Coach K is showing no signs of slowing down as he prepares for his summer stint leading the US Men’s National Team again. The FIBA World Championships take place in Turkey in mid-September, and the team will be chosen from a pool of 27 players next month. We’re guessing that the names might include the following: Kobe, LeBron, Dwight, Melo and Kevin. As for Duke, even though K has to replace three starters, his team next year is probably more talented.
In this report, Big 12 coaches talk about their feelings as it appeared their league was going to dismantle last month as a result of the almighty football dollar. Mark Turgeon and Frank Martin’s comments about how NCAA Tournament revenue finances the rest of the NCAA’s championships is the salient point here. The NCAA needs to figure a way to get in front of the next round of massive expansion or face the ugly specter of eventually getting crowded out completely.
Former Memphis guard Roburt Sallie, a player who averaged just under six PPG yet famously dropped ten threes and 35 total points in the 2009 NCAA first round against Cal State Northridge, is transferring to Louisville for his senior season. If he finishes his undergraduate degree this summer, as expected, he will be eligible to play immediately for Rick Pitino’s team. His 11/4 averages and 44% three-point shooting will help UL immediately, a team reeling from losing its top four scorers from last year.
If you had to guess the game with the largest online viewing in history (subject to change annually, we’re sure), would you choose the US-Algeria World Cup game (during work hours on a Thursday morning) or… Florida-BYU from last year’s NCAA Tournament (incidentally, also on a Thursday during work hours). Each game had over 1.1M online viewers, but the hoops game had slightly more.
Speaking of World Cup, this is great. We have a rule around here that any and all Freddy Brown (Georgetown ’84) references will make it onto the site in some capacity, so we couldn’t resist when a comparison was made between Mexico’s Ricardo Osorio’s boneheaded pass to blow the game on Sunday and Brown’s gift to North Carolina’s James Worthy some twenty-eight years ago.
