ESPN reporting that Creighton got a verbal from Class of 2017 shooting guard Ty-Shon Alexander over the weekend. Good for the league. First 2017 Big East commit that I am aware of.
on the Penn State board started by Eagleye5 and comments from our very own JHoops. The interesting part was where is Nova on the all-time college basketball list. Top 10, 11-20 or lower. I would put them in the 11-20 range all-time. Obviously you have Kentucky, UCLA, UNC, Duke, Kansas top 5. Then it starts to get a little harder. I would go with Louisville, Indiana, Syracuse, Michigan State and Ohio State. You could make a case for Nova in the top 10.
Villanova basketball is truly blessed to have a great coaching staff. Two of those guys, Baker Dunleavy and Ashley Howard, who are not just well respected assistant coaches but also great guys who can really relate to their players, stopped by last night at the semi-annual, "Recruiting Junkies Dinner".
I go to this event twice a year to keep in touch with many of the best recruiting gurus in the biz and many Philadelphia basketball "power brokers" who attend the event to talk about Philly HS basketball, college hoops, and mostly recruiting.
At the Fall dinner we always collect donations for the Coaches vs. Cancer and a City Six coach comes by to collect the donations, say a few words about the importance of the fight against cancer, and then talk about the upcoming college basketball season.
I just about broke my hand taking copious notes while Bake and Ash did a great job with their remarks and a Q&A ... here are the highlights:
Opening Remarks:
Baker Dunleavy: For all of you who have seen our teams over the years, we are going to be pretty similar. We are going to have a lot of guards running around chucking up a lot of threes and trying to create some turnovers, playing hard. This is probably our team, since our '06 team, that might shoot the ball from the perimeter the best that we have - but we will be challenged in terms of height. We are going to start probably three guards, including Josh Hart who is about 6-4 and then Kris Jenkins, 6-5 but thicker, and then Daniel Ochefu who is about 6-11. So we will be a team that is going to have to develop toughness, a kind of grittiness throughout the year and we are already working on that. Coach Wright is grinding these guys every day in practice. That will be our challenge. We are looking forward to a great year.
What we have had the benefit of over the last couple years is great leadership from upperclassmen and I think this year will be no different. We will have Daniel Ochefu and Ryan Arcidiacono back as Seniors. That has been what has been really able to set us apart from other teams in our league. We have had some normally powerful teams in our league be young the last two seasons and that experience has kind of differentiated ourselves from schools that have one-and-dones and guys that are kind of in-and-out - super talented but not as experienced. It is something we are looking to take advantage of again this year. We are excited about our guys.
Ashley Howard: We are going to be similar to what we have been in the past. We have great leadership from Ryan Arcidiacono and Daniel Ochefu. Those guys have been really setting the tone in practice every day and Coach has been really challenging our younger guys because the one thing that I think will be the difference early on is that the last couple years we have had older guys - Dylan Ennis who was a third year college guy, Tony Chennault, who was a reserve for us but had been a starter in the ACC … but now we have younger guys that will be coming off the bench for us. We will be really counting on those guys and they have responded so far in the preseason. We are looking forward to seeing how those guys develop. They will be a huge part of our success this season. They are not shorting us with effort every day so I am confident that those guys will get to the point where we will be able to depend on them the same way we have been able to depend on those guys who have come off the bench for us in the past.
Note: Coach Dunleavy then went on to describe the Cats Schedule - the highlight quote was "The Big Five always provides tournament-like intensity in terms of the environment in which you play." He also talked about a conscience effort by Villanova to front-load the OOC schedule more given the realignment of the Big East.
Is this the same Towson D that allowed our Cats 23 first downs, 421 total yds, 36 minutes possession, and 21 pts? Throwing a shut-out on UD down in Towson.
It is the college basketball season preview issue.
Dick Vitale has about a none paragraph write-up on the Cats. Doesn't say anything that we don't already know here but he says a lot of good stuff about Jay, the perimeter oriented nature of the team and harps on this likely being the 11 NCAA Tournament appearance in 12 years. Mentions the 62-8 record over the past two seasons.
Kevin McNamara failed to do his homework so I will stop reading at paragraph 5 of his article about the Big East and what he needs to accomplish this year where he states "the Big East has failed to advance a single team to the Sweet 16" ... what the hell, dude - ever heard of Xavier?
Cats are ranked 11th in the BB Times Pre-Season poll.
A-10 - Davidson picked to win. SJU(PA) picked 8 and LaSalle picked 12.
Ivy - Penn picked 4th
American - UConn to win it - Temple picked 6th.
Big East - 'Nova, Butler, GTown, X, Creighton, Hall, DePaul, Providence, Marquette and St. John's ... I would be surprised to see Marquette finish at 9.
Clark Francis: Top Recruiting Classes (To date) for the Class of 2016:
1. Michigan State
2. Duke
3. UVA and UNLV
11. UConn
12. Penn State (Joe Hampton and the 3 kids from Roman Catholic)
13. Harvard
22. Xavier
23. Villanova & Texas A&M
30. St. John's
35. Butler
Did you guys partake in this as youngsters? I know it's mostly limited to PA, Nj, parts of NY (and I think Michigan for some reason?) in terms of being a recognized term/night
We would go around breaking pumpkins and egging/toilet papering when I was between ages 12-15. It was always a tense time in school the next day as kids would get called into the principal's office to stand up for their crimes. I'm home for the weekend for a wedding and was almost hoping some kids would egg my parents' house so I could chase them. The spirit of halloween is dying i guess
ESPN got five former players and recruits to give color on the scandal. This article indicates that the assistant Andre McGee was also paying for former players, such as stars Russ Smith, Peyton Siva, and Montrez Harrell to get action, in addition to the recruits. Will the NCAA be going after Louisville for this, or will they give a pass to Pitino?
Surprising that the former players chose to speak to ESPN...gotta think their names will quickly get out amongst the UL faithful.
National TV - NBC Sports Network 7:30 PM. CAA Football has a partnership with Be The Match, which manages the largest and most diverse bone marrow donor registry in the world. Thus tomorrow is Be The Match Saturday with three conference games on national TV. W&M v JMU at 4PM and Stony-Brook v Elon at noon. Topped off with Nova v Maine at 7:30.
GO CATS BEAT MAINE
Any idiots on here do this grow a mustache crap for the month to raise awareness for something or other. Not sure what because I don't pay attention. I'm going to say cancer (real kind) or some pseudo trendy cause these millenials think they're afflicted with like Assburgers.
