Forty days ago Louisville was a banged up 6-5 team that had lost four of five and was fresh off a defeat to its archrival. For a program that had been dragged through hell the previous two seasons under Kenny Payne, it seemed then, after losing to Kentucky, like the Cardinals were fated to endure more tribulations. A return to prominence might be years away.
No one told Pat Kelsey.
“I might sound like Deion Sanders, but I felt like we were coming,” Louisville’s coach told me this week about how he felt after losing to Kentucky in mid-December.
He turned out to be right. Louisville has arrived. The No. 21 Cardinals squared off Tuesday night at the KFC Yum! Center against Wake Forest. It was a notable matchup between two ACC teams with NCAA Tournament aspirations.
College basketball rankings: Kentucky upsets Tennessee to build momentum before facing John Calipari
Gary Parrish
The Cardinals turned it into yet another double-digit win, their eighth in the last 10 games, all ‘Ville victories. Kelsey’s squad won 72-59 to improve to 16-5, advancing one of the stronger insta-turnarounds we’ve seen in college basketball in recent history.
“The only way I’m ever good at my job is if I go completely vertical,” Kelsey told me. “Blinders on, I worry about my team.”
Louisville fell to depths that were barely detectable the past two seasons under Payne: a 12-52 record, the dark nadir of a blue blood program. The Cards have already won nearly double the amount of ACC games (9) this season than it did the prior two combined. The Cards have won 10 in a row, their best spurt in five years. An 11th straight at Georgia Tech on Saturday would mark U of L’s longest streak since November-December 2014. While the transfer portal has enabled some coaches to immediately flip their situations across the sport, it’s a joyful jar to witness Louisville be so respectable so quickly after its darkest days.
Kelsey’s so monomaniacal, this hasn’t surprised him.
“I never looked at what it was, how bad it was. Who cares? Next,” Kelsey said about how he viewed the job when he (surprisingly) had the chance to take it last March.
Kelsey is a Bengals lifer. Therefore, he hates the Steelers. But damn if he doesn’t admire Mike Tomlin’s approach to coaching. There’s a mantra in Pittsburgh to never make an excuse, never feel sorry for your circumstances and never lower the expectations. And so that’s been Kelsey’s philosophy for more than a decade.
“One really good thing for me is it wasn’t like it was 12-15 years and you took the job and you probably had a three-year rebuild at least,” Kelsey said. “The way you can rebuild your roster again, it can be a three-week rebuild. I don’t think you have a ton of time. I think fans still have the old-school mentality, we’ll be patient and can rebuild. But in my mind, we have to rebuild RIGHT NOW.”
Kelsey had done roster makeovers before, but not anything like Louisville. Taking pieces at Winthrop and Charleston and remolding those rosters into teams that were winning 25-plus games was a different setup than trying to lift Louisville back into respectability, let alone relevance. He turned his spacious office into a bedroom and slept there almost every night for three months while building out his team with his staff.
“We didn’t bend on the guys we wanted or the things we valued,” Kelsey said. “Toughness, competitive, basketball IQ, are they phenomenal teammates that make people around them better?”
He expected to win a lot right away. Some doubted the hire; he wasn’t Louisville’s first, second, third or fourth choice. Ask around college basketball and a lot of people will tell you: Kelsey’s wired differently than most. To some, he’s an odd bird. Right now, he’s the right bird for the Red Birds.
In a crowded race for national coach of the year — a race that no doubt also includes Kentucky’s Mark Pope, who guided his shorthanded team to a road win at No. 8 Tennessee on Tuesday night — Kelsey is also a strong candidate. It’s not just the 16-5 record and immediate top-three status in the ACC. Louisville (which has played a weaker ACC schedule) also has seven wins away from home. Depth was a huge attribute in the spring, but injuries have ravaged this team. Kasean Pryor and Koren Johnson are out for the season, having not played since November. Aboubacar Traore missed 10 games in November and December because of a broken arm.
“We were reeling,” Kelsey said. “Trying to find ourselves. Who are we now?”
Noah Waterman’s sat the past three games because of a thumb issue. Two would-be minutes-getters, Kobe Rogers and Ali Khalifa, are redshirting. If anything, Kelsey downplayed just how much his roster has been impacted.
“Fellas, half the world could care less about your problems and the other half are glad you have them,” he’s told his team.
No one’s done more with less at the high-major level.
Somehow, a shortened bench has made the Cardinals even better. Kelsey’s staff changed tactics, having to rely on a trio of guys — Reyne Smith, Chucky Hepburn and Terrence Edwards — much more than they expected.
As this has evolved, Louisville’s become a contradiction. The Cards are a 3-point-happy team that’s not that good at shooting from deep. U of L ranks 273rd nationally in 3-point accuracy (31.6%), yet is third in 3-point rate: 51.6% of its shots come from downtown. In Tuesday’s win, Louisville took 36 but made just 11. The only knock-down 3-point shooter is Smith (40.8%). No one else is above 34%.
And yet … this isn’t part of the plan?
“We never, ever, ever, ever talk about shooting 3s,” Kelsey said.
He told me the staff never puts a target number on its triples. It’s all about taking advantage on the attack. There is no philosophy about shooting X-amount of 3-pointers in a half or a night.
“We hunt ‘great,'” Kelsey said. “Hunting great shots, big advantage shots. If they don’t get in, I sleep like a baby.”
What’s the opposite of great? A hard shot with a degree of difficulty that’s uncalled for. He’s got a name for that, too.
“You don’t get any more points for a ‘Simone Biles’ shot,” he said.
Since Dec. 15, Louisville is ninth nationally in offensive efficiency. Kelsey’s power of personality has flipped a furiously bad situation in mere months’ time. For as weird and sad as it was to see such a great program be so awful the past two seasons, it’s that much more refreshing to have Louisville be good again.
“I come into work every day and I’ve got a bunch of pros, I’ve got a bunch of dudes who are bought into winning,” Kelsy said. “We’ve got a bunch of one-year guys who could easily be about their stats, and one-year ambitions, and a lot of that is important but hasn’t come at the expense of the team.”
WCC commish tries to stymie power-conference takeover
Late last week, an unusual, pithy press release was published. The urgent 100-word statement was about “the future of college athletics,” and curiously enough, it was authored by one of the 12 members of the men’s basketball selection committee. The person who released the statement also happens to be a conference commissioner: Stu Jackson of the WCC.
“Assessing the numerous changes in college athletics and their effects, it appears the autonomy four conferences are seizing more decision-making power. It’s vital for the basketball-focused leaders, and a broader group of stakes-holding decision makers across college sports to build engaged and properly weighted representation as we look forward for basketball and Olympic sports in the wake of these discussions. The future of college athletics and the opportunities for the larger pool of student-athletes requires a diverse collaboration of representation focused on the greater good. Opportunities should not be commandeered by a few to dilute the fairest benefit to all.”
Jackson — the former No. 2 at the Big East, who now has vested interest in mid-major well-being — was compelled to say something due to undetermined but nevertheless-worrying-to-many machinations from the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and ACC. Those four are purportedly trying to put their thumb on the scale of NCAA championships (and the NCAA basketball tournaments in particular). There’s increasing worry over an eventual proposal that would fundamentally change the NCAA’s long-established and widely lauded championship structure and norms, giving additional control to the leagues already wielding more than their fair share.
I spoke with Jackson on Tuesday for a quick follow-up. I wanted to know his read of the room heading into February and why he spoke up first. He told me not enough people at high levels of college athletics are taking this situation with the proper amount of urgency and seriousness.
“The Power Four conferences are bulldozing their way through this and there hasn’t been much attention paid to them, at least in my opinion, to the potential impact and effects. Their wants, how they’d affect conferences across the NCAA,” Jackson told CBS Sports.
His statement came in advance of this week’s Collegiate Commissioners Association-22 (CCA-22) annual in-person meetings, held in Clearwater, Florida. The CCA-22 is a board of 22 commissioners from the leagues outside the 10 FBS conferences. They don’t wield as much authority, but their voices are loud and frequently heard across many channels within the NCAA. A critical guest is on the docket for Wednesday at the CCA-22’s summit: NCAA president Charlie Baker. Nothing formal will be voted on, but the powwow will allow commissioners who represent more than 65% of Division I to bluntly express their concerns.
There is an ongoing nebulous power struggle over what the NCAA’s championship structure should continue to be vs. the threat of what it could mutate to if put in the wrong hands. So far, the most powerful commissioners have stopped short of outright declaring their intentions, leading to a lot of speculation. The so-called Autonomy Four want more authority over championships, but no one’s sure what that means — not even SEC commissioner Greg Sankey or Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti.
That, in turn, has brought on anxiety.
Complicating matters, the organization is trying to build a new governance structure to have in place by the end of June. It’s all happening fast, they’re waiting for the House settlement to be approved in April and it feels like they’re trying to build the plane while flying the plane. Jackson’s sounding the alarm to remind folks of what seems afoot and how much revenue (known as NCAA Tournament units) could be reallocated away from the leagues that need it most in order to field teams and provide scholarships for Olympic-level sports.
“The revenue from the (NCAA) tournament services a lot of student-athletes and some of it could go by the wayside,” Jackson said.
I asked him if he or other commissioners had a sense of how much money could be siphoned away from mid-majors.
“There’s no number yet because we don’t know what they want, but we can surmise what their intentions are,” Jackson said, referring to the elephant in the room. “What that embodies is both structurally, the format, which is (tournament) expansion, and the revenue associated with that. If they do that, it’s going to have a real adverse effect on [mid-major conferences].”
Additional schemes could potentially include altering automatic-qualifier status for any number of NCAA championships and adjusting how selection and seeding could be done across all types of NCAA-sponsored brackets.
The NCAA hasn’t merely run its championships competently out of its headquarters for generations. It’s done so on a level that serves as a model to all other major sports organizations. This is the one big thing everyone praises the NCAA on. There is no need for the power conferences to get access to any additional levers of power, no matter how hard they’ll try to convince everyone else otherwise.
Longest AP Top 25 droughts, now that Vandy’s off the list
Who amongst us would have thought the Vanderbilt Commodores could make the AP Top 25 in Mark Byington’s first season? This week, they did. At No. 24, Vandy (16-4) is ranked for the first time since December 2015, snapping a 3,332-day drought. (This extends an NCAA record: 14 of the SEC’s 16 teams have cracked the AP poll this season. Only South Carolina and LSU are yet to break through.)
Byington, who won 82 games in four years at James Madison, has at the very least made Vandy worth watching right away. This program had been largely irrelevant for almost every season over the past dozen, yet here it is, one of the surprise risers. Making the rankings carries more significance to some programs than others; Vanderbilt having a number next to its name is a big deal in Nashville.
With Vandy’s dry spell over, here are the 10 longest AP Top droughts among the 80 power-conference programs … and I don’t think any are ending in the next two months.
1. DePaul: No. 21 on Nov. 26, 2000 (8,830 days)
2. Stanford: No. 10 in final poll of 2007-08
3. Boston College: No. 17 on Jan. 11, 2009
4. Georgia Tech: No. 20 on Feb. 14, 2010
5. Wake Forest: No. 23 on Feb. 21, 2010
6. Georgetown: No. 22 in final poll of 2014-15
7. Utah: No. 13 in final poll of 2015-16
8. California: No. 25 on Nov. 20, 2016
9. SMU: No. 11 in final poll of 2016-17
10. Notre Dame: No. 18 on Dec. 17, 2018
@ me
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The rules committee has to take action this spring and amend review protocols. Perhaps we bring in two coaches’ challenges that are allowed. We don’t let any reviews take place until there’s less than one minute remaining in the game. We put a 60-second time limit on the plays that are reviewed, from the time the video starts in front of the officials’ faces. It’s been bothersome for years but it seems worse than ever this season. College basketball’s powers-that-be have to curb the delays that plague the ends of games for the health, watchability and entertainment value of the sport.
Gillis played with Zach Edey; now he’s Cooper Flagg’s teammate. Flagg is the favorite at this stage, so he’s got a good shot. The last players to do this … played with three-time NPOY Ralph Sampson at Virginia. But Gillis could do it as a member of multiple programs. A cursory bout of research tells me Mason Gillis would in fact be the first person to be teammates for three seasons with different national players of the year at more than one program. Beyond that, he’d also be on three consecutive No. 1 seeds if Duke continues its pace.
My colleague asked this Monday after Iowa (13-8) lost 82-65 to Ohio State. My belief: McCaffrey and Iowa should split after this season. They’ve lost all five B1G road games by an average of 16.8 points. Juxtaposed against Iowa State’s success, it worsens the conditions. The Hawkeyes have had some really good offenses under McCaffrey, who also recruited/coached some college greats (Luka Garza, Keegan Murray). He had Iowa at an NCAA Tournament level in eight of his 15 seasons. But the program could use a reboot. It’s going to finish sub-40 at KenPom for a third straight year. The school hasn’t made a Sweet 16 since 1999. (Yeah, not good.) His contract expires after the 2027-28 season and the buyout isn’t crippling (near $4 million).
Not even close yet. But it’s been a tough year for Providence and it’s not getting any easier. Kim English announced Monday that Bryce Hopkins is done for the season due to lingering issues with his left knee (ACL recovery). There were heavy portal rumors with Hopkins last April. We’ll see if he opts to stay on board at PC for 2025-26, his final season of eligibility.
Despite its healthy inventory of Q1 wins (Ducks have eight, only behind Auburn’s 11 for most nationally), I’ve been an Oregon skeptic in this regard: the pedestrian tempo-free numbers combined with close-call wins. (Oregon, which is a healthy 16-4, ranks 33rd nationally in Luck at KenPom.) It’s all relative, though: I’m just not in on the Ducks as a top-25 team, big picture. (No predictive has them that high, either. The Ducks don’t do any one thing on an elite level.) That said, ceiling and floor stretch far beyond top-25 designation. I think Oregon’s seed ceiling is a 3. I think it’s floor is a 9. If the bracket broke right, an Elite Eight is the best-case scenario, while a first round loss by 10-14 points is also believable.
No shot that happens. Auburn, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky and Tennessee are the SEC teams now in position to vie for top-seed status. But one or two teams outside that SEC quartet — specifically: Iowa State, Duke, Houston, Michigan State, Marquette, Purdue, Illinois, Arizona — will wind up getting to the top line(s). Now, three No. 1 seeds is doable for the SEC if everything breaks in its favor. There is precedent. It first happened with the Big East in 2009 (UConn, Louisville, Pitt) then in 2019 with the ACC (Virginia, Duke, North Carolina).
Until there’s verified stories and observable evidence of Dan Hurley acting in the brutish ways that negatively affected Bob Knight’s legacy, we have to stop invoking these two with each other. Hurley has his quirks and faults, but enough with the Knight references. He’s nowhere near The General’s level of boorishness.
Norlander’s news + nuggets
• Caleb Love’s 55-foot heave to get Arizona to OT against Iowa State was one of the three best moments of the season to date. Love — one of the most fascinating subjects in college hoops — was 1-of-10 from deep prior to his prayer, then commenced to hit two more backbreaking 3-pointers in overtime to ensure Zona got its first win at home as an unranked team over a top-five opponent since beating No. 3 UCLA in 1979. I wrote earlier this month how Arizona turned its season with a road sweep of Cincy and West Virginia. Now it’s officially in play to win the Big 12.
• Feels like we’re not fully acknowledging how good Duke is in Year 3 under Jon Scheyer. This team has been top-three in predictive metrics for more than 80% of the season, ranked top-five in the polls eight straight weeks and it’s 10-0 in ACC play for first time since all the way back in 2007-08. (Jon Scheyer was a sophomore on that team, which earned a No. 2 seed and finished No. 6 at KenPom.) With a win over UNC on Saturday, Duke will get to 11-0 in the ACC for the first time since the senior seasons of JJ Redick and Shelden Williams (2005-06). Duke being merely pretty good would’ve been acceptable. Instead, it’s great (so far).
• As we ready for John Calipari’s return to Rupp Arena on Saturday, I want to commend Ryan Black of the Louisville Courier-Journal for writing a very good longread about all the good Calipari did to help Kentucky communities over the years. It’s no exaggeration to say that this was where he was most consistent and impactful. Read that story. UK fans shouldn’t boo him.
• Another good piece to share, this one from the Los Angeles Times’ Ryan Kartje on USC senior Saint Thomas (11.1 ppg, 6.1 rpg), who battled severe depression a couple of years ago at Loyola Chicago and has found a new outlook. Read that story too.
• There’s rarely ever One Thing that corresponds to winning, but I’ll tell you: Aday Mara’s breakout seems to be changing UCLA’s season. The 7-3 Spanish sophomore is starting to put it together, averaging 15.3 points, 7.7 rebounds and 4.0 blocks over the past three games — all UCLA wins, two on the road. After a four-game January swoon, the Bruins are 15-6 and have their next three games at home. Not much for Mick Cronin to bleat over right about now.
• Last week’s Court Report lead detailed why this season’s freshman class is the best in at least a half decade. I love when a plan coincidentally comes together, because the next day Evan Miyakawa went even further and pulled out data showing that it, in fact, is pacing to rank near the top of the past 20 years.
• Great note by CJ Moore of The Athletic earlier this week: St. John’s in-conference defensive rating (now 86.2 points per 100 possessions allowed) is the best in the Big East of any team since the league transformed in 2013-14. Now, we’re not yet halfway through league play, so SJU’s got a long way to go to best 2015-16 Villanova (95.3). That said, last night’s win at Georgetown only reinforced the stoutness.
• Will try to note every firing/coaching change prior to conference tournament play in this section. This is nearly a week old, but: Stephen F. Austin sacked Kyle Keller after a 1-7 start in Southland play. Keller, who’d been there since 2016, was the coach when SFA beat No. 1 Duke in November 2019. It’s one of the biggest regular-season upsets ever and I wrote a huge story about it when it happened.
• Speaking of the Southland Conference … a fun idea that has potentially to really draw interest if the right person submits the right kind of artwork and the conference doesn’t play it too safe: The league is holding a contest for someone to draw up their court design.
• Good news: The men’s NCAA championship game will tip at 8:50 p.m. ET this year (and hopefully sticks moving forward). It’s customarily been a tip between 9:10 and 9:20 for most of the past 25-plus years, but an earlier start (with the idea the game will end right about at 11 p.m. ET) better serves fans. Moving a tip time isn’t as easy as you might think. This takes a lot of planning and agreement from a lot of entities (including local affiliates). A 30-minute head start also hopefully correlates to me leaving the stadium before 2 a.m. local 😏
• McNeese State under Will Wade still seems fun. The Cowboys are 16-5 and will probably run the table in the Southland. (So much Southland love today!) Once pilloried, Wade feels destined to get a power-conference job in less than two months.
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