The 6th Man of St. John's Basketball

The Southeastern Conference’s basketball league slate not only features a historic tipoff date but all eighteen games in the 2016-2017 season will be televised as a result of the SEC’s contract with ESPN. Putting aside what the college basketball lines have to say, there is something exciting about this SEC schedule.

 

For the very first time since Arkansas came into the SEC (before the 1991-92 season), the Razorbacks are set to open league play in December. Along with the Gators journeying to Fayetteville for the first time since the 2013-14 season, the Razorbacks will tip off with Florida in the Bud Walton Arena on the 29th of December.

 

The Razorbacks can look forward to a number of home and home games, contending against the likes of LSU, Vanderbilt, and Missouri, not to mention Texas A&M. They will also welcome Mississippi State.

 

Arkansas can look forward to making single road trips to Auburn, Kentucky, Tennessee and South Carolina.

 

The back-to-back road tests awaiting Arkansas will begin with a trip to Tennessee on the 3rd of January. The side will also play Kentucky on the 7th of January at Rupp Arena, this after a conference-opener with the gators.

 

The Razorbacks’ schedule consists of four Saturday home games during league action. If all goes according to plan, then they should be hosting Missouri, LSU, Ole Miss and Georgia on the 14th of January, 21st of January, 18th of February and the 4th of March, these contests bringing the regular season to a close.

 

Sports enthusiasts will flood the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville between 8th and 12th in March. This is where the SEC Basketball Tournament will be held in 2017 (for the fourth time in five years).

 

With the Razorbacks, there is Head Coach Mike Anderson’s tactics to look forward to; Andersons is in his sixth season at the head of the team. With Arkansas, the key to their success will be three of their four top scorers who are returning for the new season. Notable names include Moses Kingsley, a SEC player of the year candidate that participated in the Nike Academy in Los Angeles this summer.

 

The camp brought many of the best players in the country together, giving them a chance to build their talents under the guidance of legendary Nike stars like LeBron James and Anthony Davis.

 

While Arkansas’ top three scorers are indeed something to behold, the Razorbacks are not without notable own stars. Dusty Hannah’s is one of only three players in the history of the program to score thirty points in a SEC tournament game.

 

Dusty will be accompanied by a complement of veteran returnees, this along with a highly touted recruiting class from which the Razorbacks can mine talent. Jaylen Barford is of particular interest.

 

Scoring an average of 26.2 points per game in 2015, Jaylen ended the year as the top JUCO student in the nation. Daryl Macon’s 23.9 points per game average weren’t that bad either. He was also ranked the Number 3 JUCO transfer in the class of 2016, having earned All-American honors in consecutive seasons.

 

There is a lot of excitement (and some anxiety)surrounding the 2017 Men’s basketball schedule.

All talk about the latest college basketball national championship odds is taking a backseat in favor of the news coming from Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal about the Big Ten and their billion dollar deal with ESPN.

If these most recent reports are to be believed, then the Big Ten is set to maintain their old position on ESPN, with the two entities having come to a six-year-long agreement allowing ESPN to secure about half of the Big Ten’s media rights for a whopping $1.14 billion.

The Big Ten has become synonymous with massive paydays. However, according to the Sports Business Journal, ESPN’s deal with the Big Ten is going to drop a few jaws and break a few records.

According to John Ourand of the Sports Business Journal, ESPN’s decision to spend more than a billion dollars on half of the Big Ten’s media rights means that the conference will see the average media rights payout triple.

Rumors about the purchase of the first half of the media rights package have been rife for several months, with confirmation coming out of Fox in April that it had purchased them for a $240 million annual fee. The first half of the package will commence once the coming college basketball season ends.

One cannot ignore CBS, which decided to re-up its basketball deal with the Big Ten, this securing a $10million annual fee. Take into account ESPN’s decision to spend an estimated $190million a year (over a period of six years) to purchase the Big Ten’s Media rights and the conference is looking to bring in a shocking $2.64 billion in the next 72 months.

Looking at this deal, at the amount of money three large networks are willing to pay for media rights, one cannot help but admire the colossal monster than Football and basketball have become.

And the length of the deals cannot be ignored. In six years, the conference will have a chance to renegotiate these deals all over again, most likely raising the figure a few notches higher.

The entertainment commodities around which these deals revolve have never been more popular. Fox and ESPN are looking to net over 20 football games and 50 basketball games each, with the Big Ten Network still showing the expected allotment of games.

Fox, which has majority ownership of the Big Ten network, will most likely carry the championship game every year for the duration of this deal. The fact that they will also enjoy game selection advantages will probably irk ESPN executives, what with the biggest games going to Fox.

Based on Ourand’s understanding of the deal, Fox has the benefit of being the first network to pick those weeks where it gets the first choice of games every year, with ESPN following and then Fox coming in third and so on and so forth.

Viewers can expect to find the majority of ESPN’s Big Ten games on ESPN, ABC, and ESPN2, with ESPNU having the least amount of Big Ten games.

CBS has a separate deal that permits it to keep airing the Big Ten Tournament semifinals and title game through 2023. The 14 conference schools are probably salivating at the massive infusion of cash they can expect in the coming years.

When it comes to college football, the SEC is considered the best conference because it has won more championships than any other conference over the past 20 years. When it comes to basketball, the conference is firmly in the shadows of the ACC and Big East. According to most college basketball predictions, an ACC or Big East team is favored to win the championship again next season. If that happens, it will be the fifth consecutive year an ACC team or Big East (and former Big East) school won the championship.

Even though SEC member Kentucky won the championship in 2012 and was the runner up in 2014, the SEC hasn’t been getting a lot of recognition as a college basketball powerhouse. A lot of it is due to the fact that Kentucky is the only team in the conference that is considered a legitimate contender because head coach John Calipari usually has one of the best recruiting classes ever since he got to Lexington.

The SEC is serious about improving the way it is perceived when it comes to college basketball, and the conference showed how serious it was by hiring former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese as a special advisor to the commissioner for men’s basketball.

Tranghese is now charged with turning the SEC’s basketball fortunes around. According to reports, Tranghese spoke with coaches and commissioners from SEC schools this week at the league meetings, drawing praise for his plans to the league’s basketball teams close the gap on their football teams.

Last season, the SEC had three teams invited to the NCAA tournament, making it the third time in the past four years that the conference only had three teams in the tournament. By comparison, the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, and Pac-12 all seven teams in the tournament this year.

The disparity in the amount of bids received by the SEC and the other major conferences shows that the SEC is not considered a top basketball conference. Tranghese believes the conference is capable of doing more than it has in the past.

Tranghese has some plans to build the SEC’s college basketball reputation, and it starts with scheduling games against some of the best teams in the top conferences. Tranghese also wants teams to figure out how to start winning their important non-conference matchups and he wants the coaches to work together to expand the conference’s brand.

Some of the ways Tranghese wants the coaches to work together include embracing late games on television instead of complaining about them. Tranghese also expects the coaches to use football as a recruiting tool to help teams attract better talent to the conference.

As an example, Tranghese said that if he were recruiting a player to come to an SEC school, he would make sure to invite the prospect to visit during a weekend where there is a conference rivalry game like Alabama vs. Tennessee being played.

Tranghese believes that SEC schools need to use all the tools they have to their advantage when it comes to recruiting, so if being part of a big rivalry game is one of the tools that a team has, the team needs to use it to its advantage.