Tigers coach John Calipari says guard Doneal Mack will return to Memphis for the 2008-09 season after all.
In the months leading up to college basketball's first preseason poll, it's nice to have some suspense over No. 1. Last season there was the Memphis camp and the Kansas camp, the UCLA camp and the North Carolina camp, and the voters in each one had reasonable arguments. It made for healthy debate -- the kind of debate that is bound to be entirely absent from this summer and fall, because 2008-09 is shaping up to be the Season of Consensus. There is only one choice for the early throne, and that is the Tar Heels.
NEW YORK -- As the high-school seniors on the Jordan Brand Classic roster filed out of an autograph session at a Foot Locker store in Harlem on Wednesday night, they were joined by a latecomer. He was not wearing the same Jordan-issue red jumpsuit as most of his fellow prep stars, but rather a dark hoodie and a backpack, and looked a bit weary as he strode along 125th Street. Scattered teammates began to take notice of his presence, calling him, affectionately, "'Reke!" and then launching into chatter about the topic du jour in the college basketball world: his commitment to Memphis.
SAN ANTONIO -- It was the summer of 1999 at Detroit's Condon Playground, just a few blocks south of where Edsel Ford Freeway cuts through the inner city, and Frank Lewis, an old high school teammate of Durand "Speedy" Walker's, said he was bringing over "a special one" from his block of 30th Street. Walker, the coach of The Family, a prominent Motor City AAU program, was holding a summer camp at Condon, and the 12-year-old whom Lewis had in tow did not look special. Strange was more like it. "He was this skinny kid who weighed about 60 pounds, wearing red high-top Chuck Taylors when nobody was still wearing those, and had an afro all over the place," Walker said. "He looked like he would fall apart on the court."
The ball floated through the air, its pebbled surface spinning softly, as serene and peaceful as a space capsule in a low-earth orbit. At 10:29 p.m. CDT on Monday at the Alamodome in San Antonio, the fate of a college basketball season rested on Kansas guard Mario Chalmers -- or, to be more precise, on his last-ditch three-pointer, a make-or-break heave with 2.1 seconds left that would either send the NCAA title game into overtime or give Memphis, clinging to a 63-60 lead, its first championship in school history.
SAN ANTONIO -- You do realize what took place here Monday night at the Alamodome?
SAN ANTONIO -- On the Friday night before the Final Four, the Memphis Tigers gathered in a meeting room at the Crowne Plaza in downtown San Antonio, bracing for another one of coach John Calipari's bring-down-the-house pep talks. Given the heightened occasion, they were prepared for all kinds of oratorical fireworks. But Calipari, understanding the effect of a dramatic pause, said nothing at first. He simply handed out photocopies of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, arguably the most powerful pep talk in American history. Then he asked a few of his players to read it aloud.
Kansas (36-3) vs. Memphis (38-1) Monday, 9:21 p.m., CBS Alamodome (44,000)
Read Stewart Mandel's Five Reasons Kansas Will Win here.
SAN ANTONIO -- Rest assured, hoops viewers. You will be entertained come Monday night
Tigers coach John Calipari says guard Doneal Mack will return to Memphis for the 2008-09 season after all.
In the months leading up to college basketball's first preseason poll, it's nice to have some suspense over No. 1. Last season there was the Memphis camp and the Kansas camp, the UCLA camp and the North Carolina camp, and the voters in each one had reasonable arguments. It made for healthy debate -- the kind of debate that is bound to be entirely absent from this summer and fall, because 2008-09 is shaping up to be the Season of Consensus. There is only one choice for the early throne, and that is the Tar Heels.
NEW YORK -- As the high-school seniors on the Jordan Brand Classic roster filed out of an autograph session at a Foot Locker store in Harlem on Wednesday night, they were joined by a latecomer. He was not wearing the same Jordan-issue red jumpsuit as most of his fellow prep stars, but rather a dark hoodie and a backpack, and looked a bit weary as he strode along 125th Street. Scattered teammates began to take notice of his presence, calling him, affectionately, "'Reke!" and then launching into chatter about the topic du jour in the college basketball world: his commitment to Memphis.
SAN ANTONIO -- It was the summer of 1999 at Detroit's Condon Playground, just a few blocks south of where Edsel Ford Freeway cuts through the inner city, and Frank Lewis, an old high school teammate of Durand "Speedy" Walker's, said he was bringing over "a special one" from his block of 30th Street. Walker, the coach of The Family, a prominent Motor City AAU program, was holding a summer camp at Condon, and the 12-year-old whom Lewis had in tow did not look special. Strange was more like it. "He was this skinny kid who weighed about 60 pounds, wearing red high-top Chuck Taylors when nobody was still wearing those, and had an afro all over the place," Walker said. "He looked like he would fall apart on the court."
The ball floated through the air, its pebbled surface spinning softly, as serene and peaceful as a space capsule in a low-earth orbit. At 10:29 p.m. CDT on Monday at the Alamodome in San Antonio, the fate of a college basketball season rested on Kansas guard Mario Chalmers -- or, to be more precise, on his last-ditch three-pointer, a make-or-break heave with 2.1 seconds left that would either send the NCAA title game into overtime or give Memphis, clinging to a 63-60 lead, its first championship in school history.
SAN ANTONIO -- You do realize what took place here Monday night at the Alamodome?
SAN ANTONIO -- On the Friday night before the Final Four, the Memphis Tigers gathered in a meeting room at the Crowne Plaza in downtown San Antonio, bracing for another one of coach John Calipari's bring-down-the-house pep talks. Given the heightened occasion, they were prepared for all kinds of oratorical fireworks. But Calipari, understanding the effect of a dramatic pause, said nothing at first. He simply handed out photocopies of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, arguably the most powerful pep talk in American history. Then he asked a few of his players to read it aloud.
Kansas (36-3) vs. Memphis (38-1) Monday, 9:21 p.m., CBS Alamodome (44,000)
Read Stewart Mandel's Five Reasons Kansas Will Win here.
SAN ANTONIO -- Rest assured, hoops viewers. You will be entertained come Monday night
There's a banner that greets you at the airport when you arrive in San Antonio this weekend. It's posted in the hotels, streamed across the exterior façade of the Alamodome and hangs above one of the tunnels to the court.
Reggie Rose was in Chicago on Wednesday, making arrangements for his mother and two of his brothers to get to San Antonio for the Final Four. He didn't know how many members of the Rose clan would get to San Antonio, but he was hopeful all of them would be there to see Derrick Rose, the youngest member of the family, lead Memphis against UCLA on Saturday.
With his braided cornrows and thick Baltimore accent, Memphis senior forward Joey Dorsey looks and sounds a lot like a character from HBO's crime drama The Wire. But unlike Dorsey's favorite TV show, the NCAA tournament doesn't have to be a Greek tragedy, its actors doomed by the cruel Fates. And so, in the days before last week's games in North Little Rock, the notoriously downbeat Dorsey ignored the negatives -- his February swoon, the Tigers' two straight Elite Eight exits, his backfiring smack-talk toward Ohio State's Greg Oden in last year's tournament -- and at the behest of his coach, John Calipari, wrote his own fairy-tale script in the pages of a blue spiral notebook.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- It was a scene one usually must wait until late in the NCAA tournament to find, and only then after treading cautiously into losing-team interview sessions: Here, in the Memphis locker room at FedEx Forum late on Saturday night, hung an uncomfortably thick silence. Everywhere on the Tigers' faces were expressions of dejection and anger associated with the end of something big.
After a four-day siege in Bloomington, the 'Bag is ready to talk about ... something besides Kelvin Sampson. So let's dive in:
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) -- Prosecutors have dropped charges against two University of Memphis basketball players from a dispute outside a nightclub last year.
When hoops historians look back on the 2007-08 college basketball season, they may conclude that its most significant moment came on an Indian summer evening in October '03. At the head of a heavy oak table in his Memphis steak house sat Tigers coach John Calipari, who has led teams to both the Final Four and the NBA playoffs. Next to him was an obscure junior college coach from Fresno named Vance Walberg. For six days Walberg had observed Calipari's practices, continuing an annual pilgrimage that had given him deeper insight into the work of two dozen elite college coaches, from Bob Knight to Dean Smith to Billy Donovan.
SI.com's Cory McCartney analyzes the matchups.
NEW YORK -- These made-for-TV, made-for-columnists, made-for-NBA-scouts individual showdowns never seem to turn out as prophesied by the hype machine. On Tuesday we had college basketball's version of the freshman circus at Madison Square Garden: USC's O.J. Mayo and Memphis' Derrick Rose in the 9:30 show of the Jimmy V Classic. Two 2007 Lottery Picks in the season's most anticipated rookie battle -- one that fizzled and faded into the background of a gruesome (as in, 33.1 percent shooting combined!) muck-fest between talent-loaded teams. The Tigers won by four in overtime. They won ugly. Which technically meant that Rose won ugly as well, but I'm more inclined to call it a wash, and request that the circus be re-staged in March, when both parties are better prepared to put on a proper show.
PROTAGONISTS: John Calipari, Bruce Pearl, Dane Bradshaw
Forwards Marcus and Markieff Morris have withdrawn their commitments to the Memphis Tigers a second and likely final time, forcing the team to continue recruiting to round the 2008 class.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) -- Two Memphis basketball players were charged with misdemeanors after police said they were involved in a disturbance at a Beale Street nightclub, infuriating coach John Calipari.
SAN ANTONIO -- Back in September, Ohio State coach Thad Matta called a team meeting and handed out a packet to his players. Along with a training schedule and a manual about academic standards, there was a picture from a Final Four pamphlet. "We put it in there and said, 'hey, if we work, this is what we will be working for,'" said Matta.
NEW ORLEANS -- Nevada star Nick Fazekas has always figured heavily in the Wolf Pack's formula for success. The 6-foot-11 forward, who flirted with leaving for the NBA after last season, is the unquestioned star of the team.
Also in this column: • Teams to keep an eye on • Complete projected bracket
What have we learned during this college basketball season? Well, after four months we've learned that it's a felony to possess 'shrooms in the state of Washington (who knew?); that the most genuinely touching moment of the year would feature a teary-eyed Bob Knight; and, not least, that there's no clear favorite heading into the NCAA tournament.
On the morning of Tennessee's home game against Oklahoma State on Dec. 18, Volunteers senior forward Dane Bradshaw was in so much pain from tendonitis in both his shoulders that he could barely lift his arms over his head. Yet, there was Bradshaw, all 6-foot-4, 205 pounds of him, fighting amongst the giants to tip in teammate Ramar Smith's miss with 1.9 seconds remaining to give UT a 79-77 win. It was the kind of play Bradshaw has made throughout his career, during which he has compiled far more memorable moments than eye-popping statistics.
In this week's cast, we have Billy Donovan playing an officer of the law, Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a college hoops fan, and Texas A&M playing its way into the top five ...
Wisconsin may not be an aesthetically pleasing No. 1, but it's beaten two of the AP's top-10 teams (Pitt and Ohio State) and another top-25 squad (Marquette). No other school can match the Badgers' resume -- and so, for the second straight week, they stay at the top.
Happy New Year, Hoopheads. As we all know, the new year signifies a new season in college hoops as conference play finally gets underway. That means teams are going to have to board real buses and airplanes to play real games against real teams.
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