I started and finished early yesterday and even after doing a few things to get ahead, I was able to get away for a few hours for personal reasons. I didn’t check the email after a final glance in the late afternoon. Naturally, I saw this morning that “A Guy” had sent me an email saying Kevin Jones was going to declare today he’s entering the NBA Draft.

And, of course, that’s exactly what happened.

This isn’t a surprise to me — not that something happened when I stepped away, not that KJ made this call. I was positive he would and it makes no sense not to do it. The NBA, for now, gives underclassmen the right to declare once and return as long as you haven’t hired an agent. Jones will not hire an agent … yet.

A month ago, I think it would have been safe to categorize Jones’ entry as an experiment in self-discovery with the slight chance he’d set it off and made a strong case to remain in the draft. Now, after a whole lot of very good underclassmen who would have been taken above Jones decided to stay in school, the conversation has to change.

What was before a question of “What about me?” is now more of “What about me in this group of players?” At the present, he’s not listed in any of the one- or two-round mock drafts I’ve seen and that’s with a lot of people who do this for a living figuring he’d enter the draft. That’s not a good omen.

What we don’t know is what happens when he gets into a gym for a workout and makes 17 of 25 3-pointers or nails every 15-footer or boxes out on the offensive glass like someone three inches taller and 20 pounds heavier. That’s the trick of his situation — he can only go up. He’s working with a net and if he does go down, he ends up back at WVU.