- It is beginning to seem like eventually every conference tournament will be held in the New York metro area. The latest conference to join the trend is the Big Ten, which hold its 2018 tournament at Madison Square Garden. According to the Big Ten, this is only part of a rotation as they will be going through different cities over the next four years: Chicago (2015), Indianapolis (2016), and Washington, D.C. (2017) before going to New York City. While the conference is saying all the right things about this being part of rotation the need to play in New York City is apparently great enough that they were willing to move up their conference tournament that year by a week (Big Ten title game will be a week before Selection Sunday in 2018) that year. If you are a sportswriter you might want to go ahead and book a long-term room in New York City for March 2018 as that year the Big Ten Tournament will be followed by the ACC Tournament (Barclay’s) and Big East Tournament (MSG) going on simultaneously.
- Binghamton suffered a big blow on Friday as two-time All-America East selection Jordan Reed announced that he will be transferring at the end of the semester. Reed, who averaged 16.6 points and 9.5 rebounds per game as a freshman and 15.4 points and 8.9 rebounds per game as a sophomore, had been on leave from the team since November 26 with the reason reportedly being disagreements with head coach Tommy Dempsey. Given Reed’s production and his experience he should have no shortage of high-major suitors assuming whatever happened between him and Dempsey isn’t enough to scare off programs. As for the Bearcats, we don’t think they can get that much worse as they sit at 1-8 after a loss at home against Pennsylvania in their first game with Reed officially off the roster.
- It doesn’t seem that long ago that we were writing posts asking when New Jersey Institute of Technology would actually win a game (it was actually six years ago, which in terms of this site’s existence is actually fairly long) so we have to admit that we were shocked when we saw that they have knocked off Michigan on the road. While much of this can be focused on just how bad Michigan was (hey, at least they have a bowl game to… oh, right) we would rather focus on the winning side, which as a 24.5-point underdog is the biggest such underdog to win since Gardner-Webb beat Kentucky in 2007 (favored by 26-points as part of the magical Billy Gillespie experience). We aren’t sure if there is a trend to have more bigger name programs losing to smaller-name programs in recent years (a little help, Pomeroy?), but it certainly seems that way with what we have been seeing recently.
- Gerald Hamilton, Skal Labissiere’s legal guardian and the target of quite a bit of criticism, finally responded to his critics. According to Hamilton, they have met with Kentucky, the school that Labissiere committed to, and discussed Labisserie’s history with the NCAA with all parties being satisfied. Of course, this is coming from Hamilton and neither Kentucky nor the NCAA so it obviously could be quite biased and given what we have heard about Hamilton we have to admit that we have a hard time taking anything he says at face value. Our guess is that Labisserie’s eligibility will be one of those cases that is not decided until next season starts.
- Speaking of legal guardians and questionable eligibility, Ed Smith, Thon Maker‘s legal guardian, has come out and stated that Maker (the top recruit in the class of 2016) will reclassify to the class of 2015 if he is academically eligible. This isn’t exactly a surprise given all of the movement that Maker has had in the past few years, but it is the first time we have seen them openly discuss it since Maker was moved to Canada. According to Smith, the issue isn’t so much Maker meeting NCAA requirements as he reportedly has a solid GPA, but instead the requirements of the school he just transferred to. While this isn’t the first time we would have seen a transfer backfire it might be the first time we see it backfire because of school-specific academic requirements.