1. A pair of future Kentucky Wildcats  were named to the West roster for the 11th annual Jordan Brand Classic. Archie Goodwin, from Sylvan Hills High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Alex Poythress from Northeast H.S. in Clarksville, Tennessee, will be on the 10-man team that includes the #1 player in the country, Shabazz Muhammad.  The game will be played at 7 PM on Saturday, April 14 from the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte.
2. Two SEC schools, Florida and Kentucky appear among the seven schools vying for the services of Nerlens Noel. Noel made headlines by announcing he would be finishing high school in the spring rather than in 2013, as expected. It would seem that John Calipari would just just have show an endless loop of Anthony Davis‘ exploits of this season as his closing argument to get Noel on board for the Wildcats.
3. On Tuesday, Lexington city leaders approved a $250-$300 million renovation of Rupp Arena that would be occur over three offseasons starting as early as 2014.  Multiple sources would be used to raise the money including “revenue from naming rights of the arena, premium seating, advertising, sponsorships, concert and event promotions, concessions, stock offerings, state road funds, state tourism tax incentives, tax increment financing and new market tax credits.” Basketball is big business in Kentucky — certainly everyone has a financial stake in it one way or another.
4. On the CBS Sports “Eye on College Basketball” blog, Jeff Goodman posed the question of which starting five is better, the Toronto Raptors’ five or Kentucky’s? He wrote the article after seeing Toronto, coached by a former Wildcat, Dwane Casey, open up against Boston by starting Jose Calderon, DeMar DeRozan (USC), James Johnson (Wake Forest), Ed Davis (UNC) and Aaron Gray (Pittsburgh). The online poll favored UK by a better than 4-to-1 margin which leads to the obvious question — would it be unanimous if the NBA team in the question were the Washington Wizards? Or worse, the Charlotte Bobcats?
5. On FoxSportsSouth.com, Steve Eubanks writes about the varying reasons why SEC basketball gets so little attention and respect. His two top reasons: the dominance of SEC football and the dominance of Kentucky basketball. He writes that much of the rest of the the SEC plays in front of half-empty arenas. Texas A&M and Missouri should help raise the profile of the league as a basketball conference (although the television markets and football have driven the conversations thus far), but neither have such storied backgrounds as to approach Kentucky and if you were to put fans of the two programs on truth serum, both would more likley take football success over basketball (maybe it would be a closer vote with Tiger fans).

EMoyer (47 Posts)

This entry was posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2012 at 6:31 am by EMoyer and is filed under microsites, sec. Tagged: Alex Poythress, anthony davis, archie goodwin, florida, Jordan Classic, kentucky, rupp arena. 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.