Demo

So that kid’s 17, huh?

Huge game for Ament. If the light’s come on for him UT will be nasty the rest of the year.

This draft is so good it would probably require terrible luck to get it wrong, but Dybantsa is such an obvious fit that unless there’s something about the kid that they question it’s pretty tough to see them going a different way.

Dybantsa makes it 3 40pt freshman games today so far. Unbelievable.

Looks like quite a crowd at Pauley. L.A. caught part of the storm, too, I guess.

Nick Martinelli wearing the ‘50’s style short, tight shorts and the shoes that look for all the world like Chuck’s will never not be hilarious.

I don’t know what’s the crazier stat from that game, that a true frosh goes in to Mackey and scores 46 on 2.7 pts per shot or Purdue shoots 55% with 3 TO’s at home and lost?

Anybody who thinks you can’t win with freshman anymore needs to be watching this one. What Flemings is doing to TTU is amazing. Kid’s a bada$$.

If you can’t get him at this point you were never gonna.

See, 20 words pretty well covered it. Side note on the hair: it always looks perfectly the same. It flops around as he’s playing and then lands exactly like that.

Some thoughts on Karvala after getting to see him up close for a couple of days. Makes a total of 6 games of his I’ve gotten to watch, 3 from HS last year, 1 travel ball game he played against Ethan Taylor last spring and the 2 EYBL scholastic games the last 2 days. This may go on for a while, but he is a really interesting prospect to me: 1) Physically, he is about as prototype a wing as it gets. He’s legitimately 6’7”, which I’d wondered about and while his frame is pretty narrow, he’s probably 185ish, I think he can probably get to 200-205 and that’ll play. He’s not long, but probably slightly plus, +2 or so maybe. Athletically, he’s top shelf. He can really run. He has easy movement and change of direction. And the vertical explosion is something. Probably pushing legit 40”. There was a play where they threw him an alley oop that only Wemby could have caught but Karvala’s fingertips were slightly above the top of the square and his head was at the rim. That was a woah moment. 2) We’ve run through his game before, and there wasn’t a lot I hadn’t seen. He’s a streaky shooter with some funk in his stroke that needs cleaning up that isn’t happening now. Makes his release a hair slow which with his twitch shouldn’t happen, The handle needs to tighten up notably. Right now at the HM level he’d be strictly a 3 bounce straight line driver. Not sure if that will get better or not. The defensive tools are great if he develops the mentality of a stopper. Not sure if he’s got that, but it’ll play. He’s miles better than a kid like Dorn. 3) The between the ears is gonna be the thing here. For a kid who has a legit NBA toolkit, Karvala’s confidence is a clean slate from game to game. If he makes a couple of early plays he revs up and he really pops. But if he doesn’t he becomes pretty content with just blending into the game. He’s not an alpha or instinctively a killer like Moody is. He needs a PG who understands the need to get him out of the box strong and his current PG is a shot hunting machine and doing him no good at all. And he’s just a bit of a different kid. During halftime warmups of a game they were losing yesterday he was singing along to Enter Sandman, which was playing overhead. Would think Cig would have ripped his head off. But he competed between the lines. He’s not uncompetitive, just…different. Summary: Karvala is crazy high variance, way more so than Moody or Branham. His range of outcome is anywhere from a 2 year guy who plays in The League to a 1 year and transfer out who doesn’t work out and damned near anything in between is reasonably possible. I’m down with taking the swing here because he’s gifted in a way that doesn’t grow on trees and he seems like a good kid, but anyone who watches him and confidently predicts an outcome is nuts. Fwiw

College coaching is such an insular world that it always kills me. Every coach in the country is no more than maybe 3 degrees of separation from every other coach in the country.

The injury issue concerns me with him. He’s not as athletic as Luck, he’s not built like a LB the way Luck was, but he seems to relish contact in the same way. Plus, he already has a concussion under his belt. They really need to work hard with him on picking his spots. Side note: the most underappreciated awesome thing from the NC game is the fact that the LB that Mendoza trucked on the 5yd line was the same guy who gave him the concussion hit at Cal. Love that, and you know he remembers it.

Would be really interested to know what he’d run at the combine. He’s quick out of breaks but he doesn’t seem to separate on shear speed. Wondering if he’s 4.6ish, something like that.

Moody’s gonna be in heavy rotation next year, no doubt. Probably more minutes then Sisley’s getting this year. Other than needing to add about 15 or 20lbs his game’s just ready to go.

Off to check out Karvala at the Quincy Showcase in beautiful(heavy, heavy sarcasm) Quincy, Il. Plays tonight agains Iowa United(Arafan Diane) and tomorrow night against Wasatch Academy(Junior County). Should match up a fair bit with County. That’ll be fun. Downside of these freaking winter showcase events: We’re supposed to have a bunch of snow, something in the 6-10” range, where I live starting Saturday morning and through the day. So I have to punt on the Saturday games, which is a really good 6 game slate. Not that hanging out in a hotel in Quincy for a couple of extra days wouldn’t be super sweet. Side note: Iowa United is coached by Indiana mega-legend Keith Smart. If I see him for a free moment will probably be forced to ask how it feels to now be sharing the pedestal for the greatest moment in IU sports history with Fernando Mendoza.

Hardest I’ve laughed in a minute.

Yeah.

No quibble with Kamara being DMVP, made 1 of the 2 plays of the game for Chrissake, but in real time this is absolutely how it felt. Ponds was, as always, a freaking monster.

Wish nothing but the best for the young man. He’s rep’d the school very well. I still feel like Cig would love to grow his own QB’s but since he’s clearly never conceding to the idea of a rebuilding year, and at his age why would he, it’s gonna take a pretty unusual kid to be good enough to play somewhere and yet willing to possibly spend an extended period of time not playing until they believe he’s the Guy from pretty much the 1st day he steps on the field. That’s a tough needle to thread.

Unlike position guys, strength coaches are basically just career strength coaches, right? If that’s the case I can totally see the move for that role pretty much always being whatever the best money is. If UT wants to reset the market with Owings, good for him.

Made a joke about that exact thing to a friend today. But that guy just screams the whole Rick Pitino I’m-gonna-coach-until-I-die thing.

That kid’s story is almost beyond belief. Just incredible. And gotta confess, would pay pretty good money to watch the 1st meeting between Mendoza and Mark Davis,

Those JMU kids who came from nowhere to this, God love them all. I’d adopt Ponds if I could. Love that kid.

Not sure what to say. Just extraordinary. And to think that 25 months ago a fair number of us, raising my hand, thought this was just a stone dead program and no one was gonna want the job. And the Mendoza touchdown is this generation’s Keith Smart shot. Will never, ever, be forgotten.