THE STORY EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT
Shark Week Continues

Privately, we hoped that in our day off (done with school woot!), the O.J. Mayo mess would calm down, and some other story would take over the headlines. We weren’t alone - in a small act of sanity, Ben Taylor at the Daily Bruin says, “Um, don’t all of you have anything better to cover, like college athletes dying in practice?”

NO! Silly us. Each minute factual revelation merely served to throw more chum in the water, which inevitably leads to nastiness.

On Tuesday, the attacks centered on Mayo and the USC leadership. As the story ages however, like a fine wine, more subtle variables gain strength to create layers of flavor for the well-heeled to snoot about.

Signal to Noise points out that USC may pay a price in recruiting long before sanctions come down. His local paper says Mayo has daddy issues (like any good southern boy). Wilbon says Mayo is a sweet kid caught up in the dirty system of agents. DeCourcy over at the SN goes a step further and says the entire sport of basketball is broken. (Though DeCourcy’s piece is less “subtle flavor brought out by age” and more “what happens when you toss the bottle against the wall in disgust, because the world is death.” Let it all out, Mike. Why, oh why did Celeste leave you and take both le chat and all the zigerettes?)

But at least O.J. and his former compadres won’t lose a high school title over this mess.

We’ve been asked our opinion, but we don’t view this as a forum for our “take” - we offer commentary only to be funny or make a valid point, and we’re so sick of this topic we’re not sure we can do either. We’ll try better tomorrow.

We now move onto to non-O.J. topics - but first, twins.

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Mess with the bull …

We have a certain friend - we’re guessing many of our readers know someone similar - who is just a f***in’ moron with women. He misses signals from interested women. He goes after the wrong type and drowns in flames. When he does land a girl, she is insufferable, and causes friction between him and his friends as he devotes himself to attending vegetarian cookoffs with her. By the time he comes to his senses, his buddies are pissed from five straight missed poker nights and a dozen unreturned phone calls, and he pretty much has to start from scratch in every aspect of his personal life.

We tell the tale of this friend because, after each crash and burn, we tell him, “Dude, maybe you should just be single and NOT looking for a while.” And we feel that someone needs to offer the same advice to Lute Olsen because … well, things aren’t going so hot out in Arizona:

Either way, the byproduct is this: A 73-year-old man (Olson) whose health has been questioned for years is coming off a leave of absence and trying to lead a program that is expected to lose its top two players (Jerryd Bayless and Chase Budinger) from a squad that just finished seventh in the Pac-10.

That’s a tall order, and that Olson will likely do it without a single returning assistant — while going through a publicly nasty divorce — should make it even taller, and if McDonald’s All-American Brandon Jennings doesn’t qualify (he still has some serious work to do, I’m told) then Wildcat basketball could be headed toward its worst season in many decades.

Lute, our advice - stay off the dating scene and spend that time reconnecting with your players and assistants. We’re told the young folk these days like to play video games. Maybe you could try that.

Re-defining “big” in Durham.

THE STORY EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT
Hey, Wojo? Maybe You Should Sit This One Out.

Coach K’s recent recruiting failures with big men - see Patrick Patterson and Greg Monroe - have sparked a chicken-and-egg argument. Are the trees not interested because no Duke big man has succeeded at the next level, from Jay Bilas to Christian Laettner to Sheldon Williams with every Cherokee Parks in between? Or is it because the coaching triumvirate of Dawkins, Collins and Wojociechowski (most recently in charge of post players) had no idea how to coach bigs?

Consider the egg scrambled - in the wake of Dawkins’ departure for Palo Alto, Coach K hired former Blue Devil forward Nate James to fill his spot on the bench. What remains to be seen is if this will have any discernible impact, as James comes in with no coaching experience. In fact, this resume looked better suited for reality television:

After graduating from Duke and playing in the Carolinas Basketball League, James spent parts of five seasons playing in Bosnia, Brazil, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Philippines, Poland and Russia.

While some might consider the career a world history tour, James didn’t exactly praise the vagabond experience. Instead, he talked about eating nothing but rice and noodles — with chopsticks only — in Japan for several months; playing in a freezing gym in Bosnia; and having to eat cow tongue in Russia.

So, future Blue Devil recruits, know what Duke can now offer. Even if your playing experience can’t get you in the NBA and your Duke degree can’t get you a job, Coach James can help you parlay your experiences in Durham into a spot on The Amazing Race.

TWO STORIES THAT INTERESTED US FOR NO GOOD REASON
Something is Afoot in the District

Player movements galore in our nation’s capital yesterday, as Karl Hobbs kicked two players off GW’s team. Role players, true, but two players nonetheless from a team that only managed nine wins last season. Which makes one wonder what “certain expectations” they failed to meet to warrant dismissal, since one could argue that Hobbs and all of his charges failed to meet the basic “certain expectation” of finishing higher than next-to-last in the A-10.

Meanwhile, further into the snooty part of the Northwest Quadrant, a second potential starter transfers away from the Hoyas. With the announced transfer of Doc Rivers’ kid, Georgetown will be down to four returning players with any significant playing time. Greg Monroe better be really, really good, or JTIII will need to bust out celebrity dance moves again.

QEDMF.

Each time you pay a bill, a little part of you dies. We get it. It happens to us too. Every time we pay a bill, we need a half hour of Rock Band and a pound bag of pretzels to get back to a good spiritual place. (And we’re not even married yet. Should we start the Xanax now?)

So we can forgive John Beilein for making a little bit of stink when he sent the first payment of his $1.5 million contract buyout settlement to WfVU last Thursday:

Beilein wrote that he made the first payment under protest, calling the buyout clause “unenforceable” and “grossly disproportional” to actual damages incurred by the university. …

“I urge the University to stop using the liquidated damages provision in its employment contracts because such provisions are illegal, onerous, and violate public policy,” Beilein wrote.

We applaud John Beilein on his legalese* - somebody paid more attention during their legal writing class than we did. (Attention employer: we kid. You know as well as us that no one pays attention in legal writing.)

Without belaboring the point, his argument holds no water. And since he’s already in Michigan, it’s not like he can secure PR points by bad mouthing WfVU now. But for such strong worded advocacy for a lost cause, we tip our cap towards John Beilein, and award him honorary lawya status for the day.

Give WfVU credit though - no strong worded response, no PR games, no silliness. They took the high ground and simply passed every cent of Beilein’s money on to his more successful replacement, as Huggy Bear signed an eleven-year extension that “guarantees” (promise!) that Huggins will remain at the school for the remainder of his coaching career.

Note to Morgantown Police: y’all know no danger like Huggy Bear with job security. Set your stun guns to “weird”.

No one can accuse him of discrimination.

* - Yes, we know his lawyer wrote it. We hope to write such letters some day for our clients. Trust us when we say they will be twice as wrong on the law and five times as snarky.

Smile while you can, Johnny.

THE STORY EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT
If You Love Something, Set It Free

When word first broke that Johnny Dawkins would be the new head coach at Stanford, we wondered when the weather changed in Durham. Dawkins has long been considered Coack K’s consigliare and logical successor when he retires. Had something changed? Had Chris Collins or Steve Wojchichowski passed him in the eyes of their shared mentor? Was Johnny taking a graceful exit while the gettin’ was good? Not according to Stanford’s AD Bob Bowlsby:

Bowlsby said one of the first people he spoke to about the open job at Stanford was Krzyzewski and that he asked Krzyzewski about both Dawkins, who was Krzyzewski’s right-hand man for 11 seasons, and Duke assistant Steve Wojciechowski.

“At that time, Coach Krzyzewski said that Johnny was a likely successor to him [at Duke],” Bowlsby said. (HT: Fanhouse)

That’s right - the Pac-10, where ACC assistants are sent to gain head coaching experience before they take real jobs back home in the Cackolack!

Some people on the Stanford beat don’t think this is such a great match for either party, and we understand and even second their concerns. (Color us nervous about another Duke assistant flopping as a head coach, especially the presumptive heir to the throne.) But Johnny D is a talented Xs and Os guy who is used to working under academic restrictions, so Stanford could have done a lot worse.

SLIPPING OUT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
Screw You Guys, I’m Going Home

Homesickness? Frustration with a coach? Inability to find decent eats or trim in the D.C. Metro Area? Whatever the reason, two perplexing transfers over the last week - Vernon Macklin leaving Georgetown, and Shane Walker leaving Maryland. While neither player put up monster stats this past season, both were poised to become major contributors in their respective front courts in 2008-2009 - if they had the stones to deal with a little competition from incoming freshmen. To be fair, though, Walker is British, so we can forgive him for being frustrated and confused by a meritocracy - or, for that matter, for wanting to get the hell out of College Park.

TWIDDLING THUMBS
Because It’s a Long Offseason

Even though the national championship game was only three weeks ago, we already feel the cold, dead hand of summer touching us in all the wrong places. Midnight Madness won’t start for another five months, and until college football kicks off in August, all we have to keep us warm are the NHL and NBA playoffs and, after June, nothing but baseball. (Unlike Orson, we actually enjoy baseball, but in the same way we enjoy hummus - fine as a small bite before a real meal, annoyingly bland as the only offering on the table. Needless to say, we don’t enjoy the summer months.)

We’ll do our best to keep busy around these parts - humor pieces, draft coverage, maybe a little bit of recruiting news if we are feeling particularly evil, and plenty of hate mongering. Got a tip, question, or snide remark? Email us here. (We’ll add a link to the sidebar soon.) Right now, though, we’re preparing for the last set of final exams we’ll hopefully ever take - which, of course, means we’re trying to figure out what to do with all of our newfound free time. Which leads to debates like this:

Reeeeeemix!

THE STORY EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT

Second Verse, Same as the First

Honestly, we could cut and paste everything we wrote yesterday about Providence hiring Keno Davis, replacing “Providence” with “Oklahoma State”, “Keno Davis” with “Travis Ford”, “Big East” with “Big XII”, and … OK, that’s just a lot of replacements, so we’ll write something new.

Obviously, T. Boone Pickens (who should really go by T-Bone) wanted to land a name, and a name he landed, with the added bonus that Ford turned down two big conference jobs in the past few weeks before accepting this one. T-Bone likes it when you make his dick … erm, his alma mater … look bigger than it actually is. We find ourselves wondering, though - why didn’t the Cowboys go after Davis? Had Ford not already turned down the Providence job, we would suggest that Ford and Davis swap new jobs to stay within their recruiting territories. In fact, we’ll suggest that anyway.

No doubt that UMass to Okie State is a step up, but Ford will need to win and win fast. Pickens barely let Sean Sutton last two years, and Sutton had the advantages of a) being an alum and b) being the son of a school legend. Past service as Rick Pitino’s bucket boy won’t help Ford here.

NEXT YEAR’S ONE YEAR WONDERS

Who said anything about academics?

Just as another freshman announces his intent to head to the pros after one year in college, news came out of Philadelphia yesterday that Tyreke Evans, one of the top recruits available this year (#6 Rivals, #4 Scouts), would sign with Memphis. Except he didn’t. Evans announced his decision to “attend” Memphis, but put off signing a LOI for a little while - presumably to ensure that John Calipari doesn’t bolt for the NBA.

Over at The Dagger, MJD ponders why Evans chose Memphis over hometown Villanova, showing that Evans was interested in getting out of Chester after witnessing a gang-related murder. On the list of good non-academic/athletic reasons to attend one school over another, “not wanting to get shot” ranks high. Good luck to Evans with the Tigers.

And Because I Know You Are Wondering, Too …

While we are admittedly afraid to dip our toe into the murky water that is recruiting, we always say “in for a penny, in for a pound”. With that - Scouts’ and Rivals’ Top Classes of 2008 as of the end of the early signing period back in November. Both sites say that the rankings wouldn’t shift much in the spring due to so many top players signing early, so these are good to go for now.

We give these rankings with no commentary or insight at this time. Well, except for … Florida State? Really? And we thought the Harvard kerfluffle was just Brian Cook making shit up. Scouts actually ranked them #25? What’s next, Duke signing a big man? (We kid, we kid - that will never happen.)

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

Having been all business and no play up to this point, we feel an obligation to bring you awkward Japanese reality show dancing. That’s just how we do.

The theme song for today’s coaching moves - only the finest slice of awful ’70s rock, reintroduced to us through the beauty that is Rock Band.

The big coaching story, of course, is where there was no change at all: Bill Self rebuffed his alma mater to stay at Kansas. We stated our policy on this earlier this week, so we say to Self that he had no wrong choices, and that if his heart told him to stay in Lawrence … well, then he must know something about Lawrence that we don’t. But, you know, championships are the best love like hunger is the best sauce. Rating: Chalky.

The biggest change, however, saw Trent Johnson leave a pretty damn good gig at Stanford to take over at LSU. We assume that Trent saw the Lopez twins head for the NBA, remembered he was at a school famous for its chemists and not its ballers, and took the all-expense paid trip to “Recruit Whomever the Hell You Want”-town. (We also don’t know what this says about the relative strengths of the conferences involved - is he leaving the ultra-competitive Pac-10 for calmer hoops waters, or does he view the SEC as a greater challenge?) Regardless of the reasoning, a strong move by an LSU program that has looked rudderless since making the Final Four in 2006 - kind of like it did for the fifteen years before that, too. Rating: ESS-EEE-SEE! ESS-EEE-SEE! WOOOOO BAYOU BENGALS WOOOOOO!

Because nothing says “opportunity” like “dump your new girlfriend for your ex-wife”, Mike Montgomery denied any interest in the new Stanford opening. Probably not a tough decision, given that Cal had literally just backed the Brinks truck up to his doorstep to sign him as the new coach of the Bears. While we understand angst over Cal’s decision to fire longtime coach Ben Braun, we can’t say we disagree with it. Home of hippies that it may be, Berkeley is the state flagship, and hates to lose ground to its little brother in Los Angeles in any category. You want to win big time ball? You hire big time coach. And Ben Braun seems like a nice guy, but not a big time coach. Rating: Golden.

Apparently learning a lesson from his own playing career, UMass coach Travis Ford turned down the opportunity to become a small fish in the Big East Pond at Providence to stay in Amherst. We know that the Friars were a founding member of the Big East, but the times seem to have passed them by, and we can’t help thinking time has come for relegation. That said … it was a Big East coaching opportunity. Ford reportedly passed up an interview with LSU as well, for a team that made the NIT finals. We’re going to work on the assumption that he knows something that we do not - either that his job is oddly secure at UMass, or he has a better grasp on his own Peter Principle than anyone we’ve studied. Rating: Feisty like an undersized point guard.

Recognizing that our Hoyas are the exception that proves the rule, it is never a good thing when you are having to poach from the Ivy League for your new head coach. It is worse when you are hiring an Ivy League assistant. But when you are the New Jersey Institute of Technology, oh ye of your 0-29 record - well, you take what you can get, even if that means hiring an assistant from Columbia as your new coach. So welcome, John Engles! And, for once we mean this with no risk of jinx - you can’t POSSIBLY have a worse year than the last guy. Rating: There can be only one - and the Highlanders would take even that.

0-29 is the new pink.

We hope to not take too many controversial positions on this here blog … doesn’t sit well with management when you piss off the readers … but we couldn’t help saying something about the angst-ridden pieces about Bill Self post-championship. It was like a couple of these guys got together at a bong bar to smoke unfiltered and bitch about reality:

Wojciechowski: It’s like - why do you have to be a slave to the corporate master? Huh? All they want to talk about granfalloons, like “alma mater” and “money”. Those things are false groups, man. They are false. They aren’t real.

Shanoff: Yeah, man. I mean, who the fuck tries to turn SUCCESS into MONEY? That’s just the corporations talking, trying to keep the little man down.

Whitlock: Who the fuck let you in here?

[adjusts tie] Are these guys fucking serious? Really? We know that a couple of them have axes to grind (Whitlock works for a KC paper; Gene W. grew up in central Kansas), and we hate to be found agreeing with Simmons (a capital crime in the blogosphere to be sure), but what a bunch of hypocritical crap. More bitching after the jump.

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On the heels of our scathing review of the quality of the Indiana program this morning, breaking news this evening out of Bloomington - Indiana has reached an agreement with Marquette’s Tom Crean to become the next head coach of the Hoosiers. (Link goes to Yahoo! Sports, if only because tWWL pulled the same “Well, we actually had it first, but we embargoed it - promise!” crap as always.)

Instant analysis - this is a tremendous hire by Indiana. Crean has earned (and we choose our word carefully there) a rock solid reputation in his nine years in Milwaukee. Reinvigorating a long-dormant basketball school and fan base? Check. Recruiting above his weight class? Check. Nine winning records in nine seasons and a Final Four appearance? Check and check. Survived (and thrived) with a move to a much tougher conference? Check. Perhaps most important of all - a squeaky clean record? Major, major, absolutely necessary check.

Crean brings this reputation to a hurting Bloomington, and the announcement today helps clean up the mess left by both Sampson and his fill-in Dakich. IU now stands a chance of retaining their recruits, and avoiding basketball purgatory for the next two years.

As for Marquette - gentlemen, welcome to the cellar of the Big East. We have a tough time believing that MU will find a coach as good as Crean within their budget - but we suppose they struck gold with a young assistant before, and we have to imagine that will happen again.

Carousel - a term tossed around to describe movement in the coaching labor market, but why? Upon further review, it’s oddly accurate - constantly in motion until some pimpled, power hungry AD teenager throws off the gears, needlessly detailed, exciting to kids and their parents while alternatively boring and creepy to everyone else. Properly cited, we’ll pick up the nomme d’art and talk about the school’s who lack the courtesy to save their coaching news for next week when we have nothing else to write about.

After bolting Iowa for the calmer … plateaus? … of New Mexico, Steve Alford was rewarded Monday with a three-year extension with the Lobos, putting him under contract through 2016. All of this for one season of work that got the Lobos to 24-9 and a first round loss in the NIT. When notified of the extension, Charlie Weis nodded his head with approval. Combined with Herb Sendek’s desert revival at Arizona State after leaving the boobirds in Raleigh, one has to think there is something to the whole “life is easier in the Southwest” theory, even amongst the coaching ranks. Outlook: Sunny, even with those killer cacti.

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