August mailbag: a battle for the galaxy, Tennessee's best lineup, Taylor Swift album rankings

the gamut

Happy Friday, let’s get to it. Questions split into appropriate groupings.

Tennessee

Who would you pick on this roster for a battle for the galaxy, halfcourt 1v1 (to 21, 2s and 1s, make it take it)? You don’t know the opponent beforehand. - CB

First off, I do have a recommendation for all still playing pickup: please convert to 2s and 3s to 21 already. Playing to 11 by way of 1s and 2s is an outdated mode that gives dramatic heft to whoever can hit a couple threes in a game. Anyway!

Zakai Zeigler is a decent bet here but if you’re assuming just some sort of average opponent, he’s at a massive height disadvantage (5’9” vs. the average college height of 6’5”). Santiago Vescovi is also a fine bet here because I think in a 1-on-1 scenario he’s a lot more likely to drive to the rim and score; his defense would also be incredibly powerful in this scenario.

But in a one-off deal where you just need a guy to score and he can pour it in, Dalton Knecht is probably the pick. I know he can score at all three levels because I saw it at Northern Colorado. He’s also got the physical strength to get down low and work there. Plus you’d figure that he’d stumble into a few stops even if he’s not the greatest defender.

Do you really think Jahmai Mashack is the best defender in Tennessee basketball history? - anon

I mean, sure. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal to state it? The general rush to name anyone the next big star or the next GOAT or the crown-holder or whatnot rubs me the wrong way. It’s more accurate for me to say Mashack is among a small collection of 3-5 guys that are separate from the rest of the pack historically. Mashack’s numbers in a short timespan at Tennessee are insane:

He’s also the only player in at least 15 years in the SEC (as far back as the CBB Reference database will go for me) to average >1.3 steals per game while averaging 20 minutes or less a night. Only seven players across all of CBB in that span have done it. He’s tracking towards being the best ever in Knoxville at this specific role at least.

What’s the Tennessee basketball lineup we’ll see the most versus the Tennessee basketball lineup you want to see most often? - Grant Ramey

I’ve been pondering this a good bit lately. I generally sit under the assumption that a team’s starting lineup is naturally going to be its most-played lineup, though Tennessee has done quite the job of busting that assumption the last 2-3 seasons. Even so, at full health, I think this is your starting lineup and therefore the top-used lineup:

• G: Zakai Zeigler

• G: Santiago Vescovi

• G: Dalton Knecht

• F: Josiah-Jordan James

• C: Jonas Aidoo

Some will look at this and feel surprise that Freddie Dilione V isn’t your starting guard somewhere in here. I don’t know that he would dislodge Zeigler from point but rather you’d see Knecht perhaps slide to the bench as a super-sub in this context. It’s also going to be very hard to keep both Jahmai Mashack and Tobe Awaka off the court; Tennessee is very blessed in the specific regard of having a lot of playable two-way dudes now.

My preferred lineup is frankly still in flux. I think that the most fun lineup, purely by scoring possibilities, is probably one of:

• G: Zakai Zeigler

• G: Freddie Dilione

• G: Santiago Vescovi

• G/F: Dalton Knecht

• C: Tobe Awaka

Given what I saw from the Italy series, you could easily slide Jordan Gainey in here somewhere and it would probably be fine. This lineup gives you Tennessee’s most beloved player, Tennessee’s best pure scorer, Tennessee’s best (by career track record) three-point shooter, Tennessee’s other best pure scorer, and a dadgummed wrecking ball all at the same time.

Non-Tennessee/NCAA at-large

Your thoughts on why college coaches are so against 2 for 1's at the end of half/game? - TheRealBrice

It’s case-by-case. Several independent variables have to work together for a 2-for-1 situation to arrive in the first place; most coaches just want whatever the best shot they can get will be, regardless of time left on the clock. (I generally hate watching college teams stall out the clock late in halves waiting for the last shot. It does result in some cool shots, but more frequently than average possessions, it results in players stopping the game for 15-20 seconds only to heave an off-balance jumper.)

More than anything I’d guess it’s the same thing college coaches love saying about other college coaches: everybody wants to drive the car. AKA: most college coaches love having control and want the best set rather than the most efficient usage of their time. Younger coaches with NBA-like systems (Nate Oats is the obvious example here) do it far more than those who’ve been in college ball for 20+ years.

Does realignment affect non-traditional powerhouses in basketball? Does realignment push those smaller schools farther away from the table in terms of talent/NIL/winning? Rich get richer/poor get poorer kinda situation? - WestTNBen

For realignment purposes basketball is an entirely different animal than football. The elite of the elite in terms of talent and money (SEC, Big Ten, Big 12) are going to be fine regardless of what conference their team(s) are scattered into. Smaller schools change conferences all the time, so I don’t know that much meaningful will happen on an aggregate scale.

What I would actually submit as my response here is that realignment will work extremely well for a small few, extremely poorly for a small few, and somewhere on the below-to-above-average spectrum for everyone else. I wish I had more specific examples for this but something like how the Ohio Valley has been raided by other conferences over the past few years could be the ‘extremely poorly’ side while the WAC’s reassertion of quality across-the-pack play, all of which is regionally-specific to the American Southwest (plus Washington), is an example of realignment done well.

On talent/NIL/winning I think we’re actually seeing an evening of the scale for the moment. Mid-majors get their rosters plundered by the big boys every summer, but what most don’t see is former blue-chip recruits transferring down to mid-majors and thriving there. Also: a storyline not enough reporters seem to know about is that mid-major schools often have more creative, analytically-driven staffs than those at bigger-budget universities. You gotta get weird to make things work. Obligatory indie vs. major label reference goes here.

Will NCAA ever train their refs to give benefit of the doubt to offensive player for block/charge call? - NYC Vol

My annoying snark answer is that they’ll train them to do it for exactly one month of play then it will slide back to The Way It Was by March. Ken Pomeroy showcased this phenomenon with the new flop rule last year. As with everything else college basketball does, given that the NBA started taking ‘benefit of the doubt’ stuff seriously in 2004-05, you can expect college basketball to get to it somewhere between the 2024-25 and 2029-30 seasons.

I want to know if we can get traction on a few things: dropping the shot clock to 24 seconds, 6 fouls instead of 5, and quarters instead of halves. - volalum04

You have me in favor of all three, for the record. Let’s take these one-by-one and analyze progress of each. I would anticipate that all three happen eventually, but not all at the same time.

• Dropping the shot clock to 24 seconds. This was seen as fully, completely taboo as recently as a few years ago by most coaches. Now, it’s pretty much 50/50, as evidenced by Matt Norlander’s 2022 article checking in on this. The levels of opinion on this are shifting towards shot clock uniformity, which I think would likely extend to women’s hoops as well. Prediction: the shot clock goes from 30 to 24 within ten years.

• Giving players six fouls instead of five. Given that college officials love blowing their whistles as much as I love the Popeyes Big Box, this should’ve happened already. It actually has. The Big East experimented with a six-foul dismissal in the 1990s and it went quite poorly, in the sense that games got longer and officials saw the extra foul as an excuse to blow more whistles and create more free throws. Unless they completely retrain what they’re looking for in a foul call I honestly don’t know when this one’s coming. Prediction: six fouls does not happen before I turn 50, aka 2043.

• Quarters instead of halves. Another thing that used to exist! The more you know. There’s no coaching data on this but given that women’s college hoops transitioned from halves to quarters a decade ago and everyone seems to like it, the clock is ticking for men’s basketball to do the same. Of course, as with most things men’s basketball, the level of pride and “we do things our way” is sky-high, restricting an obvious fix here. Prediction: like the shot clock, this happens within 10 years.

In other sports, people have made a big deal of having their ‘guys’ or their teams. What are yours in college basketball (Tennessee excluded)? - anon

I graduated from Tennessee and grew up a Michigan fan because my dad went there; that covers two. For many years, and somewhat still the case, the answer here was Belmont: it’s regional to me, they play a gorgeous style of offensive basketball, and they won a lot of games. That’s probably still my base answer. Beyond that I’m a sucker for one-bid conference starlets (Colgate, South Dakota State, the like) or for teams in power conferences that aren’t outright bad but feel like true underdogs (Virginia Tech, Iowa, Xavier). I’m also unapologetically in the tank for Houston because I adore their junkyard dog basketball.

Non-hoops

Do you listen to Titus Andronicus? - volburner23 on Twitter

I don’t. I never understood the hype here to be honest. That being said “Dimed Out” is a stone-cold classic and very well could be the best true rock song of the last decade; it’s a shame I never vibed with their albums much.

How would you rank the Taylor Swift albums? - Johnny C.

I don’t care much to differentiate between the originals and the Taylor’s Version versions; they all sound similar enough to me and I don’t think it’s fair to rate deluxe packages versus the original release. Grades on a 10-point scale that everyone can understand, no half-points, no Pitchfork stuff. Aping my compadre Nathan Wisnicki, who runs an elite Substack himself, my favorite three songs are in parentheses with the best one bolded.

1. Red (2012), 9/10 (“Red”, “All Too Well”, “Starlight”)

2. 1989 (2014), 9/10 (“Style”, “Out of the Woods”, “Wildest Dreams”)

   1. Quick note here that “New Romantics” is one of her very best, but is a bonus track.

3. Midnights (2022), 9/10 (“Maroon”, “Anti-Hero”, “Karma”)

4. Speak Now (2010), 8/10 (“Mine”, “Back to December”, “Enchanted”)

   1. Quick note that “Superman” is one of her very best, but is a bonus track.

5. Evermore (2020), 8/10 (“Gold Rush”, “Dorothea”, “Cowboy Like Me”)

6. Folklore (2020), 8/10 (“The 1”, “Mirrorball”, “Betty”)

7. Fearless (2008), 8/10 (“Love Story”, “You Belong With Me”, “The Best Day”)

8. Lover (2019), 8/10 (“Cruel Summer”, “Lover”, “Death by a Thousand Cuts”)

9. Reputation (2017), 7/10 (“Delicate”, “Gorgeous”, “Getaway Car”)

10. Taylor Swift (2006), 6/10 (“Tim McGraw”, “Teardrops on My Guitar”, “Our Song”)

I have no interest in being the seven-billionth person to be a Swift Stan in the year 2023. Music coverage, including that of Swift’s releases themselves, is the most abysmal it has been since I’ve been alive. (Everyone I used to read at Pitchfork, Stereogum, etc. from 2007-2012 is desperate to tell you how much they love Olivia Rodrigo, Really, We Mean It.) But Swift really is the only full-on hyper-popular artist - as in, every single living person who has tuned into a radio station has heard at least a couple of her songs - whose every move actually interests me and proves fruitful for the most part. I admire her for constantly evolving and wanting to do the biggest thing possible.