PLAYING THE DOMINANT STRATEGY, BADLY?

The University of Illinois has been revealed as a candy store for legislators, and its faculty has discovered that reasserting some authority over feckless administrators is a more promising strategy than  ... using the net outflow of students to Michigan or Wisconsin as an excuse to starve Northern Illinois and the other state universities of resources.  It's the perfect time to clean house in the basketball programs.

Illinois – as the state’s flagship institution – resembles a quagmire of revolving presidents, questionable administrative decisions, politics, egos, agendas and I haven’t started with intercollegiate athletics. While it is not with state tax dollars, in an extremely difficult and stressful economic time for higher educational funding in this state, Thomas is firing and hiring like its a Monopoly game. Perception or reality? Probably some of both. With the recent bad press, is it just me, or is the media doing a hatchet job on Illinois, or are the Illini imploding on themselves?

That's retired Northern Illinois sports information director Mike Korcek, showing irritation at coverage of Chief Can't-Skate-With-Badgers hiring a new men's basketball coach from Ohio of the Mid-American.

Groce, who had coached at the Mid-American Conference program since 2008, asked for an average of $1.375 million annually over eight years ($11 million), while Illinois offered about $1.2 million per year for a five- or six-year contract, sources said.

Groce made $307,985 per season and it had been reported the most Ohio could offer was $500,000 annually.

Thus does the Mid-American continue to be a developmental league for the power conferences. Coaches that produce a history of wins over teams in the stronger conferences get hired away, and as long as their methods of identifying prospects is portable, those coaches might be able to live long and prosper in those conferences.  Presumably Mr Groce and Illinois came to a mutually agreeable sum.

Economics question: in what way would the introduction of the star protege and tenure system of the academic departments into sports change the opportunities for advancement of coaches?

Illinois has also hired Wisconsin-Green Bay coach Matt Bollant, a steal at $330,000 a year plus performance bonuses, for the women's team.

Bollant will have the larger task of turning around a team that went 11-19 last season. He has already identified the current roster’s shortcomings — the same flaw he exposed in his matchup against Illinois last season.

“They were very athletic, but they weren’t a very good passing team,” Bollant said. “There were times when (Karisma) Penn was open inside and they couldn’t get her the ball. It doesn’t matter what offense you run, it’s only as good as your ability to pass and shoot.”

Bollant admitted that he does not expect Illinois to have immediate success but believes that changing the culture in the program will lead to success on the court and, eventually, in recruiting.

“If we can become the 10th-ranked team in the country here, where we can go recruiting-wise is pretty exciting.”

Bowling Green coach Curt Miller signed with Indiana under similar circumstances, for much less than Bob Knight or Tom Crean money.  The order-of-magnitude difference between coaching salaries for men's teams and women's teams isn't discouraging the men from going after jobs in both flavors of team.

In 1972, when Title IX was passed, women coached more than 90 percent of women's teams. By 1978, that number had already dipped to 58.2 percent. This year, it's down to 42.9 percent, according to the most recent survey by Brooklyn College professors emerita R. Vivian Acosta and Linda Jean Carpenter. That figure has hardly budged over the past six years.

But while some experts may consider this holding pattern a victory, the raw numbers say otherwise. Since 2000, NCAA programs have added 1,774 women's head coaching jobs. Men have filled 1,220 of the openings.

Women have entered the rest of the workforce at all levels and now make up 57 percent of college students. Sports are bigger than ever for them too, with an average of 8.73 women's teams per school.

And yet female coaches continue to be sidelined. Stanford women's basketball coach Tara VanDerveer is only half-joking when she says, "We'll have a female president -- and one woman coaching women's college basketball."

(Via Women's Hoops.) The Washington Monthly had a brief print article on precisely that late 1970s change, some thirty years ago.  At the time, the article suggested men were going after the Title IX jobs as a way of keeping some sort of collegiate experience on their resumes, perhaps with a view toward moving into jobs with the men's teams.  The more recent article suggests there is very little of that sort of crossing going on.  Just one more complication: the star protege and tenure system might be a track for the best students of the best professors getting their first tenure-track job at the most highly regarded departments, but there might be parallel tracks elsewhere in the pecking order.