News Around the Valley

Here's a little followup on a few players who were or are being recruited by Bradley and other Valley schools:

-John Wilkins' case is still waiting to be heard by the backlogged Iowa court system, with civil cases taking a beating in getting on the dockets. Hopefully it'll get heard this week, with a ruling to follow shortly after.

--Robert Covington was being looked at by BU, but ended up at Tennessee State. He is doing very well. He's a 6-7 wing player along the lines of Taylor Brown, but at Tennessee State he's only a freshman but putting up 10.5 ppg (2nd leading scorer) and 4.5 rpg (2nd leading rebounder) while shooting 14-38 (37%) from 3-pt.
http://www.tsutigers.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=19600&ATCLID=204816656

--one recruiting site says Lake Land junior college's Paris Carter has offers from both ISU and SIU. He is averaging 12 pts, 8 rebs in his sophomore year there.
He is 6-7 and similar to Jeremy Robinson.

--Ehimen Orupke at Three Rivers CC is signed to go to Wichita State next fall. He is a powerful 7-0 center, and he's a late bloomer and has sat out a couple years so he's at least 3-4 years older than many of the players he's facing, but his averages are not so powerful.
He is only averaging 5 ppg, 6 rpg, but also hits on only 45% of his attempts from the floor and only 50% from the FT line. He also leads his team by far in fouls per game, while his A/T ratio is 9/19. He was supposedly a shot blocking specialist and early on was blocking quite a few..but his numbers there have fallen off the chart, and now he's down to 2 bpg...not all that surprising for a 7-footer.
Even BU's David Collins put up much more impressive numbers, pretty much double the scoring and better rebounding, while hitting 60% on FG's and even better on FT's.

--John A. Logan's Lazeric Jones was getting some attention from Valley teams, but now several big programs are hot onto him. UCLA has reportedly offered, as has Wisconsin. He's averaging 10.7 ppg, 5.8 apg. In high school at Simeon, Jones was a PG, and Derrick Rose's backup.
http://wisconsin.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=1028319

--Speaking of Derrick Rose's backup, Kenyon Smith has signed a LOI to ISU and is at Lincoln College. 14 ppg, 6.7 rpg, 3 apg. But he takes a lot of shots and hits only 38% from the floor overall and just 26% from 3-pt.
He has taken 139 shots already on the season to accumulate his 147 points.
Right now, ISU is the worst 3-pt shooting team in the Valley, so they don't need more of this.

--a couple blurbs on Osiris Eldridge's personal and social web sites tell of him shearing off all his hair...
NO MORE O-Hawk....time to make a change...maybe this'll have the reverse Sampson effect and give him a boost of strength!
Also -- oddly, Osiris links to this picture on his friend's web site, from his twitter account...
could this be what he meant by his comment about taking care of his family?
Do you think this is prudent for a college kid to be flouting this much cash in $100 bills??
And check out what's meant by "rack attack" in the urban Dictionary! (urbandictionary.com)
http://twitpic.com/sotgx

--a few BU recruiting targets are mentioned here-
http://blogs.suntimes.com/hoopsreport/
but I am intrigued by the comments in the press by Manual's Andrew Jordan...who says quite plainly in many quotes that he transferred from Woodruff to Manual just to get onto a better team...
So can someone tell me again how it's the private schools who recruit??

--a couple ex-BU targets are floundering...
When Iowa played Iowa State a couple nites ago...LA Pomlee played only 1 minute...he needs to get out of there...he never plays!
And Devan Bawinkel went scoreless...the FIFTH time already this season he has been scoreless! He's averaging only 3.5 ppg, but virtually nothing else! Only 0.9 rpg and 0.5 apg.

--Nice to see that BU assistant Alvin Brooks is linking to the BradleyFans message board on his twitter!
http://twitter.com/AlvinBrooks3/status/6578883819

--details emerging suggest that Donivine Stewart was offered a scholarship by Bradley the week before the WCU game....Donivine is having a fine year at Limestone.

--other players somehow connected to BU or Illinois...
-Brian Carlwell (at San Diego State now) has lost his starting job..now averaging only 4.7 ppg, 3 rpg
-Mitchell Anderson Jr (at juco in Georgia)-has been on a comparative tear...his scoring avg up to 3.2 ppg, but his shooting is interesting..
He is only 1-5 from 3-pt and should not be shooting those shots..
he is 14-18 from 2-pt...and averages 4 rebs a game..
-D'Mitri Riggs 13.4 ppg, 5.5 apg
-Manny Cass 13/4
-Darian Norris 1 ppg, 5.5 apg
-Cephas Oglesby 14 ppg, but 33% 3pt shooting
-Antonio Owens (CSI) 13/4
-Chesterton, IN's Mitch McGary - linked to BU at one time, just broke a bone in his right foot and is done for the entire season..
http://www.hoopsindiana.com/

--I saw a long writeup about the head coach of Belmont, Rick Byrd...who some said should have been given consideration when BU hired.
Lots of glowing praise about Belmont's four consecutive seasons of 20 wins or more.
But oddly - the writer never mentioned that Belmont's accomplishment was vs. a schedule that's been consistently among the WORST in D-I...not a single season in there where Belmont's schedule was ranked better than 200+!
This year - their SOS is 281 !!
And what kind of writeup did this same author give to Jim Les - who has 4 consecutive 20+ win seasons against way better opponents?? Do you remember the "renegade" article and the sugestion that Les should be fired... yup....that's the guy...now maybe if Bradley's schedule was ranked 281 then the guy would notice??

--I noted that the Bradley blogger on Examiner, Joe Book has been absent for a while...
hopefully he's just giving that little tike a lot of attention...and I hope he's back soon, as I really enjoy Joe's columns!
http://www.examiner.com/x-7020-Bradley-Braves-Examiner

--not that anyone would notice, but an ISU blog sprung up in response to this very blog, but it has already died a 1000 deaths...not a single entry in more than a month.



This story of a DePaul player getting immediate eligibility is puzzling...
He has never made any claim that he's leaving SEMO to be closer to family or because of family emergency.
In fact, the kid is from Anna, IL, which is way, way at the southern end of the state, and way closer to SEMO than to DePaul! In fact, DePaul is 345 miles from DePaul (per google maps), and is only 25 miles from Cape Girardeau, MO where SEMO is...so by transferring to DePaul he's going to a school more than 13 times as far away as where he was at!
He's only making the claim that SEMO is a bad place to be because they are so lousy and they have a lot of troubles and their coach was canned.
But if that's an allowable reason, then ISU's Trey Blue should be eligibile immediately also as he fled Fordham before their devastation and coach firing.
Oh well...if anyone ever figures out the logic behind the NCAA's decisions, other than constant bias in favor of the BCS schools and the players at BCS schools, then let me know.
http://bradleyfans.com/vb/showthread.php?p=151903#post151903post151903

Another transfer kid, Alex Legion, who wasted his freshman season playing sparsely in a few games at Kentucky, then kinda wasted his sophomore season playing a sub role very ineffectively at Illinois for just the 2nd semester last year...is now looking to waste his 3nd season, playing little and shooting poorly at Illinois, with a bunch of freshmen zooming by him in the playing rotation...and even Bill Cole moving ahead on the depth chart.
So look for Legion to get unhappy at Illinois and move on! He only has one year left, so he'd have to go D-II! This kid was a Top 40 player!!

Here's more on transfers........

Bruce Pearl is really in need of a scoring guard and a PG...he is taking a page from Jank's playbook and frantically going after every transfer thus far!!
No sooner does the release get out of Maymon leaving Marquette, then a report says he's headed to Tennessee...
http://www.620wtmj.com/shows/llama/79277887.html
http://www.volnation.com/forum/tennessee-vols-basketball/89268-2-time-wi-player-year-jeronne.html

and even the kid from Fordham is being hotly pursued by Bruce Pearl...
http://mbd.scout.com/mb.aspx?s=7&f=1398&t=5274056

Pearl is also rumored to be hot after this 8th grader..(no joke!)
http://www.volnation.com/forum/tennessee-vols-basketball/88434-new-video-dakota-stone-pg-10-a.html

also, Ohio State's Walter Offutt is transferring to New Mexico...geez..those guys at New Mexico really love the transfers...remember when Ritchie McKay and Duane Broussard (who is still there) went after Danny Granger, Troy DeVries, JR Giddens, Aaron Johnson, Sean Phaler, Ruben Douglas, Jamaal Williams, and just about every other disgruntled transfer in college basketball?
They had tons of behavior problems with just about all of them, many being arrested, bar fights, etc....or kicked off the team, and they were flat out lucky they didn't have to deal with what Baylor had....as the Baylor issues involved one of the New Mexico transfers who went to play for Dave Bliss.