1. When last season ended many college basketball fans bemoaned the end of some of college basketball’s most significant rivalries including Georgetown–Syracuse. Both of last season’s match-ups between the two schools were hailed with a great degree of anticipation as they were expected to be the last time the rivals faced off for the foreseeable future and rightfully so. Well except for the fact that the two schools are now reportedly negotiating a ten-year deal that we would bring back the rivalry again. According to Syracuse officials their side has agreed to the “concept” of it, but are still waiting on a response from Georgetown officials. For his part, Georgetown coach John Thompson III also appears to be in favor of this. We doubt that there is anybody who would oppose rekindling the rivalry on purely basketball terms so we hope that conference and administrative politics do not get in the way of one of the best rivalries in college sports.
2. The deicision by Quentin Snider, a point guard who is ranked 28th overall in the class of 2014, to commit to Illinois over UCLA is a huge get for John Groce. The second year coach already had picked up a commitment earlier this month from Leron Black, a power forward ranked 36th overall, so this is shaping up to be one of the better classes in recent memory for the Illini. On the other end of the spectrum, this is a fairly significant blow for the Bruins who lost out of Jordan McLaughlin one day earlier. The Bruins should be able to weather the storm thanks to the presence of Kyle Anderson who will probably be staying at UCLA longer than he anticipated, but it still raises questions as to who will succeed him when he eventually leaves.
3. According to Myron Medcalf, Wichita State freshman guard D.J. Bowles underwent an unspecified surgery at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota yesterday morning. Bowles had gone to Mayo earlier this week where he underwent a series of tests after collapsing while working out on September 3. We have no idea as to what kind of surgery Bowles underwent or when (if ever) he is expected to return to the court as the Wichita State staff is appropriately releasing extremely limited information. We could speculate as to what type of procedure Bowles had, but instead we will just wish him the best of luck in his recovery.
4. It turns out that schools with limited resources and questionable academic standards are not the only ones with issues with APR scores. A column in The Harvard Crimson earlier this week pointed out the relatively low APR scores of many programs including men’s basketball. Now, we will start off by saying that Harvard‘s APR scores for basketball are well above the numbers required to participate in the NCAA Tournament, but the article and more specifically the comments, which appear to be from Harvard students and alumni, indicate some of the sociological issues–seen more clearly in the big academic fraud scandal at the school a year ago–within the campus and these APR scores only seem to add to that.
5. We are getting to that point in the year where various publications start unveiling their preseason All-American teams. The Sporting News is one of the first we have seen and for the most part we tend to agree with their picks (you can watch the video and ignore the slideshow if you refuse to click through a slideshow). Our biggest issue with their first team is also their biggest issue with their first team, which is the omission of Julius Randle. To be fair it is hard to criticize them for leaving off a freshman, but we probably would have given him the nod over Mitch McGary. There should be plenty of other preseason All-American lists coming out over the next month or two, but we suspect that most of them will look fairly similar to this one.

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Friday, September 13th, 2013 at 5:45 am by nvr1983 and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: dj bowles, georgetown, harvard, illinois, Julius Randle, mitch mcgary, quentin snider, syracuse, wichita state. 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.