KANSAN.COM / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / WEDNESDAY, MARCH 9, 2011 / SPORTS/
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"I won't. I will be practicing. I think their game is at 11:30 as well, so we will be practicing as a team. We'll have coaches scouting them though."
Bill Self about watching the Nebraska and Oklahoma State game today, Kansas Athletic
FACT OF THE DAY
Carolyn Davis' 16 points and 11 rebounds gave the sophomore forward her seventh doubledouble of the season and the 13th of her career. It was Kansas' 15th of the season.
Kansas Athletics
TRIVIA OF THE DAY
Q: What is Kansas softball's rank as of Monday?
A: It's 35th in the nation
A: It's 35th in the nation
ncaa.com
Let's adopt the Ivy League's way
MORNING BREW
Thirty-one conferences receive automatic bids to the NCAA Tournament. Thirty of those conferences have
Thirty of those conferences have season-ending tournaments to decide which school receives the bid. The lone conference that doesn't have a tournament: The Ivy League.
Jesse Newell of the Lawrence Journal-World said the Ivy League, as good as its academics are, was smart enough to not have a conference tournament. And he's right. It is the only conference that makes sure the conference season is important.
As of 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, eight automatic bids have been finalized. Of those eight teams, only one, Belmont, won the conference regular season and the postseason tournament. The spread of the other seven is four two-seeds, two three-seeds and a four-seed.
For the larger conferences, this isn't a big deal because the top seed will most likely receive an at-large bid. But for the mid-major conferences like the Missouri Valley Conference, that league will most likely only receive one bid. This season, Indiana State won the MVC tournament on Sunday and looks to be the only school from the conference going to the Big Dance. This is coming
BY MIKE LAVIERI
mlavieri@kansan.com
twitter.com/kansnball
after it finished third in the league and then knocked off Missouri State, which finished first in the league, in the finals and Wichita State, which finished second, in the semifinals.
For Missouri State, it looked like it was going to the NCAA tournament until Sunday's loss. Now it looks like it will be heading to the NIT. For Indiana State, it had no chance of making the NCAA Tournament or the NIT, but somehow managed to put it together for three straight games.
If not all conferences, then most, need to conform to the lvy League. There is a reason six of the eight schools are in U.S. News' Top 10 for best universities in academics; all eight are in the Top 15. No other conference can say
that 100 percent of its schools are that smart.
People want to complain about the BCS and how it should go to a playoff system, but that just places more focus on the end-of-season tournament instead of the regular season. There is a reason that one loss in college football might mean the end of championship hopes, because every game is important. That is the way it should work in college basketball, where every conference game means something.
Edited by Corey Thibodeaux
THIS WEEK IN KANSAS ATHLETICS
TODAY
Baseball
vs. North Dakota
3 p.m.
Lawrence
Tennis
UMKC
3 p.m.
Lawrence
Women's Basketball Big 12 Championship 11 a.m. Kansas City.Mo.
Men's Basketball
Big 12 Championship
11:30 a.m.
Kansas City, Mo.
Swimming Zone Diving TBA Austin, Texas
THURSDAY
NBA
Track
NCAA Indoor
Championship
All Day
College Station, Texas
Former Kansas point guard Sherron Collins lost a chance to return to the Charlotte Bobcats when he missed two flights scheduled by the organization that were meant to bring him back to the team from his home of Chicago.
Collins misses out on return to NBA
Collins
Collins returned home to Chicago after being waived by the Bobcats on Feb. 24 to clear space for
trade deadline acquisitions, Collins had been serving as the third point guard behind D.J. Augustin and Shaun Livingston for Charlotte, averaging 3.3 minutes and just shy of one point per game.
Charlotte coach Paul Silas told the Associated Press that the Bobcats planned to bring Collins back to the team, but withdrew the offer after he missed the flights.
Charlotte signed NBDL player Garret Temple to a 10-day contract to fill the spot.
"That was kind of it," Silas said.
Tim Dwyer
COLLEGE BASKETBALL
NCAA gets a dose of Charles Barkley
"I'm going to talk about the games, but when I met with the NCAA, I said, 'At some point we are going to have to talk about graduation rates on these damn games,' he said.
"We can't go three weeks just talking about basketball and everybody gets paid and we have a bunch of dummies running around out there."
Barkley held court for more than 30 minutes, offering quotable variations on his theme:
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
That colleges do a disservice to athletes by not taking their education more seriously, and that one-year-and-done players weaken both the NCAA and NBA.
"One of the reasons I took this job was there are some things I want to say," Barkley said. "I don't have to do this job, OK?"
Charles Barkley has been lobing verbal grenades for more than a decade as an NBA studio analyst for TNT, making him one of the most colorful, controversial figures in sports television.
Now it's the college game's turn.
Appearing at a CBS/Turner breakfast to discuss the new-look NCAA Tournament on Tuesday, Barkley promised to cover more than just brackets and buzzer-beaters next week.
"We just gave these damn people 11 billion dollars. They're not paying the players. I'm not going to go on a rant about where the money goes, but they have an obligation to graduate these players."
Barkley said he is especially concerned about the effects on black students with unrealistic expectations of pro success.
"Not to make it racial, but it has a really negative effect on the black community, because the majority of these players are black," he said.
"They're not going to make it in the NBA. They're not getting educated. Then we expect them to raise their families uneducated."
"We have to reach a happy medium. We need to help college basketball. They need to help us. But right now, everybody is just being a pig."
"The problem is we're all pigs. College is just trying to get theirs. The NBA is trying to get theirs. The agents are trying to get theirs. Everybody is just concerned about their thing.
Barkley said having star collegians leave before they are physically mature also hurts the NBA, where bad teams should benefit more than they do from infusions of young talent.
So, as usual, the floor is yours, Sir Charles:
HIGH SCHOOL
16-year-old honored by 1,500 and smiles
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
HOLLAND, Mich. — There might have been more laughs than tears at the funeral of Wes Leonard, a 16-year-old basketball star from Fennville.
And that seems fitting. Because Wes was a fun-loving kid who made everybody smile and laugh.
Leonard, 16, died Thursday after suffering cardiac arrest because of an enlarged heart. He collapsed after making the winning basket to save a perfect season for the Fennville basketball team.
More than 1,500 attended the funeral Tuesday morning at Christ Memorial Church in Holland. Many wore black and orange, the school colors.
Players from the Fennville basketball team entered the church walking side by side, the same way they entered DeVos Fieldhouse on Monday night before a Class C district game against Lawrence. The funeral started less than 15 hours after Fennville's emotional victory
over Lawrence in the first round of the state tournament at Hope
The service was organized like a football game, with four quarters, a halftime video tribute and a final victory.
College. It was Fennville's first game without Wes.
Before the service, a photo tribute showed a teenager living life to the fullest: with his parents, his brother, his friends and his teammates.