Forty names, games, teams and minutiae making news in college basketball (old plastic projectiles sold separately in Bloomington).
Awkward Carousel Season
There has been an unusual amount of pre-March movement on the coaching carousel with significant jobs. The Virginia Cavaliers, Miami Hurricanes, Florida State Seminoles and Indiana Hoosiers all have seen head coaches step down or announce their retirement at season’s end, which could lead to some awkward situations at a couple of those locales.
Could Indiana (1) be headed for a long goodbye to Mike Woodson?
Indiana is just 2–6 in its last eight, but the two wins are bangers—an upset at the Big Ten–leading Michigan State Spartans, and then a second-half annihilation of the hated Purdue Boilermakers on Sunday. Those victories have substantially improved the Hoosiers’ NCAA tournament positioning, moving them closer toward the field of 68 at 16–11 overall and 7–9 in the league. Woodson is definitely leaving at season’s end, but the tenor of that departure and the actual expiration date on the Woodson era could change significantly if Indiana makes a closing charge.
The win over Purdue was notable for a couple of reasons. The most significant was the overpowering flurry Indiana hit the Boilers with in the second half, a 28–3 punchout in the first 8:04 that turned a 12-point halftime deficit into a commanding lead. The second notable element was Woodson benching his two leading scorers, big man Oumar Ballo and forward Mackenzie Mgbako, to start the game. Ballo played 11 minutes and 42 seconds of the decisive second half and Mgbako didn’t play at all, finishing the game scoreless in nine minutes of action. In what little time he has remaining on the job, Woodson might have hit upon a major addition-by-subtraction chemistry move.
Meanwhile, speculation about who will replace Woodson shifts quickly away from Michigan and Dusty May (2) after he agreed to a contract extension. The Minutes’ free advice for the Hoosiers is to outfit T.J. Otzelberger (3) in an IU crimson smedium polo, or go get Mick Cronin from UCLA.
But there was more free advice in the air Sunday. Purdue coach Matt Painter (4) dropped a truth bomb on the IU fans when asked what he thought the program needed going forward:
“Let’s support somebody. Try that out for once, every now and then. … They jump on and off things here way too much. Like, support your coach, man. Support your players. See how that works for you. They build them up, and they overdo things. Quit overdoing s---. Just accurately talk about what’s actually happened. … It’s hard for young people to hear all that and then collectively play like, ‘Hey man, we’re playing for you guys, but you dog us when we lose and then we’re the best when we win.’ … So I think they need to learn from some of those things and support [athletic director] Scott Dolson and support the new coach and support the staff. But also just kind of be grounded with everything.”
The challenge now for the Duke Blue Devils (5) could be staying grounded as assistant coach Jai Lucas emerges as the top candidate for the vacant Miami job. Those reports surfaced Saturday and were substantive enough for Duke head coach Jon Scheyer to address after his team obliterated the Illinois Fighting Illini in New York.
“Absolutely he’s a head coach, no question about it,” Scheyer said. “It’s part of why I hired him. The job he’s done for us has been incredible. Any report or anything that’s out there, I’m just getting wind of it now. We’ll cross that bridge and figure it out.”
The bridge comes into view Tuesday, when Duke plays at … Miami. That’s going to be weird. But beyond that game, there are a couple of other looming dynamics to deal with.
The Canes look like a long shot to even make the ACC tournament, so their season is likely to end March 8, accelerating the hiring timetable. If Lucas is their guy, can he stay locked in as Scheyer’s defensive coordinator for the rest of what could be a Final Four season? Can he be Kirby Smart, working with total focus alongside Nick Saban before he took the Georgia job? Or would he be Lane Kiffin, who was told to leave by Saban in the middle of the 2016 College Football Playoff because his attention was wandering toward his next job at Florida Atlantic?
And beyond that, if Lucas does go to Miami, what happens with the two star recruits of the 2025 class, twins Cameron and Cayden Boozer (6)? They’re the sons of former Duke great Carlos Boozer, but they were also heavily recruited by Lucas and happen to be from Miami.
It’s one thing to lose a top assistant to a head coaching job—that happens at successful programs. It’s another if you lose a top assistant and have him take two star recruits with him. Maybe that wouldn’t be the case, but it’s another element of intrigue that will hang over a Lucas-Miami courtship that probably went public before key people on both sides would have preferred.
Meanwhile, Florida State (7) might be feeling the pressure rise with its rivals in South Florida already reportedly locking in on a top candidate—and perhaps on the beginnings of a recruiting class. There are a couple of NBA assistants with Seminole ties: Luke Loucks played at FSU for Leonard Hamilton and was on staff with the Golden State Warriors for a couple titles before moving to Sacramento; former Nole great Sam Cassell is currently part of the Boston Celtics’ juggernaut.
If FSU wants to look past alumni ties, there will be no shortage of candidates. More Minutes’ free advice: Take a long look at Samford coach Bucky McMillan (8), who has his fourth straight 20-win team and took the Bulldogs to their first NCAA tournament in 24 years last season; also kick the tires on George Mason’s Tony Skinn, who has won 20 games in both of his two seasons as a head coach.
Speaking of awkward: On the eve of the Kansas Jayhawks hosting the Oklahoma State Cowboys, the Tulsa World reported that Oklahoma State alumnus Bill Self (9) seriously considered going back to his alma mater last spring. Self sort of shot down the story in a statement he gave to Brett McMurphy of the Action Network, while not denying that he spoke with school officials about their open job: “I spoke to them, answered questions about the job and offered my opinion about what is needed to win in our league. Which I have done every time the job has opened. They got the right guy [in Steve Lutz]. I did join Karsten Creek, one of the country’s top golf courses, as an out-of-area member, but I’ve never spent a night close to Stillwater in the last 20 years unless my team was playing there.”
With two national championships and more than two decades of relentless winning at Kansas, Self leaving for another college job—especially one in the Big 12—would have sent ripples through the sport. But in the end it’s a what-if story. (Kansas also beat the tar out of Oklahoma State on Saturday to end a two-game losing streak.)
A compilation of other awkward situations can be summed up in a sentence: keeping it in the family (10) can create tension if things don’t go great.
The Syracuse Orange are nosediving in their second year under Adrian Autry. The Orange are 11–16 and 5–11 in an underwhelming ACC, and quite likely headed to their worst record since the 1968–69 team went 9–16. They’re in danger of missing the 15-team ACC tournament with a Wednesday game against the North Carolina State Wolfpack looming large in that equation.
If there were ever a time to appreciate the rock-solid consistency of the endless Jim Boeheim era, this is it. Autry, who played and coached under Boeheim, is likely to get a chance to fix it in Year 3. But there is a lot to fix.
The Villanova Wildcats are betwixt and between with third-year coach Kyle Neptune, a longtime former assistant to the great Jay Wright. There has been incremental improvement—17–17 to 18–16 to the current 16–12, with three winnable games left in the regular season. But the product has obviously backslid since the end of Wright’s run. Is there strong reason to believe the product will be better in Year 4, after ’Nova loses the nation’s leading scorer in Eric Dixon? A new athletic director, Eric Roedl, will make that call.
Rodney Terry did fine work as the emergency interim coach of the Texas Longhorns in 2022–23, after Chris Beard blew up his tenure there with an off-court situation, earning a No. 2 seed and making an NCAA regional final. Last year was a regression to a No. 7 seed and a second-round ouster. This year in the brutal SEC, Texas is a bubble team with a 5–9 league record despite going hard in the portal in the offseason and the arrival of star freshman Tre Johnson. Don’t be shocked if there is a change in Austin.
The Virginia Cavaliers were also stuck with an interim coach after the 11th-hour resignation of Tony Bennett before the season started. Ron Sanchez moved up the bench to take over, and it has not gone well—the Cavs are 13–14 overall, 6–10 in the ACC, trending toward their first losing season since Bennett’s arrival in 2009–10. Might be time for an entirely new approach at Virginia, moving on from BennettBall and making a hire from outside his realm.
Long Trips Are (Unsurprisingly) Taking Their Toll
On Sunday, USC Trojans coach Eric Musselman followed Cronin in articulating the difficulty of cross-country travel in their new Big Ten reality. While there is zero reason to pity the former Pac-12 schools who sold out their athletes by taking the Big Ten cash grab, Musselman isn’t wrong. Neither was Cronin when he piped up a few weeks ago.
The numbers for the Pac-12 diaspora to the Big Ten and ACC show that they are underperforming when playing two or more time zones away from home, and visitors to the West Coast in the those leagues are underperforming as well. A breakdown of the season to date (in men’s basketball only):
ACC teams playing league road games two or more time zones removed from home are 6–23, a .261 winning percentage. The overall league road record is 57–87, a .396 winning percentage.
Big Ten teams playing league road games two or more time zones removed have been markedly more in line with overall conference visiting performances. Road teams are 20–29, a .408 winning percentage. The league road winning percentage as a whole is .430.
But taking it beyond wins and losses to factor in expected results shows that teams doing the long travel are not quite playing to their predictive standard. Using Ken Pomeroy’s pregame predicted point spreads, the ACC teams playing two or more time zones away have underperformed 17 times, overperformed 11 times and pushed once. Using the same metrics, Big Ten teams playing two or more time zones away have underperformed 24 times, overperformed 20 times and pushed five times.
The Stanford Cardinal (11) and California Golden Bears (12) have been the biggest home heroes/road zeros, going a combined 2–13 on the road in ACC long travel games and 10–4 at home. Stanford has overperformed on the road just once, upsetting the North Carolina Tar Heels, an outcome the Heels may deeply regret come Selection Sunday. Cal overperformed five times but won only once, at NC State. Meanwhile, visitors to the Bay Area have underperformed nine times in 14 games.
The UCLA Bruins (13) lost their first four Big Ten road trips to Central or Eastern time before finally breaking through at Indiana on Feb. 14. The Bruins are 5–2 at home against long travelers, with a home loss to the Minnesota Golden Gophers as the more notable outlier.
The USC Trojans (14) had a stunning win at Illinois but several underperforming road losses, most recently the one against the Rutgers Scarlet Knights that had Musselman lamenting the schedule. The flip side of that was upsetting the Michigan State Spartans in Los Angeles.
The Washington Huskies (15) have been drubbed a couple of times on the road—by 34 at Michigan State and by 24 at the Ohio State Buckeyes—but also won at Minnesota and the Penn State Nittany Lions. They’ve been tougher at home, most notably upsetting the Maryland Terrapins.
The Oregon Ducks (16) have been the best long-travel road team on the West Coast, with a 3–3 record that includes the stunning comeback upset of the Wisconsin Badgers on Saturday. They have, conversely, coughed up some home hairballs—a 32-point loss to Illinois and a loss to the Nebraska Cornhuskers that pumped oxygen into the Huskers’ NCAA dreams.
European Relations
Amid a potential cooling of United States relations with Europe, guess what is happening in college basketball? European imports are playing major roles all over the place. While that’s not new in the sport, the number of impact players is noteworthy, as is the timing.
Trump Administration policies may affect foreign college athletes’ ability to make NIL money and their ease of movement into and out of the country. Now there is even some political pressure in Texas to not recruit foreign players in favor of Americans. But yo, the Euros are playing some ball right now. An admittedly incomplete Minutes list:
Vlad Goldin (17), Michigan Wolverines center. Home country: Russia. He came from Florida Atlantic with May and leads Michigan in scoring at 15.9 points per game. Goldin is something of a throwback battler, a player who never shies away from interior contact. His 146 free throw attempts are 55 more than anyone else on the Michigan team. Goldin is also the rare player on this list who prepped in the U.S., attending Putnam Science Academy in Connecticut.
Viktor Lakhin (18), Clemson Tigers center. Home country: Russia. After four years at Cincinnati, Lakhin is thriving under Brad Brownell. He’s third on the team in scoring (11.2), second in rebounding (6.1) and first in blocks (1.7). Lakhin has kicked it up another notch during Clemson’s current four-game winning streak, averaging 17.3 points and making six threes.
Henri Veesaar (19), Arizona Wildcats center. Home country: Estonia. The sophomore has improved dramatically year-over-year, achieving consistency this month and moving into the starting lineup the last two games. In February, he is averaging 12.4 points while making 74% of his two-point shots and 44% of his threes.
Igor Milicic Jr. (20), Tennessee Volunteers forward. Home country: Croatia. The son of a successful player and coach, the 6' 9" Milicic transferred in from the Charlotte 49ers and has been an instant impact player for Rick Barnes. He is Tennessee’s leading rebounder (7.6) and is shooting 40% from three-point range in SEC play.
Zvonimir Ivisic (21), Arkansas Razorbacks center. Home country: Croatia. One of the reasons the Hogs are making a run at the NCAA tourney is the elevated play of Ivisic, who has had the first 20-point games of his two-season college career this month—three of them, in fact. Highly skilled but not very physical, Ivisic is a dangerous three-point shooter who is now getting around to defending the rim, too. He’s got 20 blocked shots in the last six games.
Kasparas Jakucionis (22), Illinois guard. Home country: Lithuania. Brad Underwood has counted on the 18-year-old from the moment he arrived and he’s delivered, leading the team in scoring (15.5) and assists (4.8). He also averages a whopping 3.6 turnovers per game, but that’s part of the deal when you entrust a freshman to handle the ball as much as Jakucionis does. Teammate Tomislav Ivisic, from Croatia, leads the Illini in rebounding.
Egor Demin (23), BYU Cougars guard. Home country: Russia. He’s a dazzling 6' 9" passer who made a sensational splash in the season’s opening month. Since then Demin has looked more like the skinny freshman he is, shooting just 27.3% from three and turning the ball over a bit too much. But his talent is unmistakable, and the NBA is watching him closely.
The Saint Mary’s Lithuanians (24), guard Augustas Marciulionis and forward Paulius Murauskas. The Gaels’ top two scorers combine to average 27 points, 10.9 rebounds, 7.6 assists and 2.2 steals, powering them to a 25–4 record and the West Coast Conference title. Saint Mary’s hasn’t even missed Aidan Mahaney since he transferred to Connecticut, largely because Marciulonis has run the team so efficiently.
This Week in SEC Murder Ball
Oklahoma Sooners guard Duke Miles (25) painfully became the poster boy for this SEC season Saturday. In the heat of a must-win home game against the Mississippi State Bulldogs, Miles went sprinting after a loose ball and dived, like Pete Rose into third base, to the floor in pursuit. It was not a soft landing. Miles’s face hit the floor, and soon he was spitting parts of his teeth onto the hardwood.
He came back in and finished the game not much later. And bubbly Oklahoma got a victory it desperately needed.
Winning in this SEC requires hurling oneself face-first into ferocious competition twice a week. Sometimes you get the loose ball; sometimes you get a busted mouth. The Minutes looks at this week’s biggest games, always which are backloaded to the weekend:
Saturday: Auburn Tigers at Kentucky Wildcats (26). In such a deep league, the Tigers’ 13–1 record and two-game lead is wildly impressive. Nothing has rattled them yet; we’ll see if 20,000-plus fans in Rupp Arena can do it. And we’ll see whether Auburn provocateur Chad Baker-Mazara can behave himself for a full 40 minutes. Auburn believes Baker-Mazara is being unfairly targeted by SEC officials, who have assessed him a number of technical and/or flagrant fouls. But if you know you’re under the microscope and keep walking right up the line of what’s allowed and what’s not, you get what you ask for.
Saturday: Alabama Crimson Tide at Tennessee (27). Not many people have Nate Oats’s number, but Barnes can lay a claim to it. The Vols have beaten the Tide three straight times, including a sweep in 2024. Who wins the tempo battle? Alabama is the fastest-paced team in the league, Tennessee is the slowest.
Saturday: Texas A&M Aggies at Florida Gators (28). Texas A&M’s five-game winning streak has given way to a two-game losing streak, leaving the Aggies in a three-way tie for the fourth and final double bye in the league tournament with Tennessee and the Missouri Tigers. Florida has won six straight by an average margin of 15 points.
Stock up: Florida (29) is in hot pursuit of an NCAA No. 1 seed, and one of the reasons why is coach Todd Golden’s giant math brain. This story breaks down why Golden had his team take a seemingly antithetical foul near the end of the first half against Oklahoma on Feb. 18. He was trying to “lose” a possession by 0.2 points less than the analytics suggested they would, sweating the details into the fractions and margins. Florida won the game by 22, so it didn’t matter in the end—but that kind of detailed thinking has helped put the Gators well down the path of a special season.
Stock down: Kentucky (30). The Wildcats are a banged-up team with defensive issues, and those situations might not be fixable this season. They’re down three guards—point guard Kerr Kriisa went down early in the season, with Lamont Butler and Jaxson Robinson following. Butler, the team’s best defender and arguably best overall player, has missed six of the last eight games with a shoulder injury. Robinson, a long wing player who has made 61 threes, missed the last four with a wrist injury. Will they return this season? Nobody is saying.
In their absence, Mark Pope has thrown three freshmen into the SEC fire with largely predictable results, especially at the defensive end. Kentucky is 6–7 over its last 13 games, and the closing stretch is tough. A fun UK season has become a triage operation.
The Best and Worst Beards in the Game
With the news last week that the New York Yankees are softening their policy against facial hair, The Minutes got to thinking about beards in college basketball.
In terms of player beards, the best belongs to J’Wan Roberts (31) of the Houston Cougars. It’s a strong presence but not cartoonishly overgrown. It suits his game.
The beard that needs some reining in belongs to Braden Smith (32) of Purdue. The junior point guard looks like he was trapped in a cave for the last three months. Listed at 6-foot and 170 pounds, Smith’s fur has overwhelmed his slight physique.
The coach with the most prominent beard is Kyle Neptune (33) of Villanova. He actually puts his to use, stroking it often during games.
The most successful? That’s Chris Beard (34), coach of the 19–8 Mississippi Rebels, primed for their first NCAA tournament appearance since 2019.
Heat Check of the Week
Few things are better in basketball than a player who suddenly finds his game, and nobody fits that category this season better than Barry Dunning Jr. (35) of South Alabama. The junior scored 46 points in a loss to Texas State on Saturday, eclipsing his previous college high of 34 from a week earlier. Those games have capped a meteoric return from oblivion for the 6' 6" former Alabama Mr. Basketball.
As a freshman at Arkansas, he scored a total of five points. As a sophomore at Alabama-Birmingham, he scored a total of 15 points. As a junior at South Alabama, he finally got on the floor and started to produce, averaging 13 points a game through January. This month, he’s averaging 23.9 points. And in his last three games, the average is 31.3.
Dunning’s next opportunity to launch is Wednesday against Southern Mississippi.
Shot of the Week
The honor goes to Braxton Bayless (36), who had a career moment in a career game of his own Saturday. With Western Kentucky (37) trailing Louisiana Tech by a point and 5.4 seconds left, Bayless took an inbounds pass and went coast-to-coast for a buzzer-beating layup.
Braxton Bayless (@bayless_braxton) comes with a full head of steam down the court and takes 5 steps from half court to score the Game Winning layup at the Buzzer!! Western Kentucky wins 64-63 over Louisiana Tech pic.twitter.com/lGat3t5m3p
— NCAA Buzzer Beaters & Game Winners (@NCAABuzzerBters) February 23, 2025
That gave Bayless a career-high 27 points and gave the Hilltoppers a walk-off win. Emphasis on walk. He took his last dribble outside the three-point line and somehow got the rim without being called for traveling.
Coach Who Earned His Comp Car This Week
Kevin Young (38), BYU. The first-year head coach had a week to remember, obliterating Kansas at home and then stunning Arizona in Tucson. In another instance of poor officiating, Richie Saunders scored the winning free throws against Arizona after refs bailed him out with a dubious foul call with three seconds left. That was followed by a profane and insulting chant from the Arizona student section, which led to an apology from athletic director Desiree Reed-Francois.
All drama aside, BYU is on a four-game winning streak and on its way to a second straight NCAA bid. Young has been a great successor to Pope.
Coach Who Should Take the Bus to Work
Mark Few (39), Gonzaga. Yes, you read that right. Bulletproof Gonzaga is suddenly vulnerable. After being swept by Saint Mary’s, Few is dealing with the first four-loss WCC season in his 25-year tenure. The Zags are still going to the Big Dance, but that streak of nine straight Sweet 16s is going to be difficult to maintain once they get there.
Buzzer Beater
The Minutes kept it local this past week, but did have a tasty (and potent) beer: Citra Ass Down Double IPA from Louisville-based Against the Grain Brewing (40). Order one and thank The Minutes later. Order two and you’re on your own.
More College Basketball on Sports Illustrated
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Forde Minutes: Taking an Awkward Ride on the Coaching Carousel .