Kudos to Andrew Warren and the Braves ..and more news...plus more proof of the bias in different team coverage..

Finally some well deserved notice out of Chicago for Bradley and Andrew Warren.
Scott Powers, high school and college basketball expert now writing for ESPN ranks his ....
"Local College Hoop Player Rankings"
http://espn.go.com/blog/chicago/colleges/post/_/id/2087/local-college-hoops-player-rankings

He has Andrew Warren in the Top five!!!
He really lists mostly the big school players like McCamey, Shurna, DJ Richardson, etc...so the inclusion of Andrew ahead of every other Valley player, and ahead even of U of I's Richardson, Mike Tisdale & Mike Davis, and ahead of Northwestern's Drew Crawford & DePaul's Brandon Young!!
Congrats to Andrew!!


BTW -- BU's opponent last night has one 5-STAR player, Ray McCallum -- who was ranked by many inside the Top 20 nationally!!
They also have TWO FOUR-STAR players, Eli Holman and Jason Calliste, plus a State of Michigan HS POY (Bruinsma) and two NJCAA All Americans (Blake, Minnerath)and one other 3-Star kid Chase Simon, who is 1st cousin of ex-Bradley Brave and current Globetrotter Jarmaine Brown!
so...this all must beg the question that if Detroit has talent that is better than most Big Ten schools, they have THREE 4-or-5-Star kids...how come they cannot win?
I really have to question the coaching of the senior McCallum -- and he was on the hot seat until he landed his own 5-Star kid, so now nobody wants to even breathe a word of "hot seat" for fear that McCallum will take his own kid and bolt elsewhere.


Also -- Congrats to BU signee Remy Abell on a very, very fine run in his King of the Bluegrass Tournament...
Remy was All Tourney -- possibly the best player at the event, and in his finale had 21 points and 6 steals!!
Top recruiting analysts remarked about the talent of Abell...
one other report from last night said...
"While big name prospects like Louisville bound Chane Behanan and Alabama signee Levi Randolph had their moments, it was Bradley signee Remy Abell who came up the biggest as he led his Louisville Eastern squad ..."


Yet another great player Bradley has been following is now blowing up and getting major offers...probably sealing it that BU is out of the picture...
Charles McKinney is now getting offers from DePaul, Iowa, Oregon State, and others..
http://depaul.scout.com/2/1033431.html

Last night future Brave Donivine Stewart as well as Coach's son Tyler Les were in attendance.


Last night the Valley went 4-0 and the game that gets the most note is the UNI win over Indiana.
IU is really good only in one way -- their inflated 9-2 record coming into the game reflects nothing but easy wins over horribly soft cupcake home opponents...but still, they're a Big Ten team so it's satisfying for UNI!
UNI led by 9 at half and finished 67-61.
Kwadzo Ahelegbe scored 24 while Watford was the only bright spot for Indiana with 23.
Matt Roth got all of four minutes and was 1-3 scoring 2 pts. this is a foreshadowing of things to come, as Indiana heads into their conference season....and Roth will be relegated to the deep, deep bench and probably get the same kind of playing time, in the 2-4 minute range.
Matt's 0-2 from 3-pt range contributed to an overall 2-13 (.154) night for the Hoosiers.
UNI continues to show their weak bench and this could hurt them in the long, 18-game Valley season.

In SIU's game, the Salukis held the nation's leading scorer, Xavier Silas of NIU to just 11 pts, while yet again, one-time starter Justin Bocot was invisible in his 9 minutes..0-2, scoreless, and only 1 rebound. SIU survived 19 turnovers.

Creighton's Greg Echenique, who has gotten more publicity and press than the next five most written-up Valley players combined scored just 6 pts, 3 rebs in 20 minutes in Creighton's 58-40 win over Samford. Lawson had 7 pts, and Bluejay scoring leader Young had 14 but played 39 minutes and took 16 shots to go with his 1 assist and for some odd reason, considering the game was a 16 point or more blowout over the final 5 minutes, Young played right to the end.
But the game wasn't even close for the final 10 minutes with Samford only scoring TWO points over the final 9 minutes and 42 seconds!!!



Kudos to Coach Les for what he has done in the 11-day layoff!!
The 11 day layoff has helped BU tremendously...they have retooled and moved some players to different spots and worked on a number of different offensive and defensive variations...
Anyone watching the games is seeing players in positions they've rarely played, playing way more minutes than they were expected to play, and doing multiple defenses & zones we rarely employ.

It isn't often and it sure isn't easy to deal with a full summer of working out then a full month of preparation and preseason practices, only to have suddenly 2 or 3 of your starters and key players unexpectedly removed from the equation.

Virtually every time I can ever recall it happening in the Valley where key players went down....it huert severely --
recall Bryan Mullins' injury and the impact it had on SIU, the losses of Luke McDonald for Drake or Josh Dotzler for CU.

When it happened to Royce Waltman a few years back -- the loss of just ONE of his best players (David Moss) turned a #1 RPI team into a horrible last place Valley team.

And when ISU was 21-9 in 2000-2001 and had everyone coming back including 23 ppg scorer Tarise Bryson, ISU was unanimously the team to beat in the Valley in 2001-2002 --
but when just that ONE player went down, ISU's season turned sour, they took 2 months to recover, and finished 17-14 and they went nowhere.

Creighton was 23-11 in 2004-2005 and then when they were picked to win in 2005-2006, Nate Funk went down...only one player on a talented team, but it made a difference!
The Bluejays fought hard and finished with a respectable record, but they lost 4 of their final 6 down the stretch of the Valley season, and it was clear the loss of Funk hurt them.

Of course most people never think of that so there really hasn't been much credit given to Coach Les, but the simple facts are...
he has coached his butt off under tremendously difficult circumstances, and has made many unexpected changes and moves to compensate and has done extremely well.
I don't know about winning the Valley, but if BU even finishes in the upper half, it'll be a fine accomplishment.



Ok, ok I know I am going back to a boring subject that some PJS defenders will start their mantra again that BU gets great coverage and that nothing's unfair...but all I ask is that you contrast the way the PJ Star covered these two games...

-a disappointing loss by Bradley in a game (EIU) they could have and should have won...
-to the way they just covered last night's disappointing loss by Illinois in a game they could have and should have won

Everyone's entitled to their opinion -- but let's call a spade a spade, and their clearly is a bias against Bradley and in favor of Illinois in the coverage.
If you read the coerage of the Illini0-Mizzou game it's as if U of I played tremendous, deserved to win, there was no foul at all, and "we" got ripped by the refs!! One writer in particular shows the bias by claiming Tisdale seemed to never even touch the guy he intentionally fouled and certainly did NOT foul the guy and that the ref was bizarre in going overboard and out of the way to make such an unheard-of call!

In the Bradley loss the blame was laid 100% on the bad play of the team and the poor coaching.
"Nothing good about Bradley's loss"
"If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all."
"Just end the column now and leave the rest of the space blank."
"What we saw Wednesday was how bad these Braves can be.
No spin. No bull. No lipstick on a proverbial pig.
Les also was disgusted. He should be."
"..most embarrassing...
These guys should be ashamed of themselves."

and finally "No excuse for that. None."
..........then predicted Duke should win by 50...

But here's the way last night's bad loss and end-game meltdown by the Illini was described...and there were plenty of excuses made up to make it sound like Illinois was hit unfortunately with a terrible sequence of bad things that they had nothing to do with, blaming John Higgins, revising the facts and denying that Mike Tisdale intentionally fouled the guy and making Bruce Weber and his game policy & technical sound like none of it was anyone's fault...excuses, excuses, excuses.....
"Holiday tweets leave Illini sick to stomach"
"Tisdale was too late by a hair, and he pulled up. But as he did so, his arms were reached out, his palms open toward Bowers’ back. Whether he intentionally pushed Bowers is impossible to say. Sometimes these things are obvious. Other times, they’re not.
All that mattered here, though, was that official Higgins believed Tisdale intentionally fouled Bowers."
"What a shame, that 10 seconds of mayhem grabs the attention from a splendid game. What Weber and his team must do now is find a medicine strong enough to knock the sick feeling a tough call and a heartbreaking loss leaves in their guts"
"Illinois did nearly everything it had to do against Missouri."

Then they fail to note that Weber wasted a time out and that's why he didn't have one, they place all the blame on a terrible call by Higgins - naming him by name as the villain, they misstate Marcus Denmon's name, "Dentmon", and they spend a couple paragraphs lauding the quality of play by Illinois in a game where they only scored only 10 points in the first 8 minutes, and only 25 points in the final 15 minutes with the starters playing virtually all that way.

and if you read that description of the absolutely undeniable, clear cut INTENTIONAL FOUL that Tisdale committed, when he gave a TWO-HAND body-shove to a guy who had already scored and who was in a very vulnerable position of hanging on the rim trying to get his balance while Tisdale is lurching him sideways...
then to describe that moment that everyone on NATIONAL TV saw as..
"..his arms were reached out, his palms open toward Bowers’ back. Whether he intentionally pushed Bowers is impossible to say."

Hmm..this one is definitely not impossible to say -- everyone in the USA saw this one pretty clearly that it was intentional contact after the basket, never going for the ball in the slightest way, going only for the contact with the body on a guy in a very vulnerable injury-prone position -- the ref HAD TO MAKER THAT CALL!!
he had to, and even the other writer, Supinie and Bruce Weber agree...
"Bowers beat the defense to the hoop, and there’s no argument on the foul.
...Weber said .. 'He probably made the right call'..."

I see a clear and undeniable way in which the coverage slants....
The coverage of the Illini looks like it was written by one of the Illini cheerleaders, while the BU coverage sounds like it comes from a hostile prosecuting attorney!