This is too good to be true, and yet it is absolutely true…
A senior defensive back for the Florida Gators is facing burglary charges, just days before Florida’s showdown with #1 LSU. Gainesville Police arrested Earl “Tony” Joiner, 21, early Tuesday morning outside a towing yard. Investigators say Joiner was trying to get his girlfriend’s car out of Watson’s Towing on SW 1st Street. Witnesses told police a man pushed open the heavy gate surrounding the fenced yard, which was not open at the time. The man got into a car and tried to drive away without paying the $76 towing bill. A police officer heard the suspect, identified as Joiner, tell someone on a cell phone, “I am probably about to go to jail, cuz I did push the gate open.”
Paging Frank Tolbert… you might wanna give your SEC comrade a few tips on the art of automobile retrieval. Such as…
Show up drunk at the towing compound in the middle of the night.
Climb fence.
Retrieve car.
Drive car through fence.
Joiner did none of these things correctly, and now he’s facing felony burglary charges.
What You Need to Know (WYN2K). Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the worst basketball conference in America! For three years running, the Southwestern Athletic Conference has found itself at the absolute bottom of every major computer ranking system (RPI, Sagarin & Pomeroy) as its ten schools have gone a collective 32-229 (.123) in OOC games during the last three seasons (easily the worst). Its sacrificial lamb league champion has received eight straight #16 seeds in the NCAAs and four of those teams were relegated to the dreaded play-in game. Just how bad is it? Consider that tournament champion Jackson St. and regular-season champion Mississippi Valley St. were the only two schools with overall winning records last year – no other conference member won more than eleven games. There are no encouraging signs of change for this season.
Predicted Champion.Alabama A&M (#16 Seed NCAA). Yes, we’re predicting a worst-to-first here, but the Bulldogs are the only SWAC school returning all five starters from last season, including dynamic sophomore guards Trant Sampson and Cornelius Hester as well as 6’11 defensive freak Mickell Gladness (6.3 bpg), who blocked an astonishing 20.5% of shots while he was on the court last season.
Others Considered. Grambling is an interesting team because they return four starters including the SWAC’s best all-around player Andre Ratliff, but they also open a brand-new 7500-seat arena and we shouldn’t discount the “new barn” effect. Mississippi Valley St. is another team to watch because they won the regular-season crown last season and return former Southern Miss coach James Green, who has inspired his teams to play maddening D, which will keep them in the hunt.
Games to Watch. There’s only one game you’ll find on tv from the SWAC, and it’s the only game that matters for this conference all season.
SWAC Championship Game (03.15.08).
RPI Booster Games. The SWAC plays 28 games against BCS conference opponents, and 26 of those are on the road. In a weird scheduling coincidence, only Auburn deigns to venture into a SWAC gym, and it does so twice – it could lose either of these if Lebo’s team isn’t careful.
Auburn @ Alabama St. (11.17.07)
Auburn @ Southern (12.16.07)
Odds of Multiple NCAA Bids. Nil. It’s never happened before, and the reality of the non-conference “guarantee games” in the SWAC will ensure it doesn’t happen again this year.
All-Name Team. Alabama St.’s Grlenntys “Chief” Kickingstallionsims is a cinch for national honors, but Texas Southern’s St. Paul Latham is another worthy candidate.
Neat-o Stat. The SWAC likes to run, as half of its teams were among the top 62 fastest tempos in the nation in 06-07. By the same token, though, none can shoot the ball, as 9 of its 10 teams were among the bottom 35 teams last year in effective FG%.
65-Team Era. The SWAC is 1-21 in the era. Southern University (#13) defeated Georgia Tech (#4) 93-78 in the first round of the 1993 NCAA Tourney.
Final Thought. The SWAC isn’t worth much in basketball, so we’ll give it some love for something it’s actually good at.
Now that we’re firmly into October, roughly ten days from Midnight Madness and only about five weeks from the opening tipoff of a regular season game, we’re going to try our hand at providing some preseason content here. Here’s what we envision (but please don’t hold us to it):
1. Conference Primers – a daily rundown of some useful and not-so-useful information on all 31 conferences from worst to first.
2. NCAA Bracket – a semi-weekly update as we go through the conferences as to where we predict each team will be slotted in the 2008 Dance.
3. Preseason Magazine Reviews – as they come out fast and furious over the next month, we’ll grade them as we already have with Athlon and Lindy’s.
5. All-Everything Teams. We’ll do a traditional all-american team right before the season begins, but we’re going to try to mix that up with some other nontraditional all-whatever teams here.
6. Anything Else – we’ll continue with our usual fare of linkage and thought-provoking (gulp…) commentary where appropriate. If anyone has an idea of something else they’d like to see, hit us up at rushthecourt@yahoo.com.
We wouldn’t be doing our job if we let this one pass us by.
See Ya in 2015 Bud
Over the weekend various outlets reported that the appropriately-named Bud Mackey, a top 50 player from Georgetown, Ky. (Scott County HS) who committed to Kelvin Sampson’s Indiana Hoosiers, was charged with two felonies related to drug trafficking.
Scott County Coach Billy Hicks last night said he plans to visit Mackey at the jail. “I’m just hoping and praying … you hope it’s not true,” Hicks said. “You hope when it all shakes out there’s a logical explanation. Hicks said school officials told him that they went to look for Mackey when he didn’t show up for a fifth-period English class and found him, smelling of marijuana, near the building. Police found [crack] cocaine in his possession.
They must have found more than just a little blow in his possession to make it through those interminable sixth period filmstrips. In Kentucky, possession of a controlled substance is a class D felony with a penalty of only 1-5 years in prison, while trafficking is a class C felony with a penalty of 5-10 years. Big difference. This suggests to us that Bud was carrying around considerably more crack in his pockets than one man could possibly smoke in a lazy afternoon.
One of Mackey’s Customers
Some blogs are speculating that Kelvin Sampson, known for giving wayward kids second chances, might be inclined to give Mackey another chance at some point in the future. This assumes that Mackey will be out of prison within the next few years, and that’s highly debatable. Construda thinks that anything less than a complete separation between IU and Mackey is a no-win situation, and we agree. This is distinguishable from the JamesOn Curry or Michael Southall situations because they were both convicted for trafficking marijuana. However, the trafficking of crack cocaine, as a general rule, tends to be dealt with quite a bit more harshly. Good luck in the criminal court system, Bud, we hardly knew ye.
