1. Oklahoma was a pleasant surprise this season. Lon Kruger worked his magic to lead a struggling program to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since Blake Griffin roamed the streets of Norman, so it’s fair to call the Sooners classic overachievers. As the article points out, there were a number of bright spots during the 2012-13 campaign. Romero Osby’s production increased as a senior. Buddy Hield became the team’s best defender and became quite the character in the locker room. Kruger transformed a losing mentality into a winning one almost overnight, but it wasn’t all good news this season. There were some negatives. The end of the season wasn’t good, for starters, but despite a late road loss to TCU and no postseason victories in either the Big 12 or NCAA Tournaments, the Sooners created momentum for next season, if such a thing even exists.
2. Baylor doesn’t have any momentum, not after a fairly disastrous season that saw the Bears fall all the way to the NIT. Still, maybe Scott Drew’s team can at least salvage some pride this March. It continues this evening with a quarterfinal game against Providence. Baylor didn’t crash and burn in the traditional sense — it was on the bubble all the way through the Big 12 Tournament, after all — but that’s not good enough for a team with this much talent. Not with blue-chip freshmen in the frontcourt, the best player in the league in Pierre Jackson, and a dead-eye shooter in Brady Heslip. No matter how far Baylor advances in the NIT, that “what if” will linger into next November.
3. Naadir Tharpe is a sophomore. He really is. For all the expectations, criticism and attention, it’s easy to forget he hasn’t even wrapped up his second full season of Division I basketball. That’s life at Kansas, though, which is why he’s playing such a key role on this team right now. Alongside senior Elijah Johnson, Tharpe has also carried the brunt of criticism from fans and writers for Kansas’ occasional offensive lapses and point guard problems. But that didn’t happen during the Jayhawks’ dominant second half against North Carolina this weekend, and it’ll need to stay that way as this team advances into the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament.
4. Texas Tech might need a new basketball coach if it doesn’t retain interim head coach Chris Walker, so it’s reaching out to various candidates. The results are not good so far. Southern Illinois’ Barry Hinson, an odd candidate considering he finished in last place of the Missouri Valley in his first year in Carbondale, said he has no interest. And New Mexico State’s Marvin Menzies said the exact same thing. Texas Tech isn’t the best job in the league, but the school has lured Bob Knight and Billy Gillispie to coach there in the last decade. Those are big names — especially Knight. It remains to be seen whether the TTU program can catch a big fish again this time around.
5. Fred Hoiberg knows all about being awesome at things. Especially basketball. So he’s going to coach an All-Star game at the Final Four, featuring some of the best seniors in college basketball. It’ll be a nostalgic event for Hoiberg, who played in this same All-Star game as an Iowa State senior in the 1990s. See how he’s gone full circle?

dnspewak (343 Posts)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 27th, 2013 at 7:31 am by dnspewak and is filed under big 12, microsites, morning 5. Tagged: baylor, blake griffin, fred hoiberg, iowa state, kansas, lon kruger, naadir tharpe, oklahoma, pierre jackson. 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.