1. The Mike Rice fiasco at Rutgers will take a long time to play out, but the school appears to be taking the first step of moving into a new era with the expected hiring of Eddie Jordan as its new coach some time this week. Jordan, who was an honorable mention All-American at Rutgers and led the school to the 1976 Final Four, is probably best known for being the head coach of the Washington Wizards from 2003 to 2008 getting the team to the playoffs four straight years. Jordan is currently serving as an assistant coach for the Los Angeles Lakers, which means he should be free to take on the duties of being the head coach at Rutgers in the not too distant future. His biggest task will be repairing the basketball program’s image after video of Rice’s abuse surfaced. If he is able to gain the confidence of recruits again this could be a huge hire as the New Jersey area produces more than enough talent to make Rutgers a nationally competitive team under the right circumstances.
2. It took longer than it probably should have, but on Friday Jim Crews had interim label removed from his job title at St. Louis as he officially was introduced as the head coach. Crews inherited a talented St. Louis team that was placed in a precarious position after Rick Majerus stepped down as coach before dying of issues related to worsening heart failure. What Crews did in getting his players to focus and buy into him as a coach was nothing short of remarkable. After winning the Atlantic 10 regular season and Tournament titles the Bilikens advanced to the third round of the NCAA Tournament before losing to a underseeded Oregon team. Although the loss of Majerus is undeniably huge, the St. Louis program should be in good hands with Crews, who won the Sporting News National Coach of the Year award this season and already has 25 years of head coaching experience  at the Division I level.
3. We have seen quite a few sons of coaches transfer schools from their father’s are fired, but Steve Alford’s move to UCLA has brought about two recruiting moves. First was the quasi-transfer of his son, a high school recruit who had signed with New Mexico to UCLA. Now Cullen Neal, the son of Craig Neal who was hired to take over at New Mexico after Alford left, has gotten out of his signed letter of intent at St. Mary’s and will play for his father. Although some might argue that letting players out of signed letters of intent is a questionable strategy given the power schools have over athletes in most situations the recent rulings by the NCAA would appear to indicate that the players would be given waivers to transfer immediately. We are not sure how much of an impact either Alford or Neal (the sons) will have at their new schools, but it will be an interesting to see how well they play for their fathers.
4. With the way the NCAA Tournament ended–all three Final Four games featuring controversial calls–Deadspin’s article on college referees and the way they deal with blown calls is well-timed. As is often stated nobody knows the name of an official unless they get something wrong (or they make a spectacle of themselves on television…and get something wrong). We have usually stood by officials when they make mistakes because we think in most cases there is no bias involved and the fact remains that if we had one hundred thousand people analyzing every single decision we made for two hours we would probably get a lot of criticism too. Having said that one of the interesting secondary topics discussed in the article is the travel and volume of games some officials do each season as they function as independent contractors and can be paid quite well for their work. Fatigue from travel and officiating games is certainly something that the NCAA and conferences can do by simply hiring officials and paying them set amounts based on the number of games they are contracted to do with provisions prohibiting freelancing that can compromise their ability to officiate games that they are paid to work.
5. Now that Rick Pitino is on his way to the Hall of Fame and has won national titles with two different schools some people in Kentucky are asking the (not-so) obvious question: If this were the Baseball Hall of Fame and you had to choose a “cap” to go in under, would Pitino go in under Kentucky or Louisville? The case for both schools is certainly compelling, but given his impact on Kentucky we would go with a Wildcat cap at least as of now. However as Mark Story notes the more likely choice would be Louisville given Pitino’s current allegiances and the fact that Kentucky fans would probably still hate him even if he were to enter the Hall of Fame after having left Louisville.

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Monday, April 15th, 2013 at 5:40 am by nvr1983 and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: cullen neal, eddie jordan, jim crews, kentucky, louisville, new mexico, rick pitino, rutgers, st louis. 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.