Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

How any Kentucky basketball fan, coming off the most disappointing season of John Calipari’s Kentucky tenure, could turn to 2013-14 with anything less than a 2012-level romp of a national title as a baseline expectation is beyond my limited capacity for understanding hoops-obsessed fan bases. The Wildcats are bringing in what’s being billed as the best recruiting class of all-time, built on the backs of five McDonald’s All Americans, including the nation’s top power forward (Julius Randle), point guard (Andrew Harrison), shooting guard (Aaron Harrison) and center (Dakari Johnson), and a competitive leg in the race for the still-unsigned best player in the country, Andrew Wiggins.

If recruiting rankings foretell wins and championship odds, Kentucky is on its way to big things in 2013-14 (Getty Images)

It is a class that defies the basic tenets of recruiting: AAU Tournaments and unofficial visits and verbal commitments and the like. Calipari is drafting his personally-vetted lot, not evaluating and selecting it. Thanks to a proven track record for turning high-upside prospects into deep-Tournament outfits and high school superstars into first-rounders, Calipari can pick and choose the next batch of young stars who will join his one-and-done empire. This year, he’s blown the roof off of every former recruiting class, his included, to hit a college campus. Kentucky fans should be excited; they should be hungry; they should expect nothing less than a net-cutting ceremony at Cowboys Stadium exactly one year from now.

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1. I will start off today with a few words about Boston. We have been running this site for approximately six years now and there have been plenty of significant events/tragedies that we have not really talked about in this space for a variety of reasons, but this one hit closer to home for the primary reason that Boston was actually our home (at least for one of the two of us that run this site) for 11 years. I have not been back since leaving at the end of June for a new job, but was already planning on doing so this coming June well before the tragedy that transpired yesterday. I just want to send my condolences to those who lost loved ones yesterday and wish for a speedy recovery for all of those who were injured.
2. We knew it was coming, but yesterday Nerlens Noel made it official that he would be entering the NBA Draft. Some pundits may argue that Noel should spend an extra year in college to rehab from a torn left ACL, but we do not see the benefit. Noel, who was considered by many to be the #1 pick before he tore his ACL, is still considered a potential #1 overall pick depending on which team gets that pick. As crazy as it sounds the potential #1 overall pick in this year’s NBA Draft might get overshadowed on next year’s Kentucky team particularly if he is not 100% when he returns. There have not been many cases where an underclassman leaves early with such a significant injury, but these are exceptional circumstances.
3. Plenty of people have mocked the NCAA’s new academic standards, but for many recruits those numbers can be hard to meet, which has led to a rise in the number of recruits who pursue alternative routes to college including junior college. As the article points out New York City only produced one Division I men’s basketball player who was academically eligible and the standards are about to get tougher. As John Infante points out the new standards will also alter the calculus of eligibility for players who do not go straight from high school to Division I basketball. This might seem like a small story now, but it could become a big issue once the new standards go into effect.
4. Last season the Missouri Valley Conference was one of the best conferences in the country, but after it was announced that Creighton would be leaving we knew they were set for a downgrade. Yesterday we found out it would be a big downgrade as it was announced that Loyola (IL) would be replacing Creighton. Nothing against Loyola, which appears to be making attempts at improving its program by upgrading its facilities and hiring new coaches (unfortunately we are more familiar with their women’s coach than their men’s coach), but going from one of the top “mid-major” teams in the country to a 5-11 Horizon League team is a huge drop-off. Now the conference still has its fair share of heavyweights, but with this type of replacement we would not be surprised to see some other conferences try to poach some of the Missouri Valley Conference’s top programs.
5. One of the few bright spots for Purdue last season was how young they were. Their fans could ignore their 8-10 Big Ten record as merely growing pains for an extremely young team. They can still have those hopes, but while they maintain their top underclassmen the Boilermakers have been losing quite a bit of their supporting cast with the most recent departure being Anthony Johnson who asked for and was granted a release by the school. Johnson put up decent numbers as a sophomore (4.9 points and 2.9 rebounds), but shot a putrid 36.2 percent from the floor and was expected to see his minutes decrease with most of the team’s top players returning.

Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

Just last week, Louisville and Michigan were playing one of the most entertaining NCAA Tournament championship games in years. Luke Hancock was scorching threes, Kevin Ware was blissfully crutching his way around a confetti-drenched Georgia Dome, and Spike Albrecht was tweeting at Kate Upton. College basketball was just wrapping up another fantastic season. And now, just a week after the final game of the year, some of the nation’s top players have an utterly crucial decision to make: Stay in school or declare for the NBA Draft?

Players deserve more time to conduct research and solicit outside opinions on this pivotal decision (AP Photo).

Decisions like this – decisions that could have lasting implications on a player’s earning power and academic and professional futures – are not trivial matters to be pushed aside. Other than maybe choosing a college, deciding when to leave college and pursue one’s athletic dreams at the professional level is probably the biggest decision any of these kids have ever made. It requires calculated reasoning and a thorough investigation of the potential costs and benefits. This isn’t the case for everyone; some guys have it easy. For Shabazz Muhammad, leaving UCLA after one season will go down as one of the least surprising one-and-done jumps of all-time. Others face competing interests, unwavering loyalties and strong ties to teammates and coaches. Some just love being in college, particularly at “basketball schools” where the hardwood practitioners are afforded demi-god levels of celebrity. What’s so bad about unrivaled popularity and social stature, anyway?

The real process is a lot more complicated than that. Financial hardship often forces players to leave school earlier than they otherwise would have. A hot shooting streak during the NCAA Tournament sends them flying up draft boards, rapidly and prominently enough that not entering the draft could leave a prospect regretting a major missed opportunity after the fact.

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1. The Mike Rice fiasco at Rutgers will take a long time to play out, but the school appears to be taking the first step of moving into a new era with the expected hiring of Eddie Jordan as its new coach some time this week. Jordan, who was an honorable mention All-American at Rutgers and led the school to the 1976 Final Four, is probably best known for being the head coach of the Washington Wizards from 2003 to 2008 getting the team to the playoffs four straight years. Jordan is currently serving as an assistant coach for the Los Angeles Lakers, which means he should be free to take on the duties of being the head coach at Rutgers in the not too distant future. His biggest task will be repairing the basketball program’s image after video of Rice’s abuse surfaced. If he is able to gain the confidence of recruits again this could be a huge hire as the New Jersey area produces more than enough talent to make Rutgers a nationally competitive team under the right circumstances.
2. It took longer than it probably should have, but on Friday Jim Crews had interim label removed from his job title at St. Louis as he officially was introduced as the head coach. Crews inherited a talented St. Louis team that was placed in a precarious position after Rick Majerus stepped down as coach before dying of issues related to worsening heart failure. What Crews did in getting his players to focus and buy into him as a coach was nothing short of remarkable. After winning the Atlantic 10 regular season and Tournament titles the Bilikens advanced to the third round of the NCAA Tournament before losing to a underseeded Oregon team. Although the loss of Majerus is undeniably huge, the St. Louis program should be in good hands with Crews, who won the Sporting News National Coach of the Year award this season and already has 25 years of head coaching experience  at the Division I level.
3. We have seen quite a few sons of coaches transfer schools from their father’s are fired, but Steve Alford’s move to UCLA has brought about two recruiting moves. First was the quasi-transfer of his son, a high school recruit who had signed with New Mexico to UCLA. Now Cullen Neal, the son of Craig Neal who was hired to take over at New Mexico after Alford left, has gotten out of his signed letter of intent at St. Mary’s and will play for his father. Although some might argue that letting players out of signed letters of intent is a questionable strategy given the power schools have over athletes in most situations the recent rulings by the NCAA would appear to indicate that the players would be given waivers to transfer immediately. We are not sure how much of an impact either Alford or Neal (the sons) will have at their new schools, but it will be an interesting to see how well they play for their fathers.
4. With the way the NCAA Tournament ended–all three Final Four games featuring controversial calls–Deadspin’s article on college referees and the way they deal with blown calls is well-timed. As is often stated nobody knows the name of an official unless they get something wrong (or they make a spectacle of themselves on television…and get something wrong). We have usually stood by officials when they make mistakes because we think in most cases there is no bias involved and the fact remains that if we had one hundred thousand people analyzing every single decision we made for two hours we would probably get a lot of criticism too. Having said that one of the interesting secondary topics discussed in the article is the travel and volume of games some officials do each season as they function as independent contractors and can be paid quite well for their work. Fatigue from travel and officiating games is certainly something that the NCAA and conferences can do by simply hiring officials and paying them set amounts based on the number of games they are contracted to do with provisions prohibiting freelancing that can compromise their ability to officiate games that they are paid to work.
5. Now that Rick Pitino is on his way to the Hall of Fame and has won national titles with two different schools some people in Kentucky are asking the (not-so) obvious question: If this were the Baseball Hall of Fame and you had to choose a “cap” to go in under, would Pitino go in under Kentucky or Louisville? The case for both schools is certainly compelling, but given his impact on Kentucky we would go with a Wildcat cap at least as of now. However as Mark Story notes the more likely choice would be Louisville given Pitino’s current allegiances and the fact that Kentucky fans would probably still hate him even if he were to enter the Hall of Fame after having left Louisville.

And so it goes, and so it goes. The 2012-13 college basketball season came to a resounding end on Monday night with Louisville cutting down the nets and taking home the hardware. As such, the RTC Podcast is back for a review of last weekend’s Final Four and a last look at the season that was. Our host, Shane Connolly, walks us through some of the highs and lows of the sport’s ultimate weekend before stepping back and reflecting on some of the most memorable images and notable moments of the 2012-13 season. We plan on revisiting the podcast every month or so during the offseason, so keep an ear out for those starting in May. Thanks to everyone who has continued to listen to the RTC Podcast and we hope everyone has a safe and happy summer!

• 0:00-9:53 – Cards on Top
• 9:53-13:48 – Beilein’s Blunders
• 13:48-17:09 – Pitino Reaches Legendary Status
• 17:09-19:34 – Leadership Came Through For Louisville
• 19:34-21:39 – Refs at the Final Four – Was the Outrage Warranted?
• 21:39-23:51 – Crowd Reactions to the Louisville Final Four Deficit
• 23:51-28:02 – Evaluating the Crowd/Arena Experience
• 28:02-30:24 – Final Four Memories
• 30:24-37:09 – NCAA Tournament Wrap-Up
• 37:09-46:59 – Enjoying 2012-13’s Parity and Other Full Season Reflections

Jesse Baumgartner is an RTC columnist. His Love/Hate column will publish each week throughout the season. In this piece he’ll review the five things he loved and hated about the previous seven days of college basketball.

Five Things I Loved This Week

I LOVED…. a final game that was so good, so full of quality and runs and drama, that you literally sat in your seat and wondered if it could sustain itself for 40 minutes. The answer was yes, and anyone who wasn’t on the edge of their seat for most of Monday night doesn’t have a pulse. That game was everything we could have hoped for – after an NCAA Tournament that included both upsets and duds to go alongside some raggedy play, this was a title game deserving of the name. What a way to end the year.

I LOVED…. being vindicated in my disgust for Doug Gottlieb. Just take a few quick seconds in case you missed him making a fool of himself on national television (ahem, I mean bigger fool than usual).

I LOVED…. Russdiculousness. You have to give it to Russ Smith – he carried his Louisville team all the way to the Final Four, all the way to the title game with a torrid stretch of scoring, and once he got there he flat-out refused to become a different player. With a lead down the stretch, Russ fouled on the perimeter, dribbled into traffic, took a three-pointer with a new shot clock and 2:30 left, threw crazy passes into the stands and generally tried to give the championship trophy away. But hey, he wouldn’t be Russ if he weren’t a little nutty, and the Cardinals wouldn’t be holding that trophy if he wasn’t on their side.

Russdiculous Lived Up to His Name

I LOVED…. a shootout. It didn’t get any better than that first-half step-off from 22 feet by Spike Albrecht and Luke Hancock. Spike’s might have been more unexpected, but Hancock’s was pure guts in the face of a double-digit deficit with the season on the line. It made for some incredible runs in the first 20 minutes, and it got even better when Albrecht made a cybermove on Kate Upton.

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Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn. 

The awesomeness of the national title game almost makes you wish the season had another five months of games to offer us. It doesn’t, of course, which means it’s about time we start glaring into the blank expanse of another long offseason. But before we move ahead, before we start counting down the months, weeks and days until tip-off 2013 (Midnight Madness!), let us go back and review the stories that defined the 2012-13 season. I’m talking about the headlines with the most resounding impact – not always the rosiest or most enjoyable developments. That means good and bad, but hopefully more good. If you kept a pulse on the game this year, the following tropes will strike a familiar note, positive or otherwise; if not, then where exactly have you been since November? In the interest of not dragging out this preamble, let’s turn to the matter at hand and count off 10 of the 2012-13 season’s biggest storylines.

(* in no particular order)

Kentucky. The domination and instant stardom of Kentucky circa 2012 had the poll voters convinced: the Wildcats had perpetually solved the one-and-done riddle, and everything that happened during that Anthony Davis-led title season would become something like a yearly occurrence for John Calipari’s team. Calipari would recruit the best players, mold them into a national champion-caliber outfit, and repeat the whole process again the next year. Clockwork. So Kentucky entered the reason ranked No. 3 in the AP Poll. This seemed like a reasonably fair assessment at the time; another loaded recruiting class, the residual winning momentum of the previous season, a once-recruiter turned excellent head coach who seemed to have this recruit, develop and draft thing figured out was evidence enough that the Wildcats would turn in another deep-Tournament run with the same freshmen-lead constitution that had brought the BBN so many good memories during the first few years of Calipari’s tenure. Kentucky needed to get to the Tournament first, and as the season wore on and the flaws of UK’s roster construction – almost zero experience to speak of, the absence of a true leader, the realization that not all highly-recruited freshmen are Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist – became evidently obvious, reality sunk in: Kentucky wasn’t going to make it.

One year after winning a national title, Kentucky missed out on the NCAA Tournament (Getty Images).

A season-ending ACL injury to star center Nerlens Noel in February doomed the Wildcats’ chances, but the speculation hung right up until Selection Sunday, and when the Wildcats were passed over by the likes of Middle Tennessee, La Salle and Saint Mary’s, the only question remaining (a minor one, to be sure) was how motivated John Calipari’s team would be in a prospective NIT matchup at eight-seed Robert Morris. Yes, Kentucky, college hoops royalty at its purest, was being asked to finish its season on the road in Moon Township, PA., Calipari’s home town. And yes, Kentucky fell to the Colonials, prompting a rare NIT court storm from a packed Charles L. Sewall Center, a fitting end to a season that never lived up to the one preceding it. The backdrop to UK’s sudden plunge was that Calipari, seemingly undeterred by the chaos of the regular season, was assembling a recruiting class for the ages, built on six five-star commitments and still waiting word on the player many consider to be the best high school product since LeBron James, Andrew Wiggins. The BBN will be back in 2013, rest assured, but their dramatic fall from grace this year is not lost.

The Big Ten Was Awesome. We began the season with the highest of expectations about the Big Ten. Five of its teams (Indiana, Michigan, Ohio State, Michigan State, Wisconsin) began the season in the top 25, Indiana was a unanimous pick for preseason No. 1 and the top-to-bottom depth, just as much as the upper-tier quality, were huge selling points for a league many billed to not only outclass every other major conference this season, but also go down as one of the most dominant versions of any league in recent memory. The Big Ten didn’t disappoint us. Indiana, Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State and Wisconsin waged intense wars in blaring campus gyms on a weekly basis, shocking upsets were sprung (Penn State over Michigan, Northwestern over Minnesota, Wisconsin at Indiana, etc.) and the league grew to corner the market on the most exciting brand of high-powered, tense, must-watch hoops in the country. It was good from start to finish, all the way up to the NCAA Tournament, where four teams survived the first weekend to land a spot in each of the four regional sites.

In the end, only one made it to the Final Four – ironically, of the four Big Ten teams left standing, Michigan was probably the biggest surprise of them all; they were widely pegged to lost their round-of-32 bout with VCU – and after fending off a nightmarish Syracuse 2-3 zone no one else had managed to decode during Tournament play, the Wolverines lost a close but thrilling national championship game. The lasting memory from the 2012 Big Ten, beyond all the consistent regular season drama and Victor Oladipo’s star turn and Trey Burke’s brilliance and Wisconsin’s remarkable year-to-year consistency, will be Spike Albrecht – for the sheer fact that Albrecht, on the last and most important date of the season, not only scored an unfathomable 17 points in 16 minutes while NPOY-sweeping Burke, hit with two early fouls, was fixed to the bench. It was awesome because Albrecht followed up his once-in-a-lifetime night by milking every last drip of his newfound celebrity: Spike tweeted at international modeling icon Kate Upton after learning of Upton’s attendance at the national championship game. Like I said, Big Ten: Awesome. There’s no confusion here.

Officiating Controversies. There is no escaping one lamentable truism about the 2012-13 season: the referees were not very good. Overall, on a composite game-by-game measure, the quality and consistency of officiating was rather low. Even if that’s just an arbitrary and fuzzy subjective measure, I can take it one step further. Just off the top of my head, I can point out three calls that directly affected the outcomes of important game. The first happened in Colorado’s January 3 road game at Arizona. The Buffaloes took the No. 3 Wildcats to the wire, and on the final possession, with the game knotted at 83, Colorado reserve guard Sabatino Chen banked in a wild three at the buzzer. GIFS and close-ups slowly made the rounds on Twitter, and most every angle confirmed what the real-time game tape appeared to say: Chen’s shot was good. The zebras thought otherwise – the shot was discounted. We later learned that standard definition replay monitors (the Pac 12 doesn’t use HD screens as a cost-saving measure) may have impaired the referees’ ability to clearly determine whether Chen’s shot went off before the buzzer. Like, Really? Incident No. 2: Kansas’ road win at Iowa State, wherein guard Elijah Johnson’s drive into Cyclones forward Georges Niang, resulting in an objectively false block call, actually merited an independent review from the Big 12 conference. Or, even better, we can talk about the national championship game, where Trey Burke’s perfectly clean block on Peyton Siva with just over five minutes remaining put the game seemingly out of reach for the Wolverines.

I’ve never felt comfortable pinning the outcomes of games entirely on the backs of officials; teams decide the games, referees impartially monitor the proceedings and anything that gets in the way is but another challenge in a game full of them. Everything evens out in the end, on balance. But then you get calls like Burke’s block and Niang’s blocking foul and the countless gaffes I failed to mention above, and it gets to a point where the competence and on-sight decision making of the most important third-party in sports is called into serious question. The Ed Rush Pac-12 officiating scandal only added more stink to the skeptical aura surrounding the entire profession. Officials are going to make mistakes. Judgments will be misguided. The human element of the game is not infallible. True. True. True. When the neutrality of those officials becomes a topic of debate, and we can’t wholeheartedly confide in those officials to respect the integrity of the game, the problem transcends mere block-charge minutiae or ticky-tack holding calls. The whole premise of a level playing field in college athletics is thrown into sharp scrutiny.

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1. One of the downsides of taking a high-profile job is that some of your most questionable moments are brought out in public and Steve Alford learned that the hard way as his move to UCLA has prompted journalists to bring up the Pierre Pierce incident where Pierce was accused of sexual assault and Alford declared Pierce’s innocence (Pierce subsequently pleaded guilty to lesser charges and was eventually thrown off the team when he was involved in another similar incident). Yesterday, Alford finally relented and issued an apology (likely brought on by a wealthy booster or the school’s administration) in which Alford admits a mistake in judgement when declaring Pierce’s innocence and used the Iowa administration along with its lawyers as his own personal scapegoat for his ridiculous comments in 2002 (at least somebody learned something from the Mike Rice incident).
2. When Andre Dawkins stepped away from the Duke basketball team last season for personal reasons we were not sure if he would ever play for the team again, but it appears that he will be playing for the Blue Devils next season. While Dawkins has generated more publicity for his off-court issues (none of them his fault–coming to Duke early, his sister’s) he certainly has the ability (8.4 points per game during the 2011-12 season) to contribute to the team. The only problem is that the Blue Devils have more plenty of perimeter talent, but very little inside with the departure of Mason Plumlee and Ryan Kelly.
3. When we heard that Rick Pitino had promised his team that he would get a tattoo we assumed that he would back out of it, but he is sticking by it at least publicly. The latest news on the Pitino tattoo is that he is that it “will be a cardinal and it will say 2013 champions.” Honestly we wouldn’t expect anything less from Pitino. We just hope that there is some amusing photo of it in the Louisville preseason media guide. Actually we hope that he saves its unveiling for next season’s Louisville-Kentucky game as he shows it to taunt the Kentucky fans.
4. On Wednesday we pointed out that even though almost everybody had Russ Smith leaving Louisville there was one person — Smith himself — who had not come out with his intent to leave. Now it appears that Russ (or at least the people around him) appears to be having a change of heart as Rick Pitino said yesterday that Smith is 50-50 on the decision. On one hand we are not sure how much Smith can improve his NBA Draft stock with one more season since he will not get any taller and we really doubt that he will improve his decision-making markedly, but he is still a likely second round pick which means he would probably spend next year in the D-League or somewhere in Europe if he leaves the Cardinals program.
5. So, this Andy Enfield guy had a pretty good couple of weeks, right? On top of the pretty good couple of years, on top of the pretty good couple of decades… you get the picture. The new USC head coach stopped by the Tonight Show to see Jay Leno on Wednesday night, and well, it’s not hard to see how this guy has been mostly successful at everything he’s touched.

The finality of it all hits sometime around Wednesday evening after the National Championship game. What, no college hoops to look forward to this weekend? Just NBA Draft announcements and the coaching carousel from now until the first heat of summer? That’s right. On March 5, we began our annual foray into the Circle of March with 310 teams pursusing a shot at the title. After 35 days of fascinating and compelling elimination basketball, we were left with only one outfit still standing. The Louisville Cardinals are your 2013 National Champions, a group as deserving as they are engaging. It’s time for the CoM to retire for another year…

Team Eliminated From National Title Contention (04.08.13)

• Michigan

1. We are entering the early entry period where news about who will be putting their name into the NBA Draft. There will be plenty of time to criticize the players who make bad decisions (usually based on bad information), but we will start off on a positive note with the one player who we knew was going pro and is probably the only player we would have criticized for coming back to college: Ben McLemore. On the selfish side, we would love to see McLemore stay another year (or three), but given the financial hardships that his family faces it would be irresponsible for him to go back to college when he could help bring his family out of poverty with just his rookie contract. As for the other announcement we were in favor of Victor Oladipo will also enter the NBA Draft and his teammate Cody Zeller may be close behind. Now the only benefit we give McLemore over Oladipo (probably) and Zeller (definitely) is that McLemore has to deal with more pressing financial issues that the other two. All three of them could use work on their game and McLemore in particular could improve his draft stock by staying in school, but
2. We said there would be time to criticize the bad decisions players make we are already here. Today’s candidates are Russ Smith, who is leaving according to his father in a statement that everybody is taking as the truth, and Ricky Ledo, who did not play this year after being declared academically ineligible, but is still entering the NBA Draft. The Smith case is a little more complex because he played phenomenally well for five games of the NCAA Tournament and was probably the best player for Louisville during the NCAA Tournament even if Luke Hancock walked away with MOP honors. Still the bad Russ showed up on Monday night and that should have reminded NBA scouts and executives that he is too much of a gamble to spend a first round pick on. Of course, all this is based on a conversation by his father not the player so all of this could be completely incorrect and Russ might stay for his senior year. As for Ledo, he is a talented played with the frame and game to be a first round pick, but with his time away from the game and his reputation from the summer league circuit we don’t see Ledo making the first round either.
3. We are not sure how having four players transfer from your program is anything other than a bad thing, but when you look four players who contribute as little as the four that are leaving DePaul it doesn’t seem that bad. Of the four players, Moses Morgan is by far the most productive and even his numbers are not that inspiring (5.9 points and 2.3 rebounds per game as a junior last year down from 9 points per game as a sophomore). The moves are expected to open up roster spots for incoming players on a team that finished dead last in the conference formerly known as the Big East so hopefully they can find a few players to put around Brandon Young and Cleveland Melvin to make them more competitive in their new/old conference.
   
4. We mentioned several players that are leaving their schools–either for the NBA (or attempting to go to the NBA) or to different schools–but at least two players (Julian Boyd and Chris Otule) appear to be sticking around for their sixth year. Boyd, who was averaging 18.5 points and 6.1 points per game for Long Island University-Brooklyn before tearing his ACL last season, was granted a sixth year for medical hardship in what seemed like a near guarantee although you can never say that with the NCAA. The case of Otule is still in limbo as Marquette is waiting to hear back from the NCAA after he missed much of the 2008-09 and 2010-11 seasons with injuries. Otule’s numbers may not jump off the page as he only averaged 5.1 points and 3.5 rebounds per game, but he came up big for the team in the NCAA Tournament with two important 11-point performances that helped them advance to the Elite Eight.
5. The Boise State athletic department can at least say their men’s and women’s basketball teams interact with each other after Kenny Buckner, who played his last game for the school in the team’s First Four loss, and Brandi Latrall Henton, a player for the women’s team, were arrested for reportedly stealing food from a store (apparently a Wal-Mart). The two were charged with misdemeanor petit theft and were released after posting bond with their arraignment scheduled for later this month. This is amusing and dumb on some levels as college students presumably still have cafeterias available to them especially athletes on scholarship and it is not like Wal-Mart carries anything outside of possibly alcohol that college students cannot get in a cafeteria. However Hinton is the first Boise State basketball player to be arrested for theft in 2013 along with four men’s players including repeat offender Buckner who is set to be arraigned on April 16 along with three other players for a January arrest where they are accused of stealing several items including DVDs. This appears to be at least the third time Buckner has been arrested for theft. On the positive side with Buckner having finished his college basketball career so the school does not have to worry about suspending him.