Every week, your humble college basketball hoops blogger (er, me) will respond to your questions, comments and nonsensical rants in this here Hoopsbag. To submit a query, visit this page by clicking the link under my name in the upper right-hand corner of the blog. You can also email me or send me your entries via Twitter . (Honestly, the best way to get me is Twitter.) Per the usual, we begin with video. @ Purdidit writes : Each year has one or two: Which preseason top 10 team is most likely to fail to live up to expectations? Eamonn Brennan : This one’s actually pretty easy. It’s Memphis. For much of the summer, I thought the Tigers’ preseason ranking was going to be too high; with all this young talent, it’s easy to forget that Memphis was basically a so-so C-USA team for much of the 2010-11 season. Sure, the Tigers finished strong, and there’s reason to expect scaled improvements from a team that features so many sophomores that played big minutes as freshmen. The addition of highly-touted recruit Adonis Thomas helps, too. But top 10? Didn’t that seem just a little optimistic? What was I missing? I put Memphis at No. 17 in my preseason top-25 ballot . I thought that seemed fair. Then Ken Pomeroy released his preseason rankings (Memphis is ranked No. 20) and ESPN Insider and Basketball Prospectus maven John Gasaway broke things down in this Monday piece for Insider , and I’m more convinced than ever that Memphis isn’t a top-10 team. As John wrote, that doesn’t mean they won’t be a top-10 team by the end of the season. It may even be earlier than that. But the team with the worst offense in Conference USA — the only team to score less than a point per possession in C-USA last season — can’t possibly be the ninth-best team in the country. It may happen at some point, but I’d be shocked if the Tigers didn’t struggle at times, especially early in the season. People will say they were overrated. But whose fault is that? (Speaking of Memphis, by the way: Josh Pastner just keeps snatching up elite recruits . The present was already bright, but jeez, that future! Look out.) @ LakeRosenberg writes : In honor of The Mid-Majority , what team from below The Red Line can go the furthest in the NCAA Tournament? Brennan : It’s a new season with (hopefully) new readers, so I won’t assume everyone knows what The Red Line is. You can get up to speed right here . The short version: The Mid-Majority’s Kyle Whelliston wanted to define what, exactly, a mid-major is. He cut through the usual nonsense about tournament bids and school enrollments (people used to come up with some really wacky mid-major arguments) and instead created an intuitive, simple mechanism: The Red Line. If your conference’s average athletics department spends more than X number of dollars, you’re a high-major league.
Filed under Basketball, Football, News by on Nov 9th, 2011. Comment. 
OK, most of the time. Nobody knows better than us Oklahomans how insufferable Texas can be. But the way you deal with the Longhorns is to beat them on the football field and stand up to them in the boardroom, if you’re in the right.” Source: San Antonio Express
Filed under Football, News by on Sep 23rd, 2011. Comment.
Yesterday, Diamond, Dana, Andy and I went into roundtable mode on Texas A&M’s move , conference realignment and what the formation of four 16-team high-major super conferences would mean for college basketball. We all essentially agreed on a few things: 1. The idea of super conferences was still a long ways off, so let’s not freak out just yet. 2. If super conferences do eventually form, it would almost certainly be bad for college basketball. This is not hard to understand. Super conferences will be powerful
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I’ll admit it: Super conferences scare me
Filed under Basketball, Football by on Sep 13th, 2011. Comment.
Brown texted him back and told him the Longhorns missed him and needed him. And by the time his old teammates suited up for practice Tuesday afternoon, Goodwin was right beside… Source: San Antonio Express
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Longhorns Insider: Goodwin’s leaps back into a football
Filed under Football, News by on Sep 9th, 2011. Comment.
Do you agree with the decision to name Garrett Gilbert the starting quarterback for the Texas Longhorns ? Join the conversation on Facebook on The KVUE Insider or text/call our soundoff hotline at 512-522-8025. We welcome… Source: Kens5.com San Antonio
Filed under Basketball, News by on Aug 30th, 2011. Comment.
Back when Josh Selby announced his decision to enter the NBA draft after a disappointing freshman season at Kansas — Selby’s NBA leap was motivated more by his ability to create a better life for his mother, so it’s tough to criticize — I, strangely enough, got a little bit excited. For some reason, I felt like I had a slightly sneaky piece of information. Selby was bad as a freshman, yes, but he was ineligible, then injured, then spent most of his time trying to crack a cohesive group of senior guards that were clearly more comfortable running Kansas’s high-low motion offense with each other. But Selby was still hyper-athletic. He still had the size, speed, and strength that caused some recruiting services to call him the best player in the class of 2011. Had his season panned out, he might have been a lottery pick. Now, he was a possible steal in the mid-to-late first round, and I was interested to see which intelligent NBA front office would make a play. Apparently, the answer is … none of them. ESPN Insider Chad Ford released his Mock Draft 6.0 Tuesday , and Selby is nowhere to be found in the first round. In fact, in Ford’s projection, Selby has dropped all the way to No. 37 , several picks into the second round (which, in Ford’s mock, means a trip to L.A. to play for the Clippers). By my count, there are currently 12 guards ranked higher than him in the draft, including players like Iman Shumpert and Travis Leslie, guys whose upsides seem vastly lower than Selby’s. Just a few weeks ago, scouts raved about Selby’s individual workouts. Now, nothing. It begs the question: What happened? These answers are always hard to decode, and we’re still 36 hours from the draft, so anything can still happen. But it appears Selby’s individual workouts haven’t done enough to convince scouts he’s worth the risk of a first-round pick. Or, as the Lawrence Journal-World’s Tom Keegan writes , some NBA team may be intentionally deflating Selby’s stock in the hopes of snatching him risk-free in the second round: What’s up? Maybe scouts are a lot like Kansas fans. The more they saw of Selby, the less they liked him. Or could it be, as one NBA insider wonders, that one team desperately wants Selby to drop to them and has spread rumors that they think he’s a bust waiting to happen? If one NBA team is able to torpedo a player’s stock among the rest of the league, well, you have to hand it to them. That is one effective front office. Another possible problem is the Avery Bradley factor. In 2009, Bradley was the No. 1 player in the ESPNU 100 rankings , arriving at Texas with fanfare matched only by Kentucky guard John Wall. Wall, of course, was a national player of the year candidate and went on to be the No. 1 pick in the 2010 draft. Bradley had a so-so freshman season, jumped to the NBA early anyway, was drafted No. 19 overall by the Boston Celtics, and eventually found himself playing as many minutes in the NBA Developmental League as the NBA itself. Does that mean Bradley won’t turn into a solid pro? Of course not. But if I’m an NBA team, and I want to make the most of my first-round pick, maybe I look at Bradley and Selby as similar entities. Maybe I’m hesitant to take the high-risk, huge-upside one-and-done player who failed to make an impact in his eight months on a college campus. Maybe I’m worried Selby is just in the draft for the money. Maybe I’m fretting about his injury history. Maybe he didn’t interview well. Maybe NBA scouts saw Selby’s absence in yesterday’s Seebpomd as a prohibitive sign. (OK, OK, not so much.) It’s hard to divine these sorts of things in the run up to the draft, because you really never know what’s going to happen when David Stern takes the podium. Still, it’s hard to believe that in this draft — a weak one by all accounts, and one that features more undersized, risky combo guards with their varied share of negatives — that Selby isn’t at least worth a late-first round flier. As I wrote back in April, one man’s one-and-done bust is another man’s sleeper. Apparently, as of today, the NBA doesn’t seem to agree. Now watch the Spurs get Selby in the second round, and watch Selby turn in a DeJuan Blair-esque rookie season. The NBA is so weird.
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What happened to Josh Selby’s stock?
Filed under Basketball, News by on Jun 22nd, 2011. Comment.
Oklahoma State won a school-record 11 games last season, which only fuels fan desires for even more victories. They’ve tasted it, you might say, and were a few bounces away from the program’s first Big 12 Championship appearance. So what’s in store for the encore? KC Joyner says the Cowboys are one of his five teams that may be headed for a significant drop-off next season. You’ll need ESPN Insider access to read the whole thing, but here’s what Joyner has to say about Boone’s Boys. Offensive hurdle: The Cowboys’ offense will be going through more adjustments than a team that is replacing two starters normally would. Oklahoma State lost its offensive coordinator (Dana Holgorsen, now the head coach at West Virginia), an All-American running back (Kendall Hunter) and its No. 3 wideout ( Bo Bowling ). Defensive hurdle: Oklahoma State’s defense faced more plays from scrimmage than any other team in the Big 12 last year (1,069). Because the Cowboys’ offensive game plan this season figures to be as fast-paced as the one Holgorsen called in 2010, it means that the six new starters on this side of the ball will have their endurance tested quite often. X factor: Oklahoma State was the only Big 12 team to finish the 2010 season with a turnover margin of even or better in every conference contest. That feat will be hard to replicate. Joyner makes plenty of interesting points that aren’t quite so obvious, namely the increased impact of turnover on the defensive side of the ball for teams with high-paced offenses. I don’t see the Bowling loss as a big one; Josh Cooper can fill his role as long as he stays healthy, and I see Hubert Anyiam stepping in for a big season opposite Justin Blackmon . The turnover advantages may make last season’s accomplishments seem suspect, but Oklahoma State didn’t play many close games where turnovers might have shifted the entire game, similar to what Texas experienced in 2010. The season-defining Thursday night win over Texas A&M was the most obvious example (OSU won the turnover battle 5-3, and the game on a last-second field goal set up by, yes, a turnover), but the rest of the wins? Oklahoma State won just one other game by single digits, an early season near disaster against Troy. The only other remotely close game was a 24-14 road win over Kansas State, but the Cowboys were forced to play without the Big 12’s best player in 2010: Blackmon. So, this isn’t Michigan State in 2010 or Iowa in 2009 we’re talking about, i.e. teams hanging on with late heroics to win tight games. But what do you think? Is Oklahoma State headed for a drop-off? Vote in our poll.
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Is Oklahoma State headed for a drop-off?
Filed under Football, News by on Jun 22nd, 2011. Comment.
We’ll have plenty of Heisman coverage as the season nears (and happens, eventually), but ESPN Stats & Info got the party started with a look at all the contenders, broken up by their classification. The stats folk took a look at the system quarterbacks, the pro-style quarterbacks, and finally, the spread quarterbacks. The top two contenders? Both from the Big 12 and both from Oklahoma schools. Landry Jones , Oklahoma The blueprint for a pocket passer to win the Heisman is simple: put up big numbers and win games.
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Sizing up the Big 12 Heisman contenders
Filed under Football, News by on Jun 10th, 2011. Comment.
This summer, Freeman, Kris Clack, Chico Vazquez and Maurice Evans — four men in or approaching their mid-thirties — all are finally graduating more than 10 years after their hoops days with the Longhorns ended. Vazquez, who’s held down jobs in… Source: San Antonio Express
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Longhorns Insider: Former Horns get first degrees
Filed under News by on May 27th, 2011. Comment.
It’s strange, the kinds of questions that pop up most frequently in the mail inbox and the SportsNation chats. This offseason, one such question has been a surprising constant for the past month or so: “Do you know where DeAndre Daniels is going to sign?” No, friend, I do not. Apparently, neither does DeAndre Daniels. Daniels, a native of Woodland Hills, Calif., is the top unsigned player in the class of 2011. According to our own recruiting analysts, he’s a four-star talent with great length and shooting ability, solid rebounding skills, and loads of promise as a wing player (or a stretch power forward) who should only improve with college-level weight training and instruction. He is also a somewhat indecisive lad. Daniels reportedly narrowed his college choices to Duke, Texas and Kansas months ago, but he hasn’t come any closer to signing with any of the three. On May 12, our own Dave Telep wrote on his Insider blog that unlike most players, Telep couldn’t get any feel for where Daniels was in his decision process. After speaking with a few people, I’ve settled on the phrase “paralysis by analysis.” To be clear, I have no hard hitting inside knowledge. Frankly, I can’t even tell who is really in the mix. Could it be Texas? Duke? Kansas? Someone we’ve never heard of? All of the above are possibilities. Since no one knows where he’s going to go, I asked a simpler question: will he sign? An assistant coach recruiting Daniels told Telep the answer to that question was probably “no.” That was perceptive: On May 18 — two days ago — Daniels was supposed to announce his decision, but decided to put it off a day. Then, on Thursday, he decided to put it off again. That put him past the spring signing deadline. It won’t affect his college eligibility, but it does mean that he’s formally unable to lock himself into a scholarship agreement before he arrives on campus this fall. The schools interested are likely, as Telep wrote, to “wait him out.” Duke fans have been hoping Daniels would agree to come to Duke despite the commitment of small forward Alex Murphy. Kansas fans are hoping Daniels will want to team with two high school teammates who are already Jayhawks . Texas fans are just hoping the loss of forwards Tristan Thompson and Jordan Hamilton sway him toward Austin, Texas. But no one, not even the schools involved, seem to have a ready on where he’ll end up. Meanwhile, Daniels’ post-deadline indecision creeps along for yet another day. Will we find out today? Then again, when you’ve waited this long, why rush the choice now?
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Top unsigned recruit still waiting it out
Filed under Basketball, News by on May 20th, 2011. Comment.
