1. What was a promising string of recruits for Larry Brown has continued to dwindle as former SMU commit Matt McQuaid announced his commitment to Michigan State yesterday. McQuaid, a four-star shooting guard out of Texas, backed out of his commitment to SMU in late July and also was courted heavily by Indiana, Texas and Creighton. In the end, McQuaid said it was the relationship that he developed with Tom Izzo, cemented by an official visit to East Lansing this past weekend, that led him to commit to play for the Spartans. Michigan State picks up one of the best shooters in the country to add to two other four-star commits in Deyonta Davis and Kyle Ahrens.
2. North Carolina State junior guard Trevor Lacey was arrested last Friday for failing to show up for a court date related to a February speeding ticket. Lacey, who sat out last season after transferring from Alabama (averaging 9.3 points per game while there), was stopped for riding a moped without a helmet a little after midnight, but was arrested for missing an April 4 court date for a February 23 speeding ticket. Lacey is now scheduled to appear in court on Monday for the February ticket and also has a November 13 court date for last Friday’s clinic. While we don’t want to minimize an arrest, this is one that we feel will lead to nothing more than a slap on the wrist from the athletic department.
3. South Carolina has joined a growing list of schools that will offer four-year guaranteed scholarships. The school will reportedly give these scholarships to players in football, men’s and women’s basketball, and women’s tennis and volleyball. Athletes in other sports will have to divide up a predetermined number of four-year guaranteed scholarships with the allocations within each team to be determined by the coach. According to the school these guaranteed scholarships can only be revoked “if the student-athlete 1) decides to leave the team; 2) becomes ineligible; or 3) violates University or athletics department policies.” Although many schools have launched similar programs it is far from universal so we will be interested to see if the schools that do gain any kind of recruiting advantage.
4. One of the most exciting things about the start of each season is waiting to see which player will be ready to make the leap to become a household name. Obviously, some of the incoming freshmen stars will make that leap, but other times it is players who have been around, but now are given the opportunity to shine. Monte Morris could be a prime example of that with DeAndre Kane no longer in Ames. Morris put up an NCAA record with a 4.79 assist-to-turnover ratio as a freshman including 6.9 in Big 12 games so he obviously has the tools to guide the Cyclones. As Dana O’Neill notes Morris also an interesting back story that we think you will hear repeated on telecasts quite a bit this season.
5. Basketball doesn’t lend itself to advanced statistical analysis the way that baseball does due to the nature of the game, but it has come a long way in a relatively short period of time and has gained acceptance by many fans. At this point nearly every baseball fan has heard of Bill James, but we doubt that many have heard of Dean Oliver, who is basically the Bill James of advanced basketball statistical analysis. Even those who know of Oliver are not that familiar with his background, which Adam Rosenfield does a good job of covering in his article on Oliver. We are not sure that we necessarily agree with Oliver that today’s traditional stats will become extinct as we believe the more useful ones will survive and be used with the similarly useful advanced metrics.

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2014 at 6:30 am by nvr1983 and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: iowa state, Matt McQuaid, michigan state, monte morris, north carolina state, south carolina, trevor lacey. 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.