67 Years and Counting

First off: I put up a page for the Tournament Challenge on the site proper, so check it out here; I'll also add a link to the sidebar for those of you who don't visit the main page (where there is the usual button) much anymore. Also, if you haven't signed up, there's still plenty of time - I hope I haven't driven away any potential players with my seemingly draconian demands for prompt payment. Realistically, any time before the end of the tournament (so, early April) would be fine; I don't want you thinking that if you don't feel like you can get it in within a week that you shouldn't even bother signing up. The earlier deadline was just to try and avoid a repeat of problems in past years. Of course, it may also just be that I don't have that many friends who like basketball. But why should that stop you? Rich and Dave know minimal amounts about sports, and they both finished ahead of me last year!

Second: The iTunes Challenge is really steaming along. I got my wish; we now have six songs left (see the previous post, which I've updated in lieu of cramming this post with most of the same info), and all of them were chosen by someone! We will have a true winner, folks. Good deal.

Third: Wow, Northwestern stinks. Though I think we all got starry-eyed over the Carmody hire at the time, I agree pretty much 100% with Tyler's post on this one (check my comment at the bottom there for a couple extra thoughts)... the Princeton offense works to a point - enough to upset Iowa and Wisconsin every year, and usually sweep the worst couple teams in the conference - but only to a point. The 2003-2004 season, in which the Cats went 8-8 in the Big Ten, was probably about the best-case, and of course that was the one year where they couldn't even manage a winning record during their typical shitty non-conference schedule (you lose at home to Mississippi Valley State and you don't deserve to make the NIT).

Now, Northwestern has never been good. Of the 326 teams that were full members of Division I (as opposed to transitioning schools like North Florida and stuff) as of this season, Northwestern's all-time winning percentage ranks... 320th. 320th! There are just six schools worse than NU's .401 - in order: Texas-Arlington (.398), New Hampshire (.381), Prairie View (.371), Georgia State (.357), VMI (.355), Florida Atlantic (.338). Now, that's bad enough... but as we all know - and as the title of this entry tells you - Northwestern has never made the NCAA Tournament. For that matter, Northwestern has just three NIT appearances DESPITE PLAYING IN A MAJOR CONFERENCE! Do you know how hard it is to miss the NIT when you play in a power conference? You have to... oh, finish below .500 every year. Yeah, that'd do it. (Incidentally, of those six teams below NU, four have made the tourney in their history.)

The funny thing, of course, is that in theory it should be harder to win in football - you need to recruit more players, a mere one or two blue-chippers can't make the whole team, etc. Yet Northwestern has three Big Ten titles (won or shared) in the past decade! Meanwhile, NU's 8-8 Big Ten basketball record in 2004 placed them in a tie for fifth... easily their highest conference finish in my lifetime! Between 1985 and 1997 they finished last or tied for last EVERY SINGLE YEAR! Now that's impressive.

What to do? Let go of Carmody. Sure, a new guy might struggle at first and won't get you the, you know, five or six conference wins that Carmody would... but Carmody went 3-13 as recently as 2003, a year after he led the team to a 7-9, seventh place finish that was at the time their best in nearly twenty years. He's not a bad coach at all, he's just not the right coach. His system isn't going to bring in the talented individual players - as an article in the Daily noted, Northwestern is really a very similar school to Duke, so we could, in theory, do what they do with the right moves. But we didn't get a CPL kid for what, 20 years? Because they didn't want to come to a bad program, and now they don't want to come to a program running the Princeton offense.

This can be done. Dump Carmody, hire a charismatic younger guy who's proven himself at a slightly lower level (see: Duke, Krzyzewski), give him a couple years to recruit. Surely this team can make the tournament in my lifetime.

And surely some other coach wouldn't allow something like what happened today, where the conference's worst three-point shooting team nonetheless hoisted up a tournament-record 31 shots from behind the arc, at one point missing twelve in a row. Ye gods.