1. And the newest youngest head coach in Division 1 college basketball is… 29-year old Andy Toole, who takes over Mike Rice (departed for Rutgers) after three years as an associate coach at Bob Morris.
2. Here are some additional NBA Draft withdrawal deadline takes from Gary Parrish and DraftExpress’ Jonathan Givony.  Both have good takes but come at it from different angles.
3. Jeff Goodman has a take on Jim Calhoun’s recent contract extension, but at least one local writer has a problem with Calhoun getting a raise based on recent performance.  He knows that UConn went to the Final Four as recently as 2009, right?
4. Did you ever wonder about the numerical impact on things like applications and general fan interest that a Final Four appearance for a lesser-known school such as Butler or George Mason earns?  Try these numbers on for size from Mason’s run in 2006: “[GMU] found that requests for information about GMU jumped by 350 percent. Applications from out-of-state students swelled by 40 percent and all freshman year applications increased by 22 percent. Computer-generated applications rose by 52 percent and alumni interest in the school jumped by 25 percent. Page views on the sports division’s website soared by 503 percent and unique viewers by 702 percent. Almost everything that had to do with GMU’s sports division rose drastically.”
5. Now that Nebraska basketball has a new home with yesterday’s voter approval of the soon-to-be-built 16,000-seat Haymarket Arena, the only remaining question is whether the Huskers will be playing Jayhawks and Sooners or Buckeyes and Hawkeyes in it.

Nebraska's New Digs

rtmsf (3998 Posts)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 at 12:41 am by rtmsf and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: andy toole, butler, connecticut, george mason, haymarket arena, jim calhoun, mike rice, nba draft, nebraska, robert morris. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.