Men's Basketball Research Articles

NCAA Tournament Games: The Real Nitty-Gritty

The NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Committee annually selects its national championship tournament's at-large invitees, and assigns seeds to all participants. As part of its deliberations, the Committee is provided a so-called "nitty-gritty report" for each team, containing numerous team performance statistics. Many elements of this report receive a great deal of attention by the media and fans as the tournament nears, including a team's Ratings Percentage Index (or RPI), overall record, conference record, non-conference record, strength of schedule, record in its last 10 games, etc. However, few previous studies have evaluated the degree to which these factors are related to whether a team actually wins games once the tournament begins. Using nitty-gritty information for the participants in the 638 tournament games during the 10 seasons from 1999 through 2008, we use stepwise binary logit regression to build a model that includes only eight of the 32 nitty-gritty factors we examined. We find that in some cases factors that receive a great deal of attention are not related to game results, at least in the presence of the more highly related set of factors included in the model.

Reconceptualizing and Reexamining Suspense as a Predictor of Mediated Sports Enjoyment

Suspense is a driving force behind media entertainment consumption. However, previous explorations of the role of suspense in the enjoyment of mediated sports have not fully relied upon the richness of research from other genres. The current study seeks to correct this oversight by using the lens of fictional drama to reconceptualize and reexamine suspense as a factor in the enjoyment of sports programming. A total of 161 participants viewed and rated 1 of 7 men's basketball games. The results suggest that a measure of the unfolding nature of suspense is a stronger predictor of mediated sports enjoyment than those used previously.

Optimal release conditions for the free throw in men's basketball

The purpose of this study was to determine the optimum release conditions for the free throw in men's basketball. The study used hundreds of thousands of three-dimensional simulations of basketball trajectories. Five release variables were studied: release height, release speed, launch angle, side angle, and back spin. The free throw shooter was assumed to shoot at 70% and to release the ball 2.134 m (7 ft) above the ground. We found that the shooter should place up to 3 Hz of back spin on the ball, should aim the ball towards the back of the ring, and should launch the ball at 52° to the horizontal. We also found that it is desirable to release the ball as high above the ground as possible, as long as this does not adversely affect the player's launch consistency.

AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF HUMAN CAPITAL AND PERFORMANCE: NCAA MEN'S BASKETBALL TEAMS.

The article discusses empirical research concerning human capital and business performance with a focus on the men's basketball teams in the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The discussion...

Dyspnea on Exertion - Basketball

HISTORY: 19 year-old Freshman D-I men's basketball player presented complaining of dyspnea on exertion during preseason conditioning. He says that within 10-15 minutes of running he begins to feel very short of breath. He says he cannot keep up with his teammates. He has never had symptoms like this before. He denies fever, cough, wheezing, chest pain, no stridor, recent illness, syncope, dizziness, edema, palpitations. Upon resting, his symptoms resolved within minutes. He has a past medical history significant for congenital pectus excavatum. PHYSICAL EXAMINATION: Vital signs stable. Pulse Ox 96% RA. Peak flow average was 495. He is a tall, thin male with no Marfanoid features, but he does have a significant pectus excavatum deformity. He has no spinal deformity, no scoliosis, negative thumb sign, negative wrist sign, normal arm span, no arachnodactyly. Heart rate regular rate and rhythm; there is no murmur. Normal distal pulses palpable and no lower extremity edema. Lungs are clear with no wheezing and good air movement. DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSIS: Exercise Induced Bronchospasm Decreased Exercise Tolerance Pulmonary Hypertension Anemia Valvular Disease Myocarditis Cardiomyopathy Arrhythmia TEST AND RESULTS: Further history revealed Cardiopulmonary Stress Testing was done one year prior because of similar complaints. Findings consisted of decreased VO2 max, below the expected range for his capacity. Spirometry suggested possible increased airway resistance but no reversibility with bronchodilators. FEV1/FVC was normal. EKG was normal at rest and with stress testing. He was not able to compensate for the expected metabolic acidosis seen with exercise by increasing his minute ventilation during exercise. FINAL WORKING DIAGNOSIS: Congenital Pectus Excavatum leading to decreased Aerobic Capacity and Exercise Tolerance TREATMENT AND OUTCOMES: It was felt that there would likely not be any significant changes in these results in one year's time. An intensive aerobic exercise training program has been recommended to improve his VO2 max along with consideration to repeat Cardiopulmonary Stress Testing if symptoms persist.

Important Characteristics of Successful NCAA Division III Basketball Players and Programs as Perceived by their Coaches

All NCAA Division III head men's basketball coaches were surveyed to determine how important they believed 20 specific mental attributes were to the success of players and how 6 specific academic related items were to the success of programs. Means of a five point Likert-scale from very important (5) to very unimportant (1) were analyzed. Mental attributes of players considered very important at the highest rates were <i>mental toughness</i> (82.7%), <i>coping against adversity</i> (73.3%), <i>self-confidence</i> (74.1%), <i>in-game decision making</i> (81.0%), and <i>training hard to improve performance</i> (76.7%). The academic related item considered very important at the highest rate was having an <i>academic support program</i> (72.4%). Coaches should further emphasize the aforementioned items in order to improve the success of their players and programs.

Ocular Injury Rates in College Sports

To determine the rate of eye injury sustained in 12 college sports in order to assess whether there is a high risk of ocular eye injury in some sports. From the fall of 1990 through the spring of 2006 at an NCAA Division III college, all ocular injuries that occurred while participating in a varsity sport and reported to the training room were retrospectively analyzed to obtain an ocular injury rate per sport. This study included 5921 participants during a 16-yr period. During this time, 10 ocular injuries were sustained in five different sports. Five (50%) occurred while playing men's basketball, one (10%) in women's basketball, two (20%) in men's water polo, one (10%) in baseball, and one (10%) while playing women's soccer. The rate of ocular injury as a result of participation in baseball, basketball, cross-country, football, golf, soccer, swimming and diving, track and field, water polo, softball, or volleyball is very low. Hence, any discussion with athletes regarding the utility of eye protection while participating in any of these sports should focus on the athlete's past ocular history instead of the sport to be played.

The Effects of Combining Elastic and Free Weight Resistance on Strength and Power in Athletes

This study was undertaken to determine whether combined elastic and free weight resistance (CR) provides different strength and power adaptations than free weight resistance (FWR) training alone. Forty-four young (age 20 +/- 1 years), resistance-trained (4 +/- 2 years' experience) subjects were recruited from men's basketball and wrestling teams and women's basketball and hockey teams at Cornell University. Subjects were stratified according to team, then randomly assigned to the control (C; n = 21) or experimental group (E; n = 23). Before and after 7 weeks of resistance training, subjects were tested for lean body mass, 1 repetition maximum back squat and bench press, and peak and average power. Both C and E groups performed identical workouts except that E used CR (i.e., elastic resistance) for the back squat and bench press, whereas the C group used FWR alone. CR was performed using an elastic bungee cord attached to a standard barbell loaded with plates. Elastic tension was accounted for in an attempt to equalize the total work done by each group. Statistical analyses revealed significant (P < 0.05) between-group differences after training. Compared with C, improvement for E was nearly three times greater for back squat (16.47 +/- 5.67 vs. 6.84 +/- 4.42 kg increase), two times greater for bench press (6.68 +/- 3.41 vs. 3.34 +/- 2.67 kg increase), and nearly three times greater for average power (68.55 +/- 84.35 vs. 23.66 +/- 40.56 watt increase). Training with CR may be better than FWR alone for developing lower and upper body strength, and lower body power in resistance-trained individuals. Long-term effects are unclear, but CR training makes a meaningful contribution in the short term to performance adaptations of experienced athletes.

Media Clips: March Madness; Do Cents Make Sense?

Every March, men's college basketball teams compete in the NCAA tournament. Sixty-five teams participate, with two teams vying for the 64th slot. The 64 teams are divided into four 16-team regions, in which they are seeded 1 through 16. The winning team in each region advances to the Final Four. Fans participate by submitting predicted outcomes for the 64 teams to pools like that run by ESPN.

Assessing the impact of NCAA scandals: an exploratory analysis

This article studies the impact of athletic scandals in higher education by examining changes in key variables including overall enrolment, number of freshman applications, overall charitable contributions, alumni charitable athletic contributions and corporate charitable athletic contributions. This exploratory study involved a case analysis of 15 universities covering an 8-year period that had been placed on NCAA probation for infractions involving their men's basketball and football programmes during the 1998?2005 academic calendar years. Preliminary results indicate that athletic scandal does negatively impact overall charitable giving and overall enrolment and that the impact is long-term in nature. However, contrary to our expectations, we found that scandal had a positive impact on alumni athletic contributions, corporate athletic contributions and total freshman applications. A set of managerial implications for colleges and university administrators as well as future research is discussed.

Sport fans' responses to the end of the season

While the benefits of identification with a sport team have been described (Wann, 2006a), the conditions under which fans will change or switch identification have not been investigated. The present study was designed to address this gap. Participants (154 college students) indicated how likely they were to engage in various acts following a basketball loss in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship tournament by the University of Kentucky (UK) men's basketball team. Half of the vignettes described a loss early in the tournament, while half of the vignettes described a loss in the Final Four. Results indicated that the timing of the loss, level of team identification, level of basketball fandom and level of maladaptive fan beliefs all influenced the likelihood that participants partook in certain activities. The results are discussed in terms of the influences that affect such decisions.

Winning Does Matter: Patterns in Private Giving to Athletic and Academic Programs at NCAA Division I-AA and I-AAA Institutions

In a study of “big-time” athletic programs, Stinson and Howard (2004) documented a shift in donor giving patterns toward increased support of athletic programs at the apparent expense of giving to academic programs. The shift toward greater athletic giving was most evident at those schools with major football programs. This study's primary purpose is to determine whether the changes found at the Division I-A level are also evident at schools that compete at the Division I-AA or I-AAA level. Linear mixed models indicate that successful athletic programs influence both the number of donors making gifts to an institution and the average dollar amount of those gifts. However, unlike the giving patterns at I-A football schools, winning football and men's basketball teams have direct effects on both athletic and academic gifts. Rather than producing a crowding-out effect, athletic success appears to enhance support for both athletic and academic programs.

A Sane Island Surroundded

THE HEADLINE for the cover story of the sports section of USA Today on 9 February 2007 asked: Do prep basketball teams go too far? Underneath, a one-sentence summary read: Long-distance trips, whirlwind schedules mean missed class time but more TV exposure, money. The story recounted six days in which the boys' basketball team of Lakewood Artesia High School of California played five games, including one game in North Carolina. Over the years and across the nation, administrators of school sports programs have wrung their hands in worry and frustration over this sort of thing, which they believe is an example of the damage being done to interscholastic athletic programs by major college and professional sports, combined with nonschool sports programs for young people. However, all of these outside influences combined have not been as damaging to interscholastic athletics as the too frequent lack of creativity and courage on the part of those who are actually in charge of these programs. A combination of commercialism and professionalism has become a powerful force undermining the wholesome nature of amateur athletic programs in the local secondary schools of America. Meanwhile, those of us responsible for promoting the proper principles of school sports and protecting them from blatant attacks and insidious erosion have, for the most part, put up a pitiful defense. In some cases, we have simply retreated in full gallop. And we have gotten what our feeble efforts have deserved. But the seductions of commercialism and professionalism in scholastic sports were not created in a vacuum. The growth in popularity of professional sports in America parallels--in fact, has been primarily powered by--the introduction of television, and it has been the pervasive influence of television on American life that has driven content-starved networks to televise all kinds of sports, every day of the week, at all hours of the day. And this constant bombardment of the public psyche by a commercialized and professionalized version of sport has had its effect, first on college sports and, more recently, on scholastic sports. Numerous books have documented how and why men's basketball and football at the Division I level of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) have been seduced toward commercialism and professionalism.(1) The seduction of scholastic sports in the same direction is less spectacular and has been the subject of fewer books.(2) In recent decades, school sports programs have found themselves under assault not just from the levels of sports above (major college and professional sports), but also from those below: nonschool community youth sports programs. The Amateur Sports Act of 1978 removed the stranglehold of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) on the U.S. Olympic Committee and the participation by U.S. athletes in international sports. The law empowered newly created individual sports federations, in sports ranging from basketball to gymnastics to soccer, to organize and to some degree to regulate a sport from top to bottom, except for the programs of schools and colleges. The growth of these programs eventually led to a proliferation of youth sports camps, leagues, and tournaments across a wide range of sports. These generally well-intentioned single-sport organizations understandably see the world almost exclusively from the viewpoint of their own sport. Over the years, these organizations have pushed athletes toward competition at ever earlier ages and in ever longer seasons. One unintended consequence is that, with rare exceptions, their calendars--if not their codes--have promoted specialization in a single sport year-round. Another unintended consequence of the 1978 legislation is that the AAU, no longer able to serve the international interests of dozens of sports, lowered its sights and aimed its efforts inward: not just to grass-roots youth sports organizations, but also to leagues, camps, and tournaments for basketball teams for players aged 8 to 18. …

They Play Like Girls: Gender Equity in NCAA Sports

Based on our review of several literatures—the general sociology literature, the sport sociology literature, and the gender literature—we find that there exists an important literature that demonstrates that great strides have been made in opportunities for participation for women at all stages of the athletic pipeline. However, there are few if any studies of gender equity in resource allocation in competitive intercollegiate sports. Framed through the lens provided by feminist theory, this paper analyzes data collected from the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA) to examine the issue of gender equity in resource allocation in intercollegiate (NCAA) Division 1 sports. We find that there is significantly more gender equity in resource allocation in nonrevenue, gender neutral sports, particularly soccer, than in the high profile, revenue generating, masculinized sport of basketball. The use of this data as well as our analysis—which make "head to head" comparisons in resource allocations to men's and women's basketball and soccer—makes this paper unique. Theoretically we argue that the closer women get to encroaching on men's domain, specifically in basketball, the more gender differences are highlighted and gender boundaries are enforced. This paper makes a significant contribution and advancement in the sociological study of sport literature as well as in the gender studies literature.

The incidence and severity of dental trauma in intercollegiate athletes

The use of protective devices such as mouthguards during participation in contact sports may be effective in reducing the incidence or severity of dental injuries. Dental injuries reported to the athletic department at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, were recorded from 1996 through 2005. The authors classified each injury and determined the severity of the injury. Severity was defined in relation to the treatment required and the prognosis of the teeth and supporting tissues involved. Fifty-one traumatic dental injuries were reported. Basketball was the sport with the highest injury rate; it had an incidence rate (IR) of 10.6 injuries per 100 athlete-seasons among men, and an IR of 5.0 injuries per 100 athlete-seasons among women. The IR for men's basketball players was five times higher than that for football players for whom mouthguard use is mandatory. Given the relatively high incidence of dental injury in basketball and the potential of mouthguard use to reduce the incidence and severity of the trauma, mandatory use of mouthguards among collegiate basketball players should be considered. Dental professionals have a responsibility to educate patients and the public about the importance of using mouth-guard protection in contact sports.

Match and Motion Analyses of High Loading Movements in NCAA Men's Basketball Competitions

Much research has been performed on movement patterns in soccer, netball, and ice hockey. However, little is known for basketball. No studies have been conducted on frequency and intensity of high loading movements such as different types of jumping and cutting movements in basketball. PURPOSE: To identify high loading activities and to examine frequency and intensity characteristics of movements of an NCAA Division-I men's basketball team. METHODS: Three home games were analyzed against two conference and one non-conference teams of the Southeast Conference during 2003–4 season. In the initial analysis, high loading movements and their levels of intensity were identified. These movements and intensity were included in the subsequent frequency analysis: low and high intensity 2-leg and 1-leg jumps, stops, lateral and v-cuts, and pivots (from a jump). The players were placed into the guard (guards and forwards) and center groups for the purpose of analysis. Two evaluators conducted the frequency counts of the movements on all players of the home team. The reliability of both evaluators was examined prior to the frequency analyses using an intra-class correlation analysis and a paired t-test. The position difference for frequency counts was analyzed with a one-way repeated measures ANOVA (p < 0.05). RESULTS: The paired t-test showed no significant differences between the two evaluators. The intra-class correlation analysis showed high intra-class coefficients (r = 0.87 - 0.99). The frequency analyses showed that each position player performed an average of 65 high loading movements during a game and 3 8 of them were jumping related. Fourteen or 38% of the jumps were identified as high intensity. The results also showed that an average of 8.3 lateral cuts (59%) and 5.7 V cuts (41%) was performed. The guards performed greater numbers of low running stop and lateral and V cuts, and fewer numbers of low intensity jumps and pivots than the centers. No significant difference was found for the high intensity jumps between the two positions. CONCLUSIONS: The results on the jumping movements are similar to professional competitions. This study provides a detailed profile of high loading movements during NCAA-I men's basketball games. Funded by a grant from adidas International.

Book Review

This descriptive study investigated the graduation percentages and the Academic Progress Rates for those schools participating in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Men's Basketball Championship Final Four for the years 2000 to 2004. Preliminary assumptions about the lack of academic success of male student athletes participation in NCAA Division I basketball led to an anticipation of low academic achievement revealed by historical graduation. The findings revealed that measured academic progress was different depending on the methodology utilized. The historical method of utilizing Federal guidelines to measure successful college graduation revealed that overall, schools participating in the Final Four did not do a successful job of graduating their male student athletes participating in basketball. More specifically, African American basketball athletes graduated in lower percentages compared to their white counterparts and the average for all teams was lower than for Division I male student athletes and Division I men's basketball teams. However, when Academic Progress Rates were utilized to measure academic success, participating Final Four teams fared better than the average for all male student athletes and NCAA Division I men's basketball teams.

"The Only Thing Left for the Whites Is a Couple of Coaching Jobs": Revisiting the Discursive Influence of Pre- and Post-Brown Media on Desegregation and Resegregation in Collegiate Sports

Former CBS sports analyst, "Jimmy the Greek" Snyder said "The only thing left for the Whites is a couple of coaching jobs" (Shapiro, 1988, pp. A1, A10). The Supreme Court's landmark <i>Brown I</i> and <i>II</i> decisions brought a sharp increase in the visibility of some of the most exceptional black college athletes the country. Subsequently, many segregated, white institutions began to recruit these black "superspades" (Harris, 1993, p. 52; and Davis, 1995, p. 627) per team and mass media sources began to compare/contrast blacks and whites via sporting events. This manuscript revisits historical and contemporary messages of the mass media regarding blacks vs. whites in college athletics and considers how mass mediated sports involve (1) discursive innovation (Hughes, 2005), (2) a revolutionary message, (3) simplistic appeals to emotions, (4) rhetorical figures generating an aura of "presence," (5) invocations to a collective identity that is conducive to a situation-distressed collective group seeking a solution to social problems as a means of escape, and (6) dramatization of polarized aggression between forces of good and bad that is indicative of impending doom or hopelessness restricting individual perspectives in favor of collective group identity (Lewis, 1988). The manuscript discusses how this particular construction of messages may have contributed to the desegregation and resegregation (Orfield, 2001) of the two most visible, NCAA Division I sports: men's college basketball and football. Moreover, the article provides evidence of the necessity for an ongoing academic investigation of sports and athletes in education.

An investigation of the relationship between television broadcasting and game attendance

This study investigated the relationship between whether a major conference NCAA Division I men's college basketball game was televised and game attendance during the 2003–2004 and 2004–2005 seasons. Multiple regression analysis was used to examine this relationship while controlling for 19 other potentially confounding variables. A significant regression model was created (F = 111.586, p < 0.001), explaining 77.6% of the variance in game attendance. The model estimated that men's basketball game attendance increased by 564 spectators when a game was broadcast on television, ceteris paribus, representing a 6.3% increase over the mean game attendance of 8892. These findings support practitioners broadcasting home men's basketball games on television, as television broadcasting was found to be significantly related to a substantial increase in game attendance in the population studied.

Reliability and Validity of the Performance Index Evaluation Among Men's and Women's College Basketball Players

The Performance Index Evaluation (PIE) is a basketball-specific assessment of physical performance. The battery consists of items typically included in sport assessments, such as agility and power, but also addresses an often-overlooked performance component, namely, core strength. The purpose of this study was to examine the reliability (test-retest, interrater), validity (criterion-related, construct-related), and practice effect of the PIE among men's and women's college basketball players. Test-retest estimates were moderate for men (intraclass correlation coefficient [ICC] = 0.79) and poor for women (ICC = 0.35), but interrater reliability was high (ICC = 0.95). Criterion-related validity evidence (i.e., relationship between PIE and playing time) was weak, but construct-related evidence was acceptable (i.e., college players had higher scores than high school players). A practice effect was also demonstrated among men. In conclusion, reliability of the battery should be improved before its use is recommended among college basketball players. Additionally, the battery does not appear to be a predictor of performance but does appear to distinguish between skill levels.