It’s Halloween night across college basketball nation and all the ghouls, goblins and ghosts are out trolling for sugary goodness. Whether Gary Williams shows up on your doorstep requesting a chicken wing or it’s an exasperated Jay Bilas wearing VCU garb from head to toe, Halloween is the only night of the year where everyone can act how they really want to act if there were no social mores, norms or YouTube. With the start of the season only one week away, RTC has put together a list of five tricks and treats for some of college basketball’s most notable people, places and things. Here’s our list of Halloween night goodies for all of college basketball’s kiddies, but don’t blame us if the bullies from over at Chapel Hill Street or Lexington Avenue jump out from behind a bush and steal all of your candy.

• Treats to Purdue’s Robbie Hummel & Arizona’s Kevin Parrom— in the form of  confident minds and an even more explosive sets of wheels. The good-guy Hummel returns for his senior season after rehabilitating his knee from a second ACL injury last October. He’s taking it slowly, wearing a massive knee brace and practicing only on second days, but the obvious fear is that he’s one of those hard-luck cases who simply can’t get healthy (he has also experienced back issues in the past).  Parrom, on the other hand, found himself a victim of a shooting in September as he was home visiting his mother with terminal cancer (who has since passed). The versatile wing is projected to be back in the Arizona lineup in about a month, but despite his positive attitude and diligent rehabilitation of a leg pierced by a bullet, both he and Hummel will have to overcome the mental hurdles necessary to compete at the highest level of college basketball.  Let’s hope both players find all kinds of treats as two of the biggest success stories of the season.
• Tricks to Connecticut Basketball – for using a wink-and-a-nod to find a scholarship at the last minute for superstar freshman Andre Drummond, while former orphan Michael Bradley volunteered to give his up for the good of the team.  No matter what the courageous Bradley says publicly, we still find the whole thing rather smelly. The NCAA may have stepped in and already provided a nasty little trick for the Huskies, though, in the form of an APR ban from participation in the 2013 NCAA Tournament — which, incidentally, is likely to impact Bradley rather than the one-and-done Drummond. Oy.

Treats to These Two For Finding Their Confidence in 11-12

• Treats to Kansas’ Thomas Robinson — this kid more than any other deserves a breakout 2011-12 campaign. After a nightmarish year in Robinson’s personal life where he lost both of his maternal grandparents and his 37-year old mother in a span of a mere month, the talented big man is on the credit side of karma in a huge way and hopefully ready to cash it in. We’d like nothing more than to see Robinson become an All-American this year by leading Bill Self’s team to its eighth consecutive Big 12 regular season title, before heading off to the NBA Lottery as a superstar in the making. 
  
• Tricks to the NCAA’s $2,000 Optional Stipend –– although we agree that football and basketball student-athletes are vastly underpaid relative to their value to the schools, making the stipend optional at the leisure of the conference only opens the door for even more of an inequitable distribution of talent than already exists. The power conferences can easily weather the extra couple million bucks such a measure will require, but as for the mid-majors… they’d best keep scouring those patches for the Great Pumpkin of Mid-Major hope to find their future stars.

1. As we’re now officially only one week from the first real games on November 7, practices have moved from the getting-to-know-you phase to setting of pecking orders and definition of roles. Unfortunately, one of the side products of two weeks of full-on practice is injuries, and a few notable names have already gotten banged up in the last few days.  Louisville freshman Wayne Blackshear will miss the entire season after tearing the labrum in his right shoulder; he had already missed most of the summer with an unrelated left shoulder injury and had only been cleared to return to practice just last week.  The McDonald’s All-American was expected to help the Cards supplant the loss of Preston Knowles’ scoring abilities, as Blackshear is an impact scorer from the wing. With all of the walking wounded on Rick Pitino’s team these days — Rakeem Buckles, Stephan Van Treese, and Jared Swopshire have all had injury issues — you have to wonder if the Cardinals will be able to field a complete team this year.
2. In other injury news, Vanderbilt All-American candidate Festus Ezeli gave Commodore fans a fright last week when it was reported that the center sprained the MCL and PCL ligaments in his right knee and will require six to eight weeks for its rehabilitation. As we noted on the SEC microsite Friday, Ezeli’s absence from the Vandy lineup will force head coach Kevin Stallings to trust in his backups, senior Steve Tchiengang or redshirt freshman Josh Henderson, neither of whom have the athletic ability nor experience that the all-SEC player brings to the post.  In news considerably less consequential, Connecticut superstar freshman Andre Drummond received a concussion and a broken nose in practice on Friday that will likely keep him out of this week’s exhibition game against American International College. Drummond isn’t expected to miss more time than that, but he will have to wear one of those protective plastic face masks for the next six to eight weeks as his nose heals.  It’s already difficult enough for a freshman to become accustomed to the speed and athleticism of college basketball; it’ll be interesting to see how wearing that annoying mask might impact Drummond’s play in the early going this season.
3. While on the topic of UConn, the NCAA officially announced late last week that schools wishing to play in the 2013 NCAA Tournament will need to meet a two-year APR threshold of 900, or a four-year APR threshold of 930, in order to qualify. A university source told CBSSports.com that the school’s men’s basketball APR score for 2010-11 is expected to be approximately 975, which when averaged with 2009-10’s 826, will not be good enough (900.5). The four-year rolling average (888.5) would also come up short, which begs the question as to whether the NCAA will stick to its guns by keeping one of the sports’ marquee programs out of the Dance in 2013, or whether it will allow the Huskies a waiver opportunity by virtue of it showing ‘improvement’ or some other remedial measure.
4. Late last week California head coach Mike Montgomery revealed that the surgical procedure he underwent recently was because of ‘high-grade bladder cancer’ and that he’s now 100% free of the disease. The 64-year old coach told assembled media in Los Angeles on Friday at the Pac-12’s Media Days that his doctors found the disease at the perfect moment to ascertain its danger and treat it before it got out of control.  With Montgomery bringing back perhaps his best team to Berkeley this season, we certainly hope that the irascible coach continues on a path of sustained wellness and remission from cancer so that he can concentrate on hardwood and basketballs rather than hospitals and bedpans.
5. We plan on having more on this later today on the Big 12 microsite, but if you stumbled across ESPNU yesterday during your NFL Sunday, you may have been surprised to find Missouri playing something called Missouri Southern on that channel.  The One State, One Spirit Classic took place yesterday evening in Joplin, Missouri, site of Missouri Southern State University and ground zero of a deadly F5 tornado that rocked the town on the late afternoon of May 22 earlier this year. Over 150 people were killed and hundreds of Joplin homes and businesses were decimated that day, so Sunday’s exhibition game between the state’s flagship program and the local D-II school embodied the spirit of Show-Me Staters in an outpouring of support that will never be forgotten.  ESPN’s Dana O’Neil interviewed MSSU player Jordan Talbert about his reflections on that horrifying day (linked here because ESPN thought that the giant logo on the microphone didn’t identify who made the video clip clearly enough).

Vanderbilt’s hopes to challenge for a high NCAA Tournament seed have become a little more complicated. Senior center Festus Ezeli sprained the MCL and PCL ligaments in his right knee during Tuesday’s practice. Luckily for the preseason All-SEC Second-Teamer, the injury does not require surgery and he should return within six to eight weeks.

We Hear Ya, Big Man. Get Better Soon.

Senior forward Steve Tchiengang will likely replace Ezeli as the starting center. Redshirt freshman Josh Henderson was already planning to see more action due to Ezeli’s NCAA-mandated six-game suspension for ineligible benefits. Now Tchingang and Henderson will need to extend their roles through nearly every significant non-conference game for the Commodores: November 21 vs. either Texas or Oregon State in the TicketCity Legends Classic Finals; November 28 vs. Xavier featuring the recently reinstated 7-footer Kenny Frease; and December 2 at Louisville where Ezeli was expected to be productive against Cardinal centers Gorgui Dieng and Stephan Van Treese.

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Missouri fans have had an interesting past week. Whether they are fans of the idea of jumping to the SEC or continuing their loyalty to the Big 12, the fans are anxious to see what their athletic department’s next move is. So, when they heard about forward Laurence Bowers‘ recent ACL injury, one that will sideline him for the entire 2011-12 season, their heightened level of anxiety only rose. Bowers, a dynamic frontcourt player who brought athleticism and leadership to the Tiger basketball team, will certainly be missed this season.

The Tigers Will Miss Bowers' Athleticism

Many pundits have picked the Tigers as strong contenders for this year’s Big 12 championship. Led by a senior class with three years of postseason experience, Missouri has been deemed a promising NCAA Tournament contender. Athlon’s College Basketball Preview ranked them #24 in their preseason projections; Lindy’s College Basketball Preview ranked the Tigers #21; Andy Katz ranked them #22 in his pre-season Top 25. With this injury to Bowers, however, those pundits are likely re-thinking those projections. Senior Steve Moore is expected to take Bowers’ spot in the starting lineup. He has developed into a solid role player, but lacks the athleticism and basketball IQ that Bowers possesses. With conference realignment rumors swirling and Frank Haith’s issue of possible infractions at Miami (FL), this season will be interesting enough for the Tigers. With Bowers’ injury, it seems the hits just keep coming.

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1. Official practices start in a little over a week, but players around the country are already involved in conditioning and individual instruction as the season quickly approaches.  As a result, we’ll start to see an uptick in unfortunate injury news as was reported Tuesday that Missouri senior Laurence Bowers has torn his ACL and will miss the entire 2011-12 season.  The 6’8″ forward is a massive loss for a Tiger team already thin across the front line, and it will be felt particularly in the hustle areas of offensive rebounding and blocked shots where the bouncy Bowers excels.  Kim English will more than likely to slide over to Bowers’ position at the four, while center Ricardo Ratliffe, the Big 12’s Newcomer of the Year in 2010-11, will be asked to considerably increase his production of 11/6 per game.
2. Missouri was the epicenter of college basketball news on Tuesday, as one day after the Big 12 unveiled its new revenue sharing plan for Tier I & II broadcast television rights, the school’s board of directors announced that it had unanimously authorized chancellor Brady Deaton to explore its conference affiliation options.  The backroom snapshot of this, of course, is that Missouri thinks that will receive an invitation to become the SEC’s fourteenth member institution, bringing along the 21st and 31st largest US media markets with it (St. Louis and Kansas City).  Whether this sets off another free-for-all of rapacious deal-making/breaking that sets the Big East and Big 12 completely on fire remains to be seen, but if Missouri ends up following Texas A&M southeast, the Big 12 will have to answer in kind.
3. Western Michigan sophomore forward and Fab Five progeny, Juwan Howard, Jr., is transferring back to his hometown of Detroit to play at Detroit Mercy for his remaining three seasons of eligibility.  Howard had a very successful freshman campaign at WMU in 2010-11, averaging 9/4 off the bench in just over 23 minutes per contest, and he will be eligible in 2012-13 at his new school.  If Ray McCallum, Jr., is still playing for his father next year, a team that was already on the rise looks even better with Howard and McCallum in the lineup.
4. With the NBA lockout continuing indefinitely (talks on Tuesday reportedly did not go well), Jeff Goodman checks in with several former NCAA stars who are currently back on campus earning a few more credits toward their college degrees.  Duke’s Kyrie Irving, Texas’ Tristan Thompson, Tennessee’s Tobias Harris, and UCLA’s Kevin Love are but a few of the names current students are shocked to find in some of their classes this fall.  Obviously, we think this is great and highly encourage these guys to continue along that path — we only wish more of them would see the value in it while they’re still in college, but alas… maybe the new NBA collective bargaining agreement will take care of that issue for us.
5. We’re late to this article, but RTC alumnus John Gorman at GossipSports gets out his tin foil hat and begins connecting some of the open and notorious dots between the power players behind the scenes in the conference realignment discussions.  His target: the marriage between IMG College and its client schools, ESPN and its conference affiliations, and all of the dollars flowing back and forth between them.  It’s a really interesting piece, just try to not pay attention to the person opening his umbrella on the grassy knoll while you’re reading it.

1. This Texas A&M to the SEC thing has certainly gotten interesting.  Despite previous assurances from the Big 12 that none of its ten institutions would create a legal barrier to TAMU leaving the conference, Baylor, perhaps seeing the CUSA or WAC writing on the wall, has other thoughts in mind.  Mike DeCourcy is correct in writing that Big 12 schools (and really, all of the schools around the country) are being extremely shortsighted in their our-time, right-now mentality, but the SEC has been clear in that it will only take a school into its league if it is free and clear of any legal liabilities.  Texas A&M was all set to join the SEC on Wednesday, but Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe stated in an email to the SEC on Tuesday night that previous conversations in fact only referred to conference obligations, and that individual schools would still need to waive their rights in order for A&M to move to the new league. Apparently eight of the nine remaining conference members, with Oklahoma as the lone exception, are currently unwilling to waive their rights. “We are being held hostage right now,” TAMU president R. Bowen Loftin said on Wednesday.  So what next?  Our best guess is that Texas A&M will negotiate some kind of settlement agreement with Baylor that will ultimately destroy the Big 12, but the truth is that nobody really knows at that point.
2. Washington announced that its junior point guard and former McDonald’s All-American, Abdul Gaddy, has been cleared by his doctors to go 100% back on the court in practices.  The much-maligned player tore his ACL on January 4 last season during a Husky practice, and after 13 games at 21 MPG, he appeared to be slowly adjusting to his role as a pass-first point guard on a deep and athletic Washington team.  His 3.1 assist to one turnover ratio was very promising, though, on the heels of a freshman season where it was much closer to even (1.3 to 1).  Lorenzo Romar’s team lost a huge amount of its production from last season’s NCAA Third Round squad, but big things are expected from sophomores CJ Wilcox and Terrence Ross so the Huskies will need Gaddy at full strength to get them the ball on the wings in the right spots.  Most every analyst believes that the 19-year old Gaddy has some talent, his problem has been simply a matter of harnessing it.
3. Yesterday Luke Winn brought us a list of the top ten most efficient guards of the so-called ‘efficiency era.’  Today he moves on to the wings.  If you are in the business of guessing who the top players are in the last decade from an efficiency standpoint, you probably won’t do a lot better than JJ Redick, Adam Morrison and Brandon Roy in 2005-06 season.  These three players in that single year represent three of the top five seasons from the wing in the last ten years — perhaps you’re not surprised by Redick and Morrison as a college hoops fan, but Roy’s 2006-07 NBA ROY season perhaps was a clue to just how good he was in college too.
4. Unfortunate news from the WCC, but Santa Clara senior star Marc Trasolini will miss his senior season after tearing his ACL in an exhibition game in his hometown, Vancouver, British Columbia, on Tuesday night.  He came down awkwardly just a mere two minutes into the game and doctors diagnosed his injury soon thereafter.  Trasolini was the second leading returning scorer for the Broncos at 13/6 and his absence in 2011-12 definitely puts a crimp in plans for Kerry Keating’s team to make a run at Gonzaga and St. Mary’s in the league next season.
5. There’s been a lot of discussion about how schools might try to game the APR/930 system now that they can actually lose scholarships, and eventually, postseason opportunities, as a result.  This article from the off-the-beaten-path of the Dakotas suggests that even at that level, schools might use their last few scholarships to load up on high GPA students in order to make sure they reach the written threshold.  As South Dakota head coach Dave Boots states, “all three of the [international] kids that we signed are really good students.”   Mid-major games but big-time grades — is that what we’re heading toward?  Rest assured that if a marginal couple of D-I schools like South Dakota and South Dakota State are already doing this, the power conference schools have institutionalized it.  As we wrote several weeks ago, this is not a good thing.

1. USC point guard and best returning player, Jio Fontan, flew back to Los Angeles on Wednesday due to an injury he suffered on Tuesday night during an exhibition game in Sao Paolo against a professional team, Mogi Das Cruzes.  According to reports, he landed awkwardly on his knee on a drive to the hoop and was removed from the game immediately thereafter.  X-rays taken in Brazil were negative, but the injury was deemed serious enough that Fontan was sent back to the US rather than try to get an MRI in Rio de Janeiro, the Trojans’ next stop on their international tour.  Needless to say, this seems very bad, and if Fontan did in fact do something  tragic like tear his ACL, Kevin O’Neill’s program will once again be facing an uphill battle toward respectability in both the Pac-12 and nationally next season.
2. The Miami (FL)/Nevin Shapiro aftermath began in earnest yesterday, with opinions flying from all over the blogosphere as to what will happen next, what should happen next, and what can be done to fix it (if anything).  If you read nothing else on this topic and couldn’t care less whether the U ever suits up in the green and orange again, read this Dan Wetzel piece from Yahoo Sports Wednesday.  He poignantly and eloquently calls out this situation for what it is — nothing more than another slap-in-the-face example of student-athletes following the apparent lead (read: greed and avarice) of the administrators at their schools and at the NCAA.  He asks why should we expect anyone to act differently when the “people running college athletics are desperate for money – for themselves and their salaries and their facilities, for their private planes and their comped cars and their golf-course memberships. They want to avoid paying players and taxes as if they run a little league, then get paid and pampered like they run the NFL. Everyone is chasing the cash.”  Answer: they shouldn’t, we shouldn’t, and the whole damn system is rotten to the core.  Compelling stuff.
3. As we noted yesterday, basketball is a relatively minor part of this scandal, but it probably doesn’t feel that way to Missouri administrators, fans and new head coach Frank Haith right now.  As Luke Winn writes, ‘character and integrity’ were the two attributes that Mizzou AD Mike Alden relied upon when he made the decision last spring to hire Haith, but if the allegations against him have any legs whatsoever, it will be difficult to to justify keeping him on board in Columbia.   Mike DeCourcy writes that Haith is harmed by the NCAA’s gag order policy on pending investigations, and it’s a good point.  The narrative involving Shapiro buying off DeQuan Jones on Haith’s behalf is already being told, written, and memorialized, and Haith has veritably no recourse to defend his position in the interim.  Whether Haith will survive the next month or longer at Missouri is anyone’s guess, but our best speculation suggests that if UM brass catches any whiff of impropriety related to this situation, he’ll be gone immediately.  (By the way, DeQuan Jones’ career total points at Miami:  372, or $26.88 per point, allegedly.)
4. Things continue to improve down in the great state of Florida.  Didn’t we already refer to the Miami Hurricanes fiasco in the two spaces above?  Right, we did.  But it was a different Orange State school a few hours north that on Wednesday received an official notice of inquiry from the NCAA related to potential violations in both the basketball and football programs.  Central Florida is now feeling the heat over its association with booster Ken Caldwell, a Chicago native who has allegedly been involved in steering several basketball recruits and one football recruit to the school.  With all the shenanigans going on down there, maybe the NCAA should consider setting up a special Florida Task Force just to deal with its rampant NCAA lawlessness (and remember, Isiah is still at FIU).
5. Some international hoops updates.  First, Team USA has rolled through its four games so far in the World University Games in Shenzhen, China, this week.  So far, the Yanks have defeated Mexico by 41 points, Hungary by 49 points, South Korea by 44 points, and most recently, Finland by 60.  The team has clinched the top seed in its group, and will play one more game against Israel before moving into the quarterfinal round on Saturday.  Five players are averaging double figures, led by Ashton Gibbs’ (Pittsburgh) 13.5 PPG, John Jenkins’ (Vanderbilt) 13.0 PPG, and JaMychal Green’s (Alabama) 12.3 PPG.  The team is shooting a very nice 51% from the field and 42% from three while holding its opponents to an icy 36% overall and 22% from outside the arc.  Impressive.  One other quick international note is that Rice junior Arsalam Kazemi will not be able to play for his native Iran in the upcoming FIBA Asia Championships in September because he’d have to miss two much coursework.

1. It wouldn’t be a random mid-April Wednesday without NBA Draft comings and goings, and not one, but two, SEC teams announced the draft intentions of three of their stars yesterday.  First and foremost, John Calipari’s talented trio of Terrence Jones, Brandon Knight and DeAndre Liggins are all going to test the waters over the next few weeks, and by all indications, it appears that next year Kentucky fans will face a third straight season of uber-talented but inexperienced freshmen leading their team.  Knight and Jones are projected as lottery picks, whereas Liggins, a second rounder if chosen at all, probably wouldn’t be in any better position after returning for his senior season.  Jeff Goodman argues that, despite all of Calipari’s martyrdom last year about his five first-rounders (“best day in Kentucky history” and all that nonsense), he actually wants his players to return.  It’s no leap of faith to state that a coach, if forced to do so, would admit to wanting his best players to stick for two, three, or even four years, but Calipari certainly didn’t expect them to — after all, why recruit a Marquis Teague if you already have a Brandon Knight; or, why recruit a Michael Gilchrist if you already have a Terrence Jones?  The truth is that those players are going to Kentucky with an expectation that minutes at their positions will be available, and they didn’t get those impressions through a careful reading of the tea leaves.
2. Moving on to the SEC team that announced on Wednesday that its three stars would be returning, Vanderbilt’s all-SEC trio of Jeffery Taylor, John Jenkins and Festus Ezeli will be back in Nashville next season.  The Commodores went 23-11 overall and 9-7 in the rugged SEC East before losing a heartbreaking opener in the NCAA Tournament against a much-lower seed for the second straight year.  Kevin Stallings’ team will have the weight of enormous expectations on it next year, as this news gives him as talented and experienced a team he’s ever had in his twelve seasons at Vandy.
3. We’ve got space today for one piece of significant transfer news — Wake Forest’s Ari Stewart will reportedly resurface at USC in the 2012-13 season.  The 6’7 Demon Deacon forward suffered a bit of a sophomore slump in his first year under Jeff Bzdelik, but he has the tools and the jumper to become an all-conference level player at his next destination.  USC picked up a good one as Kevin O’Neill continues rebuilding with his own players in Troy.
4. Princeton again decided to keep it within the family by reaching out and hiring Class of 1998 graduate Mitch Henderson to take over for the departed  head coach Sydney Johnson.  Henderson has spent the last eleven years working under Bill Carmody at Northwestern, and said upon his hiring that when junior Doug Davis’ shot fell through in the Ivy Championship game this year against Harvard, he “jumped off his couch” with excitement.  His era as a player (1994-98) was one of the best in program history, as the Tigers made three NCAA Tournaments, reached #7 in the national polls in 1998, and defeated defending national champion UCLA in his sophomore year.  As with Johnson, it’s a lot to live up to for a fan base with rather big expectations.
5. Just when you thought you couldn’t be more impressed by Derrick Williams’ sophomore All-America season, we learned Wednesday that his “sprained right pinky” had actually been a broken one all along.  Yep, a broken digit that he decided to tough out and play with after suffering the injury in a late January game against UCLA.  Without question, Williams’ field goal percentages of 59.5% and 56.8% (from three) must have really taken a hit by virtue of D-Will’s injury — he likely would have been in the mid-60s in each metric had he not been hurt (we’re only partially kidding).  This exhibited ability to play through pain can only serve to elevate his draft stock come June.

1. Some injury information for your Wednesday morning.  Pitt’s Ashton Gibbs will be out until at least Saturday with his injured left MCL, even though he says he’s back to 100% as of yesterday.  St. John’s and Steve Lavin, Pitt’s weekend opponent, cannot be pleased with this news.  On the other end of the Commonwealth, Villanova’s Corey Stokes will remain out of the Wildcat lineup at least through the weekend as he tries to come back from turf toe on his left foot.  Team doctors think he’ll be ready to re-join his squad by next Big Monday’s game against Syracuse.
2. Missouri’s Kim English (ed. note: corrected) seems to have his head on straight with respect to a hate crime that went down on his campus over the weekend.  Someone had painted racist graffiti in front of a residence hall, but English, rather than getting angry, stated that he understands that it was simply the work of “one idiot” and not representative of most people in general.  It’s always nice to see young people have a healthy sense of perspective when it comes to the ugly side of the real world.
3. Radford suspended its head coach, Brad Greenberg, for the remainder of the regular season as a result of NCAA violations relating to impermissible team travel and benefits for an ineligible player.  It’s questionable whether the 5-21 (2-14 Big South) Highlanders will miss him much, as Radford is suffering through its worst season in a generation.  Greenberg probably isn’t in any long-term trouble, though, as Radford is coming off two seasons where they won forty games and enjoyed an NCAA appearance in 2009.
4. It’s nearing the end of the regular season, and as we saw yesterday with Jim Boeheim’s presser where he attacked the media after a win, people start saying interesting things as the pressure increases.  Here’s a couple of examples.  Cincinnati head coach Mick Cronin, in reference to UC fans booing a pouting Yancy Gates when it appeared he was coming back into the game over the weekend, said that’s a life lesson at the level of big-time college hoops: “At the big-time level, there is a trade-off.  You get to play on ESPN. You get name recognition that helps you, theoretically, get a job. I had a real problem with anybody getting on a kid from Murray State, riding buses all over the Ohio Valley Conference.  … At our level it’s definitely different, because there are residual benefits. It goes with it. It’s not easy for them, but  it’s life’s lessons.”  Meanwhile, down at Kentucky, Terrence Jones called out his teammates without actually naming them when he said about UK’s road woes, “I feel we play two different ways when it’s home and away when it comes to older guys or guys stepping up. A different guy can step up at home but it seems like certain guys go away when we are away.”  Maybe we should just add a quote of the day to the site from here on forth, because it’s always interesting this time of year.
5. Realizing of course that Northwestern has generally blown some golden opportunities this season to get itself onto the bubble and quite possibly into the (expanded) NCAA Tournament for the first time ever, Lake the Posts is already out there calling for head coach Bill Carmody’s dismissal.  We certainly understand the frustration and agree that NW has hurt itself in key spots this year, but some progress is better than no progress and the likelihood of three straight NIT appearances is the start of something bigger.