1. We are not ready to tell you to jump off the Kevin Ware bandwagon, but his story took an interesting turn yesterday. Ware, to many the story of the 2013 NCAA Tournament, made his triumphant return to the Louisville lineup recently and appeared to be working his way back into the Cardinal rotation. That is until he was cited for driving 95 miles per hour in a 45 mile per hour work zone and then missing his court date for that offense. So what is Rick Pitino going to do? Apparently nothing as Pitino said, “That is his business. That has nothing to do with basketball.” We can almost feel an Allen Iverson “Practice” rant coming on. The part of the story that many people will latch onto is that Ware was driving a 2013 Dodge Charger. Before that gets out of control, current reports indicate that it belonged to a “friend” of Ware’s. What that actually means is anybody’s guess.
2. Fordham will be without junior center Ryan Canty for an undetermined length of time as he has taken “a leave of absence from the team to address personal issues.” Canty, who averaged 6.0 points and 7.0 rebounds per game last season, has seen his production to drop to 3.3 points and 3.3 rebounds per game this year. The decision should be a pretty big blow for the Rams who probably expected big things from Canty after a successful sophomore season. However, after all the things we have heard about players struggling with “personal issues” we hope that he gets whatever is wrong sorted out well before he returns to a court.
3. One of the things that we often miss in the big upsets is the back stories that never get mentioned. Although we would question how big of an upset Belmont’s win over North Carolina was given the current state of the Tar Heels, that does not make the story of J.J. Mann any less remarkable. Mann, who Rick Byrd gave a scholarship to despite his players protesting, keyed the win with his career-high 28 points including 11 in the final 2:22 topped off by the game-winning three with 13.1 seconds left. We are not sure how the rest of Mann’s career will go, but stories like his are part of what make college basketball so great.
4. If you are looking for more team-focused telecasts for the Final Four, then you are in luck. Turner plans on using its three networks–TNT, TBS, and TruTV–to telecast the national semifinals with national announcers on one telecast and team-specific announcers on the other two networks. Turner only plans on using this concept for the national semifinals as the championship game will be telecast on CBS. The proposition is interesting for us on a number of levels not the least of which is what kind of ratings they will get on cable versus the regular broadcast. And of course, we also wonder how advertisers will react to getting a split audience although you could argue that Turner can negotiate three fees instead of one.
5. We have big proponent of advanced analytics on this site, but sometimes we think they go too far or in the case of “korfball” indicate that someone has way too much time on his/her hands. Essentially what korfball comes down to is trying to figure out the last date that two teams both lost on. According to Pomeroy, the leaders in this “game” are Ohio State and Kansas with Duke and Kansas coming in a close second. For some reason this was fairly popular on Twitter (maybe we follow the wrong people), but we are having a hard time believing this is anything other that a joke that took way too much time. Anyways, we have gotten some criticism for being too heavily into advanced analytics so here is our shot at the field.

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 19th, 2013 at 7:00 am by nvr1983 and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: jj mann, kevin ware, ryan canty. 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.