1. Atlantic Coast Conference:  During the most recent wave of conference realignment, the academic caliber of the ACC has been stressed as a reason for why (or why not) certain schools were given invitations. Now, the ACC is not just known for its academics, but also the impressive performance of its student-athletes.  Overall, the ACC had a graduation rate for its athletes in all sports of over 87%, whereas the NCAA-wide average is 80%.  More specifically, in men’s basketball, the ACC was the only power conference with four schools topping the APR mark of 90, those being Duke, Wake Forest, North Carolina, and Virginia Tech.    This is a great bargaining chip for the conference and definitely bodes well for the future.  A more detailed summary for all sports can be found here.
2. Washington Post:  After losing first-team all-ACC forward Mike Scott, Virginia is searching for answers in its quest to make consecutive NCAA Tournaments for the first time since 1995 (and their fourth of the  new millenium). Tony Bennett expects  junior Joe Harris, the team’s second leading scorer, to shoulder more of the offense. However, the team is not worried about replacing Scott, as forward Akil Mitchell said: “We don’t go into a season thinking, ‘Oh man, we gotta replace Mike.’ We go into a season looking at who we have and what we can do.” Bennett expects to have several players averaging between 8-12 points per game, which would definitely be a stark change from last season, where Scott took over 31% of the team’s shots while he was on the court.
3. CBS Sports:  When thinking of elite point guards in the country this year, Jeff Goodman does not want you to forget about NC State’s Lorenzo Brown. Goodman believes that Brown is in a class with and even possibly above Missouri’s Phil Pressey, Ohio State’s Aaron Craft, and Michigan’s Trey Burke. Like a lot of the love for NC State as a team, it is largely based on his Sweet Sixteen run last season where Brown really excelled. If Brown is as good as Goodman thinks, then NC State should have a great chance to win its first ACC Championship since 1987 and possibly its first national title since the miracle win over Houston in 1983.
4. CBS Sports:  Going along with the M5 entry from yesterday, highly touted forward Andrew Wiggins has officially reclassified back into the class of 2013. His father, Mitchell, a former Florida State player, confirmed the news. Wiggins, who will likely be the top-rated recruit even despite his reclassification, is strongly linked to either Kentucky or Florida State. While it would be difficult to bet against John Calipari at this point, Florida State is definitely still a strong contender for Wiggins’ services. If the precocious player wants to be the undisputed star on his team (which he might not, owing to his humble nature), Florida State would provide him that chance. Of course, Kentucky would provide the brightest lights in college basketball, and he would join at least three of the top 10 recruits in the class of 2013 if he commits there.
5. Keeping it Heel:  North Carolina’s starting lineup appears to have three certainties going into its first exhibition game against Shaw this weekend:  freshman point guard Marcus Paige, sophomore forward James Michael McAdoo, and junior guard Reggie Bullock. The rest of the lineup and rotation are definitely question marks at this point, a large change from last year’s team when the starting five was extremely constant (notwithstanding injuries). It is likely (at least according to Matt Hamm), that Roy Williams will tinker with his roster a lot this season, which means that there should be considerably more different lineup combinations that we are used to seeing from the Tar Heels.

EMann (30 Posts)

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2012 at 6:01 am by EMann and is filed under acc, microsites, morning 5. Tagged: acc, Andrew Wiggins, duke, florida st, james michael mcadoo, Joe harris, lorenzo brown, marcus paige, ncaa apr rate, recruiting, reggie bullock, unc, virginia, virginia tech, wake forest. 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.