Kentucky Wildcats Morning Quickes: USA Today All American Edition

USA Today has their pre-season all-American team out today, and Kentucky is represented only on the first team. Both the Harrisons and Willie Cauley-Stein got an honorable mention.

Tweet of the Morning

RT @EvanDaniels From what I'm hearing, Thursday is going to be a very BLUE day. Skal Labissiere & Isaiah Briscoe announce at 6:00 ET.

— Ben Roberts (@NextCats) November 12, 2014

Don’t get too excited yet. Remember, Memphis’ color is blue as well, and Skal Labissiere has them in his list. But the only blue in Briscoe’s final three is Kentucky.

Your Quickies:

Kentucky football

• Kentucky football could use its missing pieces. Yes, but that’s part of football. Let’s just leave it alone and move on. We could’ve used Keith Bogans against Marquette, and Willie Cauley-Stein againt UConn, too.

• Neal Brown previews Tennessee:

• Tuesday practice report.

Kentucky basketball

• Ira Combs talks about the regular-season tip-off Friday.

• Will UK basketball be an underdog against U of L? No. There, saved you a click. Ken Pomeroy’s ratings right now don’t mean very much, so showing us as a slight dog there won’t survive the first five or six games, I expect.

Other Kentucky sports

• Men’s soccer to open CUSA tournament against South Carolina today.

• Men’s soccer coarch Johan Cedergren has been named CUSA Coach of the Year. Congrats, and well deserved. UK goalkeeper Callum Irving was the CUSA Player of the Year, Defensive MVP and Golden Glove award winner.

Links posts

• John Clay’s Big Blue Links

• John Clay’s SEC Links

College football

• SB Nation predicts the college football playoff using advanced statistics. Looks to me like the SEC is unlikely to get there compared to several others.

• LSU apologizes to Alabama for profane chants. Just kidding.

College basketball

• Ricky O’Donnell thinks Arizona is poised to compete for a national championship. They should be, but I have a few reservations. I think I’ll wait to see how they play first. I’ve already seen how Kentucky plays.

• Yahoo’s top ten NBA prospects from this class. Kentucky has two. I’m skeptical of Montrezl Harrell — all he can do is dunk. He can’t dribble, he can’t shoot, and he won’t be playing the four in the NBA.

Other sports news

• Eric Bledsoe is a member of one of the smallest back courts in the NBA, but their lack of size doesn’t mean lack of heart or competitiveness.

• More damning evidence that the NCAA acted unethically in the Penn St. case. In this case, it seems the NCAA provided him a blueprint so that it could use his findings against the school, not exactly ethical for an "independent" investigation. Why am I not surprised? From the article:

  "Clearly the more we dig into this, the more troubling it gets," [Pennsylvania state senator Jeff] Corman told "Outside the Lines." "There clearly is a significant amount of communication between Freeh and the NCAA that goes way beyond merely providing information. I’d call it coordination … Clearly, Freeh went way past his mandate. He was the enforcement person for the NCAA. That’s what it looks like. I don’t know how you can look at it any other way. It’s almost like the NCAA hired him to do their enforcement investigation on Penn State."

  "At a minimum, it is inappropriate. At a maximum, these were two parties working together to get an outcome that was predetermined."

  And

  "I’m angry," Corman said. "When you read the other communications we’ve seen, the NCAA is saying we have an image problem. So it looks like the NCAA was looking to improve its own image at the expense of Penn State. And to do that, they were orchestrating an outcome with Freeh to make it happen … A lot of people were hurt by the sanctions brought down by the NCAA, and to think it was achieved possibly by this coordination by Freeh and the NCAA makes me very, very angry."

  Clearly, what the NCAA did was wrong from inception to conclusion.

Other news

• Video captures an unusual fireball in the sky over Texas. Ohh, scary.

• Mathematically, hipsters all look the same. Like I needed proof.

• More things that don’t surprise me: US. Postal Service hacked.

• Hacker installs Windows 98 on an iPhone 6. Because he can, I guess.