Somewhere in California, and also kind of in a fever dream I had the other night.

GHOST OF GEORGE MARSHALL: Ashley Juuuuuudd!  I have a spoooky message to deliver from beyond the graaaaave!

ASHLEY JUDD: I don’t usually take messages from ghosts, but I’ll make an exception for a Nobel Prize winner!

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Not dead yet!

With only two weeks to go until the bar exam, it doesn’t take much to provide a ray of light into our lives. (“Leftovers of a bad meal for dinner??!! Hooray!! At least I don’t need to determine if the rubber chicken is a holder in due course of a negotiable instrument!!!”)

That said, we feel fairly certain that the news that maybe, just maybe, Rick Pitino will let Derrick Caracter come back to the Louisville team would have made us WOOT out loud on the brightest of days:

“He came to me one more time and asked for any option available to get back on the team. I have given him the same option I gave Scott Padgett when he played for me at Kentucky. [...] If Derrick is willing to grow up in the game of life and we can help him realize his potential, then we are there to help him. But that’s a big if.”

A big if indeed. Caracter will need to sit out next season to show he can grow “as a student, as a person, and as a basketball player”, and (notably) will NOT be on scholarship, so he’ll have to pay his own way to school. And get a job. And not get Fulmer-like fat again. So his odds of success are, shall we say, less than great.

In other words, a win-win-win for humble bloggers – either he succeeds and he gets a chance to fulfill his unrealized potential as a hoopster (and no one has ever questioned he has the talent to be great), or he fails epically and we can ridicule him on his way down the chute. Like we’ve been doing for the last few months.

Either way, we gleefully add “caracter issues” as a new category to the blog. Because if you think we’re not going to do a few more chapters of this now that there is an actual chance that Caracter will stay … well, you don’t know us very well.

In the meantime – we return to our office cave to execute some wills and devise some property. Word.

(HT: Eamonn, doing fine fine work as always.)

Rebecca Lobo addresses the graduating class at her alma mater.

Graduating seniors, esteemed faculty, family and friends of the UConn community – I’m so happy to be back with you all here in Storrs today. Even though I last played for Coach Auriemma thirteen years ago, my experiences here at the University of Connecticut continue to be the best of my life. I’ll always be proud of how much I accomplished here, and will be eternally grateful for everything it learned during my college career.

Which is why I’m truly honored to address the graduating class this year. I hope that all of you graduating seniors have made memories here in that you hold just as dear, and that you have dreams just as big for what you will do when you leave here today. But I also hope and pray that someone in this audience will save me from the hell I’ve been living since I left.

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Theme music for this morning’s quick post, as we prepare for another ill-advised road trip:

THE STORY EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT
More Schools That Couldn’t Fake Academic Achievement
Buzz around the interwebs continues to center on the APR ratings released yesterday. Rush the Court broke down the numbers in much greater detail than us, with some interesting findings:

1) Davidson had the best overall APR (a perfect 1000) amongst hoops programs, while Carolina had the highest amongst BCS programs. There is a safety school joke in here somewhere, but damned if we can find it.

2) The total list of teams suffering scholarship losses: Kansas State, Purdue, Seton Hall, South Carolina, Tennessee, and New Mexico State take a hit of one scholly apiece, while Southern Cal and UAB will lose two apiece for their historic incompetence.

3) The ACC and the Big East had the highest conference APR averages. If that isn’t evidence of the worthiness of the APR as a measure of academic success, we’re not sure what is. (That, or Big Ten programs are even worse at finding decent educations for their players than we already suspect.)

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