1. Now that non-conference play is essentially done Seth Davis decided to release his annual Buy, Sell, and Hold column. Our microsites are in the process of releasing their responses to Seth’s ratings for the team’s within each conference so be on the lookout for those throughout the day. As for our general overview, as Seth notes he is “bullish” on this year’s field going with 19 “Buys”, 13 “Sells”, and nine “Holds”. We are not exactly sure how the three teams widely considered the best in the country right now (Duke, Indiana, and Louisville) are all listed as a “buy” since that theoretically means that all are being undervalued at this time. We are not sure what kind of market Seth believes in, but it sounds like Seth may not be a disciple of the Chicago school, but instead favors a Zimbabwean model. We wonder what Lanny would have to say about that.
2. When John Calipari released a series of posts on Wednesday night mentioning something special on Thursday morning we were expecting something ridiculous like the videos he posted of the housing for Kentucky basketball players several months ago. Instead, he  posted a fairly in-depth article about how closely he is monitoring his players. Although this lacks the “wow” factor that we have come to expect from Calipari’s surprises it is an interesting look at the level of detail top programs tend to go through in training there players (we doubt that Calipari is really as far ahead of other coaches as the media would have you believe outside of his social network wizardry).
3. If you want to see what happens to a coach when his athletic director changes direction on him, check out what happened to Josh Pastner yesterday during his radio interview with Gary Parrish. Recently, Pastner has made multiple comments essentially saying that the rivalry between Memphis and Tennessee was dead and that he didn’t see the need to continue the rivalry. Unfortunately for Pastner, the school and the athletic director had a change of heart and appear to be working on a deal that would extend the rivalry. The result is that Pastner is left having to answer questions for the media about his prior comments. Obviously, Pastner could have handled this much better by simply not being as controversial with his original comments, but it will be interesting to see how Tennessee fans treating him going forward.
4. Jabari Parker may have kept his recruiting under wraps in terms of letting the media know what was going on, but he did not keep it as “in the family” as he and his father originally stated. According to Parker he also talked to Derrick Rose about the recruiting process and Grant Hill about recovering from his foot injury. While both Rose and Hill are/were great players we are not sure that we would have talked to them about those topics unless we wanted to learn from their mistakes (Rose for the SAT fiasco and Hill for the seemingly unending series of setbacks that curtailed a promising career).
5. The NCAA has already handed down its ruling in the Myck Kabongo case and although most people have moved on Burnt Orange Nation has a few questions about the entire saga. As they openly admit Kabongo is far from blameless here, but instead takes a look back at the sequence of events that led to the NCAA deciding to suspend Kabongo for a seemingly arbitrary 23 games. As they note the facts in the case do not appear to add up to a suspension of that length particularly since Kabongo allegedly lied to school officials not NCAA officials. While the article’s parent-police analogy may be stretching it a little, it does provide an interesting basis for the argument and serves to raise interesting questions as to how the NCAA made its decision.

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2013 at 5:30 am by nvr1983 and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: josh pastner, kentucky, myck kabongo. 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.