rest of us will view it, ensure players maximize Name, Image and Likeness opportunities, further cementing college basketball as a business.

Baker spent eight years at Nike running strategy for the Elite Youth Basketball League (EYBL) and a year at the NBA as part of a WNBA rebrand. (Maybe she has previous experience working with Duke. Possibly.)

Expect many, many teams to make similar moves over the next few months/years because this had been expected/predicted in a world where programs must plan for NIL. (Texas has Chris Ogden as “Managing Director,” which is similar, but his coaching background made him more of a hybrid guy.)

Can every program afford to have someone in this role? Can they afford not to?

2. Twice as nice for Washington State

If news that Justin Powell transferring to Washington State wasn’t enough, the Cougars also reportedly will have forward Mouhamed Gueye back in Pullman next season.

Not a bad Two for Tuesday.

Gueye told ESPN that he’ll withdraw his name from the transfer portal, as the All-Pac 12 freshman wants to focus on boosting his skills and helping the Cougars get back to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2008 when Tony Bennett was on the sideline. That should get easier with him and Powell in the same uniform.

Powell’s on his third school (he began at Auburn and played 30 games for Tennessee last season) and expects to be eligible to play right away as WSU’s top perimeter scoring threat. Gueye, a 6-11 forward with a 7-4 wingspan, will anchor the interior defense (as Efe Abogidi is unlikely to return to school).

3. C.J. Fredrick’s injury odyssey

As Kentucky prepares for a preseason trip to play in the Bahamas in August, it got an important bit of news: C.J. Fredrick is cleared to practice.

The 6-3 guard and Kentucky native played two seasons at Iowa, where he hit 47% of his 3s in 52 games. But he was rarely injury free. In this terrific profile from Kyle Tucker, Fredrick played through a bum ankle, a Jones fracture and plantar fasciitis. After transferring to Kentucky, he suffered a stress fracture in his left shin that required surgery and four months recovery. Then, about a month before the season 2021-22 started, he sprained his left leg, rested, then tried dunking before the opener against Duke.

“I knew it was bad,” Fredrick told Tucker. “I went up to dunk again and felt everything in my leg rip. It immediately started to burn. I kind of hung on the rim for a minute, because I was scared to get down.”

There are wonderful details in the rest of the story, which you can read here. How the story ends? That’s for this season.

4. March Madness rules hoops TV

This could change if the NBA Finals go seven games, but thus far the NCAA Tournament tops the Finals in TV viewers.

Those championship and Final Four games are on TBS/TNT as well, not ABC (which is where Game 3 of the Finals is tonight), which traditionally limits the audience a bit. Further context: the 2022 title game was one of the lowest-rated in NCAA Tournament history.

We’ll see if the Celtics and Warriors provide some drama to goose these numbers a bit.

5. Ice cream for everyone!

Let’s end with something fun, shall we?

That’s Murray State coach Marcus Smith, who apparently has perfected the 75-footer.* Seriously, there’s video of Smith making it year after year after year, starting in 2013. Hey, when you’ve got hundreds of hungry campers awaiting ice cream if you make it, it’s worth practicing.

*OK, Brown’s also a two-time OVC Player of the Year, third on the all-time Racer points list, was drafted by the Blazers in 1996 and played professionally for 14 years, but he’s gonna be the Ice Cream Man forever. And that’s a good thing.

COACH K, UNFILTERED (AGAIN)

Krzyzewski: College sports must evolve

Mike Krzyzewski may be retired, but he’s still very much around. Especially when he still has a show on SiriusXM. Yesterday, we spotlighted his comments on gun violence. Today’s it’s the current state of college sports, including NIL and the structure of the NCAA.

As noted in the Raleigh News & Observer, Coach K is pro-NIL because he’s “all for the rights of the student athletes and for them to do as much as as much as they can.” But for it to work, the NCAA has to drastically change its thinking about NIL, starting with whomever replaces outgoing President Mark Emmert. From there, Krzyzewski notes, one governing body seems unlikely because of what each individual college sport needs.

“What happens for specific sports?” he said. “Are you a revenue producing sport? Are you an Olympic sport? You know, everyone can’t live in exactly the same house under the same conditions. That’s not being unfair to anybody. It’s just being realistic that certain things. Certain things happen in your neighborhood that don’t happen, another neighborhood. So to have a rule for all neighborhoods doesn’t work. That’s been the downfall of the NCAA.”

He expects college football will create the blueprint for what’s next (“SEC football is the best college sports product on TV except for March Madness.”) and for men’s and women’s basketball to function as “a big block” because the women’s game is growing so quickly.

Read more on Coach K’s show here.

FOUR QUESTIONS

It all happened really quickly for Kyle Neptune

Villanova started summer workouts on Monday, the first one without Jay Wright on the sideline since 2001.

So how’s new coach Kyle Neptune feeling about that transition? He spoke with Jeff Goodman about that and much more.

Q: It’s April 20, and Jay Wright’s retirement starts to circulate as news. How long did you keep it as a secret?Kyle Neptune: “It was as quick of a turnaround for me as it was for everybody else. I had maybe a couple days.”

Q: Give me the one piece of advice that Jay gave you on his way out. He’ll give you more as you need it. That’s the thing about Jay Wright. He won’t hover.Kyle Neptune: “Hover? I’m been begging to see him! There’s definitely no hovering. I’m trying to get him on the phone right now.”

Q: The culture at Villanova is set. How much do you really even have to change?Kyle Neptune: “I really don’t need to change much. People would ask me, even last year when I was at Fordham, ‘How are you different than coach, what are you going to do different with your program?’ My basketball mind was formed [at Villanova] and the way I think about the game. It’s much more about staying committed to what we do here.”

Q: Villanova didn’t hit the portal much. How much will that change under your leadership?Kyle Neptune: “It’s not like we say ‘we’re never going to take a transfer.’ We just look for the right guys, wherever those guys are. It’s more about the guy, their family and the people around them.”

Hear more from Kyle’s interview with Jeff Goodman here. And be sure to subscribe to the Field of 68 on YouTube.

THE FAST BREAK

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