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Hearing, recruits steal thunder from current Buckeyes

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OSUBasketballJunkie

OSUBasketballJunkie

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10/13/05

Hearing, recruits steal thunder from current Buckeyes

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[SIZE=-1]RUSTY MILLER[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=-1]Associated Press[/SIZE]
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COLUMBUS, Ohio - Two months before an NCAA hearing determines the program's future, and 11 months before one of the most heralded recruiting classes ever enrolls at Ohio State, the Buckeyes open practice on Friday.
It's almost as if no one is paying any attention.

An NCAA hearing in December will decide the future of Ohio State's program after the university agreed with seven violations from the tenure of fired coach Jim O'Brien.

That potential doomsday, however, has been bumped from the headlines by a glittering group of verbal commitments featuring the nation's No. 1-rated high school senior, Greg Oden, a 7-foot center from Indianapolis Lawrence North.

The current Buckeyes are caught somewhere in the middle, overshadowed by those two colliding worlds.

"Coach (Thad) Matta has done a very good job of brainwashing us," forward J.J. Sullinger said Thursday at the team's media day. "We don't think about it - it doesn't come across our minds."

If they notice all the off-court distractions, it prompts a chuckle.

"I know it's out there," center Terence Dials said of the fuss over next year's incoming freshmen. "I have friends who work in the athletic office and they tell me, 'Oh, everybody's buying season tickets now because they think if you buy them this year they'll be on the list again next year.' We joke about that."

This year's Ohio State team may be too good to ignore for long. The Buckeyes went 20-12 a year ago despite having their postseason taken away by university officials hoping to appease the NCAA.

The highlight of the season came in the final home game when Matt Sylvester hit a 3-pointer from the right wing with 5.1 seconds left to hand No. 1-ranked Illinois its first loss of the season.

Asked how often someone mentions the shot to him, Sylvester said, "Never." After a hesitation, he grinned and added, "Actually I'm joking. Every other day. Literally, every other day."

Sylvester, one of four senior captains on the team along with Dials, Sullinger and Je'Kel Foster, said it hit home this summer how big his shot was.

"I went out to Vegas this year and was sitting at the blackjack table," Sylvester said. "Some guy - he's looking like he's losing all his money, he looks like he just put his mortgage down - looks over at me and says, 'You're the guy who hit the shot against Illinois!"

The Buckeyes return most of the best players from last year's team, and add Bowling Green transfer Ron Lewis, junior-college sharpshooter Sylvester Mayes and big man recruit Brayden Bell.

The Buckeyes play Chicago State in their opener on Nov. 20.
Soon after that, on Dec. 9, the Buckeyes face their day in court at the NCAA offices in Indianapolis.

"It's still unfortunate that it looms over our head," said Matta, in his second year at Ohio State. "I give our guys a lot of credit. We've never looked behind, only forward."

The NCAA could levy additional penalties, such as extending Ohio State's postseason ban, or could accept Ohio State's self-imposed punishment which includes limiting the number of scholarships.

Meanwhile, a lot of Buckeyes fans are already salivating over the arrival of Oden, his high school teammate, Mike Conley, junior-college transfer Othello Hunter, and top Ohio recruits Daequan Cook and David Lighty.

The current Buckeyes will muddle on through all the distractions, good and bad.

"You can either look at it like, 'Oh, man, here we go again ...' or you can just take it like we've been here before so we know how to handle it," Sullinger said. "We're just excited about this season, and we're excited about Ohio State basketball - for years to come."
Click to expand...
 
Re: "I went out to Vegas this year and was sitting at the blackjack table," Sylvester said.

This doesn't sound good!!!

Yea, I know he's over 21 and didn't do anything illegal. However, I don't think "playing blackjack in Las Vegas" is the ideal image for the Ohio State student athletes .
 
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ScriptOhio said:
Re: "I went out to Vegas this year and was sitting at the blackjack table," Sylvester said.

This doesn't sound good!!!

Yea, I know he's over 21 and didn't do anything illegal. However, I don't think "playing blackjack in Las Vegas" is the ideal image for the Ohio State student athletes .
Click to expand...

Yeah - for what happens in Vegas -- should stay in Vegas.
 
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ScriptOhio said:
Re: "I went out to Vegas this year and was sitting at the blackjack table," Sylvester said.

This doesn't sound good!!!

Yea, I know he's over 21 and didn't do anything illegal. However, I don't think "playing blackjack in Las Vegas" is the ideal image for the Ohio State student athletes .
Click to expand...

as long as robert baker wasn't standing behind sylvester, i have no problem with it.
 
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ScriptOhio said:
Yea, I know he's over 21 and didn't do anything illegal. However, I don't think "playing blackjack in Las Vegas" is the ideal image for the Ohio State student athletes .
Click to expand...
I think people are a little too sensitive since mr. 13 came to town. I doubt I'd enjoy myself in Las Vegas, but I hardly see this as a big deal.
 
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I went to the source (textmap.com) and it is definately one of the stranger things you'll see on the internet. It takes the number of times any "entity" is mentioned in a newspaper, and then makes a map of all the mentionings. Pretty strange ... I checked the source list and all the major ohio papers are used. It takes looking at a map that makes a little intuitive sense to understand it (ie orlando pace)

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but looking at that thad matta map is just crazy. I guess some newspaper editors in the south have a real interest in matta.
 
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Hang with me on this and I can explain it.

Traditionally, marketing expenditure is presented on the income statement and shown as an expense during the year. This suggests that it has created nothing of lasting value. On the other hand, if every part of the Coca-Cola empire were destroyed, not one of us would fail to note that the brand has value.

In recent years, there has been growing recognition of this. Brand equity is now calculated, using various detailed formulae, to represent the longer term value created by marketing investments. Reputation is an element of brand equity that refers to top-of-mind awareness, the opinions people hold about a brand, and their affinity to the brand.

Companies are increasingly measuring and managing brand equity and customer equity (the lifetime value of each customer). These two concepts often dictate the marketing mix (product, price, promotion, place) that will be implemented in a particular geographic market. Geographic information systems have been reduced to desktop systems to enable firms to implement regional marketing strategies. End of tutorial.

The Thad Matta map represents a multivariate map of Thad's reputation. It has been constructed by measuring and modeling "the relative amount of exposure this entity has received over a given period of time at every locale in the United States. These maps were generated for the time period 3/2/2005 - 3/25-2005."

Areas of the map that are shaded in red represent areas where news coverage of Thad was highest during the period. Folks in Atlanta seem to have had high interest in his recruiting and we can see media serving Wake Forest supporters show interest in the Carolinas. In the case of the Orlando Pace map, he receives highest coverage in St.Louis, as might be expected.

The statistical modeling exercises behind analyses such as these can be very sophisticated, using Bayesian estimation, artificial neural networks or more traditional spatial modeling approaches. The content can be bought from a number of "newspaper clipping" and other media monitoring companies or can be culled automatically using Internet based services that collect data.

How are analyses such as these used by marketers?

Let's take a hypothetical case. Let's say that a large media house decided to attack the athletics department of a large, well-respected university by printing allegations made by a former player. OK, things like this don't happen but let's pretend that it did.

The business analysts in the media company's marketing department likely would use an approach similar to this to measure mentions of the campaign in other national and local media and to measure the location of email traffic. For instance, one measure might be the amount of traffic on boards such as BP. Another measure might bethe number of mentions and direction (positive/negative) of commentary in newspaper sports pages in the top 50 media markets.

A professionally run media firm would use many different measures to determine the kind of coverage to give a major story. These could then be related to audience measures (who, how many) by geographic market. This will give some BP members a better understanding of why I, and some others who work in this profession, believed that the attack on Ohio State was premeditated. Large media firms have the capability to put very sophisticated audience management tools into place and ESPiN is the largest sports media company. Given the fiduciary responsibilities that the directors have to the shareholders, it is highly unlikely that such "best practices" will not be implemented.

The ability to "light up the map" might help explain why allegations disproven in the first NCAA investigation of Clarett got repeated anyway, Desmond Howard got hired and why sports announcer commentary is managed to the extent that Herbie once indicated...and why I, and others who work in this profession, will tell you that, no matter how nice and cozy things seem today, ESPiN is not our friend. It's just not their job.

Whether your organization is a university, a commercial firm, or a governmental organization, it must take a media management approach of its own and ensure that it understands and engages in good reputation management so that is is capable of responding effectively and proactively to challenges to its reputation.
 
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there's no way I'm reading that whole thing. I'm glad NC is writing about thad matta a lot. It still doesn't explain why Ohio isn't even close to some of those other red areas. Almost all of the papers in Ohio have some interest in Ohio State, so that's gonna be a ton of chances for Thad Matta's name to come up. Plus, this was right around the close of the bball season, so it would have been very relevant to talk about Thad's future a lot.
 
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