1. In an off-season filled with too many negative stories to keep track of, one of the bright spots is the return of Michigan State sophomore Miles Bridges. To most, his decision to return to school forgoing (or at least delaying) millions of dollars was irrational, but as Carvell Wallace notes Bridges does have his reasons to return for at least one more season. While we still can’t say that we agree with his decision it does provide a better rationalization than we have seen elsewhere and gives good insight into who Bridges is.
2. On Tuesday we mentioned that Bruce Pearl‘s job might not be secure, but we had no idea that the next day news would come out that he was refusing to cooperate with Auburn and its investigation into the FBI allegations. If that is true and Pearl continues to refuse to cooperate with the administration we do not understand how he can stay on at the school. Pearl is a good coach, but not nearly good enough to compensate for a mediocre performance at the school with a show-cause in his recent past and his unwillingness to work with the school in a federal investigation.
3. Compared to the other legal issues we have seen around college basketball lately the misdemeanor charges filed against Connecticut junior Jalen Adams seem pretty trivial. Adams, who averaged 14.4 points and 6.1 assists per game last season, has been charged with a misdemeanor for leaving the scene of an accident after he crashed his scooter into another scooter during an on-campus race. Unless he has had disciplinary issues in the past that we are not aware of we expect that Adams won’t face any significant punishment.
4. When North Carolina defended its basketball program by saying that the student-athletes had not been granted special privileges because the fraudulent classes they had taken were available to all students we wondered when its academic accrediting body would come around questioning its academic standards. It looks like that day might be coming soon as The News & Observer (the paper that led the investigation into the scandal) reported that accrediting body is taking a deeper look into the school. We doubt that the school will face any major penalties, but it seems odd that the school defended its basketball program by throwing itself under the bus.
5. The suspensions of Josh Okogie and Tadric Jackson got more complex on Tuesday when Gary Parrish reported that Ron Bell (a former friend of Josh Pastner) was the individual who provided the players with the impermissible benefits. We are struggling to understand why Bell would turn on Pastner, a man he says saved his life when he was dealing with drug addiction, but it does appear that Bell has solid evidence of providing benefits to the two players and speaking extensively with Pastner on October 2, the day that the school announced the suspensions. The school has not given much in the way of a response to these allegations and it is unlikely that Pastner will face any long-term consequences from this (other than maybe his reputation within coaching circles), but we are almost certain that the people who will be affected by this the most are Okogie and Jackson.

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Friday, November 10th, 2017 at 7:01 am by nvr1983 and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: auburn, bruce pearl, connecticut, georgia tech, Jalen Adams, josh okogie, josh pastner, michigan state, Miles Bridges, north carolina, uconn, 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.