Last night’s 10-point loss to Stanford may have exposed Houston’s fast start as a byproduct of some soft scheduling, but those expecting last night’s game to expose junior forward TaShawn Thomas‘s gaudy statistics as a byproduct of the same scheduling received a rude surprise. Thomas entered last’s night game averaging 16.8 points, 11.6 rebounds, and 4.6 blocks per game. Those are impressive numbers no matter the competition, but because Houston’s schedule had thus far featured such college basketball luminaries as Howard and UT-Pan American, most expected Thomas to regress against some improved competition.

It’s About Time People Start Paying More Attention To TaShawn Thomas (Photo: Kathy Willens, AP)

Then the Cougars squared off with a Cardinal team that featured a lot of size and athleticism on Monday and all Thomas did was shoot better than 57 percent from the floor on his way to 22 points, 14 rebounds, five steals, and three blocks in losing effort. Stanford’s strength is its frontcourt and between Stefan Nastic, Dwight Powell, and Josh Huestis, the Cardinal seemingly had more than enough size and talent to control the paint and the glass. Instead it was Thomas who controlled the paint and the glass all by himself. The Cardinal frontcourt got its buckets, but Thomas almost kept the Cougars in the game on his own by grabbing seven offensive rebounds and repeatedly getting to the free throw line in the second half. He was so obviously the best interior player in the game that when Nastic went to the bench with four fouls in the middle of the second half, ESPN’s announcers openly wondered how the Cardinal would get rebounds even though it still had two players on the floor — Powell and Grant Verhoeven — larger than Thomas.

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Four Thoughts is our way of providing some rapid reactions to some of the key games involving AAC teams throughout the season. 

Stanford

1. Houston Has Upside. Yes, the Cougars fell apart at the end of the first half and most of the second half, and yes, their defensive performance left a lot to be desired. But that said, Houston looked like a better team than most of the teams surrounding them in KenPom’s latest updated rankings. The Cougars are full of athletes who love to run and have a lot of different individual offensive options behind the spectacular TaShawn Thomas. Stanford isn’t a marquee name this season, but the Cardinal are a very good team with legitimate NCAA Tournament aspirations and Houston looked like the better squad for a good portion of the game. Houston’s main problem seems to be maintaining consistency and defensive effort for a full 40 minutes (a hallmark of a young team), and lest we forget, the Cougars boast a rotation that features just two significant upperclassmen. Nobody is saying that Houston showed enough in a losing effort to make the NCAA Tournament, and certainly the schedule gets much more difficult from this point, but there is more than enough talent to surely finish in the top half of the AAC standings this season.
2. They Need to Find a Shooter. It’s difficult not to imagine how lethal the Cougars would be with a pure shooter on the wing, someone like Connecticut’s Niels Giffey. Point guard L.J. Rose is an effective shooter from behind the arc but he is also in charge of running the offense and isn’t the type of guy coach James Dickey wants to run off screens for catch-and-shoot opportunities. The roster is full of ridiculous athletes like Danuel House and Jherrod Stiggers, who are great in transition but considerably less threatening when they are being dared to shoot over the zone. Stiggers was supposed to be a marksman after shooting better than 37 percent from downtown last season, but he missed all four of his three-pointers against the Cardinal and is off to a slow start from deep this season (28.6%). Tione Womack and Jaaron Simmons are competent backup guards but one more pure shooter to complement Stiggers and catch passes from Thomas when he kicks it out of the post would make the Cougars tough to stop offensively. Read the rest of this entry »

Out of the country? Living under a rock? Here’s what you missed in the second week of Pac-12 basketball.

Power Rankings (As voted upon by Connor Pelton, Andrew Murawa, and Adam Butler):  

1. Arizona
2. Oregon
3. UCLA
4. Arizona State
5. Colorado
6. California
7. Stanford
8. Oregon State
9. Utah
10. USC
11. Washington
12. Washington State

Jahii Carson Went Off On Tuesday In Las Vegas. (Joe Nicholson)

Best Game – Arizona State @ UNLV: In a week where Harvard-Colorado was probably the second best Pac-12 game, Arizona State and UNLV provided greater drama. Intensity was high from the outset as both teams battled back and forth in the first 20 minutes. Neither team led by more than four points in the first half, and that was the margin when junior Deville Smith hit a jumper as time expired to put UNLV up by a score of 38-34. The crowd of over 12,000 was quieted with about five minutes remaining when the Sun Devils went on a critical 8-2 run to lead by seven, and Jahii Carson made sure the Devils stayed in front with a clutch jumper and two key free throws. When all was said and done, Carson had finished with 40 points and seven assists, a performance you may not see topped this year in conference play, and Arizona State left the Thomas & Mack Center with an 86-80 win to remain undefeated. The 5’10” sophomore also made 14 of his 16 buckets from the field at the rim, a ridiculous stat for someone of his stature.

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1. Rodney Purvis can’t play this year, but he’s still helping the Huskies get off to a hot start. The former highly-touted recruit who transferred to UConn after a year at NC State has been the star member of the scout team, helping one of the nation’s top backcourts prepare for the likes of Dez Wells and Yogi Ferrell. The full year of practice will be crucial for Purvis, who likely will have to step into the sizeable shoes of Shabazz Napier next season. Of course, it may also be playing a pretty big role in Napier’s blazing start, which will have him in consideration for a number of postseason awards if he can maintain it. Based on the early returns, luring Purvis to Storrs looks to be a pretty major win-win for both he and head coach Kevin Ollie.
2. Sean Kilpatrick was angry when coach Mick Cronin redshirted him due to a crowded backcourt and a mechanical flaw in his jump shot four years ago. Both he and Cronin have to be pretty pleased with how it worked out, though, as Kilpatrick now ranks #13 on the school’s all-time scoring list as a fifth-year senior. If he keeps up his current pace – he’s averaging nearly 20 PPG through five games – he could end up second on the list to some guy named Oscar Robertson. And while Cronin might have had some inkling that the little-recruited guard would help more down the road than right away, he almost certainly couldn’t have understood just how much. Kilpatrick is posting a ridiculously high 155.2 offensive rating through five games, vital for a mediocre offensive squad like the Bearcats. If he can approach that number during a key three-game swing next month – at New Mexico, then neutral court games with Xavier and Pitt – both he and his team will earn some rightful attention.
3. Kevin Ware‘s eventful year (life?) continued with a plea deal involving a $268 fine, bringing the latest kerfuffle over a speeding ticket and missed court date to a merciful end. This follows Rick Pitino’s rather pointed press conference on the topic last week after he was apparently blindsided by the news. That all followed on the heels of, shall we say, some colorful tweets from Ware’s Twitter account to Anthony Davis, quickly deleted and attributed to hacking. That followed denials from Ware and Pitino of summer “reports” that Ware had been secretly dismissed from the team. All of that, of course, follows the gruesome injury in last season’s NCAA Tournament which catapulted the quiet reserve to national prominence. That followed an indefinite suspension last spring that lasted one game. Even that followed a recruitment which included a commitment to Tennessee, later withdrawn when Bruce Pearl was fired in the face of an NCAA probe, then a commitment to UCF, later withdrawn in the face of an NCAA probe, then a commitment to Louisville, delayed by a semester due to the NCAA probes. Seems like quite a bit of drama for a junior with a career high of 11 points, no? Whew.
4. When Louisville went way off the board for the fifth member of its signing class last week, no one knew much of anything about Matz Stockman. He wasn’t ranked by any of the major recruiting watchers, nor had his name been tied to the Cardinals publicly before his papers came through the fax machine. Not even Rick Pitino had seen him play. Now that his team has played a few games on American soil, word has started to trickle out. Jerry Meyer of 247Sports says the seven-foot Norwegian will be a three-star recruit, one who has a good scoring touch near the basket but “will likely need a couple years of development before he is ready to compete at a Louisville type level.” A year ago, Louisville’s thin backcourt ended up with a walk-on as its only reserve in the Final Four, so the recruiting class featured three guards. It’s no coincidence that this year’s Cardinal frontcourt, which got exposed by North Carolina on Sunday, has led to Pitino bringing in three recruits 6’9” and taller.
5. Another night, another couple of blown opportunities for AAC teams to earn a much-needed yet impossible to find quality win. First, Oklahoma State continued its roll through the conference with a 93-67 win at USF. Then Houston gave Stanford a tough test before falling in Brooklyn. And now the AAC nears the end of November with UConn’s two wins over a mediocre Maryland, and a young, inconsistent Indiana, and that’s about it. This is nice for the Huskies, but less great for the other teams that hoped for a few chances for quality wins in conference play to make up for weak non-conference slates. Now those opportunities might not be there, making it tougher to build an NCAA Tournament-worthy resume.

With Feast Week tipping off over the weekend, we’re outlining the roads ahead for prominent Pac-12 teams involved in neutral site events this week.

What They’ve Done So Far: If you’ve heard much about Stanford this season, it is most likely because they scored 103 points against BYU – and lost. You can probably take away a couple of things from that little blurb, namely that Stanford’s defense isn’t very good but that their offense is. Still, BYU is no joke, so losing to a quality team like that isn’t necessarily a death knell and the Cardinal will have a chance to prove themselves on a national stage this week. Make no mistake, this is not only a talented team but it is also a veteran team with four seniors and three juniors among its nine-man rotation. Still, despite all that experience, none of these guys have yet learned how to win on a regular basis, so until they string together a number of  wins, there is plenty of reason to have lingering doubts.

Stanford Can Be Fun When They’re Scoring, But Their Defense Is The Big Question (Ben Margot, AP Photo)

First Round Preview: The Legends Classic actually began last week, with Stanford taking care of Texas Southern in a inconsequential (literally of no consequence, as Stanford was going to advance to the semifinals in Brooklyn regardless of the outcome) regional round game. But tonight, the Cardinal will get the elimination portion of the tournament underway when it faces Houston in the nightcap of a pair of games at the Barclays Center. Houston hasn’t lost in five games, but its best win is over a middling Lehigh team. Given that last year’s best player, Joseph Young,  is playing for Oregon these days, this is not a team that should give Stanford too much trouble. Still, TaShawn Thomas and Danuel House are talented scorers, and sophomore point guard L.J. Rose – formerly of Baylor – is a quality point guard. It’s possible the Cardinal could draw this team into a shootout and simply outscore them, but Johnny Dawkins needs to make sure his team starts to buy in on the defensive end.

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1. Welcome to Feast Week! It’s already been a great November of basketball with high quality hoops from coast to coast (and beyond), but we have still got one of the best weeks of the regular season ahead of us, with wall-to-wall ball and great tournament action. There will be plenty of Pac-12 action this week, but Cal and Stanford tip things off today, and the two cross-bay rivals will be playing in a pair of games about 5,000 miles apart from each other. The Golden Bears will get things underway in the Maui Invitational today just after 9 AM local time, while the Cardinal will face Houston at roughly 9:30 PM in Brooklyn this evening in the semifinals of the Legends Classic. But for both schools, it will be a chance to measure themselves against good competition and get some national publicity.
2. Utah got to 5-0 this weekend after sweeping through the Global Sports Hoops Showcase, an exempt event hosted by the university that featured less than stellar competition. Over the course of three days, the Utes knocked off Grand Canyon, Lamar, and finally Savannah State to win the event. And yet, despite the relatively unappetizing appeal of the opponents, the Utes announced attendances averaging better than 7000 every night. Either that is some very creative accounting, or there are a few fan bases around the conference that could learn from the Ute fans.
3. USC head coach Andy Enfield made a big splash on Friday with some loaded quotes in an article published in Men’s Journal. The money quotes are straight trash talking about fellow coaches, like cross-town rival Steve Alford and former USC head coach Tim Floyd, currently that head man at UTEP. About Floyd, Enfield dropped this bomb: “Tim Floyd shows up every day at work and realizes he lives in El Paso, Texas. And he’s pissed off that he didn’t get the USC job [again].” While Alford received this treatment: “I’ve made it to one Sweet 16 in two years, and he’s made it to one Sweet 16 in 18 years.” Just a reminder: you may want to circle January 5 on your calendar, as Enfield’s Trojans will visit Alford’s Bruins that day. You probably won’t have to watch the second half.
4. Speaking of USC, with the news that J.T. Terrell was declared academically ineligible for the rest of the fall semester dropping last week, Jeff Eisenberg of Yahoo Sports writes that the gamble that former USC head coach Kevin O’Neill took on Terrell and his former Wake Forest teammate Ari Stewart most decidedly did not pay off. Stewart saved the drama and earned himself an academically ineligible designation prior to the season. The duo had run into problems – both academic and otherwise – previously in their college careers.
5. Lastly, Arizona head coach Sean Miller weighed in Friday on his 2014 recruiting class, the latest in an increasingly long line of unabashed successes. His class features 6’6” wing Stanley Johnson (the #9 overall recruit according to ESPN), 6’7” power forward Craig Victor (#29) and 5’8” mighty-mite point guard Parker Johnson-Cartwright (#60), along with off-the-radar JuCo guard Kadeem Allen. But, Miller says scoring a big recruiting class like this just buys a coach a little more time, but that he’s still got to go out next year and do it all over again. Meanwhile, former Arizona head coach Lute Olson can relate and says one of the big things he doesn’t miss about coaching is having to deal with the new dynamics in recruiting.

1. USC and first-year head coach Andy Enfield got some terrible news Thursday when it learned that senior guard J.T. Terrell had been declared academically ineligible. After averaging 10.0 PPG in the first three Trojan contests, Terrell sat out the Cal State Fullerton on Tuesday. Add in the West Alabama game last night, which tipped just a few hours after this story broke, and he will miss at least seven games for USC. The Trojans will not have to forfeit the games he appeared in so far this season.
2. I don’t know how much basketball you caught yesterday (I saw the majority via a number of shaky streams while working), but Eamonn Brennan was spot on with this piece, calling it “November Madness”. The whole day, the first of ten straight with holiday tournament action, had an early-round NCAA Tournament feel, what with a classic first round Georgetown upset, Charlotte topping Kansas State, a double overtime thriller between UAB and New Mexico, Florida State’s upset of VCU, and 1-3 Boston College taking 18th ranked Connecticut down to the final seconds. The Pac-12 was on the map as well, most notably the Washington schools, although both tumbled with 16 and 18 point losses to Gonzaga and Indiana, respectively. In Boulder, Colorado was able to hold off a pesky UC Santa Barbara team for a 76-68 win, and elsewhere around the west, Utah and Stanford both picked up their third straight wins. November Madness continues today with Washington-Boston College in the 2k Consolation game and UCLA-Morehead State in the Las Vegas Invitational preliminaries, in addition to games like Kansas State-Georgetown, Massachusetts-New Mexico, and Michigan-Florida State being played out across the world.
3. Oregon State picked up one of its biggest non-conference wins in recent history last Sunday at Maryland, but the Beavers know it’s only one game and there is plenty left to prove. They are still capable of looking like the team that lost to a lower level MEAC club to open the season, but both the players and coaches are on the same page; the intensity in practice needs to continue. We should see on Tuesday whether the new Beavers or old Beavers come out against Southern Illinois-Edwardsville.
4. Utah athletic director Chris Hill is attempting to put together a project that I have thought about for a long time; a small tournament between each school in the state. If it goes according to plan, Utah, BYU, Utah State, and Weber State would meet in either a bracketed or round robin event at EnergySolutions Arena in Salt Lake City. The earliest the tournament could start would be 2015, and could come down to whether or not the Aggies would be willing to give up the home-and-home series with the Utes.
5. Lastly, we close things out with our weekly football pick’em. While basketball is at the front of everyone’s mind, the final three weeks of football are terrific. Teams are battling in cold weather for bowl bids and BCS positioning, and of course, this is when the rivalry games begin. Last week both Drew and I went 3-3, with me hitting UCLA’s win against Washington and Drew getting Arizona State over Oregon State down in the desert. On the season, I still have a one-game lead, checking in at 61-18 to his 60-19. Our game of the week is a no-brainer, as 17th ranked Arizona State travels to the Rose Bowl to face #14 UCLA in the Pac-12 South Championship. We’re both riding the home-field advantage and taking the Bruins.
   

   Oregon at Arizona	Connor: Oregon	Drew: Oregon
   Utah at Washington State	Washington State	Washington State
   California at Stanford	Stanford	Stanford
   Arizona State at UCLA	UCLA 38-35	UCLA 31-28
   USC at Colorado	USC	Colorado
   Washington at Oregon State	Oregon State	Washington

Recruiting well while you’re on the hot seat shouldn’t be as easy as Stanford coach Johnny Dawkins is making it look. On Wednesday, the Cardinal got a verbal commitment from Dorian Pickens, a 6’5″ shooting guard with scholarship offers from Arizona, Arizona State and several other power conference schools. Pickens is the fourth top-100 player in the class of 2014 to commit to the Cardinal since early September, joining four-star point guard Robert Cartwright and four-star power forwards Michael Humphrey and Reid Travis. The most impressive name in that group is Travis, who spurned offers from Arizona, Duke, Georgetown, UCLA and others before pledging to the Cardinal. Stanford’s 2014 recruiting class now ranks 14th in the country, according to Scout.com. With four good players arriving next year, the Cardinal will be well-equipped to restock its lineup with talent and athleticism and remain competitive in the Pac-12 after veterans such as junior Chasson Randle and seniors Josh Huestis, Dwight Powell and Aaron Bright graduate.

With Wednesday’s commitment from Pickens, the Cardinal have one of the best recruiting classes in the country in 2014 (AP Photo).

The most interesting part about this recruiting surge is that Dawkins, now in his sixth season in Palo Alto, might not even be around campus at this time next year. In March, first-year athletic director Bernard Muir essentially said Dawkins needed to lead his team to the NCAA Tournament this season in order to keep his job. “There’s a clear expectation that we can do that here,” Muir said. So if the Cardinal doesn’t end the school’s five-year NCAA Tournament drought in March, those recruits that gave their verbal commitments to Dawkins could wind up playing for a different coach. Why, then, would these talented high schoolers – players that had good scholarship offers from other schools – pick Stanford? Maybe they’re confident Stanford will reach the NCAA Tournament this season, that Dawkins has Cardinal basketball on the cusp of a breakthrough, that Stanford hoops is just an evolutionary step or two behind Stanford football. Or maybe they don’t care whether Dawkins is their coach, as long as they get to attend one of the most prestigious universities in the country, located on one of the most beautiful campuses in the country.

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1. Sometimes, when you are afraid you won’t have enough news to fill the Morning Five, you have to pray to the College Basketball News Gods. They don’t always listen to your prayers, but when they do, they always answer them by sending Richard Andrew Pitino to save the day. After Louisville demolished Hartford on Tuesday night, Pitino could have just answered questions about the Kevin Ware speeding ticket by expressing his disappointment and moved on. Instead he took the time to make vague insinuations that the story only broke because a Kentucky fan tipped off the media outlets. It can’t be proven, but given the nature of this rivalry, absolutely no one would be surprised if Pitino’s suspicions were totally true. Ware’s suspension rumors from the summer were also supposedly started by someone in Big Blue Nation and let’s not pretend like Louisville fans are any nobler. They would be direct messaging every national college basketball writer in the country if they thought they could get Julius Randle suspended or even looked at by the NCAA. I’m not a proponent of trading in gossip but this is also partially what makes the rivalry between the teams so fun… so… uh… work those phones Cardinals’ and Wildcats’ fans!
2. It’s a little bit surprising to hear that former Boston College coach Al Skinner never even bothered to call Shabazz Napier and at least feign interest just in case his preferred targets fell through. Napier wasn’t exactly a can’t-miss prospect coming out of prep school, but he did play in the Eagles’ backyard and was probably worth at least a phone call. Skinner’s loss (it is really Steve Donahue’s loss since he actually tried to recruit Napier but was too late) was Jim Calhoun’s gain as Napier has built himself into a conference player of the year candidate and the Huskies’ most important player. Napier gets a chance to indirectly exact his revenge tonight as the Huskies and Eagles square off at Madison Square Garden in the 2K Sports Classic. Donahue has a pair of solid sophomore guards in Olivier Hanlan and Joe Rahon, just don’t think for a second that either one of them is going to be able to stop Napier.
3. The coronation of Troy Caupain as Cincinnati‘s point guard of the future will have to wait at least one more game after last night’s underwhelming performance. I won’t pick on the members of the media who were already starting to sing his praises because I was singing them just as loudly after his excellent all-around game against Appalachian State. But the beginning of the breakout that was supposed to happen against Campbell last night never materialized as Ge’Lawn Guyn played most of the minutes and Caupain missed the only two shots he took from the field to finish with one point, one rebound, one assist and one steal in just 14 minutes. I will readily admit that my itchy “breakout performer” trigger-finger got the best of me on this one, but I am not jumping of the Caupain bandwagon quite yet. Caupain is still more than a week away from his 18th birthday and he is already part of an AAC team’s rotation. He will undoubtedly have bouts of inconsistency throughout the season but he has a lot of room to grow and he is going to do that by playing a lot.
4. The theme of the week for Temple is patience. Coach Fran Dunphy is preaching it. The student newspaper is preaching it; and star forward Anthony Lee is preaching it too. Although the Owls were picked to finish fifth in the preseason AAC coaches poll, it is now fair to wonder whether that prediction has more to do with the respect for Dunphy than it does with the Owls’ actual abilities. The outlook from KenPom is far less favorable (for those without the subscription, he is predicting the Owls finish 10-18) and the team is going to need to grow up in a hurry if they want to prove the prognosticators wrong. They have the pieces and a good amount of talent, but right now they aren’t particularly good in any facet of the game. They have been particularly bad from behind the three-point arc, shooting just over 26 percent from downtown, and they also rank near the bottom nationally when it comes to forcing turnovers. The hope is that some of this will improve as the team gets more comfortable and more experience, they just better hope that happens before its too late.
5. I’m fine with giving Houston‘s TaShawn Thomas conference player of the week honors, as he has dominated in all four games this season. I am not fine with hyping Houston as a contender, however, not at least until they play someone even remotely worthwhile. They are still a bad defensive team, and while the offense is improving, it still isn’t that efficient and certainly not enough so to help them beat conference foes. The schedule doesn’t get any better against Howard, which rates as one of the worst teams in the country, so expect Thomas and Danuel House to get theirs in an easy win.  But the Cougars get a shot at Stanford at the Barclays Center on Monday and if they can beat the Cardinal, then I will consider to start to take the team seriously.

Out of the country? Living under a rock? Here’s what you missed in the first full week of Pac-12 basketball.

Roberto Nelson Poured In 31 Points In Oregon State’s Upset Win At Maryland (credit: Andy Cripe)

Best Game – Oregon State @ Maryland: Arizona-San Diego State would be a fine pick here as well, but the Wildcats held a comfortable lead for nearly 35 minutes in that one. In College Park, things were exiting and intense from the outset. The whole atmosphere, bolstered by an appearance from the President of the United States, made this feel like something much more than a mid-November game. And on a day when Indiana State won at Notre Dame and Belmont upset North Carolina, it was the Beavers’ turn to pull the shocker. The knocks on Craig Robinson‘s team remain; it is largely a two-man offense without a great rebounder, but it has a solid distributor in Challe Barton and two capable three-point shooters in Angus Brandt and Olaf Schaftenaar. Who knows where the unpredictable Beavers go from here, but the Maryland win provides a boost of momentum that the program desperately needed.

Upsets – There were three upsets in the conference this week, starting late last Monday night when BYU walked into Maples Pavilion and hung 112 points on Stanford. Junior Chasson Randle scored 33 points for the Cardinal, but it was nowhere near enough after a horrific showing on the defensive end of the court. Three days later, UC Irvine destroyed Washington on its home court, taking a 38-36 halftime lead and turning it into a 14-point win. And of course, the Beavers topped Maryland to close out the week. Oregon State went on an 8-0 run to start the second half and never trailed in the final 20 minutes, winning by a final of 90-83.

Power Rankings (As voted upon by Connor Pelton, Andrew Murawa, and Adam Butler):

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