1. Much of the next month will be spent with Doug McDermott collecting awards and by now you have heard almost everything about McDermott including his recruitment, how he got passed over despite every major program actively recruiting at his school. Still the piece by Elizabeth Merrill on McDermott is full of interesting anecdotes that might help you get to know him better. To us one of the more interesting things about McDermott is that despite the fact that he seems to have all of features you would expect from a player that the media would shove down everybody’s throat leading to a backlash we don’t get the sense that people are tired of McDermott.
2. After coming into the season with plenty of buzz, Harvard has flown under the radar, but with the NCAA Tournament just around the corner the Crimson are on the verge of wrapping up the first automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament tomorrow if they beat Yale. SB Nation has an excellent story on Tommy Amaker, the head coach and architect of Harvard’s basketball renaissance. As David Tannenwald points out Amaker’s time in Cambridge (they technically play their games in Allston) has not been without controversy, but what he has done to turn the program from an also-ran into a frequently-mentioned NCAA Tournament dark horse.
3. Apparently some people actually thought that Andrew Wiggins might stick around Lawrence for more than one season because we heard some surprised voices when Wiggins essentially said goodbye to Kansas fans in what is widely expected to be his last home game as a Jayhawk. Wiggins might not have lived up to the ridiculous expectations heaped on him before the season (anything short of LeBron would have been a disappointment), but he still is a legitimate choice as Big 12 Player of the Year so we have a hard time calling his season a disappointment. Wiggins might never become the player that some projected him to be, but it is already clear that he should be a solid NBA player for a long time.
4. In one of the weirder stories that we have mentioned in this space, Scott A. Weitzell, the director of basketball operations at  New Hampshire, was fired amid allegations that he videotaped his team’s players in the locker room during one of the team’s games in January. The school has already tried to scrub its site of Weitzell, but his old profile is still available thanks to the magic of Google cache. Unless this turns out to be something more widespread this is probably the last we will hear of this story on a national level, but it will probably be a big story for a while in New Hampshire.
5. We have not seen much of it up close, but based on how popular college basketball is the fact that getting autographs from star players has become a big business should not be a surprise. As Jason King points out, this is a bigger deal at some campuses than others. It goes without saying that the autographs of future NBA All-Stars will be worth something, but even the autographs of players who are “only” regulars on top teams can be worth quite a bit of money. We always knew that basketball players and other elite athletes would frequently get stopped on campus. We just did not realize that it would be by adults looking for autographs.

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2014 at 7:00 am by nvr1983 and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: Andrew Wiggins, Doug McDermott, new hampshire, tommy amaker. 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.