1. Louisville‘s hopes of repeating as national champions took a hit yesterday when they announced that Chane Behanan was suspended indefinitely for what has been described as a “violation of university and team rules”. There is a tendency to view these type of preseason suspensions with a cynical eye since we have all seen how these indefinite suspensions tend to be miraculously lifted just in time for a big game, but the way in which Rick Pitino and school have been discussing the suspension it appears that it will not necessarily be a short one although we would be surprised if Behanan did not come back to the team assuming that this is not a legal matter. According to Pitino the reason for the suspension was “multiple things” and guaranteed that Behanan would not play in November and might return in December (just in time for Kentucky on December 28).
2. Yesterday, Trae Golden joined the ever-growing list of players granted a family hardship waiver as the NCAA approved of his transfer waiver to play for Georgia Tech this season. Golden, who averaged 12.1 points and 3.9 assists per game last season as a junior, transferred from Tennessee to be closer to his ailing father. Of course, there are other reports of why Golden may have left Tennessee (Google Search is your friend). While the decision to grant Golden a transfer waiver was hardly unexpected it does make them a potential NCAA Tournament team and could put them in the top half of the ACC.
3. Like Golden, Joey King also had his hardship waiver approved (for an undisclosed family illness) by the NCAA allowing the Drake transfer to be eligible to play for Minnesota immediately. King averaged 6.9 points and 2.9 rebounds per game while being named to the Missouri Valley Conference all-freshman team and should join what will be a rebuilding/reloading process for Richard Pitino who is taking over after coaching at Florida International last season. With the lack of depth the Gophers have on the interior we suspect that King would get plenty of playing time on a team that will be relying on its background for much of its scoring next season.
4. It remains an annual tradition that we do not quite understand, but yesterday Jeff Goodman and Andy Katz released the “secret scrimmage list” that features games running from October 19 through November 3. Almost all of the match-ups are regional with a few exceptions (Baylor-Memphis in Ruston, LA, jumps out) so in most cases they are an issue of convenience rather than of truly testing each team although there are a handful of games that we would be interested in attending. We have always considered these games to be mere curiosities outside of an occasional injury, but the public became more aware of these games after Donte Hill lost his final year of eligibility due to playing eight minutes in one of these exhibitions as a sophomore. Hopefully teams get through the games this year without anybody getting injured or costing anybody their eligibility.
5. Finally, college basketball sites went crazy when a column from Bleacher Report indicated that adidas was set to pay Andrew Wiggins $140-$180 million over 10 years and that Nike was set to match, which we discussed in Wednesday’s Morning Five. That was nice, but it appears that the original report was false according to an adidas spokesman who pointed out just how fraudulent the letter cited in the original report was. Many will be quick to point out the credibility of the site originally reporting the story, but we would note that many well-respected sports journalism establishments have also had fairly big misses in recent years. Perhaps the biggest take-home point of this entire story is that the hype surrounding Wiggins is so great that people actually believed such a ridiculous number.

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Friday, October 18th, 2013 at 5:45 am by nvr1983 and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: Andrew Wiggins, chane behanan, georgia tech, louisville, trae golden. 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.