Author: Scott Adamson

NIT is now a college basketball laboratory

OK, let’s get some housekeeping things out of the way.

Out of Left Field is written by Scott Adamson. It appears weekly and sometimes more frequently if he gets up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep. Follow him on Twitter @adamsonsl

First and foremost, it’s the National Invitation Tournament, not the National Invitational Tournament.

And secondly, joking that the NIT also stands for “No Important Teams” is cute and all, but it’s a bit harsh.

Now, there is no argument over the first issue … you can look it up.

The second? OK. The NCAA Tournament is the only postseason event that “matters,” but if you like college basketball – and like to watch off-the-radar schools compete in tournaments – the NIT can still be fun.

In the Big Dance, you get to see small schools from small conferences play on the sport’s biggest stage.

In the NIT, you might come across a team you forgot even existed. But sometimes those teams will put on great shows and score victories that are very important for their school.

Last year, for example, CSU Bakersfield stunned California, 73-66, in the first round, while Belmont shocked Georgia, 78-69 and Oakland rallied from a huge deficit to upend Clemson, 74-69.

None of those outcomes altered the landscape of college basketball, of course, but they raised the profile of the winners – even if it was just for a couple of days.

And that made it meaningful for them, even if it’s not meaningful for the person who spent hours filling out their NCAA brackets at work.

But the NIT is more than just a postseason consolation prize nowadays. Thanks to the NCAA, it is also a laboratory.

When it gets underway on March 13, it will be using rules that could conceivably go into effect in May, 2019 – the next time the governing body can officially alter its rules and regulations.

“The NIT is an exciting event with a rich tradition and history, yet it also provides us a platform to consider how the game might look in the future,” Dan Gavitt, NCAA senior vice president of basketball, said in a news release. “We’ve seen the adoption of recent experimental rules and how they have had a positive impact. This track record of the game evolving is a result of us having the flexibility to see if the rules work and are met with satisfaction.”

This year will mark the third time in four years experimental rules have been in place for the NIT, and the four changes this year are pretty big:

​• The 3-point line will be extended by approximately 1 foot, 8 inches to 22 feet and 1.75 inches – the same distance used by the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) for international competition.

​• The free throw lane will be widened from 12 feet to 16 feet, the width used by the NBA.
​• The games will be divided into four 10-minute quarters and teams will shoot two free throws beginning with the fifth foul of each quarter.
• The shot clock will reset to 20 seconds after an offensive rebound, instead of the full 30 seconds.

The changes are designed to give NCAAs rules, oversight and competition committees “data and feedback” as they consider changes to the game.

All rules used in the NIT have been on the table before, but this will be the first time for coaches and officials to see them in action.

“The style of play in men’s college basketball is healthy and appealing, but the leadership governing the game is interested in keeping the playing rules contemporary and trending favorably,” Gavitt said. “Experimenting with two significant court dimension rules, a shot-clock reset rule and a game-format rule all have some level of support in the membership, so the NIT will provide the opportunity to gather invaluable data and measure the experience of the participants.”

I think the four quarter format is long overdue. It’s used in virtually every other level of basketball and it just makes sense for the NCAA men to join the party.

I’m also intrigued by the wider lane. While basketball is not supposed to be a contact sport it most certainly is. However, this could make it less so and also increase the number of driving buckets.

It’s a highly significant alteration.

I don’t have strong feelings one way or another about the increased length of 3-pointers, but I am hopeful the clock reset will quicken the pace of games.

The thing is, there’s a chance none of these rules will be part of college basketball come 2019.

But then again, they might.

Sure, the “No Important Teams” moniker isn’t going away; the NIT will always pale in comparison to the NCAA Tournament.

But it still has a place. Hey, maybe going forward we should think of it as the National Innovation Tournament.

 

Why do all stylists want to give me high hair?

I’m not sure if it’s because of my age or what, but virtually every time I go to get a haircut these days the stylist thinks I want to walk out looking like vintage Porter Wagoner and Conway Twitty, or current John Mellencamp.

Brain Farce is an alleged humor column written by Scott Adamson, who does not like wearing his hair high. Follow him on Twitter @adamsonsl

Porter and Conway, of course, once rocked that slick, high hair that was combed straight back. If they had ever brushed it forward, it would’ve reached their navels.

About the only other people you see with this particular ‘do are TV evangelists, funeral home directors and the brothers of killers on “Snapped.”

Mellencamp used to have basic “rocker” hair – long and mussed. It looked good on him.

As he got older, though, he channeled his inner Porter/Conway, adding quarts of Valvoline and seeing just how high on his head his hair would go.

These days the dude looks like a cross between Charles Starkweather and Brainiac thanks to his huge noggin and high hair.

This is not how I want to look.

This is not how I’ve ever wanted to look.

Of course, we’ve all evolved in terms of hairstyles.

As a kid, growing up in the sixties and cursed with poor eyesight, I had short, slick brown hair that accentuated my black horn rimmed glasses. I looked like Clark Kent if, in fact, Clark Kent had never left Krypton and instead was a member of the planet’s debate team.

By the 70s, in an effort to be more appealing to the opposite sex, I wore contact lenses and sported the “butt cut,” which was longer hair parted down the middle.

It would’ve been a decent look except my hard contacts were extremely uncomfortable and made my eyes water, so I always walked around looking as though I had just watched “Old Yeller.”

Hair stylists seem to think this is how I want my hair to look. They are wrong, for I do not want my hair to look this way.

In the 1980s I resumed wearing glasses and moved more toward the Elvis Costello look. While in a perfect world I would’ve preferred to wear my hair long, it started flipping on the ends, causing it to resemble Marlo Thomas’ cut in “That Girl.”

I love Marlo Thomas.

I didn’t love looking like Marlo Thomas in drag.

By the 1990s, I had settled on hair that was neither very long nor very short. And aside from a few brief flirtations with the “old hippie” look, I’ve basically stuck to a relatively simple hairstyle.

However, at no point have I ever slicked my hair back, which makes me wonder why people who cut my hair think that’s what I want.

Now – in the interest of full disclosure – I go to one of those haircut franchise places so I never know from one visit to the next who will be cutting my hair.

I just walk in and whoever has an available chair takes me. They’re all capable, obviously, but sometimes they don’t seem to listen.

“So what are we looking to do today?” Haircut person asks.

“Really, just a half-inch all the way around,” I say.

Simple, right?

Nope.

They snip and spritz and snip and spritz and then blow it dry while combing it backward.

Every single time.

“How does it look?” Haircut person asks.

“Actually, I don’t comb it back, so would you mind trimming some more off the top?” I ask.

“Sure,” haircut person says. “About how much?”

“Oh, 11 or 12 inches,” I say.

Once my hair reaches a reasonable length they ask if I want any “hair product” and I always decline, opting instead to fight my own style battle when I get home.

Look, I realize I’m not GQ material … I have no illusions that I’m going to leave the shop looking like a young George “Goober” Lindsey.

I also know that – technically – I’m a “senior,” and apparently society expects people over 50 to look a certain way.

Well, society can bite my ass.

I like my hair a little messy and I like to have the option of letting bangs rest gently against my forehead.

If I wanted to look like Porter Wagoner, Conway Twitty or John Mellencamp, I’d have become a singer-songwriter.

Instead I’m just a writer – one who will forever sing the praises of the first stylist who figures out how I want my hair to look.

Silverbacks keep grassroots soccer alive in Atlanta

It spends a lot of time in my upstairs closet, situated toward the back of the clothes rack where it remains mostly unworn.

Scott Adamson opines about The Beautiful Game periodically in Sidewinder Insider.

But every once in a while, I’ll break out the red jersey – the one with the Atlanta Silverbacks badge sandwiched between the Joma brand name on top and Premiere Global Services sponsor logo on the bottom.

It even has a sweet, old school USL logo on one of the sleeves.

And caps?

Oh, yeah, I got the caps – both a black one and a red one.

As a Birmingham native, Atlanta was always the closest big league town that had professional soccer.

So although I was a New York Cosmos fan back in the days of the original North America Soccer League, the Chiefs were something of a “home team” for me.

But while the Chiefs, like the NASL, are no more, the Silverbacks are survivors. And I’ve followed their odyssey from the beginning.

Officially, they’ve been around 20 years, becoming the Silverbacks in 1998. However, they actually started their soccer life as the Atlanta Ruckus in 1995.

I still break out the Silverbacks jersey and cap now and then.

Since then they’ve played in circuits such as the American Professional Soccer League (which morphed into the A-League), the United Soccer League First Division, the rebooted NASL and now the National Premier Soccer League.

I suppose one could make the case that they’re working their way down the ladder. But I’m not going to be that cynical, which is something of an upset because I’m cynical by nature.

True, in U.S. soccer’s unofficial pyramid, the NPSL represents the fourth division.

But if you like soccer from the ground up – and the NPSL is certainly that – it’s a great fit for a club that absolutely refuses to go six feet under.

And I love the way this club is going about its business.

Have you heard about the Atlanta Silverbacks FC Trust?

Go to asfctrust.org and read about it. Do that, and you’ll see how grassroots soccer is supposed to work.

The primary focus behind the trust is for fans to raise $100,000 to contribute to the club’s operating expenses. Once that threshold is met, it will own 25 percent of the team and have a seat on the board of directors.

This is the model of many successful soccer clubs in Europe and, in fact, partial fan ownership is required in Germany.

This is what community soccer is all about and what makes it accessible to everyone.

Certainly, Atlanta United FC is the “sexy” soccer team in the city right now. Shoot, with the number of fans it drew to Bobby Dodd Stadium and later Mercedes-Benz Stadium in its inaugural season in 2017, it’s the golden child of Major League Soccer.

And that’s terrific. The passion of Terminus Legion is very real and contagious – proof that the Deep South can be a futbol hotbed as well as a football hotbed.

But MLS has a single entity structure and Arthur Blank is the “investor-operator” of the franchise. The decision-making group is a small one.

If the Silverbacks get their way, though, fans will not only get a seat at the table, they’ll get to eat, too. It’ll be more than a club they root for because they’ll have skin in the game.

It’s kinda funny … for as long as the team has been around, I only got to cover it as a reporter once.

On March 28, 2015, the Silverbacks came to Riggs Field to play Clemson in an exhibition. Managed by Gary Smith (currently coach and TD of Nashville SC of the United Soccer League), they won on a goal by Matt Horth, who now serves as coach of Gordon College.

I spent a long time bending Smith’s ear after the match, and at the time it seemed that Atlanta and the modern iteration of the NASL might be in for a long association.

Of course that wasn’t the case.

Earlier in the week, the NASL announced it had canceled the 2018 season and you have to believe that decision was tantamount to folding for good.

But while that league won’t be going forward, the Silverbacks will, with their home opener at Silverbacks Park slated for May 26 against Asheville.

For those of us who want to see real change in American soccer, this is where it starts.

The Silverbacks are an old team that will feature young talent, and you don’t have to take out a loan to take your family to see a match.

I’m going to make a point to go to Silverbacks Park this season. The home team hosts Greenville FC on June 16, and since I’m based in Greenville, that might be a good excuse to take a road trip.

And the trust?

Maybe I’ll contribute to that as well. While it’s fun to talk about turning the United States into a soccer nation, it also requires some effort.

I need to put my money where my mouth is.

The Silverbacks have scratched and clawed their way through history, and I think their persistence should be rewarded.

It’s great to see them survive.

But it’ll be even greater to see them thrive.