1. Over the years we have seen a lot of championship rings go on sale, but we cannot remember the last time we saw such an item from an active player on the auction block. So you can imagine our surprise when we saw an auction for a 2012 Final Four ring from Chane Behanan. Now on some level we can understand why Behanan would not have a specific attachment to a ring that might symbolize a loss to Kentucky when he has a championship ring from a year later, but we are almost certain this would be considered a violation if it is Behanan selling the ring based on what happened to the Ohio State football players and Oregon basketball players. We doubt that Behanan will admit to selling the ring so we are just wondering what excuse the Louisville administration will come with as to how this ended up on the auction block.
2. There were a couple of interesting announcements yesterday. The one that will probably garner the most attention is Oklahoma State announcing that suspended guard Stevie Clark was not with the team “due to personal matters”. The school has not released any more information and the best insight into the matter that we have is that Clark’s mother agrees that he deserved to be disciplined. We have no idea as to when Clark will return to the Cowboys, but fortunately their schedule is so soft that they probably won’t need him for a while (they most likely will not play a ranked team until January 18). On the other end of the spectrum is San Francisco guard Cody Doolin who decided to leave the team “due to personal reasons”, which sounds similar, but suggests that the departure was of his own volition rather than being imposed upon him. Clark may be more well-known due to his team’s prominence, but the loss of Doolin, a senior point guard who was averaging 13 points and 7 assists per game this season will likely have a more detrimental effect on his team.
3. Yesterday, Washington disclosed that Shawn Kemp Jr. had been diagnosed with Graves’ disease in September. We won’t get into the details of the disease (here’s a basic primer if you want information). We are also not sure what led the school to disclose the information since it is a fairly common diagnosis that is a benign condition if treated by competent medical professions, which Washington certainly has, and it has been nearly three months since he was diagnosed so we are not sure that it is particularly newsworthy outside of the fact that the school disclosed his medical condition without any apparent reason.
4. We love the passion that college students bring to college games. It is one of the reasons we wish more early-season tournaments would play games at on-campus sites. Unfortunately sometimes those groups go overboard. One stark example of that comes from the Missouri student section where a group of students known as the Antlers were thrown out of their second game this season for yelling a variety of unimaginative, offensive things at opposing players. Our general tendency is to forgive people for doing stupid things, but based on what the group is saying with their Twitter account it is pretty clear that they don’t get it. At this rate we imagine that the group might eventually get banned from going to any sporting events at the school.
5. We are still trying to figure out what Joe Nocera’s angle is at The New York Times where he appears to be spending quite a bit of time trying to be their NCAA attack dog (perhaps a book deal?). His latest article on “The North Carolina Five” focuses on the state of North Carolina attempting to prosecute individuals for essentially acting as agents to players who were still in school at North Carolina. To be honest we are not that familiar with Nocera’s writing from before his current crusade, but his logic seems pretty weak in this article. If we have any issue with the state of North Carolina taking on these cases it is that they should probably be focused on more important things (like fake academic departments at state institutions).

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 27th, 2013 at 7:00 am by nvr1983 and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: chane behanan, Cody Doolin, missouri, north carolina, shawn kemp jr, stevie clark, unc. 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.