It was a close call for me this morning whether to post the news, or another article I have been researching. Well, the news won out for the moment ... but only for the moment.
Continuing our march toward football season, we are starting to see more and more of the Kentucky Wildcat football team showing up in sports articles. Kentucky is becoming a trendy top 25 pick, and now CSTV has us at #23, ahead of such traditional football schools as UCLA and South Carolina and just one spot below perennial powerhouse Tennessee.
The Sand Mountain Reporter has a short article looking at last year's Gridiron 'Cats statistics, and notes that we return 17 starters from last year.
Blogs? Yeah, we got those, also. Shawn Zobel of 411mania.com has Andre Woodson going 14th in next year's NFL draft to Carolina, just 6 spots between Brian Brohm of Louisville. DarrenMcFadden.org has this post about how Andre Woodson is on or near the cover of FOUR national magazines covering college football. Tampabaytiger's blog at The Sporting News lists no less than three (3!) Wildcats on his pre-season All-SEC offensive team.
In other semi-football related news, the Kentucky high school all-star football team defeated Tennesee's last night, continuing our high school domination of the Volunteer State since 2002. Now, if we could only get that job done at the college level ...
Naturally, this wouldn't be a Kentucky blog without some basketball news, and we do have some.
First of all, Jared Carter's new shoulder injury appears to be minor at this point. That is surely good news, and I hope it holds up against continuing medical scrutiny.
Dick Vitale is continuing to draw the ire of the Wildcat Faithful: WATCH HERE
CSTV.com has the final 2007 hoops class rankings. These are really no surprise, but Patrick Patterson does get a mention in here.
Rush The Court has a follow-on to an prior post which I linked earlier this week. This new one looks at under- and over-achievers in the NCAA tournament. A lot of statistics and analysis, but very interesting if you have a few minutes.
Finally, Rivals has two free articles today. First is this article about the 2009 class -- the 2009'rs were officially eligible for recruitment on Friday.
Second is this article by Jerry Meyer which focuses on 2008 top targets. This is an interesting piece which looks at various issues such as the slower pace of UNC's recruiting and Donovan's flip-flop, but also has this blurb about UK's current efforts:
There is much more, so read the whole thing.
Finally, the Indiana high school basketball all-star series may be coming to an end due to the utter domination of Kentucky by Indiana. Sad, but we really haven't managed to keep the talent that we have grown here in state -- it tends to go to Oak Hill and other out of state prep schools.
The Ledger Online reports that Reggie Hanson has been hired as an assistant basketball coach for the University of South Florida.