1. Yesterday, while most of the nation’s attention was focused on New York City and the variety of ceremonies honoring those who lost their lives in the horrific events of September 11, 2001, another tragedy occurred in the city. Early yesterday morning, Tayshana Murphy, one of the top female prep players in the country, was shot and killed in the hallway of her apartment building in what was believed to be a case of mistaken identity. Unfortunately, this one happens much more frequently in this country and often goes unnoticed. Our condolences go out to Murphy’s family and friends along with anybody else who has lost a loved one in a sadly “everyday” tragedy.
2. This year’s Carrier Classic featuring Michigan State and North Carolina is one of the premier games of the season even if the Spartans are not expected to be as solid as we normally expect of a Tom Izzo-coached team. Of course, this leads to the inevitable question of who will be playing in the game next season. Although the match-up has not been announced, Morale Entertainment Foundation, who is putting on the game, has announced that Connecticut would be one of the participants. The potential opponents for the Huskies next season are Kansas, Illinois, Florida, Arizona, and Texas. We doubt that this game alone will be enough to convince Jim Calhoun to coach another season if he was not already planning on it, but it would be an interesting environment for a new head coach to try to direct his team in if Calhoun does step down at the end of this season.
3. We briefly touched on Duke‘s decision to induct Mike Krzyzewski and Bobby Hurley into the school’s Hall of Fame last week when Krzyzewski stated that Hurley’s 3-pointer against UNLV in the 1991 national semifinals was the biggest shot in school history. They were formally enshrined during a ceremony on Friday night along with three other Duke athletes.  We don’t have much to add here other than to ask the question: what took so long? On some level I can understand not wanting to induct an active coach into the Hall of Fame, but once you name the court after him I think that argument is moot. As for Hurley, he is the second of the championship-era Duke basketball players to be inducted with the first being Christian Laettner (an obvious selection who also has the perfect portrait that encapsulates everything about him right down to the sneer). We expect that there will be a couple more Blue Devils from their run of championships joining these three in the next few years.
4. One of the more amusing topics in college sports over the past few weeks has been the ongoing discussion about team uniforms, the fashion statements they make, and whether they can attract a coveted player to come to a school that he or she might otherwise not be inclined to do so. The football uniforms from Oregon sparked this discussion before the start of the football season and the uniforms (or whatever you call them) that Maryland unveiled in their season opener last week created a Twitter frenzy. Still, we didn’t think that the uniforms could make a big difference until we read an interview from highly coveted prospect Archie Goodwin that appeared to suggest he ruled out Baylor because he did not like their colors or their shoes. The person who wrote the article has updated it to lash out at a few site that he felt unfairly criticized Goodwin for this comment and there were other reasons listed for his dismissal of Baylor. While we won’t go so far as to say that aesthetics were the singular reason that Goodwin crossed Baylor off his list it is interesting that it is enough of a factor that he would even mention it and might be something that college coaches take into consideration the next time the school’s athletic director unveils a new uniform for the team to wear.
5. Finally, what would a Morning Five be without a comment on the ongoing ridiculousness that is conference expansion? Today’s submission comes from a little different perspective–the conferences trying to prevent teams from leaving via financial penalties. In this case, the ACC is reportedly looking to increase its penalty buyout to $13 million from the previous figure of $10 million. Honestly with the size of the TV contracts being thrown around that extra $3 million is more symbolic than anything else especially if an ACC school would be looking to join, say, the SEC. We are not sure if there is a realistic way to limit schools from switching conferences (having a school “sit out” a year from conference play would never be politically feasible), but some administration has to come up with a way or stop with the pettiness against programs that decide to switch conferences.

If you are interested in participating in our ATB2 feature, send in your submissions to rushthecourt@gmail.com. We will add to this post throughout the day as the submissions come in so keep on sending them.

General News

• Jim Boeheim: ‘The Ideal Conference Has 10 Teams’: The Syracuse legend opines on conference expansion. (Troy Nunes is an Absolute Magician)
• Decision on Kevin Ware expected by tomorrow: “A handful of folks, including those at Scout Focus, are reporting that freshman guard Kevin Ware is expected to receive a decision from the NCAA about his eligibility by tomorrow” (Card Chronicle)
• Villanova 2011-12 Schedule Released: A look at Villanova’s schedule this season. (VU Hoops)
• Jon Rothstein Interviews Kevin Stallings: Going through the interview as it was posted on Twitter. (Anchor of Gold)
• Erik Murphy Cleared To Return To Florida Basketball By Billy Donovan: “Erik Murphy will play for Florida basketball this fall. That’s the news out of Billy Donovan today, who issued this statement on the player who was arrested for an incident at a St. Augustine bar this spring.” (Alligator Army)

If you are interested in participating in our ATB2 feature, send in your submissions to rushthecourt@gmail.com. We will add to this post throughout the day as the submissions come in so keep on sending them.

General News

• McDonald’s Rehab Expected To Take 7-8 Months: Leslie McDonald is expected to miss the entire season recovering from his ACL injury. (Tar Heel Fan)
• Bruce Pearl hired by grocery company: “The wait is over, Bruce Pearl has a job. Pearl accepted a position with H.T. Hackney Co., a Knoxville-based wholesale grocery company that provides products to stores. The company does not have a basketball team; Pearl will be the vice president of marketing.” (Kentucky Sports Radio)
• Memphis Still Bitter About Calipari?: “According to Dan Wolken (former Memphis Tigers beat writer) ‘word is that the new Penny Hardaway Athletic Hall of Fame, which opened today on Memphis’ campus, includes no photos of John Calipari.'” (Kentucky Sports Radio)

1. Isaiah Armwood, who announced that he was leaving Villanova last week, has decided that he will be moving on to George Washington. Armwood, who played at nearby Montrose Christian, should help bolster the frontcourt for a team that has fallen off significantly in the past four seasons after making the NCAA Tournament three consecutive years. Although his contributions to the stat sheet in the past (2.5 points and 3.6 rebounds per game last season) are marginal he was named captain of this year’s team so he should help with the “intangibles” that the team has probably been missing.
2. It seems like we are always dealing with these conference realignment rumors, but yesterday was a fairly interesting day for the Big 12 as Texas A&M officially told the conference that it was exploring its conference options and Southern Methodist declared its interest in joining the conference. Honestly, from the Big 12’s point of view this would be a pretty significant downgrade unless SMU returns to its “Pony Excess” glory, but realistically as long as the conference has Texas (and maybe Oklahoma) the rest of the conference probably doesn’t matter financially. We know that Kansas runs the conference in basketball, but they are essentially irrelevant in the conference in football with the exception of a few seasons under Mark Mangino.
3. It appears that Bruce Pearl has already started his PR/spin tour after receiving a three-year show cause penalty from the NCAA. According to Pearl the NCAA is using him as an example and called the sanctions a “very, very heavy price for the mistakes that we’ve made” while criticizing the NCAA’s rulebook for being too onerous. Later in the day, Pearl went on The Doug Gottlieb Show for what turned out to be a fairly insightful interview in which he appeared to throw his assistants under the bus for the infamous photo of him illegally meeting Aaron Craft andJosh Selby. While at some level I understand Pearl’s need to frame this a certain way if he hopes to get back into college basketball I sort of wish he could just own up to what he did without having to cloak it in a handful of qualifiers.
4. ESPN released the schedule for its Tip-Off Marathon, which is scheduled for November 15th. We will have more on the line-up later, but ESPN appears to have put together a fairly impressive line-up yet again. Obviously this year they are helped by the Champions Classic that features Duke against Michigan State and Kentucky versus Kansas, but Florida at Ohio State may be the best game on the docket. The other intriguing games are Belmont at Memphis and what will probably be George Mason at Virginia Tech. Outside of that the games aren’t particularly noteworthy, but at this point in the year we would take just about anything that we can get.
5. When we first heard the story of DePaul assistant coach Billy Garrett, who reportedly came back from a trip with the team to Europe to find his house had been burglarized we were shocked. Among the items that were reportedly stolen were some family memorabilia including mementos from his father William, the first African-American player in the Big 10, and shockingly an oxygen tank used by Garrett’s son, who suffers from a form of sickle cell disease. Now news has come out suggesting that the case may be a disagreement between Garrett and his landlord. We aren’t sure which direction this story is going, but we assume that it is going to get very messy.

Every July, college basketball fans obsess over the July recruiting period where summer AAU legends are made and scholarships are won or lost. While most of the buzz this summer was over the superstars (particularly Shabazz Muhammad and class of 2013 recruit Nerlens Noel), the more interesting action was happening further down the ranking list. While ESPN’s decision to move Muhammad above Andre Drummond in their new rankings is interesting at some level, in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t mean much. For the purposes of recruiting and scholarship offers, it is the guys that won’t be getting headlines on the front of ESPN.com or trending on Twitter who are more useful to look at. To that end, we took a look at the pre- and post-July recruiting rankings for the class of 2012 from ESPN.com and Scout.com to see which players were climbing up the ranking list and which ones were plummeting.

Shabazz and Drummond May Have Dominated the Headlines, But We Aren't as Interested in Them

To do this, we looked at where certain players were ranked before the July recruiting period and where they were ranked afterwards. The obvious caveat here is that rankings are subjective and some fans have accused scouts of a form of confirmation bias where they tend to rank players higher if they are recruited by certain schools (particularly Duke in basketball and Notre Dame in football) than if they were  being recruited by similarly powerful programs, but not the de facto face of the sport. Still, it seems reasonable to think that two independent scouts ranking players would be fairly reliable (assuming Dave Telep and Evan Daniels aren’t cheating off each other).

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Virginia Tech announced today that it was denying transfer Allan Chaney medical clearance due to ongoing medical issues related to his diagnosis of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) in April 2010. Chaney, who was a 4-star recruit coming out of high school in Connecticut, appeared in 23 games as a freshman at Florida where he averaged 3 points and 2.1 rebounds per game in limited action as he played just 9.8 minutes per game in a season that was marred by injuries and a season-ending suspension, which eventually led to his decision to leave Gainesville. After sitting out the 2009-10 season as a transfer at Virginia Tech expectations were high for Chaney as Hokie fans expected him to help Malcolm Delaney and Jeff Allen get the team back to the NCAA Tournament after a prolonged absence. However, that all changed when Chaney collapsed during an April 2010 workout, which at the time was thought to be due to dehydration, and was later diagnosed as myocarditis.

Complications from myocarditis kept Chaney from wearing a Hokie jersey

While Chaney recovered from the viral myocarditis the resulting scarring around his heart, which reduced his exercise capacity, was concerning enough for team physicians that he was forced to sit out the 2010-11 season and underwent an undisclosed cardiac procedure in May at the University of Pennsylvania. Still, many Hokie fans expected (or hoped) that Chaney would be available to return for the 2011-12 season. In the end, it appears that Chaney was not able to regain enough functional capacity (or there was enough concern for a potentially fatal arrhythmia) for the team doctors to clear him to play “due to persistent complications from myocarditis”. In a statement, coach Seth Greenberg said, “Allan Chaney has been through a great deal in the last year and a half. Everyone involved in our basketball program feels for him. Unfortunately, this rare condition will prevent him from continuing his career here at Virginia Tech. We will do everything in our power to assist Allan as he goes through his next procedure and support him in every way possible.”

If you are interested in participating in our ATB2 feature, send in your submissions to rushthecourt@gmail.com. We will add to this post throughout the day as the submissions come in so keep on sending them.

General News

• 2011-12 Florida Basketball Non-Conference Schedule Includes Ohio State, Arizona, Syracuse: “Billy Donovan’s Florida basketball team won’t be dining on the typical buffet of cupcakes in the 2011-12 non-conference schedule. Instead, these Gators will follow up their Elite Eight run in the 2011 NCAA Tournament by playing one of the toughest non-conference schedules in college basketball this coming season.” (Alligator Army)
  
• St. John’s and Arizona to square off in Coaches vs. Cancer Classic: “The 2K Sports Classic revealed Wednesday that the Arizona Wildcats will face the St. John’s Red Storm in the second semifinal game of the Coaches vs. Cancer tournament on Nov. 17 at Madison Square Garden in New York.” (Arizona Desert Swarm)
  
• 2011 Puerto Rico Tip-Off Bracket Released: “We’ve known the field for the Puerto Rico Tip-Off – Maryland basketball’s preseason tournament this year – for months now, but we had no idea who the Terrapins were going to play. The full bracket was released earlier this morning, and that question has been answered: the Terps will play Alabama in the first round on November 17 at 5:00pm.” (Testudo Times)
• Wichita State to play Colorado in Puerto Rico Tip-Off: “The brackets have been released, and Wichita State opens the tournament against former assistant coach, Tad Boyle and his Colorado Buffaloes at 6:30 Central, on November 17th.” (Shocker Hoops)
• Garrett Green takes final visit to Wichita State: “The recruitment process is coming to a close for Garrett Green, who announced he would leave Louisiana State to play his final season elsewhere on July 18. In the 16 days since that announcement it’s been a whirlwind for Green, who is now on his fourth visit in a little over two weeks. The 6-foot-11 center, who averaged 6.3 points and 5.1 rebounds in 18 minutes per game last year at LSU, confirmed this morning via Twitter that his current trip to Wichita State will be his final visit.” (Inside the Hall)
• Rick Pitino press conference notes: Take-home points from Pitino’s 40-minute press conference. (Card Chronicle)

1. The match-ups for several early season tournaments were released yesterday. Looking through the match-ups we have to say we are kind of underwhelmed. By far the best bracket released yesterday was from the 2K Sports Classic, which features Texas A&M against Mississippi State and St. John’s against Arizona. With four intriguing teams we would be interested in all four of the games played there including the consolation game. Outside of that the only interesting match-ups are the opening round match-up between Iona and Purdue in the Puerto Rico Tip-Off and a potential match-up between Vanderbilt and Texas in the Legends Classic. Of course, our perception of what is deemed a quality early season tournament might be skewed by the upcoming Maui Invitational.
2. On Tuesday we pointed out how weak Connecticut‘s non-conference schedule was. We won’t be doing the same with Florida‘s non-conference schedule where they are scheduled to play against six teams that made the NCAA Tournament last season. The most daunting games are trips to Ohio State and Syracuse (both of which should be ranked in the top 5 in the preseason rankings). Outside of that the Gators will play against Arizona, Florida State, and UAB in Gainesville and a neutral site game against Texas A&M. That has to be one of the most brutal non-conference schedules in the country and if Billy Donovan has any questions about his team they should be answered relatively early in the year.
3. Yesterday there was a lot of buzz on Twitter about an article in The Wall Street Journal about Jerron Love, a 15-year old basketball player, and his father Jerry, who runs his own recruiting site. The basic premise of the article is that Jerron is a “phenom” who some are calling the country’s top eighth-grade basketball player. The catch? The person calling him that is his father. We didn’t have a chance to follow every comment on Twitter about this story, but it seemed like everybody thought the entire story was ridiculous (here’s our tweet about it). The more amusing thing was how they were interviewing people who were raving about Jerron based on the ranking and did not even realize that it was his father doing the ranking.
4. For years sports fans have made jokes about Boise State‘s blue football field. Now, thanks to Northwestern, we may have the college basketball version. The school is designing the court at Welsh-Ryan Arena and has offered it fans (and curious onlookers) four options from which they can reportedly choose the new court. We aren’t sure how much impact the fan voting (done here), but we would like to direct your attention to option 3. We are hoping that option 3 is a joke or we might have to make another post similar to the one we did for Oregon‘s court.
5. The NCAA granted Toledo transfer Hayden Humes a waiver to play next season at the University of Illinois-Chicago after Toledo’s program lost three scholarships due to low APR scores. As a freshman Humes averaged 5.7 PPG and 5.1 RPG and he will be expected to contribute to a team that finished last in the Horizon League (7-24 overall, 2-16 in conference) and graduated its top three rebounders from last season. While Toledo will miss his production on the court they might miss his 3.43 GPA as a freshman even more as it may have been more helpful to the program in the long run.

1. The Dominican Republic’s national basketball team arrived in Kentucky yesterday before they start their training camp on Sunday. The team from the Dominican Republic is training in Lexington per request of their coach, John Calipari. While most of the college basketball world’s interest in the Kentucky Legends team that is being assembled and will feature many recent NBA stars who recently played for the Wildcats, we are more interested in the Dominican Republic team that has Al Horford (Florida) and Edgar Sosa (Louisville) on it staying in Lexington for at least 2 weeks (the game against the UK Legends is on August 15th) with the, um, crazed Wildcat fans around them. If ESPN or any network decided to follow this team while they were in Lexington we would definitely tune in.
2. UNLV‘s hiring of Dave Rice was widely praised as a sign that the program was headed in the right direction, but don’t count Runnin’ Rebel legend Larry Johnson in that group. The 1991 National Player of the Year has come out recently and been very critical of the program and the direction it has taken under an administration that is headed by Jim Livengood, who came from Arizona, which has led Johnson to say, “It’s not UNLV Runnin’ Rebels no more, it’s UNLV Wildcats right now.” Johnson concedes that former coach Lon Kruger had made some attempts to bring some of the former UNLV players back into the program. When Kruger left Johnson put his name in for consideration, but was reportedly not even contacted by the current administration. While Johnson does not have any coaching experience that we are aware of and his name probably doesn’t carry a lot of weight with players who are entering college or younger, it is pretty clear that the UNLV administration made a mistake here by not even reaching out to Johnson even if it was only for show. Given UNLV’s recent efforts to land local recruits having someone of Johnson’s reputation on their side would be a major pull even if it was only the AAU and high school coaches who knew how good “Grandmama” used to be.
3. After arriving at Maryland head coach Mark Turgeon talked openly about installing a 4-guard offense. That task and creation of a rotation to make the feasible became harder earlier this week when rising sophomore Haukur Palsson announced that he was heading back to Europe to play professionally. Normally the loss of a player who averaged 2.8 points and 2.1 rebounds per game would be relatively minor, but with Palsson’s ability to play inside and outside he would have been an ideal player to use in the rotation as a guard who could also battle underneath for rebounds. With Palsson gone the Terrapins only have eight scholarship players and fitting them into an unconventional offense could be a big challenge for the new head coach.
4. When we first saw the headline mentioning that Jabari Parker, one of the stars of the class of 2013, was seriously considering BYU we brushed it off as just more ridiculous Internet speculation until we remembered that Parker is a member of the LDS Church. While BYU has had its share of star players they very rarely land a major recruit (Danny Ainge is the only even close to Parker’s level that I can think of). The hype on Parker is already getting to ridiculous levels (Mike Krzyzewski has compared him to Kobe Bryant and Grant Hill and Seth Davis has already written a feature story on him for Sports Illustrated), but don’t think that just because Parker is a member of the LDS Church he will be a guaranteed commit to BYU. Our older members will remember that when 1997 Sporting News National Player of the Year Chris Burgess turned down BYU then head coach Roger Reid told him that he was letting “the other 9 million members of the LDS Church down” (before he let millions of Duke fans down with his play during his two years there).
5. When former Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl was fired in March there was plenty of speculation about where he would head next. While the logical choice seemed like a TV studio or announcing booth, it looks like Pearl wants to get back into coaching. With a NCAA show-cause penalty imminent Pearl would have to head to the NBA (former Oklahoma coach Kelvin Sampson’s hiring is a pretty clear indication that the NBA doesn’t care about breaking NCAA rules). It appears that the Texas Legends, the NBDL franchise for the Dallas Mavericks, are interested in hiring Pearl as a head coach. Pearl will meet with the team on Thursday in Dallas and reportedly has the job locked up if he wants it. Even though we will miss Pearl’s antics and his excellent coaching we have a feeling that this may be a sign that we won’t be seeing Pearl around college basketball any time soon.

If you are interested in participating in our ATB2 feature, send in your submissions to rushthecourt@gmail.com. We will add to this post throughout the day as the submissions come in so keep on sending them.

General News

• Former Kentucky Student Assistant To Play For Turkey National Squad: “Forever a former Wildcat in our hearts, Enes Kanter was listed among 18 players set to play for the Turkish National Team on their finalized roster. Kanter mentioned a handful of times that he would like to play for Turkey in the event of a lockout, so seeing this made official doesn’t come as much of a shock. Kanter will be joined by a few other NBA players including Hedo Turkoglu and a few other players you aren’t familiar with.” (Kentucky Sports Radio)
• FIBA U19 World Championship — USA Defeats Australia For Fifth Place: Team US was unable to win gold, but knocked off the Aussie in the 5th place game. (Villanova by the Numbers)
• Erik Murphy Receives Deferred Prosecution: “Remember the incident at a St. Augustine bar in April that produced arrests for Florida basketball players Erik Murphy and Cody Larson? Murphy’s taking deferred prosecution for his part, according to the Orlando Sentinel, an arrangement that should keep him from doing time and in the Florida program.” (Alligator Army)

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