The Big Orange basketball team took home several awards yesterday, including Co-Coach of the Year for Bruce Pearl. He split the title with Billy Gillispie. Chris Lofton and Tyler Smith were named first team All-SEC while JaJuan Smith was named to the second team. Finally, J.P. Prince won the Sixth Man Award for the SEC.
Some people are upset that Pearl was not the sole winner of CotY. I have heard a few conspiracy theories about coaches not liking him personally or even holding a grudge about the Deon Thomas scandal from 1989.
Come on.
Gillispie, as much as I personally dislike him and his brand of basketball, did an amazing job this year to resurrect the Kats after their awful start and string of injuries. Pearl deserves credit for UT's tremendous season, but I don't mind him sharing the award.
I wish Tyler was the Player of the Year, but Shan Foster won it with his memorable performance against Mississippi State in the overtime. The guy is freakishly good in Memorial Gym, but only pretty good outside of it. How does that happen? To channel Coach Norman Dale, the free throw line is always 15 feet, the rim is always 10 feet off the ground...how is a player so much better at home than on the road?
The overwhelming sentiment seems to be for JaJuan's recognition. I guess he is often the forgotten man on the team. Look at what this kid has done - from walk-on to All-SEC. The story is true for so many of these Vols. Chris Lofton cannot get a scholarship from Kentucky, but he is two-time first team All-SEC. J.P. Prince and Tyler Smith come over as transfers. Brian Williams is emerging as a real player despite playing no high school ball. Duke Crews's ticker sidelined him for weeks, but he is right back to being a force inside. There is not one McDonald's All-American on the roster of a team that will be a #1 seed and favorite to make the Final Four, and they are led by a coach who was blackballed for years because he did Dr. Tom's dirty work with the NCAA.
Good Ole Rocky Top,
Rocky Top, Tennessee
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4 comments:
What dirty work did Bruce Pearl do? I honestly know nothing about this.
Back when Pearl was an assistant coach at Iowa under Dr. Tom Davis, a recruit named Deon Thomas told him that Illinois was offering him a car and cash to join the Illini. Pearl talked to Davis about it and they agreed to tape a phone conversation about it. Pearl turned it all over to the NCAA who found that Illinois had done nothing wrong with Thomas, but did get them on a couple of other violations.
Illini fans still hold a grudge about it.
For Pearl, he committed "career suicide" according to Dick Vitale by ratting out another coach. The guy in question was named Jimmy Collins. He became the coach at Illinois-Chicago when Pearl was at Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Whenever the two teams played each other (they were both in the Horizon League), they refused to shake hands.
Pearl has never blamed Davis for what happened to him (Pearl went to D-II Southern Indiana because nobody in D-1 would touch him), but I don't understand why. It was Davis who told Pearl to tape the conversation. Somehow Davis escaped the controversy and Pearl was the fall guy.
It still comes up from time to time. It was mentioned in the SI article this year. You can google it to find more (some of it pretty hateful even now). Thomas, who went to Illinois, calls Pearl, "a snake."
Why is Gillespie getting a free pass on the nearly catastrophic early season performance of the Kats? Should he really be getting credit for bringing Kentucky back to respectability when they sholdn't have been in that position to begin with? Here are some of the preseason ranks that were bestowed upon Kentucky: #13, #24, #21, #11, #15, #16. They had the talent all year. The only great coaching that I see here is in relation to a horrid start to the season. Oh, and every coach deals with injuries.
I agree and disagree - I think you make a great point about UK's early failures. You can chalk it up to adjusting to Gillispie's system, but there is no excuse for losing to Gardner-Webb.
On the other hand, he deserves credit for getting them to buy into his way of playing after the early disasters. It helps that he had two seniors in the backcourt, but those guys could have quit on Billy pretty easily. Instead, they won 12 games and are probably going dancing.
I'm also not sure whether the SEC awards are based on anything other than the SEC schedule. I don't know that for sure.
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