The mood music for this week’s final post, courtesy of Violent Femmes:

Sure, this might be a month old, but if Gary Williams lives by “better late than never”, then so shall we. While most teams are finalizing their recruiting Class of 2009 and getting started on 2010, Williams is still scrambling to find 12 guys to suit up for this season. Seems like he could just walk the streets of Baltimore with a pack of Cluck-U Chicken certificates, but what do we know?

Speaking of additions to the ACC, Raleigh jock-talk host Joe Ovies looked at the five-year results of the ACC’s expansion to 12 teams. Basketball? Meh. Profit? ¡Sí! Thanks to new football revenue, the nine pre-existing members of the conference can’t hear your complaints about the drop in basketball quality, what from all the money they are bathing in.

In a much more sad development, Jamar Smith has been kicked off of the Illinois basketball team after violating his probation. Eamonn reported Smith’s off-court woes with proper due diligence, but we’ll chime in to say that Smith appears to have a problem of some variety - might be booze, might be mental, might just be a case of incredibly immaturity. Whatever it is, we hope he gets help.

Meanwhile, his departure leaves the Illini in rebuilding mode for another year. Somewhere at New York’s offices, a emo-banged gentleman is crying in his drink.

Gin-and-tonic, or pure tears? Also, we actually believe he wears a tux to work now.

Wondering if a zebra is on the take? Our friends at A Sea of Blue point out that, with so many off-court relationships between refs and teams, you might be right - and the NCAA might be a-OK with the relationship. Nico Bellic doesn’t see what the big deal is.

Finally, Matt Smith at Bleacher Report believes he has found the evil among us, and it is a 17-year-old at a prep school in North Carolina. John Wall, previously known to college football fans as Mitch Mustain, is the number 1 point guard in the Class of 2009 - which makes his decision to attend Baylor make oh-so-much sense. Oh, wait, they hired his AAU coach as the “director of player development”? Must have been a coincidence.

Have a great weekend, folks, good to be back.

Working for a Fortune 500 company can be a drag. Sure, once you get to the top level you get money, perks, and fame*. But until that point, work can be a drag. Go to the office, sit down in your cubicle, keep your head down and hope that the paychecks keep coming.

But then comes the day that every corporate worker bee hopes for - the day that the the CEO of the company reaches out to you personally to say that you are doing a great job not just as an employee, but as a parent. So impressed is he, in fact, that he hopes that your child will attend his alma mater - all the way across the country.

Wait, wait - sorry, doesn’t that happen to everyone? You could have fooled Oseye Gaddy, since the customer service rep for FedEx got just such a phone call earlier this week from company CEO David Bronczek.

We share Gaddy’s joy in the well-deserved praise, and we’re certain that Bronczek’s choice to reach out to her personally had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Gaddy’s son, Abdul Gaddy, is a highly sought-after point guard in the recruiting Class of 2009, and that one of his top pursuers is Memphis, which happens to be Bronczek’s favorite local team**.

But just to be sure, those boy scouts in Memphis reported the phone call to the NCAA just the same - seems that boosters calling recruits is kinda-sorta-maybe a NCAA rules violation. Bronczek claims he was unaware of the restriction, which just shows that he didn’t watch very much college football in the early 1980s.

Meanwhile, Oseye will keep living the work-a-day life with her head held high. When you know that if you live right, work hard, and happen to parent an athletically gifted young man who becomes the (only slightly creepy) fancy of older, richer men, everything will work out just fine.

For Bronczek and his Memphis colleagues, though, they might want to figure out other ways to push Gaddy towards the Tigers - seems that a certain contingent on the interwebs already has him headed for Tuscon. Because we know how well young point guards mix with Lute Olsen.

* - By fame, of course, we mean “the ability to walk around with your d*** out in the office and the country club locker room, even if no one on the street knows who you are”.

** - Did we say “favorite local team”? We meant “chosen recipient of over $500,000 in athletic donations from Bronczek, and likely much more”.