Final Four Bundle
The last stories from San Antonio.
After this newsletter, my cadence will slow down a bit, just for a little while, for two reasons. The first is that basketball season is over, though of course there’s still a lot going on off the court (field, track, ice, etc.) in college sports. And the second is that, in a month, my wife and I are moving from D.C. to St. Louis. From a work perspective, I’m really excited to be closer to more high-major schools, allowing me to tell a lot of different stories for the Washington Post. From a life perspective, I can’t wait to settle in and explore a new place.
So yeah, a lot of happening over here! But in the meantime, I wanted to package up the last batch of things I wrote from the mens’s Final Four. Below, in reverse chronological order, are the links and short excerpts. Hope you enjoy.
Final Four Bundle
The latest edge for Woj — yes, that Woj — as a college basketball GM? Insurance.
With the critical injury insurance, the Bonnies can sign players to contracts that aren’t fully guaranteed to be paid by the school. If a player is injured and misses a certain amount of time, a bulk of his agreed-upon salary would be paid out by the insurance policy, meaning the Bonnies would save some cash for a future roster.
With the insurance on performance incentives, think of it this way: If Wojnarowski is going for a player and another school is offering $10,000 more — $10,000 the Bonnies don’t have — he can offer $10,000 in insured performance incentives to make up the difference. Maybe the premium, paid to Players Health, is $1,000. But if the player is first-team all-A-10, he could make that $10,000 in incentives, all paid out by the insurance policy. The school would have bet the $1,000 premium to land him. The insurer would have bet, too, seeing as it would have collected the $1,000 premium if the player didn’t reach the incentive.
Everyone is hedging and calculating what’s worth it.
An inside look at the possession that sealed Florida’s national title
From the middle of the paint, Clayton sprinted at Sharp, closing maybe 10 feet in less than a second, forcing Sharp to stop his shot in mid-air and drop the ball to the floor. If Sharp grabbed it, he would have been called for traveling, so he let it bounce, then bounce, then bounce again, hoping a teammate would get there. But Condon fell on the ball like a fumble, turning onto his back as time expired, flipping it to Clayton for good measure.
Final score: Florida 65, Houston 63
Final possession: Mayhem with a work-of-art closeout in the middle of it.
College sports are about to change again. You could feel it at the Final Four.
In the very near future, then, an entire economic model will be flipped on its head. That’s exactly why Luke Bogus and Nick Siscoe were at the Final Four. On Thursday evening, they stood in a downtown bar, sipping two-dollar, eight-ounce beers. (Turns out San Antonio has at least one excellent happy hour.) Bogus wore a black shirt with a small logo on it. Siscoe’s tan shirt read “Dropback” across the front.
When you’re selling something new, you turn yourself into a walking billboard. Their company, Dropback, is a software platform to help teams manage their front office, a common tool in professional sports. An athlete’s salary, so to speak, could soon include money from the school, broken down by money from their scholarship and money paid directly through “revenue sharing,” plus additional funds from donors and brand deals brokered by their program.
That’s a lot to track. Seeing a need, Bogus and Siscoe started coding.
A story on transfer guards and the dunk of the NCAA tournament
There is, if you zoom all the way out, a total excess of Final Four material. The first one was in 1939. Over the decades, as the arenas got bigger, as phones turned into mini TVs, as they started playing in stadiums that could fit an airplane or five, the access to that material expanded, making it possible to watch the Final Four — or any number of AT&T commercials — from the air, the sea, maybe even outer space.
How hard, then, is it to do something that might actually be remembered?