1. DePaul was dealt a big blow yesterday when incoming freshman Shane Larkin announced that he would not be going to DePaul this fall due to an undisclosed medical condition. According to Shane’s father (baseball Hall of Famer Barry Larkin) Shane has a medical condition that requires him to be closer to his home (presumably for family support because we cannot think of a single medical treatment that you can get in Orlando that would be considered significantly better than what you can get in Chicago). We wish Shane a speedy recovery from whatever he is going through and hope to see him on the court someday soon.
2. The brackets for the Maui Invitational were announced yesterday and unlike the other early season tournaments we mentioned in yesterday’s Morning 5 this one is stacked. In fact, outside of the few match-ups that we mentioned yesterday the opening round match-ups where Belmont faces Duke and then Memphis is much more intriguing that most of the match-ups we saw in the other early season tournaments including potential championship round match-ups. As for the actual games in Maui, let’s just say that it deserves its own post.
3. West Virginia and Illinois will be staging one of the more unusual college basketball games that we can remember later this month when they play at Aviano Air Force Base in Italy  on August 17 as well as running youth camps for children of military members stationed there. Both teams were going to be in Italy on separate tours, but were not going to meet in accordance with NCAA rules, which prohibit teams from playing against each other during this period. Fortunately they were granted a waiver by the NCAA yesterday and will be allowed to play against each other and run camps for the military members and their families. [Ed. Note: When you count the decision to let Hayden Humes transfer without penalty that makes two reasonable decisions by the NCAA in two days, which is the most certain sign of the apocalypse that we can remember.]
4. USA Basketball announced its roster for the World University Games National cutting its group of 14 finalists to a team of 12. Interestingly, the last two players cut–West Virginia’s Aaric Murray and Connecticut‘s Shabazz Napier–were relatively big names while at least two of the players that made the team–Yale‘s Greg Mangano and UC-Santa Barbara‘s Orlando Johnson–are less well-known to the casual college basketball fan. Having said that, we are excited to see what Mangano and Johnson can do playing with a group of players from much bigger programs on daily basis. Given the limitations (top college players wanting to stay home) it seems like Team USA picked a pretty solid group even if they do lack a little on the inside.
5. Former Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl was offered the position of head coach of the NBDL Texas Legends yesterday with a reported salary of $500,000. While that figure is a long way away from the close to $2 million per year that Pearl was getting at Tennessee it is a pretty competitive offer for a disgraced coach who would be coaching in a league that nobody ever watches. Of course, for Pearl this would merely be a stepping stone to a NBA job or possibly another college job down the road. We doubt that Pearl would get a college job that he would be interested in even after the imminent show-cause penalty expires, but the possibility of Pearl coaching a team run by Mark Cuban is something that we could definitely see happening.

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Friday, August 5th, 2011 at 5:15 am by nvr1983 and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: aaric murray, belmont, connecticut, depaul, duke, Greg Mangano, illinois, memphis, orlando johnson, shabazz napier, shane larkin, uc-santa barbara, uconn, west virginia, yale. 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.