For a rather wild day, it looked like things were going to get even weirder than they usually do in the college basketball offseason. Even before the summer recruiting began. In the end, it was a lot of noise but no change. Xavier and C.J. Henry are still going to Kansas for the 2009-10 season, not reversing field to go to Kentucky to be with John Calipari.
Xavier Henry is one of the top-5 high school players in the country. He had already switched his commitment from Memphis to Kansas, but since he could not sign a new National Letter of Intent (NLI) he is not actually bound to Kansas until he shows up on the campus and signs the scholarship papers. His older brother, C.J. Henry, is a walk-on with the New York Yankees paying his way following a failed baseball career.
Could the NBA and its minimum age requirement really be guilty of hypocrisy?
It certainly appears that way to Oklahoma coach Jeff Capel and some other Big 12 coaches after watching the most recent NBA Finals and seeing which NBA players were pushed as the faces of the league throughout the season.
The straight out of high school players, who are the type of players the NBA no longer wants to be associated with, are now carrying the torch for the world's best pro game.
"If you follow the NBA, if you look at the guys who are promoted as the face of the NBA, you are talking about Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Dwight Howard, Kevin Garnett," Capel said. "Those are four that jumped right out and none of those guys attended college and I don't think it hurt them."
The debate about which conference is the best basketball league usually heats up in December.
But the Big 12 coaches set fire to the debate early by staking claim as the best basketball conference Tuesday, some five months before the 2009-10 season begins. So the Big East, ACC, Pac-10 and SEC will have to just lineup for second best.
"I do think it's going to be the best with what we have retuning and the things that we've done in the last few years," Texas A&M coach Mark Turgeon said during the Big 12 summer teleconference call Tuesday. "I've talked to some so-called experts out there and they think we are going to be the best league, too.
The Kansas Jayhawks team could very well enter next season as the top team in the nation.
If they remain that way throughout a grueling non-conference slate, they will deserve it.
Kansas released the non-conference portion of its 2009-10 basketball schedule Tuesday and it features some must-see matchups, including a rematch of the 2008 national championship game against Memphis while also renewing the rivalry with UCLA.
With John Calipari now coaching at Kentucky, top shooting guard Xavier Henry reopened his recruiting. C.J. was already on the Memphis squad following a failed professional baseball career, but that meant little. Ultimately Xavier Henry has opted to go to Kansas, and his older brother will be joining him.
The addition of Henry to a recruiting class that includes power forward Thomas Robinson and point guard Elijah Johnson -- both top-50 recruits -- means that a likely top-10 recruiting class will join a Kansas team that finished in the top-10 and will be returning everyone. Kansas now joins North Carolina and Michigan State as the presumed favorites for 2010.
Even if you phrase it as carefully as a major leaguer testifying before Congress, ask Kansas coach Bill Self who he thinks should be the national coach of the year and you're likely to get about the same answer as if you'd just asked him to explain the economic stimulus plan.
Which is to say a whole lot of stammering and more tap dancing than Broadway's spring season.
Headlining: Pittsburgh beat Connecticut to kick off the week, led by DeJuan Blair's ridiculous 22-point, 23-rebound effort. It seemed relatively unlikely at the time that the Panthers could manage to jump both North Carolina and Oklahoma, providing that either one of the two won out for the week.
But then Saturday rolled around. The Tar Heels fell to Maryland and Oklahoma, without Blake Griffin for most of the game, coughed one up to Texas.
The story wasn't going to be about Kansas winning. Seriously. The Jayhawks never had a chance of grabbing the headlines. Even with Bill Self's crew closing out an impressive Big 12 road win, ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla was still discussing the lack of impact this game would have on Oklahoma's NCAA tournament resume.
When you talk about being able to weather a storm in the state of Kansas, what Bill Self's Jayhawks did on Saturday ranks right up there with Dorothy dodging that tornado.
No. 16 Kansas endured an absolutely abysmal start on the road against a Kansas State squad needing an NCAA tournament resume-booting win. The Wildcats spurted out to a 30-14 lead just 12 minutes into the game -- a run almost as baffling as the fact that Kansas melted that 16-point cushion down to 43-42 at the break. KU then took the lead a little more than five minutes into the second half, and poured it on for an 85-74 victory.
NCAA Basketball 
For a rather wild day, it looked like things were going to get even weirder than they usually do in the college basketball offseason. Even before the summer recruiting began. In the end, it was a lot of noise but no change. Xavier and C.J. Henry are still going to Kansas for the 2009-10 season, not reversing field to go to Kentucky to be with John Calipari.
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The debate about which conference is the best basketball league usually heats up in December.
The Kansas Jayhawks team could very well enter next season as the top team in the nation.
With 
Even if you phrase it as carefully as a major leaguer testifying before Congress, ask Kansas coach 
The story wasn't going to be about Kansas winning. Seriously. The Jayhawks never had a chance of grabbing the headlines. Even with 
When you talk about being able to weather a storm in the state of Kansas, what Bill Self's Jayhawks did on Saturday ranks right up there with Dorothy dodging that tornado.
