1. Now that Halloween is over and done with (best costume we saw this weekend? definitely the couple who dressed up as the scene in American Gothic; well, that, or the random yet very sexy squirrel we saw walking around), we can officially say that we’ve moved into the college basketball season.  November 1 is a sort-of de facto calendar line where many slightly-more-casual fans around the country wake up and realize, “shoot, we have a game next week.”  We’ve been coming strong throughout the month of October with our season preview materials, and we still have a few more up our sleeves this week, but man we’re definitely ready for some game action.  Next Monday night cannot come quickly enough.
2. Is the most hated man in professional basketball actually helping the South Florida schools, particularly Miami (FL), with their recruiting?  This article by Fanhouse suggests that LeBron James may be, although there’s been no direct evidence of it yet.  There was considerable buzz when King James went over to Coral Gables to play pickup ball on campus back in August, and the revered superstar (among South Floridians at least) showed up in no fewer than four photos in the team’s 2010-11 media guide this year.  Whether it will work for Frank Haith’s program remains to be seen, but there’s no question that the Hurricanes, looking for any possible advantage in a league full of heavyweights, are trying to leverage it.
3. In a move we’re having trouble figuring out, the Pac-10 announced that it would be combining its men’s and women’s postseason tournaments in coming years, beginning in 2011 at the Staples Center.  Although our initial thought drifted toward some absurd hybrid of the three-ball competition at NBA All-Star Weekend, we immediately wondered how merging the semifinal and final rounds of the tournament into a single venue would actually increase fan interest?  Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott has done a solid job at marketing his oft-staid league in his six months on the job, but we’re not sure he realizes that putting a gimmicky thing together like this could actually disincentivize fans who are only interested in one sport (men’s), not the other (women’s).  In other news, the World Series, facing flagging television ratings as result of the Yankees or Red Sox not being involved this year, is looking into tagging along its Game Five tonight with Monday Night Football’s matchup between the Colts and Texans.
4. There have been some open doubting Thomases around here with respect to the AP/Coaches poll rankings that UNC has received in the past week (#8/#9).  And with good reason — the Heels simply weren’t very good last year, and they lost their top three returning scorers.  Does the addition of super-frosh Harrison Barnes mean that suddenly Roy Williams’ team is not just better, but top 10 good?  Seth Davis spent some time in Chapel Hill last week watching practice and he came away from the experience believing that the Heels will indeed be as good as Barnes makes them.  Honestly, we’re thinking a fair comparison might be the Kevin Durant Texas team of 2006-07 — Durant was amazing, but that team was simply way too young and inexperienced to do much in March (they lost to USC in the Second Round).
5. Some exhibition nonsense for your consideration over the weekend: #9 Florida 92, Florida Tech 58 (Kenny Boynton had 24 pts on 10-15 FG); #17 Butler 90, Florida Southern 70 (Matt Howard had 19/7); Louisville 83, Northern Kentucky 66 (UL opened its new KFC/Yum Center with newly-eligible Gorgui Dieng’s 14/11); Pittsburgh 104, Northwood 62 (Ashton Gibbs had 25 pts).  It seems like every year some ranked team ends up losing one of these games — wonder who it will be this year?

Rush The Court is back with another edition of One on One: An Interview Series, which we will bring you periodically throughout the year. If you have any specific interview requests or want us to interview you, shoot us an email at rushthecourt@yahoo.com.

Scouting high school basketball players is a task that probably ranks just above weather prediction and winning trifectas at the track in terms of its certainty, but there are several folks out there who are among the best in the profession.  Dave Telep, former National Recruiting Director for Scout.com and current Senior Basketball Recruiting Analyst for ESPN, is one of those guys.  As a young college graduate in the mid-90s, he helped launch PrepStars before quickly rising up the ladder and developing his name at both Rivals and Scout, two of the pre-eminent recruiting services in existence today.  In the intervening decade, Telep built a sterling reputation for his workhorse approach to scouting, going from game to game in state after state to see players with his own eyes so as to fairly evaluate them.  He also founded Dave Telep’s Carolina Challenge in 2007, a one-day camp for 80 hand-picked North Carolina high school players in who want to learn what it takes to become a top college basketball player.  Some of the recruits who have attended this camp have been Duke’s Mason Plumlee and former Kentucky star John Wall.  The recruiting aficianado was in fact driving to a game in Virginia at the time of this interview — he never stops moving when there are players to be evaluated.  You can find Telep on both Facebook and Twitter — we’d recommend you friend/follow him to stay on top of all of the latest recruiting and scouting news.

Telep is a Scouting Mastermind

Rush the Court: Let’s start with the most newsworthy item in your life right now, the move from Scout.com to ESPN. Can you tell us a little bit about how this all came about and what the plan is for the immediate future there?

Dave Telep: Yeah, you know, I could not be more thankful and more grateful for the nine years I spent with Scout.com and Fox. My contract came up for renewal this summer and ESPN presented a really unique opportunity to do some things in the recruiting world on a bunch of different media platforms. It’s something where, to be honest, I’ve always wanted to work for ESPN. When I realized that I wasn’t going to be a professional athlete around the age of twelve, I realized one of the things I wanted to do with my life was to eventually work for ESPN. It’s really been a fun time for me and my family, and we’re having a great time with it. We have such a really neat team of guys there from the scouts to the guys who operate the database, that it’s really exciting to have so much support of a bunch of guys who are really woven into the fabric of college basketball. It’s awesome!

RTC: To many in this business, getting the call from ESPN is a dream come true. Is this the Dave Telep equivalent of seeing your name at the top of a recruiting list?

DT: The cool thing for me as the father of two boys is that I can someday look at those guys and say “if there’s something in your life that you really want to do, and you have the ability to, through hard work and luck and people helping you out, you can make that happen.” That’s been the neat thing for me with ESPN so far, just sharing and talking about it with my parents. You set these goals when you’re younger, and to see one of them come to fruition on a personal level is really cool. It’s not just a job for me. This is something I’ve always kinda had my eye on. I never knew what I would ever do at ESPN someday; I just knew that I always wanted to be around people who were excellent in their field. I knew from a young age that I would love to do that someday. This is definitely a dream come true for me.

RTC: Let’s move into some scouting questions.  Everyone has predictions from their career they’re proud of and a few they’re not quite as ready to shout from the hilltops. What are some of your most notable ones both ways?

DT: Great question. I was very excited the first time I saw Chris Paul, and I was happy to be one of the first people who spearheaded that charge. That worked out really well for me. You know, recently a couple of years ago we had DeJuan Blair in the top twenty, and the reason why I ranked Blair in the top twenty was because six or seven years before that I totally whiffed on Emeka Okafor by ranking him in the 80s. I was bound and determined that if a guy averaged as many rebounds as Blair did to not make the same mistake that we made with Okafor. I screwed up with Okafor but I’d like to think I learned something from it. Some others — I’ll never forget the day I saw Adam Morrison go for 30+ in a packed gym in Las Vegas, and I totally whiffed on that one. I learned a lot from the evaluation of Stephen Curry. I watched him all through high school. I evaluated him as a low-major player, a mid-major player, and at the end of his HS career, I rated him the highest level mid-major player possible. But if I could have stuck him into the top 100, that would probably be one of my bigger regrets in not doing so. My real job is to learn from all these mistakes and try to avoid them [in the future]. You see a situation like Emeka Okafor – he averaged 18-19 RPG in high school – that is a freaky number, to be frank. Then to see Blair come around and be that same kind of a rebounding force… they’re two different players, but although we screwed up Okafor it taught me a little more on the back end with Blair. When you see a guy with such a freakish skill set and such a knack for doing something extraordinary, your radar definitely goes up.

Telep Was Onto Chris Paul Before Anybody Else

RTC: You’ve talked in the past about ‘balancing potential with production’ when evaluating prospects. Which is harder – figuring out where a prospect can top out or figuring out where he will top out?

Read the rest of this entry »

Shamelessly cribbing from the clever NBA catch phrase, we here at RTC will present you with the 2010-11 edition of Thirty Reasons We Love College Basketball as we ramp up to the start of the season a little over a month from now.  We’ll be bringing you players to watch for this season and moments to remember from last season, courtesy of the series of dump trucks, wires and effluvia known as YouTube.  If you want to have some fun while killing time, we encourage you to re-visit the entire archive of this feature from the 2008-09 and 2009-10 seasons.  Enjoy.

#11 – Where The Next Great Duke Point Guard Happens

1. We’ve got a lot of season preview stuff going on, as we’re sure you well know, but we want to draw your attention to our Tweeting the Preview feature which began yesterday and will continue all the way up through Opening Night on November 8 in two weeks.  Every hour on the hour we’ll be providing a 140-character or less tweet previewing a team, and each morning we’ll wrap up the previous day’s tweets with a post outlining all of them in case you weren’t waiting around every hour to see them roll out live.  Here’s Monday’s list, which includes the bottom dozen or so teams for 2010-11 in Division I basketball.
2. Score one for the mids on the recruiting trail.  Norcross (GA) senior forward Alonzo Nelson-Ododa picked Richmond over California, NC State and DePaul yesterday.  Maybe this isn’t too much of an upset after all, as it’s likely that UR will be far better this coming year than any of those schools (we’ll believe in Sidney Lowe’s Wolfpack when we see it…).
3. The NCAA was sued on Monday in federal district court in a class-action matter over its standard policy of offering only one-year renewable scholarships to its student-athletes.  One of the plaintiffs is a former Rice football player named Joseph Agnew; he was released from his athletic scholarship during his senior season at the rather expensive school after a coaching change and injuries derailed his playing career.  Perhaps not coincidentally, the same attorney who is representing Ed O’Bannon, et al, in their lawsuit against the NCAA and EA Sports over use of their playing likenesses in video games is also spearheading this case.  Is it safe to say that Steve Berman is becoming Public Enemy #1 at NCAA headquarters in Indy?
4. It was a Corey Fisher kind of Monday on the interwebs, as both Seth Davis and Dana O’Neil filed reports on Mr. Summer League Century Mark’s upcoming senior season.  There are a million pieces like this in the preseason, of course, but what we found particularly interesting was Davis’ conclusion from watching Villanova’s practice that he doesn’t see a Final Four appearance out of this group.  He qualifies it by saying it’s only October, but this is a fairly experienced team and what you see is usually what you get with squads like that.
5. You’ve no doubt read or heard by now that Pittsburgh head coach Jamie Dixon played the role of Good Samaritan on Saturday night when a car directly in front of him on I-279 struck a barrier wall and flipped over.  In this below video on ESPN, Dixon talks about what happened when he initially saw the accident and how he figured that there was no way anyone could have survived the crash.  It turns out that both women riding in the car survived, and by all indications Dixon did the right thing by helping them get out of the smoking vehicle immediately (even if the first woman he helped ran away?).

1. Thursday was a big day in the recruiting world, as three top prospects in the Class of 2011 made their commitments public with the result that two Big 12 schools not named Kansas and Texas will also be bringing elite talent onto their campuses.  The #4 player in that class according to Rivals, LeBryan Nash, committed to Oklahoma State, while the #5 player, Quincy Miller, and his teammate and #43 player, Deuce Bello, committed to Baylor.  Nash and Miller are program-changing forwards, while Bello is a ridiculously athletic shooting guard.  As an aside, Scott Drew is absolutely getting it done on the recruiting trail — Miller represents the third top ten player to commit to the Bears in the last two years (Perry Jones arrives this year; seven-footer Isaiah Austin will arrive in 2012), and he’s beating out the likes of grizzled veteran recruiters such as Rick Pitino for these kids.  When you also consider that Baylor had to rekindle an entire program from the ashes of the Dave Bliss debacle merely seven years ago, seeing this kind of talent commit to play ball in Waco is nothing short of extraordinary.
2. The preseason USA Today/Coaches poll came out on Thursday, and as expected, Duke was at the top with 29 of the 31 first-place votes.  Michigan State was second and received the other two first-place votes.  Kansas State, Pittsburgh and Ohio State rounded out the top five.  For a little historical perspective, last year’s Final Four teams were ranked #2 (Michigan State), #8 (Duke), #9 (West Virginia) and #10 (Butler) in the preseason.
3. Could the summer evaluation/recruiting period become a thing of the past?  According to a report released Thursday, the Conference Commissioners Association voted last month to recommend abolition of the summer period.  The NCAA’s Board of Directors will make the final decision on this, but many coaches are already harping on the proposal as a disaster in the making.  In an email sent to coaches from NABC president Tom Izzo, he noted that it will become much more difficult and costly to evaluate prospects individually rather than in the summer camp group setting, and that the cancerous influence of agents, runners and other hangers-on during the summer will only become more powerful without the coaches and NCAA around to lend an air of propriety.
4. Scary news from the DC area that former Georgetown star guard Charles Smith was shot twice in the chest on Thursday and was taken to the hospital in critical condition.  Smith was the Big East POY in 1989 and played on the 1988 bronze-medal US Olympic team, the last US international basketball team comprised solely of collegians.  The suspect who shot Smith is still at large, but we certainly hope that Smith comes through this ok and his assailant is brought to justice.
5. The Atlantic 10 media made their predictions yesterday in NYC, with Temple receiving the burden of expectations to win the conference while Xavier, Richmond and Dayton fell in line behind the Owls.  The preseason all-A10 first team consists of Lavoy Allen (Temple), Kevin Anderson (Richmond), Andrew Nicholson (St. Bonaventure), Damian Saunders (Duquesne) and Chris Wright (Dayton).

Shamelessly cribbing from the clever NBA catch phrase, we here at RTC will present you with the 2010-11 edition of Thirty Reasons We Love College Basketball as we ramp up to the start of the season a little over a month from now.  We’ll be bringing you players to watch for this season and moments to remember from last season, courtesy of the series of dump trucks, wires and effluvia known as YouTube.  If you want to have some fun while killing time, we encourage you to re-visit the entire archive of this feature from the 2008-09 and 2009-10 seasons.  Enjoy.

#15- Where Another Tar Heel Stud Happens

Andrew Murawa is the RTC correspondent for the Pac-10 and Mountain West Conferences and an occasional contributor.

To read the entire In Their Words series, click here.

Part Five: SCHEDULING

Over the summer, we’ve spent time hearing about some of the next big-name recruits on their way to college basketball: Jared Sullinger and Harrison Barnes, Anthony Davis and Michael Gilchrist. We’ve heard the big-time schools announce their high profile games on their upcoming schedules: Kentucky going to the Maui Invitational and visiting North Carolina, Michigan State hosting Texas and going to Duke. But for the vast majority of Division I programs, they’ve been flying under the radar. There are at present 73 teams that participate in basketball in the six BCS conferences, but there are 347 total programs in Division I. Of those other 274 programs, there are certainly quite a few big-name programs: last year’s national runner-up Butler comes to mind immediately, as does Gonzaga, Memphis and a handful of other schools in conferences like the Atlantic 10 and the Mountain West. But, we were also interested in how the other half (or really, how the other three-quarters) lives, so we spent some time talking to coaches, athletic directors and other people around the country affiliated with some of those other schools — those non-BCS schools, those “mid-majors” — and we asked them about how they recruit, how they create a schedule, how they market their programs, and quite a few other things. Over the next eight weeks, we’ll let them tell you their story, in their own words.

To begin, let me introduce and thank this week’s cast of characters:

• Eric Brown, Assistant Coach, Long Beach State – Brown enters his fifth year as an assistant on head coach Dan Monson’s staff, after previously having spent time on coaching staffs at Cal-State Northridge, USC and Iowa State.
• Dale Layer, Head Coach, Liberty – Layer enters his second season at Liberty after having spent a season as an assistant at the university in 2007-08. In between, he spent a year at Marquette and previously he spent seven seasons as the head coach at Colorado State. He has compiled a 118-122 record in his eight seasons as a Division I head coach.
• George Ivory, Head Coach, Arkansas-Pine Bluff – Ivory enters his third season in Pine Bluff, where he has turned the Golden Lions into winners. UAPB turned around an 0-11 start last season by finishing 18-5 over their last 23 games, winning UAPB’s first SWAC tournament title in 43 years and advancing to the NCAA tournament before losing to eventual national-champion Duke.
• Larry Williams, Athletic Director, Portland: Williams has been the AD at Portland for six years now following a five year stint as the head of licensing and product marketing at his alma mater Notre Dame. Williams was a two-time All-American offensive lineman with the Irish before starting 44 games in the NFL.
• Murry Bartow, Head Coach, East Tennessee State – Bartow is entering his eighth season as the Buccaneers head coach, after having previously succeeded his father Gene Bartow as the head coach at UAB. Bartow has posted a 118-72 record in his years at ETSU and has racked up 241 total wins and four NCAA appearances in his 13 seasons as a head coach.
• Tommy Dempsey, Head Coach, Rider – Dempsey enters his fifth season as the head man at Rider, following two seasons as an assistant. He has compiled an 83-75 record over that time and coached NBA lottery pick Jason Thompson during his time there.
• Gregg Bach, Assistant Athletics Director for Communications, Akron – Bach was named to his current position this past summer after having spent the previous eight years on the media relations staff in the Akron athletic department. His new job makes him the spokesperson of the athletic department.
• Eric Reveno, Head Coach, Portland – Reveno heads into his fifth season at Portland having turned around a program from a team that was 18-45 in his first two seasons to a team on the rise with a 40-24 record over the last two seasons. Reveno spent his previous nine seasons as an assistant at Stanford, his alma mater where he was a Pac-10 Conference All-Academic Team selection as a senior.
• Chris Caputo, Assistant Coach, George Mason – Caputo is entering his sixth season as an assistant coach for the Patriots after spending the previous three seasons as an administrative assistant and video coordinator under head coach Jim Larranaga.
• Jason James, Head Coach, Tennessee-Martin – James enters his second season as the head coach at UT-Martin following eight seasons as an assistant coach there. His first season was rough, to the tune of 4-25, after he was appointed head coach in the wake of scandal with the previous head coach. But James, the recruiter who brought Lester Hudson to UT-Martin, has plans to begin to turn things around this season.

For the most part, our first two articles on scheduling at the mid-major level have talked about the difficulties associated with lining up game. We mentioned that some schools see benefits to playing big-time programs with talented rosters, both in recruiting and in preparing their teams for conference and postseason play. Another benefit to playing these types of games is the money. Very few of the programs at this level have huge athletic budgets, so the money from taking a guarantee game and going on the road to face a bigger school is important not only to the basketball program, but also to the entire athletic department and the university. So while getting a chance for publicity from playing these games is a great incentive, the money associated with them is also a strong enticement.

Guarantee Games Are Not Always Guaranteed

Eric Brown, Assistant Coach, Long Beach State: The Big 12, the ACC, they’re all paying out big guarantees. It all depends on that particular school’s budget – some big schools will pay $55,000 or $60,000 guarantees. You can even get up to $80,000 or $90,000. And the later you wait, if there is a BCS school still looking for games, they may have to raise up the ante, they’ll pay a larger amount than they would have three months earlier.

Dale Layer, Head Coach, Liberty: It’s an important part for most mid-majors. Here at Liberty, the athletic department typically tries to reinvest a lot of that money back into the program, so we’re able to use it in a way that enhances Liberty basketball and the athletic department in ways that everybody can appreciate.

George Ivory, Head Coach, Arkansas-Pine Bluff: We think the money is very important, and the main thing when we play those games, you want to do everything you can to help out within the athletic department and the university. So we don’t have a problem playing guarantees. It’s a great thing for the guys to play that kind of schedule, you’re playing some of the top players in the country, some of the top coaches in the country, so I think it is a great experience for all of us.

Larry Williams, Athletic Director, Portland: We will play guarantee games. At some places there are mandates where you’ve gotta play these many guarantees and earn this much money, but we don’t do that. We’re trying to be very conscious of the growth of our program. And if an appropriate guarantee presents itself, we’re not afraid to play it, because quite frankly, we can win those games too. So, we’ve gotta be conscious of the opportunity to get a win and a paycheck.

Murry Bartow, Head Coach, East Tennessee State: I wouldn’t say we have a mandate. My AD and I have a very good relationship, and I, based on conversations with him, know what he is hoping to get, in terms of number of guarantee games, and know what he is hoping for based on the current budget and the current situation. So he and I sit down and visit and based on those conversations I know what I need to do. The bottom line is, I don’t mind playing those games.

Tommy Dempsey, Head Coach, Rider: You can ask ten different schools about guarantee games and get like five different answers. I don’t have a lot of pressure on me, on our basketball program, to play guarantee games. We do play them, but we don’t play too many of them. Last year for instance, we played one against Mississippi State, this year we play one at Pitt. It does help us with revenues within our athletic department at a school like ours, but fortunately our administration isn’t saying to me, you have to go out and play four guarantee games so that we can fund a different program. You know, I don’t have that pressure on me, I don’t have a certain number of dollars that we have to generate through guarantee games. If I choose to, if I want to maybe buck our RPI up in a year when we think we have a chance to be pretty good, maybe help us with getting into a postseason tournament, I have the opportunity to schedule them if I’d like. But I don’t have pressure from my administration to schedule them to bring in a lot of money, and I think that’s a very good situation to be in, where your program is funded enough that there’s not pressure to go take four losses, just to help out with the budget. And I’m very appreciative that I don’t have to do that.

While road guarantee games are the usual case for mid-major match-ups with BCS conference teams, there are other ways to get matchups with BCS schools in other environments, the most common and a greatly preferred way, is in the early-season tournaments like the NIT Season Tip-Off or the Maui Invitational. These tournaments often (although not always) give mid-major programs a chance to face high-majors on a neutral court.

Read the rest of this entry »

Shamelessly cribbing from the clever NBA catch phrase, we here at RTC will present you with the 2010-11 edition of Thirty Reasons We Love College Basketball as we ramp up to the start of the season a little over a month from now.  We’ll be bringing you players to watch for this season and moments to remember from last season, courtesy of the series of dump trucks, wires and effluvia known as YouTube.  If you want to have some fun while killing time, we encourage you to re-visit the entire archive of this feature from the 2008-09 and 2009-10 seasons.  Enjoy.

#19- Where The Next D-Rose/Tyreke/Wall Happens

1. One of the best UConn traditions is called the Husky Run, a 5k amble through the streets of Storrs where the coaches and players “kick off” the basketball season with a spirited jog.  Jim Calhoun has been doing these since he was back in Boston at Northeastern in the 70s, but he was compelled to miss this year’s event for the first time as a result of preparations for Friday’s hearing in Indianapolis in front of the NCAA Infractions Committee.  Friday’s “First Night” event — the UConn version of Midnight Madness — will certainly be muted without Calhoun in attendance, not to mention the ugly specter of possible further NCAA sanctions  hanging over everyone’s head in attendance.
2. Earlier this week Luke Winn gave us his top sixteen backcourts, led of course by the ridiculously deep and talented Blue Devils.  So who has the best frontcourt for the 2010-11 season?  Would you believe the scintillating group at Purdue led by JaJuan Johnson, Robbie Hummel and Patrick Bade?  You should.  Duke comes in at #2, UNC at #3, and Kansas State at #4.  Five schools other than Duke ended up on both of his lists, which should give you a pretty good sense as to who the top contenders for the title will be this season:  Purdue (#1 frontcourt, #12 backcourt); Kansas (#5, #6); Syracuse (#7, #10); Ohio State (#9, #9); Michigan State (#15, #2).
3. TSN’s Chris Littmann put together an interesting list of the top five Twitter All-Americans for the 2010-11 season.  If you don’t have the following players on your feed, get them on there now… Mizzou’s Kim English (@englishscope24), Washington’s Isaiah Thomas (@isaiah_thomas2), Duke’s Nolan Smith (@ndotsmitty), Illinois’ Mike Davis (@illiniballa24), and Texas A&M’s Dash Harris (@dash5harris).  Personally, we can’t wait to see what Thomas has to say leading up to Maui and a potential game against Kentucky next month.
4. Hubris, arrogance, mere stupidity — or all three?  Gary Parrish has long harped on the tendency for coaches to repeatedly and egregiously get busted for texting recruits when they’re not supposed to be doing so, but it doesn’t seem to stop their madness.  We can only suppose that these are some of the same guys who, after looking up a bunch of porn on the work computer, think that by simply deleting the search history means they won’t get caught.  You mean pressing “clear history” doesn’t get rid of it?  Huh?
5. We mentioned this situation in a Morning Five last week, but the schizz hit the fan publicly today when St. Louis’ two stars, Willie Reed and Kwamain Mitchell, were noticeably absent from Photo Day on Wednesday.  The reason is that neither is currently enrolled in the school as a result of a year-long suspension meted by the university’s student court for an as-yet undetermined violation of student conduct (later changed to two months on appeal).  Bryan Burwell spoke to Reed’s father about the suspensions, and although details on the specific allegations are sketchy, the father alleges fairly serious concerns about rights to due process and railroading if what he suggests is true.  Michigan State fans would do well to look at this situation with a certain degree of interest, as there are two unnamed players on their campus possibly facing similar inquiries.

1. Things do not continue to improve for Baylor’s Scott Drew.  Last week his star player LaceDarius Dunn’s basketball future was placed in question over allegations of aggravated assault against his girlfriend, while yesterday Jeff Goodman reported that the Bear program is being investigated by the NCAA concerning the recruitment of Hanner Perea, a 6’9 high school junior from Colombia (the country, not the phonetically-same Missouri/South Carolina city) currently playing in Indiana.  The primary issue ONCE AGAIN COMES DOWN TO TEXT MESSAGES!!!!  Baylor assistant coach Mark Morefield was already serving a suspension for text message-related violations, so what did he do during July’s quiet period?  He of course sent multiple text messages to Perea’s high school and AAU coaches, a rather unbelievable example of Pavlovian conditioning if we’ve ever seen one.  Baylor has already self-reported the latest violations, according to Goodman’s report, and we can only hope that Morefield’s SMS package was turned off on the latest cell plan provided by the university.
2. Are we getting closer to an NCAA decision on the eligibility of Kentucky star recruit Enes Kanter?  Only the NCAA knows that for certain, but NYT’s Pete Thamel writes that the club team in Turkey is standing by its original assertion that it holds bank statements and documentation proving that Kanter was paid well beyond “reasonable and necessary expenses” during his time with the club.  Their representative, Nedim Karakas, says that they promised not to show these documents, however, until the NCAA has made its final decision.  It’s hard to know whom to believe here, but we’re having trouble understanding why the NCAA would care in the least what the Turkish club team does or does not do with its documentation, right?  What are we missing here?
3. Tuesday was KU Media Day and Bill Self told the assembled scribes that he expects his star recruit Josh Selby’s eligibility decision to come sooner rather than later, and he expects it to be positive.  Selby is currently practicing with the team and will be able to suit up on Friday night at Late Night in the Phog at Allen Fieldhouse.  In our view, Selby is the difference between a Kansas team making another serious run at the Final Four and one that will be pleased with playing into the second weekend.
4. It’s looking more and more like the Pac-10 will go to a two-division system in both basketball and football starting in 2011-12.  Final decisions have not yet been made, but this report from Andy Katz suggests that Stanford and Cal are the final hurdle for the league to split into six-team North and South divisions — the Washingtons, Oregons and NorCals in the North, and Utah/Colorado, the Arizonas and SoCals in the South.  The hoops schedule would remain at eighteen games, with home-and-homes guaranteed against each team’s rival (UCLA vs. USC, for example) with six other home-and-homes and four one-games rotated on a yearly basis.
5. This dumbfounded us, but did you know that Arizona State’s Herb Sendek, himself a branch on the incredibly fecund tree of Rick Pitino (yes, we went there), has a total of eight former assistants who are now head coaches in Division 1 basketball, more than any other coach?  The names on the Sendek tree:  Thad Matta (Ohio State), Sean Miller (Arizona), Mark Phelps (Drake), John Groce (Ohio), Larry Hunter (Western Carolina), Ron Hunter (IUPUI), Jim Christian (TCU), Charlie Coles (Miami (OH)).   Louisville’s Rick Pitino and Rice’s Ben Braun currently have six each.