News and Notes: Tuesday Edition

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Below, news and notes for Tuesday...

Seth Davis hints that Bruce Pearl could be a head coaching candidate at Boston College. Meanwhile, a A Jersey Guy writes:

BC basketball coach Steve Donahue is just past the midway point of his fourth season at The Heights. The Eagles, coming off a 16-17 season which showed signs of promise with five starters returning are 5-13 and 1-4 in the ACC. An aberration or a trend? BC is not a bad team. ...The dilemma that BC athletic director Brad Bates faces is obvious as it is difficult. Bates didn’t hire Donahue. As good a person and as good a coach Donahue may be, the bottom line is still the bottom line. You have to win games.
Four years into a program is enough time to establish a winning pattern. Donahue has not done that...What Bates must decide is whether it is worth waiting another year for the turnaround or to pull the plug after this season and go in a different direction...There is also a theory that Donahue can not do the job. It took Donahue 6 seasons to break the .500 barrier at Cornell, before a four season spurt, which included two NCAA first round appearances and a remarkable Sweet 16 effort in 2009-2010, transformed the Cornell program. Maybe Bates will be patient with a team which is solid academically, plays competitively and represents the school well...

Cornell RPI Watch: The RPI (Rating Percentage Index) is a measure of strength of schedule and how a team does against that schedule. It does not consider the margin of victory, but only whether or not a team won and where the game was played (home/away/neutral court). The formula is 25% team winning percentage (WP), 50% opponents' average winning percentage (OWP), and 25% opponents' opponents' average winning percentage (OOWP). (See: CollegeRPI.com for a further explanation of the formula.) The RPI may be the most influential factor in NCAA Tournament seeding. Cornell's RPI rank as of January 21, 2014 is No. 333 out of 351 total Division I teams. While neither the Ken Pomeroy or the Sagarin Rankings (USA Today) are used by the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee, the KenPom.com site ranks Cornell No. 346 in the nation, while the Sagarin Rankings (USA Today) have Cornell at No. 339. Both sites are predominantly used by fans and the media.

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