Wednesday Open Thread: Talk About The Kentucky Wildcats And More

In lieu of the Quickies today, which I am unable to attend to due to other responsibilities, I offer this open thread with a few news stories that deserve some discussion. A proper Quickies post requires fully an hour and a half of preparation, and I just don’t have that to spare today, unfortunately.

So here we go:

• Thon Maker plans to reclassify to 2015 — this is quite significant, as Maker is a major UK target and Calipari will want him above even the likes of Malik Newman for this upcoming season. Maker is a remarkable talent who can play inside and out, has great athleticism, is over seven feet tall, blocks shots and can shoot the ball from everywhere. SB Nation also has more here.

• Grantland’s Mark Titus has his updated top 12 NCAA rankings, and talks about the mock selection process. Consider this:

  Wait. I lied. Kentucky did get mentioned once. After 14 hours of deliberation, when the entire bracket was set, I said to the room: "This was a ton of work just to hand a trophy to Kentucky in a few weeks." Some people laughed. I didn’t.

• Bat Cats tickets are on sale:

  Single game @UKBaseball tickets are NOW ON SALE through http://t.co/49PYelGktL. We can't wait to see you at #TheCliff pic.twitter.com/D8BkgIXv5r

  — UK Ticket Office (@UKTix) February 18, 2015

• Sofball tickets also:

  Single game @UKsoftball tickets are NOW ON SALE by calling our office at (800) 928-2287. Get yours today! pic.twitter.com/xrev9jLpOY

  — UK Ticket Office (@UKTix) February 18, 2015

• No Kentucky players on the Julius Erving Award watch list.

• John Clay’s Big Blue LInks

• Willie Cauley-Stein thinks the whole country wants UK to lose. Hey, Willie, we don’t. Trust me. But those other people, yeah, they probably do.

• Former UK assistant AD and now MSU athletics director Scott Stricklin wants to add a year of athlete eligibility, not take one away like the Big Ten and Big 12 commissioners. I like this idea.

• Ask the Smithsonian: What would happen if a solar flare hit the earth? Hat tip: Instapundit

• Jameis Winston will throw at the combine. Hurrah! Wait, what?

• Rajon Rondo set to return for the Mavericks on Thursday.

• What do the mysterious clouds on Mars mean? Aliens, of course.

• How the NBA became the first major sport to embrace Virtual Reality (VR). I saw a similar article relating to porn, but I decided to link this one. Consider:

  What surprised me the most was how eager they were to talk about livestreaming, because bandwidth constraints are an obvious hurdle. (If you think it’s annoying when a video buffers in your browser, just imagine how infuriating it would be when the video completely surrounds you.) But imagine putting on a head-mounted display at home and watching a live, 360-degree feed in 3D from a courtside seat: both Samsung and BigLook360 have technology to make it happen, as do other companies.

• Molecule found that can delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Faster, please.