- The NCAA has taken a lot of criticism, but we have to give them credit for coming to their senses and granting Kerwin Okoro a hardship waiver after transferring from Iowa State to Rutgers. The NCAA has managed to make plenty of highly questionable decisions over the years, but Okoro’s struck a chord due to callousness of it. We have questioned the NCAA’s at times over the top willingness to grant family hardship waivers to players who had some distant relative who was sick or a father who lost or quit a job as a coach. In the case of Okoro, the NCAA denied his request to transfer to be closer to his family after his father and brother died within a span of three months presumably because they were already dead (I know stupid). In the end, the NCAA corrected itself so Okoro will get what he deserved in the first place.
- Before we start to sound like NCAA homers, we should point out that we don’t agree with their decision to ban college coaches from attending practices at schools that are not underneath a governing body. The decision appears to target two schools–Findlay Prep and Huntington Prep–that produce an abundance of Division I talent so we suspect that coaches will be after the NCAA to reverse this. We can certainly understand the NCAA’s desire to cut down on diploma mills (not calling either of these programs that), but we are not sure what this accomplishes. The coaches will still be able to watch the recruits in games. This just makes it more difficult for recruits to catch the attention of a coach and slows down the process of recruitment. We also are not sure why they singled out these two schools as the ruling opens up a huge can of worms. Our best guess is that this ruling will get amended very quickly.
- Although they missed out on Emmanuel Mudiay, Kentucky got a nice consolation prize in Tyler Ulis, a four-star point guard, who committed to Kentucky on Friday night. With Andrew Harrison a likely one-and-done player it was essential that Kentucky get a point guard to replace him and after missing out on Mudiay it appeared that they were essentially down to Ulis or Tyus Jones, who is believed to be a Duke lean at this point. Kentucky beat out Michigan State and Iowa for Ulis’ services. The one catch with Ulis is his size, or lack thereof, as he measures just 5’9″ and around 150 pounds. We would never doubt John Calipari’s eye for talent (or at least his ability to recruit it), but this will certainly be something to watch for when Ulis presumably comes in as Wildcats starting point guard in 2014.
- It turns out that there is one more elite point guard in the class of 2014 who is still up for grabs after Louisville commit JaQuan Lyle backed out of his verbal commitment. Lyle is the second top point guard prospect to decommit from Louisville since July as he is following Quentin Snider, who backed out of his commitment from Louisville to commit to Illinois. It appears that the primary reason for Lyle’s decision was concern over playing time in a crowded Cardinal backcourt. We are a bit surprised that a player who is a top-25 overall recruit would be that worried about getting playing time on a team that admittedly has plenty of talent, but is not loaded with first round talent. Although Lyle has listed several teams, Kansas is the clear leader if they are willing to extend Lyle a scholarship.
- On Friday we mentioned the very real possibility that Syracuse and Georgetown would restart their rivalry even after they moved to different conferences. We hoped that they would serve as an example for other schools that had abandoned rivalries due to conference realignment. Based on a recent radio interview with Mike Krzyzewski it appears that it is unlikely that Duke will resume playing Maryland anytime soon. In between criticizing conference realignment, Krzyzewski essentially said he did not think that the two schools would play unless they were paired against each other in the ACC-Big Ten Challenge (this is your chance, ESPN). We understand the logistical challenges of scheduling non-conference opponents with the increasing size of conference schedules, but there are certain match-ups that we think should happen on a not infrequent basis and this is definitely one of them.