Jessel Curry, as you have probably heard, told WVU last week he planned to be part of the 2010 football recruiting class. We see a lot of highlight videos these days, but Curry’s is something else.
So, too, is the caption.
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… from the weekend that was. For your use in elevator rides, trips to the water cooler and other awkward moments on a Monday. Sponsored by Work so Thorough it Makes Me Feel a Little Guilty.
– The WVU Hall of Fame Class was announced.
– Two more players joined the 2010 football recruiting class.
– Women’s Track achieves top-three ECAC goal.
– WVU is the No. 3 seed in the Big East Tournament … and Austin Markel is in the home run derby.
– Oh, that’s just great.
Welcome to the Friday Feedback, which is feeling nostalgic today. Remember a while back when we discussed the University of Michigan alumni meeting in one of WVU’s alumni strongholds? Well, it happened Tuesday and it was a beautiful thing. Take it away, Rich Rodriguez.
He needed all of 20 seconds to go Disney on those people, who, of course, loved it. I miss it, I do. And I will say this — that guy’s still great at that stuff, though the rhyming at the end is a little … well, it’s silly, kind of like saying, “The folks is West Virginia are still pissed at me. I’ve said many times I’d have been better off killing a family of five with an ax.”
The Lion King and mass murder. Things sure will be fine in ’09.
Onto the Feedback. Comments appear as posted. In other words, accept your fate.
rekterx said:
And this man had the audacity to call Stew a “painter”! Somebody needs to contact the AZ press and direct them to all of those derogatory comments that Kendrick about Bill Stewart.
I’m assuming someone somewhere has shone the light on Ken Kendrick. Right? Anyone?
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Something about law enforcement in the Beilein family. John Beilein has a new gig … and it didn’t even take him five years! (I kid.)
Beilein accepted a job Thursday as chairman of the new men’s basketball ethics coalition, a panel that hopes to clarify the rules and the intention of those bylaws so coaches don’t inadvertently run into trouble.
“There’s a spirit to the rules we all need to follow. We don’t want to be, as coaches, trying to find our way around the rules,” Beilein told The Associated Press. “There’s a spirit we have to live by.”
There was a neat little story last year about the at-long-last graduation of Corie Blount from the University of Cincinnati. I can’t remember Bob Huggins bringing this up once, even though he was deeply involved in the entire ordeal and certainly had a great deal of incentive to point to it as a way to show how the graduation numbers can sometimes be flawed.
“Here’s a guy who was 11 years in the NBA and came back and finishes his degree, and it is never going to show up on a statistic,” Huggins said last month. “But we know, and I think that’s what’s important. He wants to coach. He will be able to go on and coach.”
Ehhh, probably not. Mr. Blount is going to jail for a while after being caught in possession of about 30 pounds of marijuana and contributing to one of the zanier quotes in quite some time.
“Cheech and Chong would have a hard time smoking that much,” Hedric said, repeatedly marveling that, “that’s a lot of marijuana.”
This is where we dig into Huggins’ character and accuse him of crusading for his reputation. Stuff like that, right?
Quite the opposite. A guy like Blount may let Huggins down, but Huggins won’t let a guy guy like Blount down. And again, not a mention of this was made to anyone.
Well, not really — or is it not yet? — but Greg Paulus is going to play quarterback at Syracuse. You or Cam or both may doubt Paulus’ court cred, but the kid could really play football back in the day.
And so the Doug Marrone Era begins at the Dome. I like it.
Well, actually, WVU’s charges-taken leader isn’t always on the tracks. And that’s an interesting revelation as it relates to the NCAA’s proposed alteration to the current charge rule.
Rather than add an arc under the basket like that found on NBA floors, the committee restricted the area under the basket from the front of the rim to the front of the backboard.
Bryant, the Mountaineer point guard, figures he’s unaffected by the proposal.
“I never tried to take charges under the basket,” Bryant said Thursday. “That’s risky. You might get dunked on. I tried to take charges on the drive or far enough away from the basket where I knew someone wouldn’t dunk on me.”
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That WVU football recruiting video is now available for your repeated viewing. Two parts here and here.
Always fun. Appropriate homages to Pat White as well as the bruising defense and the gifted feet of Noel Devine. The highlights, of course, come from Oll Stewart’s locker room speeches. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go off and use my pads and heart-punch someone.
The not-so-secret secret is now official — former Musselman High kicker Corey Smith is transferring to WVU. Offered a full ride a few years back before opting for Alabama, he’s now accepting the same offer, though he’ll have to sit out a season per NCAA rules.
In the meantime, he’ll be available for interviews, which should be interesting given his apparent proclivity for provocative comments.
Smith made appearances in three games last season. He missed a field goal, missed an extra point and booted a kickoff out of bounds in a 20-6 win against Tulane when Tiffin was temporarily knocked out of the game. The performance left Alabama coach Nick Saban questioning Smith’s role during his postgame radio show.
Smith, however, wasn’t deterred.
“When you are playing at this level, everyone was the best on their team, the best at what they do and capable of producing,” Smith said. “Wherever you are, you have to compete. That’s all I’ll say about that.”
So he’s not a fan of Saban. One wonders what life with The Product would have been like. Perish the thought.
“Coach Stewart brought a whole new mentality,” he said. “It wasn’t like that with coach (Rich) Rodriguez. You get coached instead of yelled at. There is a lot more trust…”
In her farewell Q&A with the Cincinnati Enquirer, outbound President Nancy Zimpher admitted she’d handle her defining clash with Bob Huggins differently.
Well, kind of.
I would shorten the time frame. I thought that we were presenting options for a reasonable resolution of our differences. And we never really got to debate those options, because it went immediately to the court of public opinion. And I wasn’t able, given my own ethics, to give line and verse to what we had discussed, and therefore took my knocks in the court of public opinion. And that caused everything to slow down. Dragging something out is never is healthy as just getting on with it and getting it done. And that takes two. That takes two people working together to reach a reasonable conclusion.
Along those lines — “Dragging something out is never healthy…” — I suppose the best part of this, for both Huggins and Zimpher, is it’s over. Neither is associated with U.C. any more and neither has to tiptoe around impossible-to-avoid issues. Good riddance to all that.
