1. The big news yesterday was the death of Armen Gilliam, who starred at UNLV and led the 1987 Rebels to a 37-2 record and a Final Four appearance. Gilliam died while playing in a pickup game near Pittsburgh and although initial reports suggested that he had died of a heart attack in fact the cause of death will not be officially determined until an autopsy is performed at a later date. In addition to his playing career at UNLV and in the NBA, Gilliam also coached at Division III Penn State-Altoona. No announcements have been made yet regarding funeral services for Gilliam, but we expect a big turnout like NC State had for Lorenzo Charles this past weekend if the Gilliam family chooses to do so.
2. Georgia Tech transfer Brian Oliver announced yesterday that he would be heading to Seton Hall. Oliver, who averaged 10.5 PPG and 4.5 RPG last season as a sophomore including a 32-point outburst against Syracuse. Despite a disappointing end to his season where he missed the last eight games due to a broken thumb, Oliver likely would have remained at Georgia Tech if not for the firing of Paul Hewitt. The Pirates were able to win Oliver’s services over a handful of teams and after he sits out a season they should have a potential All-Big East performer in Oliver.
3. Apparently one game over .500 in three seasons is enough to get a contract extension in college basketball because Stanford announced late yesterday that they were giving Johnny Dawkins a two-year extension through the 2015-16 season. After a relatively promising 20-14 record in his first season in Palo Alto, Dawkins has seen his Cardinal team fail to break .500 in the past two season and may have worked his way out of one of the top jobs in any sport–head coach at Duke. Perhaps Dawkins can turn things around on The Farm, but he has his work cut out for him in a Pac-10 conference that is no longer as weak as it was a few years ago.
4. Most of the attention in the US for the U-19 World Championships has been on Team USA and its college stars, but as Luke Winn reports college fans may want to start paying attention to the Australian team as several of their players may be heading to college campuses near you in the very near future. While some schools (St. Mary’s) dominated the Australian recruiting scene in recent years, the players have started to shift their focus to other schools and Winn reports the current favorites for the present group of Australian star U-19 players are Butler, Boise State, and New Mexico.
5. With the summer circuit heading up Dave Telep has ten major storylines to watch for this month. You will find a lot of talk about all the big names that you are probably familiar with from various recruiting sources online and although we love the big-time showdowns (LeBron James destroying Lenny Cooke is our personal favorite) our favorite part is waiting for the relative unknowns to emerge as major prospects. It was just a year ago when Anthony Davis went from a decent Chicago-area prospect who wasn’t even getting much attention from in-state school to the top prospect in his class in the eyes of many recruiting analysts.

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 7th, 2011 at 5:30 am by nvr1983 and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: anthony davis, armen gilliam, boise state, butler, duke, georgia tech, johnny dawkins, lorenzo charles, nc state, new mexico, north carolina state, paul hewitt, penn state-altoona, seton hall, st mary's, stanford, syracuse, unlv. 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.