Morning Five: 04.09.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on April 9th, 2014

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  1. Following a sophomore season in which he finished third in the nation in scoring at 24.9 points per game to go with 7.1 rebounds per game, T.J. Warren announced that he will be entering the NBA Draft. The news is not exactly a surprise as it had been reported that Warren would be leaving almost three weeks ago, but Warren did not make it official until yesterday. Warren might lack a good outside shot, but he is projected to be a mid-first round pick so it makes sense that he would leave. Even though NC State has a solid class coming in next season Warren’s departure likely means that next season will be a rebuilding one in Raleigh.
  2. So that John Calipari to the Los Angeles Lakers  rumors appear to have hit a roadblock. The rumor was started when former Kentucky legend Rex Chapman tweeted out that Calipari was going to the Lakers less than an hour before the championship game. Now Chapman has offered his version of backtracking by claiming that he is not a journalist (even if he was on TNT for the national semifinal teamcast). Rex says that he stands by his comments, but he thinks that Calipari will wind up staying at Kentucky. So essentially what he is telling us is that he is just talking in circles and should just be ignored.
  3. Maryland is headed to a new conference next year and it will be doing so a very different team as three players–Nick Faust, Shaq Cleare, and Roddy Peters–announced that they will be transferring. While none of the players would be considered a star on the team they all contributed with Faust being the biggest contributor with 9.4 points, 3.7 rebounds and 2.0 assists per game. The Terrapins will probably be able to cope with the losses, but as former Terrapin Terrell Stoglin notes the moves raise questions about how firm of a hold Mark Turgeon has over the program.
  4. Yesterday, Appalachian State named Davidson assistant Jim Fox to be its next coach replacing Jason Capel, who was fired almost a month ago. On some level we are interested in the what Fox can do for the program, but honestly we are more interested in seeing how he handles the Devonte Graham situation. Graham as you may remember signed a letter of intent to play for Appalachian State before his stock shot up. When he asked for a release to explore other options, the school refused and has since been widely criticized by fans. How Fox handles the Graham situation, which is a mess he had nothing to do with, could set the tone for his program going forward.
  5. With Saul Phillips headed to Ohio, North Dakota State has moved on and named assistant coach David Richman to be their next coach. Richman, 35, does not have any head coaching experience, but has been on the Bison staff for 11 years including seven as an assistant coach. That might be a concern for some programs, but that is the same position that Saul Phillips was in when he took over for Tim Miles at North Dakota State when Miles left for Colorado State. While that transition was not completely seamless, the Bison can only hope that the end result is as good as what Phillips left them with.

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Morning Five: National Championship Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on April 8th, 2014

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  1. So it’s over. Another season in the books. If you want to hear our thoughts on last night’s title game, check out our post from afterward. Briefly though, congrats to Connecticut, who played a phenomenal game making all of its free throws and making key shots when they needed to. On the other side of the ball, Kentucky made the plays they needed to stay in the game, but couldn’t make the shot that would put them over the top and never actually led in the game. In fact, they were never tied except when it was 0-0. Oh, and those free throws. Again for a Calipari team. We will have more on the season later this week as we recap the season.
  2. The immediate future of Manhattan basketball will be determined over the next few months in Lexington as Manhattan announced that it would welcome disgraced coach Steve Masiello back to his head coaching job after he receives his degree from Kentucky. The school has decided to frame Masiello’s deceit about his education as poor judgement rather than a lie. While that might be considered as forgiving it is worth noting that the school would not be able to get a coach of Masiello’s caliber if they didn’t take Masiello back.
  3. We are not sure what it is about South Florida that draws former NBA players and coaches to coach lower-tier teams, but we are up to two in the past five years as Florida Atlantic hired Michael Curry to be its next coach. Curry played in the NBA for 11 years and coached the Detroit Pistons for one season where he went 39-43 before being fired. Curry does not have any other head coaching experience, but apparently that was enough to beat out LaVelle Morton and Matt McCall for the job. Hopefully, Curry will have more success in South Florida than the last head coach with NBA experience (Isiah Thomas at FIU) had there.
  4. The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame announced its 10-member class of 2014 yesterday. The headliners for college basketball fans are Gary Williams and Nolan Richardson with Alonzo Mourning and to a lesser degree Mitch Richmond. The resumes of the first three on the college level does not need much explaining, but perhaps Richmond’s does since we noticed that the college part of his Wikipedia entry had been left blank so this might be a useful primer. The induction ceremonies will be held from August 7-9 in Springfield, Massachusetts.
  5. We have probably seen the last of Oregon guard Johnathan Loyd on the basketball court (at least if you don’t want to watch overseas basketball), but we could see him in an Oregon jersey this fall except this time he will be a wide receiver on the Oregon football team. Thanks to a NCAA rule allowing a player to compete for a fifth year if it is in a different sport (remember Greg Paulus at Syracuse) Loyd would have another year of eligibility. Normally we would worry about how someone of Loyd’s size would survive on a football field, but perhaps Oregon’s up-tempo style might help him.

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Morning Five: 04.07.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on April 7th, 2014

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  1. The national title game is set for tonight and we feel fairly confident in saying that nobody saw this one coming on Selection Sunday. Connecticut proved that its victory over Florida in December was no fluke as they beat the Gators by a surprisingly large margin. In the second semifinal, Kentucky continued its goal of giving every single person in the state of Kentucky a heart attack with its fourth straight nail-bitter as they beat Wisconsin by one thanks to yet another late three-pointer by Aaron Harrison. So now we find ourselves in the strange situation of watching two of the most prominent programs in college basketball play for the title as a #7 and #8 seed.
  2. For the sake of Wake Forest fans we hope their new administration got it right with their decision to hire Danny Manning. Manning is best known for leading carrying Kansas to 1988 NCAA title and his time in the NBA, but he also has ties to North Carolina as he went there for high school before a move to Kansas that would have made Twitter explode if it happened today. Manning has coached at Tulsa for two years leading the team to the NCAA Tournament despite losing several players to transfer when he took the job. Manning certainly has a big enough name to get the attention of recruits (or at least their coaches), but the question is whether he can make Winston-Salem a destination for top recruits in an increasingly competitive ACC.
  3. It did not take Ohio very long to move on from the Jim Christian era as they announced the hiring of North Dakota State coach Saul Phillips over the weekend. Phillips compiled a 134-84 record in seven seasons at North Dakota State including two NCAA appearances (2009 and 2014) and one NCAA Tournament victory (this year). Outside of the on-court success Phillips had his push for a bigger and better job was undoubtedly helped by his time serving as the director of basketball operations at Wisconsin under Bo Ryan and his personality that made him a media darling during the opening weekend (you can be sure that his celebration after North Dakota State’s win over Oklahoma win be included in “One Shining Moment” tonight).
  4. It appears that the new target for the public’s ire with regard to unreasonable transfer restrictions will be Nevada based on their limits for Cole Huff‘s transfer. Huff is certainly a solid player as he averaged 12.4 points and 5.4 rebounds per game this season as a sophomore, but we do not understand why a school would restrict his movement so much. Huff is prohibited from transferring to any Mountain West, West Coast, or Pac-12 school as well as any schools that are on Nevada’s scheduled this coming season. So essentially Huff, who is from California, is prohibited from transferring to a school in the Pacific or Mountain time zones. To a degree we can understand limiting a transfer if the school feels like some tampering took place, but this seems excessive.
  5. So about that whole unionization movement… Kain Colter might have won in court (at least at the first level), but now it appears that the players at Northwestern might not even step up to unionize according to football coach Pat Fitzgerald. One of our issues with Colter’s involvement from the beginning was that he essentially did not have any skin in the game since he had already exhausted his eligibility before coming forward. While a vote not to unionize would not permanently cripple the movement it would be a very ugly public setback and would only serve to reinforce the difficulty any such movement would have. To add to that, Mark Emmert also came out yesterday stating that unionization would be a “grossly inappropriate solution” to the issues that college athletics face. As we said before, this has a very long way to go before we see any significant changes.

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Morning Five: 04.04.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on April 4th, 2014

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  1. After being rejected by Harvard coach Tommy Amaker and deciding against Syracuse assistant Mike Hopkins (possibly the most sought-after assistant in the country), Boston College announced that they were hiring Ohio coach Jim Christian to replace Steve Donahue. Christian was 49-22 at Ohio after taking over for Jim Groce, who left for Illinois. The move is an interesting one is that despite his relative success in stops at Kent State, TCU, and Ohio, Christian has only made two NCAA Tournament appearances in twelve seasons and never got past the first round.
  2. Few players have seen their NBA Draft stock drop as much as James Michael McAdoo during his three years at North Carolina. Coming in as a top-10 recruit, he was still a lottery pick, but decided to come back to school. Despite boosting his production significantly between his freshman and sophomore year, McAdoo returned to school yet again. Now after his junior year, McAdoo has finally decided to enter the NBA Draft. At this point, he is a mid- to late-second round pick. Financially it would have been better for McAdoo to enter after his freshman year and get at least one NBA contract, but in the end he probably would have ended up with the same fate: playing overseas.
  3. T.J. Warren‘s NBA prospects are significantly brighter than McAdoo’s, but he has not decided on whether he will enter the Draft or not. According to Warren’s father, T.J. will probably make his announcement on Tuesday. Warren won ACC Player of the Year honors while leading the conference in scoring (24.9) and shooting (52.5%) and ranking in the top in steals and rebounds. Warren is a borderline lottery pick so at this point we would be surprised to see him return for another season in Raleigh, but stranger things have happened.
  4. St. John’s has had a tough off-season so far. They already had JaKarr Sampson declare for the NBA Draft and now Chris Obekpa has decided to transfer. The 6’9″ sophomore might not be the college player that Sampson is, but he is a better NBA prospect because of his ability to block shots as he averaged 4 blocks per game as a freshman despite playing just 26 minutes per game. He saw his minutes and blocks drop this season, but still had a similar blocked shot percentage (15.7%) putting him among the best in the country. He is believed to be looking at Oregon and Baylor as potential transfer destinations.
  5. It takes a special kind of stupid to get arrested twice in one day, but that is what (former) Missouri player Zach Price did yesterday. Price was arrested early yesterday morning after assaulting his roommate and his roommate’s girlfriend. Price was released a short time later and managed to get arrested yesterday afternoon although the details of that arrest remain unclear. Missouri had already suspended Price following his first arrest so we would not be surprised to see them dismiss him from the program in the near future.

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Morning Five: 04.03.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on April 3rd, 2014

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  1. Fans in the AAC can start working on their cell phone and texting jokes as Houston hired Kelvin Sampson to be its next coach. Sampson was successful at both Oklahoma and Indiana before a variety of issues that have been documented in great detail before derailed him leading to a five-year show-cause penalty in 2008. Sampson has spent the last six years floating between jobs in the NBA and was serving as an assistant for the Houston Rockets so he might not even have to move for his new job although he might be moving into a bigger house with the upgrade in his salary. Much like the Bruce Pearl hire this has to be considered a huge get for the program, but we have to wonder how long he will stay there..
  2. After what has to be considered a successful first season for Steve Alford things are looking pretty good at UCLA. However, accusations by a spurned sports agent that he provided former Bruin Tyler Honeycutt with impermissible benefits could halt that progress. The school had previously investigated the matter and said that the NCAA ruled the case closed, but with the new documentation they will have to investigate the matter further. This is the second such incident involving UCLA in the past two years (Shabazz Muhammad being the more well-known case), but we wouldn’t consider it an issue with the school. Our bigger question is why do these issues typically arise with mid-level players and not the real stars?
  3. With many of the bigger jobs being filled or in the process of being filled the attention on the coaching carousel shifts to the mid-tier schools. One example of this is North Carolina Central coach LeVelle Morton, who is reportedly interviewing at Florida Atlantic and Marshall. Morton has led the Eagles to better records in each of his five seasons culminating in a NCAA Tournament appearance this season. His move might not move the needle nationally, but it could lead him to an even bigger job in the future.
  4. Chane Behanan cannot seem to avoid getting in trouble. The former Louisville forward, who was kicked off the team for marijuana use, has already enrolled at Colorado State, but took a trip back to Louisville this week. At 1 AM on Wednesday morning he was cited, but not arrested for marijuana possession after a police officer smelled marijuana in a car in which Behanan was a passenger. Behanan reportedly admitted to having a marijuana cigarette. Although he was not arrested he will have a court date later this month. Avoiding the whole social discussion regarding the legalization of marijuana one has to question Behanan’s maturity at this point for getting arrested for something after he has already been through so much.
  5. Next season could be a rough one for Missouri after Jabari Brown announced that he would enter the NBA Draft. Brown joins fellow junior Jordan Clarkson in potentially leaving Missouri early although both could withdraw their names from the Draft by April 15 depending on what they hear. Brown was a first-team All-SEC player this season and led the conference in scoring at 19.9 points per game. Like Clarkson, Brown is also projected to be a second-round pick so it would seem to make sense for him to return, but it would not be the first time that we have seen a player leave early for that type of fate.

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Morning Five: 04.02.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on April 2nd, 2014

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  1. The biggest name on the coaching carousel (or at least the longest) is off the market as Marquette hired longtime Duke assistant Steve Wojciechowski to be its next head coach. It is pointless to go in-depth about Wojciehowski because he was possibly the most well-known college basketball assistant coach in the country, but he will have a tough task in front of him in replacing Buzz Williams at Marquette. We hesitate to put too much stock into the Krzyzewski coaching tree just because of Chris Collins’ (relative) success in his first season at Northwestern, but it would appear that Wojciehowski would have a good chance of being successful at Marquette given his experience.
  2. With the Marquette vacancy filled, the most prominent remaining opening is at Wake Forest. Yesterday, the school met with Tulsa coach Danny Manning to discuss the opening. Even without Manning’s background in the state of North Carolina, this would be a tremendous hire for Wake Forest and the position is certainly a step-up for Manning assuming that he is confident that he can make the team a winner in the ACC, which would be much harder to do than build a consistent winner at Tulsa. Given the difficulty of winning at Wake Forest and Manning’s name recognition, the smart move would probably be to parlay Wake Forest’s interest into a better contract at Tulsa and then try to move on to a much bigger job when Tulsa makes a NCAA Tournament run.
  3. We usually don’t discuss women’s college basketball on this site (particularly at this time of the year), but we are intrigued by the decision of Louisiana Tech to hire Tyler Summitt as its next women’s basketball coach. Tyler, is of course the son of the legendary Pat Summitt (the all-time NCAA Division I wins leader), so the fact that he followed in his mother’s footsteps should not be that shocking. What is surprising is that Tyler is only 23 years-old and Louisiana Tech has one of the more storied traditions in women’s college basketball so it is hardly the typical starting job although the team has fallen on tough times recently. Tyler will be replacing Teresa Weatherspoon, another women’s college basketball legend, at Louisiana Tech.
  4. Along with the coaching carousel the next few weeks will be full of NBA Draft decisions. Yesterday, Johnny O’Bryant announced that he would be entering the NBA Draft. O’Bryant, who averaged 15.4 points and 7.7 rebounds per game this season, is predicted to be a mid-second round pick. Two other significant players–Gary Harris and Spencer Dinwiddie (and his glorious mustache)–are reportedly still deciding although rumors indicate that they are leaning towards entering the NBA Draft. For Harris the decision would appear to make sense as he is expected to be a borderline lottery pick. Dinwiddie is a more questionable case as he is coming off a season-ending knee injury and is most likely a second-round pick.
  5. Matt Carlino, who stepped in for Kyle Collinsowrth in the NCAA Tournament, is transferring from BYU with one more year of eligibility left. Carlino averaged 13.7 points, 4.3 assists, and 3.4 rebounds per game this season and will be eligible play immediately as he is scheduled to graduate from BYU this summer so he would appear to be an almost ideal transfer target. This will be Carlino’s second transfer as he left midway through his freshman year at UCLA.

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Morning Five: 04.01.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on April 1st, 2014

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  1. South Florida appears to have its next coach and hopefully he has completed the coursework that he says he has. Yesterday, the school announced that Orlando Antigua would be its next head coach. Antigua is expected to continue to serve as an assistant at Kentucky through their Final Four run. The deal, which is reportedly five years, adds Antigua to a growing Calipari coaching tree that already includes Josh Pastner, Derek Kellogg, and Bruiser Flint. Antigua is best known for spearheading Kentucky’s recent ridiculous recruiting run. He will not be recruiting anything close to the same caliber of player in Tampa, but getting better players into the program will be the first step in making it respectable.
  2. Antigua is just getting his head coaching career started while across the country Mike Montgomery appears to have decided to end his. Yesterday, Montgomery announced that he would be stepping down as the coach at California and retiring. Montgomery coached at three schools–California, Stanford, and Montana–for 32 seasons and in the NBA for the Golden State Warriors for two seasons. Outside of his time in the NBA during which his teams went 34-48 in each of his two seasons, Montgomery was very successful at all three schools he coached at going 677-317, but will be best remembered for making Stanford into one of the top programs in the country before he left the Farm to head to the NBA.
  3. Staying in the Pac-12, Washington State announced that it hired former Oregon coach Ernie Kent to be its next head coach. After having a degree of success under Tony Bennett (not exactly shocking anymore) the Cougars went through a rough patch with Ken Bone, who was fired after five seasons. With his 13 seasons at Oregon, which included two Elite 8 appearances, Kent would appear to be ideally suited to compete in the Pac-12. Having said that perhaps the biggest key for Kent was his relationship with athletic director Bill Moos, who had hired Kent to his first head coaching position at St. Mary’s.
  4. Former Arizona star Jason Gardner (last seen having this done to him by Jason Williams–seriously, no foul was called on that) was named as the new coach at IUPUI yesterday. Gardner is best known for his time at Arizona, but he subsequently played overseas before serving as an assistant at Loyola then Memphis. Outside of his professional experience and name recognition, Gardner also was a Mr. Basketball in Indiana in 1999, which could serve him well as he tries to recruit within the state although he will have an uphill battle trying to get recruits over much more well-known in-state schools.
  5. We had two players announce that they were entering the NBA Draft yesterday. One had been expected for over a year while the other one was a bit of a surprise. The first (and obvious) one was Andrew Wiggins, who announced that he would be leaving Kansas after his freshman season. Wiggins’ draft stock may have dropped from what it was before the season (an unquestioned #1 overall pick), but he is still a top-five pick at worst. The announcement out of Missouri was a little more surprising as Jordan Clarkson has elected to enter the NBA Draft after his junior season. While Clarkson’s numbers this season may have been close to what Wiggins put up, he is closer to a late first round pick at best so this might end up backfiring on him if he were to slip into the second round.

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Morning Five: 03.31.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on March 31st, 2014

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  1. The Final Four field is set and now all we have to do is wait five days for the national semifinals. The first semifinal will feature Florida against Connecticut, which is a rematch of the game in Storrs on December 2 that the Huskies won on a last-second Shabazz Napier jumper. This time Florida will be completely healthy and it will be at a neutral site, but it will be interesting to see if the Gators can beat the last team to beat them this season. The other semifinal features Wisconsin and Kentucky. Despite the fact that Wisconsin is a #2 seed and Kentucky is a #8 seed the Wildcats opened as two-points favorites in this one.
  2. Four teams were sent home earlier than they would have liked over the weekend and three of the fan bases acted in an appropriate manner. Arizona was the exceptions where students rioted leading to stand-offs with police and subsequently arrests. Fortunately no injuries were reported, but it was a bad way for the Wildcats to go out particularly when the coaches and players conducted themselves so well after a frustrating loss. While we understand the idiot of protests and riots in terms of political and civil issues, we don’t understand doing it in front of people (Arizona staff and Tucscon natives) who presumably agree with you.
  3. Now that the season is over for all, but four teams we are starting to transition into the part of the college basketball season where NBA Draft decisions are being made. Two of the biggest ones will come from Aaron Gordon and Andrew Wiggins both of whom are almost certainly expected to turn pro. They are expected to officially announce as early as today. On the other hand, Juwan Staten tweeted out on Saturday night that he would be returning for his senior year at West Virginia. Unlike the other two Staten is most likely a borderline draft pick so it makes sense for him to return. The other two are probably top-five picks so it makes sense for them to go after the guaranteed contract.
  4. Some players are headed to the NBA while others are just leaving school. The biggest news was out of Louisville where news broke that Kevin Ware was transferring. It was just a year ago that Ware became a symbol of the Cardinals on their march to the championship following his compound fracture in the Elite 8. Neither Ware nor his family have given any indication of where he will be transferring, but some sources suggest that he could be headed to Auburn to play for Bruce Pearl since Ware committed to play for Pearl at Tennessee before the barbecue/cookout  fiasco. The other major transfer announcement was Tyler Lewis who will be leaving North Carolina State. Whereas Ware had issues coming back from injury, Lewis had no such issue and was starting making his transfer even more confusing. Like Ware, Lewis has not listed any potential destinations.
  5. Finally, we get to the coaches who are part of the ever-revolving coaching carousel. The biggest news of the weekend was based on the lack of movement as Tommy Amaker turned down Boston College to stay at Harvard and Dave Rice turned down South Florida to stay at UNLV with Rice possibly getting two more years added onto his contract. In terms of potential news, Mike Montgomery is expected to announce later today whether he will remain the coach at California or retire.

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Morning Five: 03.20.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on March 20th, 2014

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  1. In a twist on his usual Power Rankings, Luke Winn decided to rank the eight most likely bracketbusters. Winn’s criteria were that a team had to be an 11 seed or higher with only two could be from power conferences and two had to be seeded between 13 and 16. His top two picks are Tennessee and Iowa, which should not be too surprising although Iowa was already eliminated last night after losing to Tennessee in the play-in game last night. We are not sure how much the first round opponent factored into it. The top six teams in these rankings are all teams that we considered as legitimate threats of advancing when we made up our bracket earlier this week.
  2. As great as the TV highlights of magical March moments are we sometimes forget how great the writing about it can be. One example of that is SI’s longform piece on the 1989 Georgetown–Princeton game. For those who do not remember the game or were not aware of its significance it was one of the most memorable games in NCAA Tournament history. The recent piece does contain a bit of hyperbole, but does an excellent job recounting many of the more important details. If you are looking for a great account out of that game from the scene, check out Alexander Wolff’s column on it from the March 27, 1989 issue of Sports Illustrated.
  3. Jeff Eisenberg has a great article on Bill Frieder, who announced just before the 1989 NCAA Tournament that he would be leaving Michigan for Arizona State after the season. Rather than wait for the season to end, Michigan athletic director Bo Schembechler fired Frieder immediately and replaced him with Steve Fischer, who went on to lead the Wolverines to the national title. Can you imagine the circus there would be today if something similar happened?
  4. There has been a lot of talk about fans rushing the court recently, but we had not heard of anybody infiltrating the court. That is until we heard about a Virginia fan, who worked his way into the Cavalier bench and became part of their celebration the ACC Tournament title game (more detailed version here). On the surface this is certainly an amusing story, but we are guessing that the officials at Virginia and the ACC find it much less so. We would guess that security will be tighter at future ACC Tournaments.
  5. Everybody is focused on the NCAA Tournament, but Oregon picked up a significant piece for next season when JaQuan Lyle announced that he was committing to play at Oregon next season. With Lyle committed, Myles Turner is the only significant recruit who has yet to commit (Turner is #2 in ESPN’s rankings and the only other uncommitted player in the top 100 is ranked 99th overall). As Jeff Borzello notes, Lyle’s recruitment has been complicated (involving him backing out of a commitment to Louisville) and there are still some academic questions that need to be answered, but Lyle should fit in well at Oregon.

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Morning Five: 03.19.14 Edition

Posted by nvr1983 on March 19th, 2014

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  1. Bruce Pearl still has a few months left on his show-cause penalty, but that isn’t stopping Auburn from hiring him to a six-year deal worth $14.7 million. Since it appears that the NCAA won’t raise any objection with the hiring (the lead investigator on the case works for Auburn now) it seems like a great move by Auburn. We would be tempted to question Pearl’s decision to take the Auburn job, but when you have been blacklisted by the NCAA for three years and technically still are you have to take what is available. Our only question is that now that the door has been opened by Auburn, how long will Pearl stay there before moving on to a better job. The school appear to be weary enough of that they included a clause where he will have to pay $5 million if he leaves within two years meaning that he will actually lose money on the deal if he does so.
  2. We would not have considered Boston College’s decision to fire Steve Donahue that surprising if not for Pete Thamel’s recent report that they were retaining Donahue. Assuming that Thamel’s sources were good it is a pretty abrupt change of course for the program. Having said that it seemed like it would only be a matter of time before Donahue was gone as he was 54-76 in four seasons with his first season being by far his most successful. Boston College is one of the more interesting job openings because many people consider a spot with great potential because of its proximity to several great AAU and high school programs, but nobody has been able to tap into that potential.
  3. Donahue was not the only big name who was shown the door yesterday as Washington State fired Ken Bone yesterday. Bone went 80-86 in five seasons and had a difficult task of following up Tony Bennett, who went 69-33 in his three seasons there while leading the Cougars to two NCAA Tournament appearances including a Sweet Sixteen (and is also doing an ok job in Charlottesville). Pullman might not seem like a great destination to the outside observer, but it is still in the Pac-12 and has quite a bit of talent in the region to draw from. If they are able to lure one of the names mentioned in the link above they could be competitive in the Pac-12 in the not too distant future.
  4. We had almost forgotten about the strange circumstances under which Providence suspended Rodney Bullock and Brandon Austin. The pair of prized freshmen were suspended on November 6 for “not upholding their responsibilities as student-athletes” and nobody paid much attention to it after that except when Austin transferred to Oregon. Now it appears that a woman is claiming that the pair sexually assaulted her on November 3–three days before they were suspended. We aren’t going to say that the two events are related, but the optics don’t look good. Outside of the obvious legal implications we have to wonder what this will mean for Austin, Bullock, and Providence administrators.
  5. The transfer market is starting to heat up as two big names–UNLV’s Bryce Dejean-Jones and Temple’s Anthony Lee–entered it in the past few days.  Dejean-Jones was UNLV’s leading scorer this year, but had some off-court issues that likely led to his decision to transfer for his senior year. He is on pace to graduate this summer so he will likely be able to play next season with the graduate student transfer waiver. Lee averaged 13.6 points and 8.6 rebounds per game and has also decided to transfer for his senior year. Lee has already graduated and is expected to use a graduate student transfer waiver.

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