It’s been pretty crazy lately with summer activities, so I haven’t been able to do as much in-depth stuff as I would have liked. Anyway, today’s ATR is more of a catch-up than anything as a lot of these things have already been talked about or know about … but interesting nonetheless.
- George Mason coach Jim Larranaga twittered on Sunday that MVC commish Doug Elgin and coach Dana Altman called to see if they could move the December 12th matchup to ‘10-’11 but coach Larranaga said NO. He has since removed those two entries from his Twitter, but makes you wonder what was going on. I’m wondering if Creighton was trying to schedule a home game that weekend since there was no UNO hockey in town that weekend.
- A big congratulations goes out to the Creighton Sports Information Office as they received 4 publication awards for the Volleyball and Men’s Basketball media guides from this past season. Rob Anderson and the staff there do a great job for the program. This is a great honor. Herewere the rest of the winners. The Creighton department was also recognized by the conference this past season as the top SID office in the conference. Great job.
- The NCAA removed the “last 12 games” criteria from the NCAA Selection Committee’s toolbox starting this season. I guess there was a point of confusion between the different members of the selection committee on the weight of the last 12 games. Some people thought it was more important than others and the application of that tool was not consistent. So while the last 12 games for most teams deal with Conference play, it will be interesting now to see if the non-conference schedules carry more weight now.
- A Saluki fan that started a new site a few months ago came out with his opinion of the rankings of the basketball facilities in the MVC. The Qwest Center tied with Wichita’s Koch Arena as the best in the league. I’m not sure you can really put the two on the same line. The blogger talks about the facility as well as the environment, though he only has the Saluki home court 6th in the list. If you want to put environment over the actual facility, I think it would have been higher than Drake and Northern Iowa. We will have to see where Evansville ranks in a couple of seasons with their new Arena.
- An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal this week about AAU teams and how players are being developed without fundamentals and focused more on what coaches want athleticly to be recruited. College Basketball is starting to look more like the NBA and individuals rather than teams. I wonder if AAU basketball is the crux in all of that. At the same time the NCAA is really scrutinizing recruiting services. I always wonder how Scout, Rivals and the like get away with how they have access to the players and influences without getting in trouble.
- I will have to give props to the Omaha World Herald in the past few weeks as they have been heavily covering not only Creighton Basketball, but Creighton Athletics in general. They have talked about the Ryan Center about how it could give more access to the Men’s team due to open practices over there and some Soccer news. With basketball, they have done features on P’Allen Stinnett, Cavel Witter, and others.However, because of the newly re-designed site, most of those articles are falling off the online site within a few days when new articles are put up there. That is too bad. There are some great features there and as more and more newspapers try to add more online features to draw more interest, it appears the OWH would rather people not read the newspaper on the internet and instead purchase the newspaper and cut out news clippings. I guess that is a model to go, but could really give the Jays and people outside of Omaha more exposure. I also figured since they were cutting off western Nebraska since they don’t deliver papers out there anymore better online information and access so those people could still keep in contact with Omaha. But to each their own.
- A website called “The Hoops Report” has started previewing their top 65 basketball teams for the upcoming season and have Creighton in at#61. Interesting enough, I will be excited to see how well Kenton Walker does in the starting lineup…..obviously they didn’t get the memo on him.
- Here’s an interesting way to introduce the non-conference schedule for basketball. Marquette (who the Jays may play this season in the Old Spice Classic) started this week announcing 1 game each day and giving a little capsule of the team they are playing with the full schedule to be released by the end of July.
- Finally, since it is a big recruiting period, here are some recent articles on players the Jays seem to be interested in: Elliott Eliason, Ricky Kreklow, Jose Bonilla and Josh Gasser.