This is becoming the question of the offseason, and the offseason is only a week old now: What’s the deal with Derek Culver? You remember him. Top recruit in Ohio, kicked off his high school team in the January, part of a West Virginia recruiting class with five players coming in and four players going out and a subsequent problem therein.

So, what’s the deal with Derek Culver? Apparently nothing at all.

Here’s what we’ve been led to believe through, shall we say, various channels. Culver was benched/suspended early in his senior season. No one ever said, “Academic issues,” and his coach instead expressed concern with Culver.

And then Culver got the boot, and, again, no one ever said academics. In fact, the coach wouldn’t say anything. Culver’s school operates on the quarters academic calendar, and if you shift the pieces around, sure, you can build a believable case that academics or proactive concerns about upcoming academics were involved.

Whatever. I didn’t do much with this as it was happening, but I do know WVU was pretty confident throughout that he’d be fine and on campus in June.

But as the season neared its end and folks became curious and even antsy about who and what is next, Culver was a topic. I’d get asked all the time, and I’d sort of shrug my shoulders all the time. I didn’t know. I was hearing all sorts of stories but no facts, and it’s unfair to speculate. As often happens, these whispers turned into pseudo facts.

No offense, Stefan. I cherry picked, but I never saw anything anywhere about junior college or prep school, unless people were spitballing. In all honesty, I don’t search for these things. We know the five in/four out numbers don’t work, so I suppose one player delaying his enrollment with a year of prep school or junior college would solve that. But when I asked about this, I was told it wasn’t happening.

And now it appears we know why. Culver himself edited the history written about him and detailed his plans at Saturday’s Scott Brown Classic in Beckley.

“My academics are fine,” Culver said. “The reason I came off the team; it was my mom’s decision. Something personal was going on.

“Everybody thought it was my academics, but that wasn’t it at all. I played high school ball for three years and never had an academic problem.”

Culver insisted he would be in Morgantown in June and would be set to enroll in summer school before the start of the fall semester.

“As far as the [NCAA] Clearinghouse, everything is fine,” Culver said “I’ll be in Morgantown in June. Everything is fine.”

And with speculation came talk in the hallways in school or on Internet message boards or on Twitter.

For Culver, there was no escape from what everyone else thought about his basketball future.

“I’m not going to lie, it was difficult to deal with,” Culver said. “When I woke up the next day, it was all on the news. Derek Culver this and that. Me being a kid who doesn’t really like the attention very much, I was kind of like, ‘Wow, nobody really knows the real story behind all of this.’

“It was something I had to roll with, but it was a learning lesson for me.”