1. Everyone knows about Adreian Payne the basketball player, but unless you are a regular viewer of the BTN show “The Journey,” you may not know the story of his relationship with 8-year-old cancer patient Lacey Holsworth. He met her when he and his Michigan State teammates went on a hospital visit, and they’ve remained friends and have been a constant source of motivation for each other. In the wake of news that Lacey’s cancer has unfortunately returned, Bleacher Report’s Jason King does a tremendous job tracing their special bond and some of the off-the-court tragedies Payne has overcome to become a potential first-round draft pick.
2. Minnesota has struggled defensively all season long, and it’s worth wondering whether a switch to man-to-man on a permanent basis might be a cure for what ails them on that side of the ball. On one side, the zone can be effective because there simply aren’t very many teams in the conference that consistently make teams pay from the outside. On the other side however, the Gopher man-to-man helped them have a much better second half defensively against Purdue. Playing man would allow Deandre Mathiue and Austin Hollins to potentially get more steals and allow the team to get easy buckets in transition. Either way, they can’t allow 23 offensive rebounds like they did against Purdue if they want to finish above .500 in league play.
3. Mike Tyson quotes should be taken with grain of salt, but one of his more famous ones applied to Nebraska and their efforts in their 79-50 loss to Michigan on Wednesday night. “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” can easily be applicable to how quickly Michigan came out and leveled the Huskers with hay-makers to the tune of 9 made three pointers in the first half. This result reinforces the fact that Nebraska cannot really be taken seriously until they get a quality road win, or just a road win in general. They get another chance Saturday when they travel to Northwestern.
4. Tim Frazier is the first name people generally think of when they think Penn State basketball. But the contributions of DJ Newbill, especially during their three game winning streak shows that Newbill could be equally, if not more important to the team. After averaging only 8 points per game in his first three Big Ten games, Newbill has upped that mark to 19.7 points per game in their last six games, and 20 points per game in their last three wins. He also does a nice job on the glass despite being only 6’4″. It will be interesting to see where Frazier and Newbill end up once post-season honors are announced.
5. Thursday means another edition of ESPN releasing Joe Lunardi’s latest Bracketology predictions. The most interesting takeaway from this edition is that it does nothing to solve the question about which conference is the best. If you were to only use the amount of NCAA tournament teams per conference to figure that question out, you would be greeted with a four-way tie at the top. The ACC, Pac-12, Big 12, and the Big Ten all have six teams in his field right now. Minnesota is the lowest seeded team right now for the league, with Indiana lurking as the third team in his “first four out” category.

Brendan Brody (307 Posts)

Brendan Brody is in his fourth season covering the Big Ten for RTC. Email him at brendan.brody@gmail.com, or follow him on twitter @berndon4.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 7th, 2014 at 8:40 am by Brendan Brody and is filed under big ten, microsites, morning 5. Tagged: adreian payne, DJ Newbill, indiana, minnesota, nebraska. 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.