In the wake of Jerry Wainwright’s firing at DePaul, the Big East hot seat formally shifts to Rutgers University and the Scarlet Knights’ head man, Fred Hill. Hill is in his fourth year at the school, and he is noted for his fiery personality and the occasional ability to get a hotshot recruit to stay close to home (see: Mike Rosario from Jersey City). He isn’t particularly known for winning, however, as his RU teams have gone 41-66 (.383) overall and a horrid 8-47 (.145) in the very difficult Big East Conference over that period. With recent news that injured forward Gregory Echinique will transfer to another school next year, and rumors that Rosario may not be far behind, former Hill player JR Inman (2005-09), now playing in Japan, took it upon himself to pile on Hill’s misfortune. In a big, big way.
Inman (seated, left) and Hill During More Pleasant Times
Initially we had concerns as to the authenticity of this information allegedly posted to Inman’s Facebook page today, but NJ.com believes it to be authentic, and it’s too alternatingly bizarre and hilarious for us not to excerpt it even if Inman didn’t actually pen it. If you want to read the whole thing, as of now you have two options. You can go here (which requires free registration), or you can read it on the Seton Hall message boards. The message is sometimes grammatically painful, other times amusing, and a few times downright mean, but one thing can be inferred without logical modeling — Inman, who feels that the reason he’s playing in Japan rather than for the Knicks, is no fan of Fred Hill.
On Hill in general:
What you guys don’t know is just how much of a scum bag this guy really is and guess who’s about to air his punk ass out. Me.3 years ago Fred Hill stole the Head Coaching Job from the Coach who recruited me to Rutgers Gary Waters. Since then the program has been in complete turmoil. Among many excuses Hill has been using to justify his lack of success, the biggest one was “Jr Inman”
The best line we’ve heard in some time, about anything, anywhere:
I feel bad for my fellow teammates that are still thier cause it is about to get really ugly.I don’t want to put all of Fred’s buisness out thier. I’m sure youll read about it in the Newspapers within the next couple of weeks but I just want the public to know one thing. “It took 3 years for Fred Hill to cook his steak of turmoil but the check for the dinner is coming due”
And how he feels that Hill ruined his career:
I wish Fred would call my cellphone talkin [redacted]. If I was 30 years older, 10 inches shorter and a [redacted], I would go to the rac right now and punch Fred Right in his face. […] Initially I wanted to take Fred to court and sue for defamation of charecter. My senior year in college I took an employment in law class and we learned about that. During class I would sit there mesmorized realizing that everything we learned in class I have experienced first hand thanks to your boy Freddy. My close friends know how much I dreaded coming from practice because of Fred Hill. He literally turned me into a psycopathic disfunctional human being for my entire senior season.
Wow. We haven’t seen a player throw his ex-coach under the bus like this since… ever?
OK, maybe that headline’s a tad unfair, because by just about every account, Jerry Wainwright is a top guy. Who knows, maybe being a nice guy got him a little more time at DePaul than anyone else would have received. Either way, Wainwright was let go today as head coach of the Blue Demons. He took over before the 2005 season and built a 59-80 record while running things there. In a twist that might make that ol’ Yalie Stephen V. Benet proud, it’s now The Demons and Tracy Webster, the assistant who was promoted to interim head coach for the rest of this season. The buzz on Wainwright’s departure began in earnest last night, but we should give props to Sporting News’ Mike DeCourcy for listing him as numero uno on his list of coaches under pressure in a pre-season article.
Wainwright in better -- yes, better -- days.
Wainwright’s squad had started out 5-1 this season, scoring wins over a decent Detroit team, losing a close one to current darlings Tennessee, and handing 14-1 Northern Iowa their only blemish on the season. There were a few cupcake wins and a couple of setbacks to a pair of pretty good SEC teams in Vanderbilt and Mississippi State. These early performances likely served to mitigate the sting left over from last year’s crippling 0-18 conference record, but then came a home loss to American (3-13), a loss at Florida Gulf Coast (5-10), and eventually three convincing losses to Big East powerhouses (at Pittsburgh, Georgetown, at Villanova) to start the conference slate that put the Blue Demons at 7-8, and turned out to be Wainwright’s undoing. In that last game against Villanova, by the way, Wainwright actually suffered a torn MCL and broken tibia when he was hit by a diving player near the DePaul bench.
The hallmark of Wisconsin basketball is efficiency, and they just lost their most efficient player.
It’s an instinctive thing to put your arms and hands out in front of you during a fall, because you want to use them as shock absorbers and cushion the blow. Sometimes, the price for saving your head, neck, or chest is a broken bone in one of the upper extremeties if the fall is fast or awkward (or both). Wisconsin junior forward Jon Leuerknows a little about this concept, learning about it on Saturday during the first half of the Badgers’ win over Purdue. Attempting to reduce the impact from a fall, Leuer broke his left wrist, and there is no mention anywhere of when he might be able to return.
Leuer is the leading rebounder and shot-blocker for the Badgers, snagging 6.0 RPG and adding 1.1 BPG. He has almost doubled his scoring output from last season, going from 8.8 PPG to this year’s 15.4 PPG, which is second on the team (Trevon Hughes averages only 0.4 PPG more). His absence, though, will be felt in a slightly more subtle way. If you’ve seen Wisconsin play, you know that they are the Ivan Lendl of college basketball. Not a single movement is wasted, and they’re more than content to sit back and take their time, slug it out with you, wear you down with their physical and mental toughness, induce you into mistakes, then beat you with a mixture of power and intelligence. Efficiency is the Bo Ryan mantra.
The problem for Wisconsin is that Leuer leads his team in just about all of the efficiency statistics. Out of 345 Division I teams, Wisconsin ranks 337th in possessions per 40 minutes (62.5). This is by design, but you can see how important it is that they score when they get the chance. Wisconsin is good at this, ranking 15th nationally in points per possession (1.12). Leuer averages 15.4 PPG but only plays 27.9 minutes in a game, on the average. Extrapolating it out, Leuer averages 22.1 points for every 40 minutes he plays, a full two points higher than Hughes, who is second. His overall efficiency rating and efficiency per possession numbers are also tops on the Badgers.
Wisconsin only turns the ball over an average of 9.2 times a game, second in the nation. A team that prides itself on control and economy of this magnitude can only suffer when they lose the one player that basically embodies the style of the team. While Leuer is on the shelf, Coach Ryan will have to try to find ways to squeeze even more points out of every precious possession but still take extra care of the basketball. Most of all, he (and about every UW supporter) will be hoping that Leuer’s bones knit quickly. Surgery is scheduled for tomorrow, but there’s been no mention of a timetable or even which bones were broken, so it’s tough to say how bad this is right now. The only good thing is that…well, Wisconsin is the Dairy State, so there’s no shortage of calcium for those bones.
Injured center Gregory Echinique announced that he is transferring from the Rutgers program, and one possible destination for the talented big man from Venezuela is Tom Crean’s Indiana program.
From last week, CBS/FSN announcer Tim Brando apparently (allegedly?) got into a bizarre email exchange with a Kentucky fan over his comments regarding DeMarcus Cousins’ elbow in the UK-Louisville game. It doesn’t seem real, but whoever wrote it trashes the SEC and the “limited knowledge” of Kentucky fans outside of their own team.
Midnight Madness on October 1 as well as a shortened regular season could come to fruition if the NCAA Board of Directors proposals are approved this week in Atlanta. Another key proposal is the elimination of the hire-the-AAU-coach loophole to get a top prospect to attend your school, which is a fantastic piece of legislation if you ask us.
BONUS: Late-breaking news but DePaul’s Jerry Wainwrightwill be removed as head coach today, according to Andy Katz. Wainwright seems like a good guy, and he’s had coaching success at the mid-major level, but he could never get it going there in Chicago.
Upset Weekend. Let’s get one thing out of the way right away. It was a great weekend of college basketball, with over 175 games of juicy goodness, starting with Friday evening’s Sunshine State battle of A-Sun foes Jacksonville and Stetson, and ending with tonight’s Civil War game in Eugene between the Ducks and Beavers. If you didn’t get enough hoops over the last 54 hours, then you probably need your head checked (our appt. is Tuesday morning). But let’s not get too excited about this weekend just yet. By our count, there were ten upsets involving ranked teams, and a host of others barely survived. But this is something we all knew was coming. It’s called life on the road in conference play (note: we realize, of course, Kansas was on the road in non-conference play), and it’s what makes the next ten weeks so much more fun than the previous ten. No longer will teams be able to play Holy Names and Penn Central and St. Augustanus to pick up easy Ws. No, they now have to face conference foes — the family — and like your nutty Grandma at the holiday dinner table, the family can be harsh in its brutal honesty. If your team has a weakness, the family will find it and exploit it. If your team has multiple question marks, your days of skating by with superior athletes and a friendly home crowd are over. If your team has been using smoke and mirrors to get it done this year, well, the seven years of bad luck are about to begin. This phenomenon happens every single year, and every single year we all get all fluttery and hyperbolic talking about the early upsets, but the fact of the matter is that there are no dominant teams in the 1-and-done era and truthfully the real surprise would be if we didn’t have great weekends of parity like this one.
Hopson Crushed It on Aldrich (credit: Saul Young)
Now, About That Kansas Thing. #15 Tennessee 76, #1 Kansas 68. This was going to be one of the tougher games of the season for Kansas regardless of the Tennessee personnel issues, but you can almost imagine Bill Self fretting about his team’s focus when he found out that 40% of the Vol offense would not be available for this game. There’s no question that Kansas has elite talent, but they’re not robots, and it’s understandable that all the news about the UT players might have led to a bit of a letdown. Bill Self referred to his team’s lack of aggressiveness as manifested in the worrisome fact that KU’s all-american center Cole Aldrich (7/18/4 blks) only took five shots in 30 minutes despite a considerable size advantage inside. Repeated post-ups in the halfcourt offense resulted in few touches for Aldrich, as Sherron Collins and Tyshawn Taylor in particular were more interested in chucking threes and calling their own number throughout (20 and 11 shots, respectively). Tennessee, to its credit in using just six scholarship players and several walk-ons, kept hustling and scrapping for loose balls and hitting big shot after big shot every time it seemed that the superior KU talent was surging. Skylar McBee’s step-through three from the left side as the shot clock expired and UT up three very late was the stuff of legend (see below), and we doubt the walk-on marksman will be buying his own meals in Knoxville for many a year after he graduates.
In a game where the odds were repeatedly stacked against the Vols — the missing players, the foul trouble of Wayne Chism and JP Prince, the horrid FT shooting (15-29) — Pearl’s team was able to take to heart what has always made the colorful coach such an interesting guy. He sees himself as an underdog, but his teams only seem to take on that scrappy mentality when they are actually sitting behind the eight-ball. Tennessee always comes strong when they’re not expected to win — the game at Memphis in 2008, the wins over the national champion Gators in 2006 and 2007 — but it’s the games where they’re considered the heavy favorite that give Pearl’s teams trouble (last year’s two blowout Ls against struggling Kentucky come to mind). You could very reasonably argue that in the Vols’ two wins this week with six scholarship players (vs. Charlotte and the Jayhawks), they’ve looked better than they did when they went ten deep. The problem is that the underdog role can only be embraced and milked for so long, and there’s still an entire sixteen-game SEC slate ahead of them. Today was a tremendous, mood-lifting sort of win for the UT basketball program, but it won’t mean much if the Vols finish at 8-8 in the SEC East. Still, Bruce Pearl’s charges should be incredibly proud of themselves and by all means should stay away from rental cars and various weaponry after this big win (Pearl didn’t mention that, but he did mention complacency in his postgame speech below). Final thought: Scotty Hopson (17/4). Kid looked like a superstar today; his dunk over Aldrich was ridiculous. Keep it coming, young fella.
RTC Meets Ashley Judd. RTC editor John Stevens got to meet Kentucky Superfan Ashley Judd after Saturday’s Georgia game, and given that this may be a once-in-a-lifetime event, it deserves its own space. Here’s John:
I have to include the fact that I got to meet Kentucky alumna Ashley Judd at this game…and by “meet,” I mean shake her hand, stand beside her with my recorder (one of about 30 total) in her face, ask her a question, and smile dumbly at her like a mental patient who knows it’s almost pill time. Let me tell you something, folks. I don’t usually get star-struck (when you’ve sat behind Goodman, Bozich, DeCourcy, and Forde in a media room, hell, you’re ready for anything, heh), but when Ashley Judd looks you dead in the eye? Ballgame. Good night, everybody. Yes, she’s very attractive. But it’s not just that. She’s got that “star quality,” meaning that when she’s looking at you and talking, it’s morphine. You are tractor-beamed, and you’re very aware of it when your time is over. This is not something she’s trying to do, it’s something with which you’re born or you aren’t. They say politicians have this ability, too, though I doubt I’d feel the same effect if I were standing in front of, say, Strom Thurmond. As for my question, because she had been asked every possible hoops-related question by the 30 or so reporters around her, I asked her how that frenzy in the media room compared to the scene on a Hollywood red carpet. She replied like someone who, though she was glad her Wildcats escaped, was even happier to be home, even if temporarily. She smiled, thought for a second, and said with relish, “This is better! This is the blue carpet!”
Ashley is Happy to See RTC There
Moving On… Obviously, there were a bunch of other upsets this weekend beyond #1 Kansas going down, but we don’t have time to discuss them all so here are some of the key takeaways as we see them.
Much more on this weekend’s ATB wrapup later, but how about Bruce Pearl’s Tennessee Volunteers, staring adversity in the face and having it slink away with its tail tucked? The #1 Kansas Jayhawks ran into an emotionally-charged, feisty and gutty UT team this afternoon that showed pluck and heart despite losing four players to dismissal/suspension. Credit to Bruce Pearl for doing what he does best – getting his six scholarship players and walk-ons to internalize their difficult situation and play the underdog role to a T. Congrats to his team are in order. College basketball at its finest!
Welcome to College Park where we at RTC will once again be courtside as the Florida State Seminoles meet up with the Maryland Terrapins. It will be the ACC opener for the Terps, who have not quite lived up to expectations this season. With a senior-duo in the back court, including all-american Greivis Vasquez, and a couple of talented wings, Maryland was expected to be a top 25 team this season. But Gary Williams club is just 1-3 against major conference foes, the only win being against Indiana, and alos has a loss to William & Mary on their resume. Florida State, on the other hand, comes into this one with a 13-2 record, having already beaten Georgia Tech on the road in ACC play. The Noles have length and athleticism for days, but their back court can be suspect at times. There are going to be two keys to watch for tonight: How will FSU’s back court handle the pressure (Maryland has been using a 2-2-1 3/4 press the last month or so) the Terps bring, and will the much smaller Terps (FSU goes 7’0″, 6’9″, 6’9″ across their starting front line) be able to compete in the paint.
If you’re pretty much anywhere east of the Mississippi today, you’re cold. At least you are if you bother to venture outside. We’ve entered the pale and gray days of January, of course, which around here means it’s time to implement our favorite cure for our Seasonal Affective Disorder — college hoops. We’re not kidding, either. Nothing gets us through these days like watching (or attending) some fine college basketball, and what’s even better is interacting with other people out there doing the same thing. Not only will we be live blogging today’s slate of basketball games, but we’ve also got some of our correspondents attending games and cranking up the RTC Live from courtside (schedule at top left). So keep checking this space, get that refresh-button finger warmed up, and let’s hear what you’re thinking in the comments section, because it’s another BGTD for your Saturday. We’ll be back around noon to get things going. As the mercury plummets outside, this one’s not only fun for us…it’s necessary!
12:35pm: Great timing! As soon as we decided to light this candle, the internet connection tenders its resignation. But we’re back up now, it looks like.
12:37: The first thing I should mention is that we have someone courtside at UConn vs Georgetown for RTC Live, so while I might say a few things about that one, for now I’ll be focusing more on some of the other games happening. A link to the RTC Live for GU/UConn is above left, or just click here. UConn is currently spanking the Hoyas, 36-21.
12:44: Right now, St. John’s is looking pretty confident at Louisville, up 26-22. Man, that’s all Rick Pitino needs right now. A home loss in a Big East game. St. John’s is very patient on offense and the only threes they’ve taken have been virtually wide open, which is why they’ve hit 50% of them so far. Just under 3 minutes to go in the first half there.
RTC Live is making a habit of heading over to Berkeley for games at Cal, but if we keep getting games like we had on Wednesday night at Haas Pavilion versus UCLA — a 1-pt game UCLA won with 1.8 seconds remaining — we’ll keep going back. Tonight the Bears welcome the surprise team of the Pac-10, Kevin O’Neill’s USC Trojans. As you know, USC learned earlier this week that, despite their surprisingly strong pre-conference record, they would not be playing in the postseason this year as a result of the OJ Mayo/Tim Floyd/Rodney Guillory fiasco. Somewhat predictably, they immediately lost their next game by one point at Stanford. Now that the players have had a little more time to digest the news, we’re expecting a much more focused Mike Gerrity, Alex Stepheson and company tonight. As for Cal, they’ll try to recover from a game against the Bruins that they obviously felt they should have won. Jerome Randle will try to get his shooting touch back, as he only had 11 points on 2-11 shooting in 41 minutes of action, and they will undoubtedly have their hands full with the sticky USC defense as both teams seek to avoid a second loss in the conference. Join us tonight (late-night on the east coast) for some Pac-10 hoops!
