Morning Five: 12.03.10 Edition

Posted by rtmsf on December 3rd, 2010

  1. Seton hall star guard Jeremy Hazell had surgery on his broken left wrist on Thursday, which he injured nearly two weeks ago at the Paradise Jam.  It’s a little strange that he didn’t have the surgery sooner even though his doctors knew that the wrist was broken some time ago, but we’re sure they had their reasons.  Originally Hazell was expected to be out of the lineup for four to six weeks, but there’s been no additional information as to a revised timeline after this procedure.  Let’s hope he’s back in time for the bulk of Big East play.
  2. Seth Davis gave us five things we learned from Wednesday night’s Duke-Michigan State game.  He makes the somewhat controversial claim that Kyrie Irving is Coach K’s best freshman ever at Duke, while also suggesting that the Blue Devils and Spartans are the best two teams in the country.  As for Irving, if we’re comparing apples to apples (an 18-yr old then vs. now), then he’s probably right; but 18-yr olds are generally better now than they were in the 80s and 90s.  Still, relative to the time period, we’re not sure that Irving surpasses Christian Laettner, Bobby Hurley or Grant Hill, all of whom were outstanding freshmen going to Final Fours while competing against NBA-caliber juniors and seniors (those don’t exist nearly as much today).  As for Duke/MSU, we’ll agree about the Blue Devils, not MSU.  The Spartans will lose several more games, but they’ll turn it on in March as they always do and find a way to get back to the Final Four.
  3. There’s a buzz around the country about Duke possibly going unbeaten this year, believe it or not.  Let’s hold off on that talk, shall we?  Seriously, does anyone over the age of 15 actually believe that a team with obvious flaws inside like Duke can go undefeated in the age of parity and 1-and-done stars?  Come on…
  4. Luke Winn’s weekly power rankings are always a great way to wile away a morning — seriously, it takes us at least an hour to read through all of it and actually digest it (which means he probably researched and wrote it in about three minutes while completing the NYT crossword puzzle and hand-brewing the latest hipster French press coffee).  It’s nice to see he agrees with us on Georgetown (a bunch of bro-haters if we’ve ever seen one).
  5. Duke’s Mason Plumlee shows a skill in the below clip that we’re not sure we’ve seen anyone else even attempt, much less actually perform — the three-basketball dunk.  Yet for some reason, we really weren’t all that amazed by this.  Maybe we’ve just been jaded by all the dunk contests over the years, but we’d actually have preferred to see him use only two balls and do simultaneous windmills or something.

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Morning Five: 11.30.10 Edition

Posted by rtmsf on November 30th, 2010

  1. The biggest news of Monday was of course that in the interminable quest for more football dollars, Texas Christian University (TCU to most of us) will join the Big East starting in the 2012-13 season.  That makes seventeen Big East basketball schools if you’re counting at home.  Yes, the league that in large part made college basketball what it is today — with hundreds of ESPN games and the star-making powers all of it entails — is now chasing skirts in a region of the country over a thousand miles removed from its nearest member institution.  Presumably the league will now look into adding another school like Houston to lock up another major media market as the 18th hoops (and tenth football) school, and then there’s the possible addition of Villanova football should they choose to do so, but where does it end?  Does it go to twenty basketball schools by adding Memphis and Central Florida?  And what about the Big East Tournament — nobody was a fan of the double-bye system before; do we move to a triple-bye now?  How would you like to be the #20 seed in your conference tournament?  David Steele over at Fanhouse has a nice piece on how the ACC and Big East, two conferences that were to basketball what the SEC and old SWC were to football, have completely lost their hoops souls with football-driven expansion.  Luke Winn also breaks down what the addition of TCU will do (or won’t do) for the Big East from a hoops perspective — he makes an excellent point about Marquette’s recruiting prospects improving with a Texas team in tow.  Can’t say we disagree wither either’s takes at all.
  2. Condolences go out this morning to John Calipari and his family, as the Kentucky coach announced via Twitter that he lost his mother, Donna, to a battle with cancer on Monday.  Calipari does not expect to miss the Wildcats’ next game versus Boston University tonight, and we’ve heard rumors that Kentucky students will exhibit some unifying show of solidarity through the wearing of black shirts or something similar.  Nice touch.
  3. Seth Davis goes out on a shaky limb with his proclamation Monday that UConn’s Kemba Walker has been the best player in America through the first four weeks of the season.  Ok, not really, but as always, his Hoops Thoughts column is well worth the read.  Can we use this opportunity to say that having sat through three UConn games in Maui last week, we’re not as sold on the Huskies and Walker long-term as some others seem to be?  We think that UConn is a nice team — probably an NCAA Tournament team — but top ten?  We’re just not seeing it.
  4. Butler’s Ronald Nored will miss at least one game as a result of the concussion he suffered last weekend at Siena.  The Bulldogs’ next game is Wednesday in their Horizon League opener on the road against 7-0 Loyola (Chicago).  He’s questionable for Saturday’s game against top-ranked Duke as well.  With Butler not playing very well as it is, these next two games are fairly important, so it’s not a good time for Nored to be on the shelf.
  5. Bruce Pearl certainly knows how to play to an audience.  At a Knoxville Quarterback Club dinner on Monday night he mentioned former UT football coach Lane Kiffin in reference to having made mistakes and “hoping for… some other dumbass to take [me] off the front page.”  The dumbass in question, of course, was Kiffin.  Perhaps the funniest part of this series of quotes by Pearl was his reference to the “slippery rock theory,” which we suppose is a theory founded somewhere in central Pennsylvania (as opposed to its better-known but obstructionist cousin, the “slippery slope” theory).

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Evening/Morning Five: 24 Hours of Hoops Edition

Posted by rtmsf on November 15th, 2010

  1. Since you’re going to be up all night with us anyway, we thought we’d get a head start with today’s M5 to give you a little bit of reading material before we get started.  As you undoubtedly already know, John Stevens will be BGTDing the entire event from start to finish, but there are a couple of other nuggets we want to throw your way as well.  We will also have a couple of RTC Live events during the day, starting at 2 am ET with St. John’s visiting St. Mary’s in a battle of  Catholic schools with a little something to prove this year (SMC – that they’re not going away; SJU – that they’re back).  Later at Noon ET, we’ll be in Tulsa for the crosstown rivalry game between the Golden Hurricane and Oral Roberts.  So keep an eye out for those good ones. 
  2. Let’s talk some matchups.  Mike DeCourcy took some time yesterday to rank-order the ESPN games from #1 to #12, and although we don’t have any beef with the top three, that St. Mary’s-St. John’s game should be higher.  Come on… the return of Steve Lavin on the sidelines, the burden of expectations, a packed bandbox of a gymnasium…  that’s a top four game.  Our own Zach Hayes also put together a list of some things each team in selected games needs to do to win in his Ball Reversal post that went up on Monday.
  3. We don’t talk much around here about Division II basketball, but this score caught our attention: West Liberty 154, Lock Haven 48.  The West Virginia-based Hilltoppers put nine players into double figures and shot 68% for the game (including hitting 21 treys).  Still, they fell short of the all-time D2 record margin of victory of 118 points set by Mississippi College nearly forty years ago.  As an interesting piece of historical errata, LIU holds the DI record with a 117-point victory over Medgar Evers (presumably more than just him) in 1997, while Purdue holds the record between current Division I teams with a 112-6 win over Indiana State in 1911.  Yes, you read that correctly. 
  4. There was quite a bit written about Opening Weekend, including Seth Davis’ Hoop Thoughts where he discusses how impressive Illinois has looked so far this young season, and Gary Parrish’s Monday Look Back, where he belabors the fact that there really were very few (if any) great games last weekend.  That’s what tonight’s for, right?
  5. This column by Ray Holloman at Fanhouse has more than you’d ever want to know about Stetson basketball and its relevance to Coach K/Duke and Jeff Bzdelik/Wake Forest, both of whom dropped a game to the Hatters early in their ACC careers.  If you’re lost, it’s because you should be.  While we’re making absurd comparisons, both Krzyzewski and Bzdelik drink water AND brush their teeth with the wet substance.  We’ll have a story up on this tomorrow.

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Morning Five: 11.10.10 Edition

Posted by rtmsf on November 10th, 2010

  1. Today is the basketball version of National Signing Day, inasmuch as the sport has such a thing.  Officially it’s the first day of a week-long signing period, but there’s virtually no drama this year as most of the elite players have already made their collegiate choices (23 of the top 25 players, according to this Sporting News article).  The two biggest names still on the board are 6’8 power forward DeAndre Daniels from Bradenton, Florida, and 6’10 power forward Cody Zeller, from Washington, Indiana (brother of Tyler and Luke).  Daniels is expected to wait until the spring signing period to make his choice but Zeller has scheduled a press conference on Thursday where he will choose between UNC, Indiana and Butler.  Scout has some interesting information available as to which conferences have the strongest aggregate classes thus far, and breaks down the classes for each school within each.
  2. What will a thumping at the hands of the University of Indianapolis get ya?  How about a 5:30 am film session to see in living color all of your mistakes from the night before?  That fate befell Bruce Pearl’s Vols yesterday morning a few short hours after Indy walked out of Thompson-Boling Arena with a 79-64 win.  Obvious joke: did the Tennessee players refuse to acknowledge that it was actually them on the screen when Pearl asked them questions?
  3. This is an absolute must-read from a guy that literally nothing in this sport gets past — Jeff Goodman’s 68 Things to Watch in the 2010-11 Season.  Goodman is one of the few in this business who, when he says something has a good chance of happening, we actually listen.  You should too.
  4. CNNSI came through with its Crystal ball selections from its three primary CBB writers: Seth Davis, Luke Winn & Andy Glockner.  Look at Sexy Seth with the Gonzaga Final Four pick!  There’s a lot of great stuff in this article, so read it, but we’re especially loving Winn’s pick for Surprise Team, Glockner’s choice for Best Player Nobody Knows About, and Davis’ Flop Team.
  5. More exhibition nonsense last night:  Syracuse got its revenge on last year’s nemesis, Le Moyne, 91-48, which clearly means that this year’s Orange squad is a lock for the Final Four since the 2009-10 edition could only muster the Sweet Sixteen.  SU hit 11-16 treys, which addresses one of their key questions going into this season.  Kansas also defeated Emporia State, 90-59, and Purdue beat Midwestern State, 78-58, last night.  As for games that count, the 2kSports CvC continues tonight at the four regional sites of Austin, College Park, Pittsburgh and Champaign.  We’ll have our SYT out later today for those.

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Morning Five: 11.01.10 Edition

Posted by rtmsf on November 1st, 2010

  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?

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Morning Five: 10.18.10 Edition

Posted by rtmsf on October 18th, 2010

  1. It was an eventful weekend across the college basketball landscape as programs began officially practicing on Friday night with spirited Midnight Madness celebrations ranging from Duke’s banner unfurling to Michigan State’s astronaut theme to Pepperdine’s For Whom the (Keion) Bell Tolls…  in case you were busy with football and/or the MLB playoffs this weekend, be sure to check out our BGTD: Midnight Madness Edition from Friday night as well as our postmortem of highlights we posted on Sunday.  And believe it or not, we’re only twenty-one days from game action, folks.
  2. Like everyone else, we were extremely sad to hear that Purdue’s Robbie Hummel had once again ruptured his ACL, an injury that will leave him on the shelf this season.  You can really feel the pain in Jeff Goodman’s article over the weekend where he discusses just how unfair it is that a great kid such as Hummel seems to have such crappy luck.  For Purdue fans, this is also devastating — the Boilermakers rallied after Hummel’s late February injury last year to sneak into the Sweet Sixteen, but even with the experience of playing without him and E’Twaun Moore and JaJuan Johnson returning, we just can’t see a Final Four run in this squad.  Hummel will have one more year to play college basketball in 2011-12, but he’ll return to a team gutted by the graduation of those two stars and although hope springs eternal, we have a feeling that these couple of years will ultimately represent unfortunate missed opportunities for Matt Painter and his program.
  3. Speaking of Goodman, here’s his preseason Top 25 (keep in mind Purdue at #2 was prior to Hummel’s injury); here’s Mike DeCourcy’s at Sporting News; and here’s Gary Parrish’s over at CBS Sports.
  4. Seth Davis checks in with his 10 Burning Questions to start the new season, a great read as usual.  Unfortunately, we already know the answer to the second half of #2, but he brings up a good point about Duke managing to duck much of the ubiquitous hatred last season largely because most pundits (and the public) didn’t start taking the Blue Devils seriously as a title contender until the very end of the season.
  5. Friday was Midnight Madness at most places, but it was also the date of UConn and Jim Calhoun’s hearing in Indy with the NCAA Infractions Committee.  Calhoun reported that the meeting took thirteen hours, but he provided no additional details as to its substance (although a 13-hour meeting is no joke).  The NCAA is expected to make a ruling on this issue by December.  Let’s hope for Husky fans that their season is generally going well by then; otherwise, it could be a particularly cold winter in Storrs.

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Morning Five: 08.03.10 Edition

Posted by rtmsf on August 3rd, 2010

  1. Your Pitino/Sypher trial update…the biggest news from Monday was that Sypher’s ex-husband stated on the record that Sypher told him that she turned down a plea bargain because she wanted to “take Pitino [down] with” her.  The brilliance of this woman should not be understated, folks — she very well may end up imprisoned and penniless, while Pitino simply continues on about his business coaching his team and making millions of dollars (although she might counter with “15 seconds,” FTW).  To that end, CNNSI’s Dan Shaughnessy believes that Louisville should can Pitino for such a public embarrassment, while Seth Davis implores all of us to consider that, while Pitino is many things — including cad, adulterer and narcissist — he’s also a victim in this mess.
  2. Two former prominent collegiate point guards joined coaching staffs yesterday, with 1995 national champion Tyus Edney returning to his alma mater UCLA to join Ben Howland’s staff; and Duke basketball/Syracuse football star Greg Paulus joining Billy Lange’s staff at the Naval Academy.
  3. The fourth installment of the Flourishing Five finds Texas at #2 on the strength of Mack Brown and Rick Barnes’ programs.  That means that Florida will be #1 when the final installment is released later this week.  How do you guys feel about this?  Certainly we understand that the last five years have been phenomenal for both UF programs (titles in basketball in 2006 and 2007; football in 2006 and 2008).  But now, at exactly this moment in time?  UT hoops is  clearly ahead of Gator basketball, but can we say that UF football is right now that far ahead of Texas pigskin?  Not sure about that.
  4. Believe it or not, but practice has already started…at Kentucky.  And this isn’t some loophole that John Calipari has found in the NCAA rulebook, either.  Since UK is taking a mid-August trip to Windsor, Canada, the Wildcats get ten days to break in all of their new players over the next couple of weeks.  One player who won’t be joining the team on the Canada trip or at any point next year (according to Calipari) is Darnell Dodson, the top returning scorer on last year’s team (6.0 PPG).  Another projected top 25 team taking advantage of this mid-summer opportunity to get better is the Pittsburgh Panthers.  Jamie Dixon’s team is in Ireland at the moment as part of a six-game trip over the next week-plus, and they’ve destroyed the two Gaelic teams they’ve faced so far.
  5. This is an interesting article by Pete Thamel at the NYT about World Wide Wes (aka William Wesley) in his newish role as an advisor for Creative Artists Agency (CAA).  There are questions as to the amount of access WWW will be able to have with blue-chippers now that he’s formally associated with an agency, but if we know anything about World Wide, he’ll probably figure out a way.

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Morning Five: 07.29.10 Edition

Posted by rtmsf on July 29th, 2010

  1. Fifteen seconds to infamy.  Rick Pitino took the stand yesterday and will likely do so again today in the extortion trial of Karen Sypher in Louisville.  The twitterati are all over this in a big, huge, ridonkulous way.  Like here, or here, or maybe here.  We’re thinking that perjury where the only person on earth who could impeach you is also the defendant might have been a better option.
  2. Good news from Vegas as West Virginia head coach Bob  Huggins was released from the hospital yesterday.   In less good news, former Missouri State, St. Louis and UNLV head coach Charlie Spoonhour is at Duke University hospital waiting on a lung transplant.  He is on the list, and we’re hopeful that he gets the procedure that he needs, as we’ve always been a fan of his.
  3. And even sadder news from Memphis, as the body of former Tiger all-american Lorenzen Wright was found in a wooded section of the city yesterday nine days after a 911 call went out from his cell phone followed by at least ten gunshots.  He leaves behind six children and a legacy of being a great father and never having a harsh word for anyone.  RIP, Lorenzen.
  4. On Tuesday, Seth Davis gave us the best of his interviews with eleven college coaches about next season; yesterday he followed it up with part two which consisted of his assessments of various college and high school players that he saw play in Las Vegas last week.  The truth is that few of the returning players that Davis saw seemed all that impressive (Kyle Singler and Shelvin Mack excepted).
  5. We admit that we know as much about NASCAR as we do about geophysics, but Jim Boeheim and driver Tony Stewart enjoyed a shooting contest at the Melo Center on the campus at Syracuse University yesterday.  Boeheim quipped about his penchant to speed, but you can watch the whole interview for yourself below.
    6. Boeheim and NASCAR Star Tony Stewart

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Morning Five: 07.28.10 Edition

Posted by rtmsf on July 28th, 2010

  1. From the we are completely and utterly shocked, shocked we tell you, department, the two Drexel players who were arrested on Monday on suspicion of armed robbery were suspended indefinitely from the team yesterday.  Jamie Harris and Kevin Phillip will find it awfully tough to play basketball next year while in lockup anyway.
  2. Additional information from the WVU program yesterday revealed that head coach Bob Huggins actually broke seven ribs (#3-#9), not four as was originally reported.  He is still having trouble breathing without pain and will continue to be held in a Las Vegas hospital until that pain subsides.
  3. Northwestern’s Kevin Coble indicated yesterday that he is retiring from basketball after a summer of worse-than-expected rehabilitation on the foot he injured prior to last season’s first game.  This is obviously very sad news for Coble and Northwestern in their hopes that the all-Big Ten second-teamer in 2008-09 would be back next season to lead the Wildcats to their first-ever NCAA Tournament.  The silver lining for Wildcat fans: Coble is on track to graduate from the elite school in December, and four starters including star John Shurna (18/6) will return from an NIT team next year.
  4. Day two of the Karen Sypher extortion trial was Tuesday in Louisville, and jurors were rewarded with a previously unseen video of her making allegations of rape to authorities in April 2009 after the extortion plan fell through when Rick Pitino reported her to the feds.  Testimony was also given by patrons and workers on the infamous night at Porcini’s that suggest Sypher and Pitino were getting along very well throughout the encounter.  Pitino could testify as to his side of the story as soon as today.
  5. Seth Davis checks in with a summer report from Las Vegas, where he spoke to eleven prominent coaches about the status of their programs going into next season.  Always good stuff from one of the class acts in the business.

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Morning Five: Cinco de Mayo Edition

Posted by rtmsf on May 5th, 2010

  1. Kentucky’s John Calipari is the news gusher that keeps on giving.  After a single year of work in Lexington, the school is already discussing a contract extension with the coach that would (ostensibly) keep him at UK until he retires.  Of course, Kentucky could give him a 1000-year contract and it would be relatively meaningless if he has his eyes on coaching a superstar like Lebron James in the League someday.  Last evening’s buzz is on the heels of rumors that the Chicago Bulls were interested in trying to lure the Squid back to the NBA.  Would the chance to coach Derrick Rose again (and no threat of vacated wins) and Lebron and D-Wade as free agents be enough to move on to Chicago?  You never know.
  2. This is pretty amazing if you think about it.  Long before the endless griping about a 96-team tournament and the subsequent decision of the NCAA to opt out of its current television deal with CBS in favor of a new joint deal with CBS and Turner Sports, the Blinking Eye Network approached ESPN to take the Big Dance off its hands.  In fact, facing up to as much as a $50M loss in 2010, CBS was willing to pay ESPN to take it off their hands.
  3. Bad decision, FTW, Alex.  Louisville’s Samardo Samuels has hired an agent and is locked into the NBA Draft even though most experts have him as a fringe second rounder at best.  Remember this from a few weeks ago?  It feels to us like Samuels just wants the hell outta dodge.
  4. Will the last player in the state of Iowa leave the lights on?  Iowa’s Aaron Fuller, an all-Big Ten honorable mention selection who averaged 10/6 in 2010, will resurface at USC for Kevin O’Neill, and Iowa State junior Charles Boozer will transfer out of Ames after a weekend incident where he is alleged to have assaulted a woman outside his apartment complex.
  5. If you can name the two current head coaching jobs still available, you likely already have your application in — Mt. St. Mary’s and Chicago State.  Thanks to Seth Davis’ wrap-up of this spring’s coaching carousel, we now know that factoid and you do too.  Check out the rest of his piece for a breakdown of the good and bad from this year’s version.

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