Since college basketball entered the national spotlight, it has been marked by class warfare. The most well-regarded programs receive lucrative television and equipment deals, while most produce little revenue. Schools like University of Kentucky and the University of North Carolina have an essentially unlimited recruiting budget.
Smaller Division I programs, meanwhile, cannot afford to send coaches across the country to court high school talent.
The latest installment, as Billy Witz reports in Tuesday’s New York Times, has to do with analytics, which have already begun to revolutionize sports.
SportVU, a sophisticated sports analysis system that uses cameras to monitor movement on a basketball court, is one of the newest technological development in this growing field. It can inform assessments of a team’s performance and boost scouting reports about opponents, shedding light on which strategies work best.
However, it costs roughly $100,000 annually, making it accessible only to a limited group of schools. Some who can afford it, like Duke University and Louisville University, have already begun to use the system.
Yet, rather than decry the gap between the power conferences and the lesser-known mid-major leagues, let’s ask a better question: Have the successes of prestigious programs trickled down to ones with fewer resources? I see two ways that this has occurred, both evident in this year’s NCAA Tournament.
First, the tournament’s broad television coverage grants national exposure to many lesser-known schools. The immense popularity of the best-seeded teams is what triggered television networks to broadcast college basketball in the first place. Mid-major conferences enjoy the media benefits because of the tournament’s inclusivity, which grants automatic bids to winners of all 32 Division-I basketball leagues.
The tournament’s first-round upsets are all the more glamorous because they are often an underdog’s first opportunity to play in front of a national audience. No doubt that these victories pave the way for coaches to attract elite high school basketball stars such as George Mason University’s magical run to the Final Four in 2006.
In this way, the tournament’s national television coverage doesn’t merely magnify the glory of one game or one Cinderella run. Rather, by raising the profile of an under-appreciated program, the national spotlight can provide a foundation for coaches to build a program’s longer-term reputation. There is historical precedent for this phenomenon: the Big East conference rose to prominence in the 1980s because its founders had seized on opportunities for television broadcasts previously never afforded to Northeast-based schools.
Second, assistants for legendary coaches are often hired to fill head coaching jobs at second-tier schools. They end up adopting the philosophy and game-plan of the coaches they worked with — effectively transferring the basketball genius of the top-ranked teams to smaller programs.
That knowledge transfer may be paying the greatest dividends right here in the Ivy League. For the second year in a row, Harvard University pulled off an upset victory in the first round. Coach Tommy Amaker formerly played for and coached alongside Duke legend Mike Krzyzewski. Harvard has soared to the top of Ivy League hoops, after years where the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University were without question far ahead of the pack. The transformation has to at least be partly attributed to the wisdom Amaker gleaned from Coach K.
Sometimes a protégé may build his program to be on par with that of his mentor. Billy Donovan, who assisted Louisville’s Rick Pitino at Kentucky in the 1990s and played for him at Providence College, has catapulted University of Florida into the upper-echelons of college basketball. There may be no hope of ever leveling the financial playing field in college sports, but it doesn’t necessarily require complex analytics systems to build a reputable basketball program. Instead, lesser-known teams can draw upon two resources long held by their wealthier peers — television exposure and Hall of Fame-level coaching.
