Some news on early entries as the deadline (Sunday at midnight) looms and some other flotsam we’ve been holding on to for your Friday…

• UNC’s point guard Tywon Lawson will be testing the waters.  Reading the tea leaves, does this signal a pending domino effect for his teammates Wayne Ellington, Tyler Hansbrough and/or Danny Green? 
• Speaking of the Heels, in light of KU’s title, ol’ Roy’s face was consequently removed from a bathroom in a Lawrence, KS, barber shop. 
• Super Mario Chalmers will be testing the waters of the NBA Draft, joining teammates Brandon Rush and Darrell Arthur in the pool. 
• Memphis juniors Antonio Anderson and Robert Dozier joined Derrick Rose and CDR in declaring for the NBA Draft this week – both will test the waters.  With Joey Dorsey (ahem) graduating, Memphis could potentially lose its entire starting five.    
• The Texas backcourt of DJ Augustin and AJ Abrams have also decided to declare for the draft.  Abrams is probably only testing the waters. 
• Missouri’s DeMarre Carroll and Leo Lyons will be testing the waters this year as well. 
• A returner!!!  Tennessee’s Tyler Smith will return to Knoxville, where he’ll likely lead the Vols to another SEC regular season title (and not much else). 
• VCU’s Anthony Grant and UAB’s Mike Davis received contract extensions from their schools.
• You’ve probably heard that the itinerant Larry Brown stepped down from his job as Executive VP with the Sixers yesterday.  At least one report thinks he might be going to Stanford to take over Trent Johnson’s old job. 
• This is a neat article on which Tobacco Road players and coaches are supporting whom in the 2008 election.  Um, shouldn’t Grant Hill be supporting Billary, given that his mom roomed with her at Wellesley?  Or…  maybe that tells you all you need to know. 
• From the leftovers department, YABB did a quick and dirty analysis of the final conference standings of the NCAA Tournament.  Big 12… good.  ACC and SEC… bad. 
• This is something we found that shows the progression/regression of the top four programs in terms of total wins over the last ten years.  Carolina really took a hit during those Doherty years, didn’t they?
• Turning to the NBA Playoffs, this is a nice article on the positive effects that the late Skip Prosser had on his players now in the postseason – CP3, David West and J-Ho. 

In case you missed it…

• Presumptive top two pick Derrick Rose is declaring for the NBA draft.  No word on whether he’ll have to shoot free throws under pressure in workouts. 
• Rose’s coach, John Calipari, has agreed in principle to a hefty extension at Memphis. 
• And it won’t be difficult for Coach Cal to stay near the top of the polls with players like Tyreke Evans (the nation’s top unsigned player and McD’s Game MVP) coming on board next season.  Maybe he can make free throws? 
• K-Love and Special Sauce is going league as well – he will announce on Thursday.  Still no word on his backcourt buddies Darren Collison or Russell Westbrook. 
• Gonzaga guard Jeremy Pargo will take his high-wire act to the draft camps (where they will tell him he cannot shoot and to come back next year with a jumper).
• UMass head coach Travis Ford will take the Oklahoma St. job, one week after telling UMass that he’s their guy for “years to come.”   Boone Pickens has his new houseboy! 
• AP National COY Keno Davis is also leaving Drake for Providence, where the Friars need help (2 NCAAs in the last ten years).

Gotta say, we’re a little shocked by this one. 

It had to be the money.  Otherwise, why would Trent Johnson, a west coast guy who had rebuilt Stanford basketball into a top program in the west take a job in the south at a football school with only lukewarm support for roundball?

Johnson May Find Things a Little Different in Baton Rouge

And what about LSU – they were reportedly looking at Anthony Grant or Travis Ford, two of the hotter young program-builders around.  Hiring Trent Johnson seems to come a little out of left field, but it undoubtedly will be the ship upon which new AD Joe Alleva will raise his sail.

As for Stanford, can Monty get out of his contract with Cal this quickly?  Will they now target someone such as Grant or Ford?  Do they look internally?   

Last fall we wrote a posting in reference to former Stanford and Golden State Warriors head coach Mike Montgomery taking some undefined and vacuous role as an advisor in the Stanford athletic department.  Getting the sense that Monty was restless, we wondered aloud whether this move was some sort of failsafe strategy on the part of Stanford should Trent Johnson’s Cardinal have another underachieving season. 

Given that Stanford ended up as a #3 seed in the NCAA Tournament and rode the Lopez Twins to the Sweet 16, Johnson’s job appears safe, but lo and behold if the other major source of academic smug on the west coast, Cal-Berkeley, didn’t fire its longtime and chronic underachiever Ben Braun last week.  Hmmm… 

Judas Iscariot is Moving to Berkeley

Mercenary that he is, Montgomery today accepted the head job at Cal in a startling move that can only be compared with one of the other great treasonous acts in college sports history (Rick Pitino to Louisville) – equally heinous, but perhaps with a little less passionate response from the fans.  Make no mistake though, despite both being world-class institutions of higher education, these two schools do not like one another, and several of the pranks the students have played on each other rank among some of the very best we’ve seen (especially this one).  So the very idea that the architect and greatest coach in the history of Stanford basketball (he’s in the Cardinal HOF, for chrissakes!) will cross the Maginot Line Bay to coach the enemy is nothing short of perfidy. 

To its credit, um, the Stanford community seem to be taking the news well.  One poster named CreoleCard on this forum caught our eye with his measured response to the news (love the use of the small “c” to really hammer home the inferiority angle):

1. We got his best years.  I can’t imagine that he will be that thrilled to recruit now at his age.
2. He won’t have to worry about admissions standards at cal.
3. It’s fitting that cal would want our left overs.
4. Interesting that cal would go to him with all the younger, up-and-coming coaches available.
5.  Anything at cal is doomed to failure.  The tide is turning on Tedford now.

So the coaching carousel rumor mill is blowing up right now, and this one is on a little firmer footing than yesterday’s Knight/WKU rumor (which interestingly still hasn’t been refuted), but Pat Forde and others are reporting that UMass coach Travis Ford (and NIT finalist) will take over the head position of the LSU Tigers later this week.  The firm leading the search for a new head coach (and AD) had this to say:

Dan Parker of Parker Executive Search denied Wednesday an ESPN report that LSU is prepared to name University of Massachusetts Coach Travis Ford as its next basketball coach.  “We’re waiting on the new athletic director to be named today or tomorrow, then we’ll engage with him,” said Parker, whose firm was hired last week to assemble candidates and was also hired for the AD search. “There have been no interviews, but we have made some phone calls. LSU wants it to be an inclusive search.”

If the Bayou Bengals do hire Ford, we may as well start calling the SEC the Pitino Protege conference, what with three of his former players (John Pelphrey – Arkansas; Billy Donovan – Florida) running programs down there. 

This would be an intriguing hire.  Ford got the previously moribund Eastern Kentucky program into the NCAAs in 2005, and even gave his alma mater Kentucky a run in the first round before losing 72-64.  After a rebuilding year in 2006 at UMass, the last two seasons have been very successful by UMass standards (24-9 in 2007 and 25-10 thus far in 2008), culminating in two postseason trips to the NIT with the possibility of an NIT title tomorrow night against Ohio St.   

If true, LSU fans should be thrilled.  Ford is young, ambitious and has a strong hoops pedigree.  But hey, anything beats John Brady, right? 

Update:  Ford took his name out of consideration for the LSU job (ultimately taken by Stanford’s Trent Johnson), but he had that snivelling look of someone with one foot out the door after all.  He’s headed to Oklahoma St. to become Boone Pickens’ houseboy.