4 Quarters Radio April 13 2nd Half

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The second half of 4Q's April 13 episode starts with college basketball coach migration, and in the case of Butler's Brad Stevens, the prevention of said migration. The outrageous costs of forced coach migration gets Scott's hackles up a bit, and Joseph gets to dig into the Tennessee QB situation. MTSU's spring game gets a lookover before intermission, as well. Rampant identity theft continues in the 4th as Bobby prepares to sound off on UFC 112. Anderson Silva's "heel turn" could lead to big dollars for UFC, according to the MMA Authority. Joseph can't resist one last Conley/Thabeet dig in Epic Fails, and Scott wonders if J.R. Smith lost his damn mind. Excised music: "Here We Are Juggernaut" by Coheed & Cambria and "He Was a Jazzman" by the Flatliners.

4 Quarters Radio April 13 1st Half

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The first half of the April 13 episode starts off with the final days of the NBA season. Scott, Joseph, and Bobby talk about the exclusive club that Tyreke Evans has joined, as well as the one that LeBron James is trying to start. The question "Why Don Nelson?" is discussed, and an emergency siren test sires a potential new segment called State of Emergency. In the 2nd, Ben Roethlisberger's potential suspension, his former receiver's new home, and overrated draft prospects highlight the NFL discussion. Plus, a young goalscoring ace and a UFC upset figure in the Whodaman? segment. Excised music: "Please Don't" by David Byrne & Fatboy Slim feat. Santigold and "When You Come Around" by Geist.

Breathe: What Boiler Nation Needs to Do As Johnson Declares

News of JaJuan Johnson declaring for the NBA Draft has reached the blogosphere, and the reaction is predictably hysterical.

Just when it seems that Purdue may have a realistic shot at a championship (at least Andy Katz seems to think so), along comes a story to make Boilermaker Nation cry in their, um, Boilermakers yet again.

Not to mention Gary Parrish coming along to twist the knife even further, but that's another story.

Before everyone indulges their "woe is us" impulse, however, let's examine JJ with a critical eye.

Why would the NBA take him?

He's 6'10" with an 18-foot jump shot. Long body, good shot-blocker, can make the finesse plays inside.  Sounds great, right?  So...

Why wouldn't the NBA take him?

On that 6'10" frame, there's only 215 pounds of flesh and bone. He's a fairly maligned rebounder, even in college. While he had 10 double-figure rebounding games this season, he had seven more with four boards or less, including a three-carom night against Texas A&M in the NCAA Tournament, so there's a tendency to disappear.

Part of that can be due to his own forays to the perimeter, as other players below Johnson on the list linked above have been known to stroke the three.

However, also partially due to JJ operating on the perimeter, his field goal percentage stood at a mediocre-for-a-center 50.4 percent this season.

The other part of that rebounding malaise stems from that 215-pound frame. If his jumpshot and ballhandling were more consistent, we could possibly project him as a small forward. They're not, though, so right now, he's an undersized power forward who would get hammered mercilessly in the Association.

Is he on the NBA's radar?

Considering several teams like to dazzle the establishment by scraping up some Euroleague guys who will never see an NBA contract, of course they know about a two-time All-Big Ten center. But what do they think of him? That's the million-dollar question.

No team will tell you, so we must consult the websites that rank players for such purposes.

NBADraft.net: They have a mock showing JJ as a high second-round pick...in 2011.  His profile? Bare. Hmmm.

DraftExpress.com: Same mock status as above.  At least he has a profile, even if it hasn't been updated in about 400 days or so.

RealGM.com: On their inaugural Top 100 list for this year's draft, we need to scroll all the way down to No. 78 before we get to Johnson's name.

Does any of this sound like the treatment of a highly touted 2010 prospect?

Not really. So, it begs the question:

WTF is JaJuan thinking?

He's likely thinking that he'll get a little feedback from actual, official NBA scouts rather than the armchair websites and bloggers. That way, he makes the most informed decision he possibly can.

If I was on Pardon the Interruption, playing a game of Odds Makers right now, and I was asked to give my odds on JJ staying in the draft, I'd come back with an answer in the neighborhood of five percent. If he's not a first-round pick, there's no guaranteed cash, so it's a gamble.

As more touted freshman and sophomore prospects declare, it pushes Johnson further down the big priority list for the scouts. He has until May 8 to decide officially, but I won't be surprised if he turns around and comes back sooner, once he gets the information he needs.

Only when JJ shows up to an early May press conference looking like Karl Malone will I become truly concerned. Something tells me that might be as likely as 50 Cent's next album being grounded in acoustic folk.

96 Tears: The NCAA Wants to Make the Rich Richer

Some sources will tell you that the NCAA Tournament's expansion to 96 teams is as guaranteed as death and taxes. Others, including the NCAA itself, want to tell us to pump the brakes, nothing's set in stone yet.

And if you buy that, you're obviously shopping for some Arizona swampland.

I'm not here to cry fire and brimstone and claim that a 96-team tournament means that the apocalypse is nigh or the terrorists will win or whatever. What I am here to claim is that there is a fair, equitable way to do it without this basically becoming a care package for the BCS conferences.

The worst thing that can happen for the tournament is some 16-16 team from the ACC getting into the Big Dance ahead of, say, a 23-9 regular-season champion from the MAC who got poleaxed in the conference tournament.

If the regular season means something, then dominating your conference should mean something. Something more than making excuses like, "Oh, well, their record was terrible because they played dominant competition."

The one way the NCAA can make Greg Shaheen not sound like a total liar when he spouts off about "increased opportunities" in between bouts of ignoring John Feinstein's questions is in actually granting opportunities to those who truly need them: namely, the other 25 conferences (not including the Great West).

Offer automatic bids to the regular-season AND tournament champions of each conference, following the recommendation of that noted mid-major advocate Mike Krzyzewski, and the whole thing becomes much more palatable. Expand the tournament just so the Big East and ACC can challenge themselves to see if EVERY member can reach the Big Dance, and what are we left with?

Well, we're left with college football, in all honesty: a Mafioso system with 20 percent of the leagues drawing 70 percent of the party invitations.

Offering two bids for each non-BCS league gives us 50 spots filled, allowing 46 more for the BCS leagues and other assorted at-larges (which, let's face it, will be the endangered species in the Fat Bracket arrangement). Even if there are no other mid-major at-larges, the Cartel will still be fighting over seven bids per conference, or 14 more than they managed this season.

Also consider: only 41 of the 73 BCS schools managed winning records this season. Dan Guerrero, or whoever takes over the committee chair, will tie themselves in knots trying to defend the inclusion of a 15-17 Pac-10 team over a 22-6 team from the Big Sky.

Or, perhaps, the NCAA will continue with its current method of "we'll tell you what you want and you'll like it."

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Funny enough, the people who are all about more NCAA spots are the power-conference coaches, who all like the idea of being rewarded for landing between the 20th and 30th percentiles, the schools who get left out now.

What does this do to alumni, administration, and trustee expectations, however? If a coach gets a three-year leash to reach the 20th percentile, does he get the same latitude to get into the 30th? If tournament places are given out like candy, is the window reduced to two years to reach one?

Coaches like the idea of an easier coat of resume polish, but diluting the pool cuts both ways. If a goal is easier to reach, but still not reached, a lot of coaches will find themselves with even less time to do so, losing their job security in the quest to gain more job security.

Not sure if that's irony, but it's gotta be close.

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Finally, there's the argument that there will be no more "Cinderellas," depriving the tournament of its charm and drama.

What, like there are so many now?

Dick Weiss of the New York Daily News, linked above, couldn't even give any coherent reasons why the upsets would never happen. If Ohio University, for example, could beat Georgetown, why in the world could they not beat North Carolina (to continue beating this dead horse)? And did anyone honestly think that the Bobcats were launching a run to the Final Four after beating the Hoyas, anyway?

Not many outside of Athens, Ohio, I'm sure.

Butler qualified as a "Cinderella story," despite the fact that they ended the regular season ranked eighth in the nation. New Mexico was a three seed, ranked in the top 10, but would have also stunned everyone if they'd gotten to Indy. Why? Simply because the four semifinalists are only supposed to come from the same six leagues that can win the football championship, too. Outsiders are treated as interlopers and curiosities, sort of like a five-legged unicorn.

Let's not OVER-romanticize the tournament. The Bryce Drews and the Courtney Lees and the Mouse McFaddens and the Steve Nashes are great stories...for the first weekend.

The second weekend is all about the hoops factories. So it has always been, so it shall (probably) always be. Butler's path this season would have been no different in a 96-team bracket than it was in a 65.

The Tournament is still The Tournament. It's still a vastly superior system to the BCS football cartel. Most of us will adapt and survive, even Betty the receptionist, who'll have to pull out her reading glasses to read the smaller team names on the bracket sheet...most of which she knows nothing about anyway, but that still won't stop her from taking all of your money in the office pool.

On College Radio, No One Can Hear You Scream

After about three months of hosting and producing 4 Quarters, I've come to a difficult realization.

Doing radio is easy. Doing GOOD radio is hard. Very hard.

Maybe my own standards are too high, but it just seems that the last few episodes have gone downhill faster than Charlie Weis on a Crisco-covered waterslide.

While I flail around for something to say, my co-hosts do the best they can with what they know. Even with that, there's still minimum show prep going on, as they both wander into the studio about four minutes before showtime and disappear right around the time I put on the "postgame show" song.

Either I come in with topics that we get totally out of hand with and burn a whole quarter or I get shrugs and mumbles.

My own preparation continues to get more and more sketchy by the day, and I shudder to think what it'll be like next semester or even this summer, when I'm taking something resembling a full course load.

Of course, it's not like it'll matter one way or the other, since I'm having it proven repeatedly that no one pays a damn bit of attention to this blog, this radio show, and very few seem to take any notice of whether or not I live or die. Even some people that have the gall to call themselves "The Family" would surprise me greatly if they even knew that I had a radio show at all.

Promo efforts have repeatedly fallen flat, not helped by the fact that MTSU seems mostly apathetic to the fact that there is a student station in their midst.

Station meetings take place at 9 PM, primarily for the sake of one or two people who might take night classes, and screw all the people who live off-campus and might want to go home to see their spouse before said spouse retires for the night.

Station "management" can barely be bothered to spend any effort on helping their "staff" handle anything, whether it's recording a commercial for their shows or explaining why a position on the website has nothing to do with the station, and is therefore off limits to all of us pathetic scrubs.

Sometimes I wonder how much of this is actually similar to an honest-to-God professional radio station. Do the guys at the Zone have to deal with an apathetic management that can't respond to anything in a timely manner?

I know the hosts don't have to deal with pushing all the buttons and doing all the programming themselves because they have their own producers. Maybe that's the part that's most difficult. When I'm busy trying to pull something up on the computer to support our discussion, I'm also conducting said discussion, choosing the spots that will run at the next break, and preparing the music that will play at the intermissions. Dan Patrick and Mike Greenberg don't have to deal with all this.

And I'm quite sure the guys that do this for a living have very understanding wives who know that keeping up with sports is what pays the bills. I have no doubts that mine will be that way when that actually comes to pass for me. Until then, however, Tuesday night is Biggest Loser night, Thursday night is Survivor, and if I spend too many nights on the computer doing research, it might become a Relationship Issue.

And for all this, I can't get anyone to tell me if the show's any good or if it stinks like week-old milk. Only one podcast has had both halves reach 10 listens (and I think a couple of those were me doing troubleshooting). I can count the number of comments on this blog (all 10 months' worth) on one hand. People on Facebook are doing their damndest to ignore promotional efforts...oh, unless they're a call-in guest, and then they'll shout it from the rooftops. Sometimes. That's if they're not too fucking arrogant to admit that they're slumming on a college radio show in the first place.

I have no doubt that it'll all become much more fun once I learn how to do it right. Unfortunately, I can't find anyone willing or able to tell me exactly what it is I'm doing wrong.

But, enough whining. I've been germinating a post on the 96-team NCAA monstrosity for weeks now, and I should probably get around to finishing that instead of bitching to a room that's pretty empty already.

4 Quarters Radio Episode 11: 2nd Half

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NBA Crimes and Punishment open the second half of March 30's show, with Big Z making a jailbreak back to Cleveland and Gilbert Arenas getting a return to Washington next season. A brief history of football players in pro wrestling follows, provoked by Bill Goldberg potentially bringing Shawne Merriman with him on a return to WWE. NFL trade speculation continues after that, primarily swirling around Brandon Marshall. UFC 111 results are discussed in the 4th, with a little extra ridicule for Jon Fitch making noise like he's ready to cross the boss. Monta Ellis's delusions of grandeur (spoiled by Scott for both of our listeners earlier) headline the Epic Fails. Excised music: "Cover Me" by Bruce Springsteen and "Let the Madness Begin" by Fozzy.

4 Quarters Radio Episode 11: 1st Half

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March 30's first half starts off with a repeat appearance from Adam Biggers of the Flint (Mich.) Journal discussing Michigan State's Final Four prospects...and also being vaguely aware that there are three other teams there, too. From there, Scott steers the rapidly careening 4Q train from sporting philosophy (do you BIRG and CORF?) to tangentially sports-related pornography. Tall Russians and women get shouts out in Whodaman, as well. Excised music: "Yes" by LMFAO.