Score one for the mid-majors
Shaka Smart is staying at VCU. He isn’t headed to Illinois. He won’t entertain offers from other programs. Not now at least.
The third-year coach has gone 84-27 in three seasons with the Rams, including six NCAA tournament victories and one Final Four appearance. With a little bit of a salary bump, he’s staying put.
Fair enough. Good for him and good for college basketball.
“I am very grateful for the support and belief in the coaching staff and basketball program that comes from the very top of our university's leadership,” he said in a prepared statement. “There are great things to accomplish at VCU and I'm looking forward to building on the successes of our program and university.”
School president Michael Rao certainly sounded excited, as well.
"He continues to demonstrate his commitment to VCU and its pursuit of excellence athletically and academically,” Rao said. “Under his leadership, the success of the VCU basketball program and our scholar athletes raises the bar for national research universities and intercollegiate athletics.”
Smart has become the latest mid-major coach to turn down a multi-million dollar offer from a BCS conference school.
Similarly, in 2010, Butler coach Brad Stevens inked a 12-year extension to stay in Indianapolis, spurning schools such as Clemson, Oregon and Wake Forest. After all, the Bulldogs had been just one game away from winning an NCAA title.
Seemingly every year, Gonzaga’s Mark Few also tells just about everyone: “thanks, but no thanks.”
As of late at least, the routine shuffling that would appear normal – almost cyclical – in each offseason has subsided to some degree.
It begs the question: So what gives?
College coaches aren’t all leaving mid-majors and flocking to power-six conferences. It would be natural to assume they’d look to snatch up big dollars. It’s a business at the end of the day. But it isn’t happening. The line between a “major” program and a “mid-major” is blurring.
Credit parity for that trend.
If the first weekend of the NCAA tournament taught us anything, it’s that college basketball isn’t necessarily dominated by power conferences – not entirely anyway.
Though all No. 1 seeds are still alive in the 68-team tournament, it hasn’t been smooth sailing for everyone. During the second round last Friday, six lower-seeded teams won. For the first time since the tournament expanded in 1985, two No. 15 seeds defeated a No. 2 seed. A No. 13 seed, Ohio, advanced to the Sweet 16 for the first time in six years.
Perhaps most notably: three double-digit seeds, this season’s No. 10 Xavier, No. 11 North Carolina State and Ohio, are in the Sweet 16 for the third consecutive year.
More and more schools have quality players. Many boast guys on their rosters that appear headed to the NBA – at least at some point.
Players such as New Mexico’s Drew Gordon, St. Bonaventure’s Andrew Nicholson and Weber State’s Damian Lillard could all end up as first-round selections next June. In short, Kansas, and Kentucky, and Syracuse don’t have all the future pros.
In the early 1990s, the NCAA reduced the scholarship offerings for men’s basketball from 15, to 14 and then to 13 over the span of two years.
What that move did was distribute talent. So say for the Big Ten, which features 12 schools, that’s 24 players that head elsewhere. And that’s 24 for the Pac-12, 20 for the Big 12, 32 for the Big East, 24 for the ACC and 24 for the SEC.
Combined, that’s 148 players who are playing in, the Mid-American Conference, the Summit League or the Colonial Athletic Association.
Certainly, some of the more prominent schools have advantages. They have tradition, more money, bigger facilities and a name brand.
But in a sport where simply winning your conference earns an automatic bid to the tournament, unlike college football, it’s anyone’s game. And as we’ve seen recently, the mid-majors are taking advantage.
Joey Kaufman is a Spring 2012 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about him here.
This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.