1. Jerry Palm of CBSSports.com is back with his first Bracketology of the year. He predicts his field as if the season ended today, not based on how he thinks teams will do the rest of the season. The Big 12 has six teams in Palm’s field: Kansas (#1 seed), Oklahoma State (#6), Kansas State (#8), Baylor (#11) Oklahoma (#12) and Iowa State, a #12 seed playing in one of the four play-in games. As Palm notes, the Jayhawks are the only #1 seed remaining from his preseason bracket. Duke is the overall No. 1 seed.
2. Bill Self turned 50 on Tuesday. Self is one of the best coaches in the country and is relatively young compared with what he has already accomplished. He will surpass 500 wins this season and is on pace to win his 900th game in about 15 years, according to Kansas City Star beat writer Rustin Dodd in this article yesterday. But Self shot down any talks of catching Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski someday. “I don’t think that I’ll want to coach near that long,” Self told Dodd. While it seems natural for a coach as successful as Self to stay on the sidelines for another two decades like Coach K, Jim Boeheim or Jim Calhoun, those instances of great coaches staying in the game well into their 60s and 70s are few and far between. If Kansas fans have Self patrolling the sideline for another decade, they should be ecstatic.
3. The idea of playing four games simultaneously next season in Cowboy Stadium looks to be dead, the Detroit Free Press and Matt Norlander of CBSSports.com have reported. It was the original plan of Michigan State Athletic Director Mark Hollis, the creator of the first aircraft carrier game last season. Being in Dallas, the Texas Longhorns seemed to be one of the eight teams who would participate, but there were just too many obstacles to overcome. It would have been a television nightmare (a television nightmare I would have watched, admittedly) and like college athletics have shown us recently, if it won’t work on TV, it probably won’t work at all.
4. Seth Davis of Sports Illustrated gave us his top five freshmen wings in a video segment last week, and Kansas guard Ben McLemore came in at No. 5. “Self has made clear,” Davis said. “That he (McLemore) is the one that needs to carry Kansas deep into March.” Davis is spot on. While Elijah Johnson, Jeff Withey, and Travis Releford provide senior leadership for the Jayhawks this season, it will be the play of McLemore that will determine if Kansas makes the Final Four. They might not make it deep into March with McLemore playing well, but they are certain to not advance if he plays poorly.
5. Many people might have forgotten about former Iowa State coach Larry Eustachy by now. He was fired in 2003 after a night partying in Columbia, Missouri, following a loss at Mizzou. He sat out a year, went to rehab, and landed at Southern Mississippi, where he took the Golden Eagles to the NCAA Tournament last season. Now at Colorado State, he has guided the Rams to a 10-2 start while coming up on a decade of sobriety. It is hard to imagine the coach in both of the stories linked are the same man.

KoryCarpenter (150 Posts)

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2012 at 7:31 am by KoryCarpenter and is filed under big 12, microsites, morning 5. Tagged: baylor, ben mclemore, bill self, iowa state, kansas, kansas state, larry eustachy, oklahoma, oklahoma state, texas. 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.