Ole Miss did what good teams do this past week, winning at Mississippi State, navigating a quick turn and then holding off Tennessee in Oxford. As March approaches, the Rebels are in excellent shape to make the NCAA tournament. The next three weeks contain opportunities to improve their seeding. Shea Patterson committed to Ole Miss last week in Shreveport, La. How long are his coattails? Weather wreaked havoc on the college baseball season. The NBA trade deadline was crazy, but did anything change? Spring training has begun in Arizona and Florida and Sunday was the 35th anniversary of what was perhaps sports' greatest upset ever. My thoughts on those topics and more follow here, thanks to Oxford-based RE/MAX agent Harry Alexander.
1. Ole Miss improved to 19-8 overall and 10-4 in the Southeastern Conference with a 59-57 win over Tennessee Saturday night at Tad Smith Coliseum (which had no noticeable leaks on a day when it poured for more than 12 hours straight in Oxford; good for you, Tad Pad).
Stefan Moody scored a game-high 22 points, making six of 11 shots from the 3-point line to help the Rebels overcome an eight-point second-half deficit. Moody, as I wrote Saturday night, might be the most valuable player in the SEC, and he's clearly become Ole Miss' go-to scorer.
Ole Miss beat the Volunteers because of Moody, defense (the Rebels forced 13 turnovers and held Tennessee to 43.1 percent shooting from the floor) and its steady penchant of protecting the basketball (Ole Miss committed just six turnovers). That allowed the Rebels to win despite shooting just 38.9 percent from the floor and being out-rebounded, 37-28.
I thought there was another bright spot Saturday night. Jarvis Summers, who has struggled for the better part of the last month, showed signs of finding his confidence against Tennessee. Summers was 5-for-15 from the floor and 2-for-8 from the 3-point line en route to a 13-point, eight-assist night.
"He definitely played with a little more pop (Saturday)," Moody said, referring to Summers. "That's the word (Andy Kennedy) uses. Jarvis played very well (Saturday)."
"We gave him a round of applause that he's now off the milk carton," Kennedy said Saturday night. "He's back."
2. If the NCAA tournament were seeded today, Ole Miss would make the field, likely as a No. 8 seed. That's according to both Jerry Palm and Joe Lunardi, but it makes sense. The Rebels are somewhere between No. 28 and No. 32 in RPI, which would put them right on the No. 8 line, meaning they would play in an 8-versus-9 first-round game and then against a No. 1 seed in the second round if they were victorious in the opening round.
This week presents a pair of really strong opportunities for Ole Miss to play itself off the 8-9 line and perhaps into a 7-seed. Ole Miss plays host to Georgia (likely a 9 or 10 seed today) Wednesday night and then travels to LSU (likely a 10 or 11 seed today) Saturday afternoon in Baton Rouge.
Ole Miss' final week of the regular season includes a trip to Alabama and a home date against Vanderbilt. The Rebels head into the final week with a two-game cushion on a double-bye in next month's SEC tournament in Nashville.
3. Making the NCAA tournament, should the Rebels finish the deal and hear their name called in three weeks, will help Ole Miss' case in the battle for five-star guard Malik Newman.
This won't be popular here, but I think it's a shame Newman is having to worry about a college choice. So does he.
"I would like to skip college and go straight to the NBA," Newman told Mississippi News Now. DraftExpress.com projects Newman as the No. 5 overall pick in the 2016 NBA draft, and Newman would likely be a lottery pick this summer is he could go straight to the NBA from Callaway High School in Jackson, Miss.
Newman recently cut Ohio State from his list and plans to take official visits to Kentucky, Kansas, LSU and N.C. State.
"I haven't decided where I'm going yet," Newman told Mississippi News Now, adding that he would "like to stay in state, but if that's not the best decision for me, then I wouldn't do that."
Newman also said he could pull the trigger at the McDonald's All-American Game set for April 1 in Chicago.
"I may do it at McDonald's or I may not," Newman said. "I haven't set a date yet. As of right now I will be going into the McDonald's Game undecided."
4. Five-star quarterback Shea Patterson committed to Ole Miss on Tuesday in Shreveport, La., saying the words every Rebel fan had to want to hear. Patterson said he's shutting down the recruiting process, adding he plans to be a lead recruiter of sorts from now until January, when he plans to enroll a semester early to get an extra spring under his belt.
I have no idea what kind of quarterback Patterson will be --- people who know the game far better than I believe Patterson will one day be a first-round NFL draft choice --- but one thing was obvious Tuesday: Patterson will have influence over his peers. Another Rivals100 prospect, Devin White, drove more than an hour each week to hear Patterson announce something he had told White a day earlier. Patterson's cell phone lit up before and after the announcement with one prospect after another calling or texting congratulations.
Will another elite prospect choose Ole Miss just because of Patterson? Realistically, no. But don't for a minute think Patterson's presence at Ole Miss won't get the Rebels in the game for some elite prospects. Sources close to Ole Miss believe Patterson's presence will have a major impact, helping the Rebels put together a nationally elite class, one that insiders believe will be even better than the one Ole Miss signed in 2013 that finished ranked No. 7 by Rivals.com.
5. Ole Miss took two of three games from Wright State this weekend, fighting through brutally cold temperatures on Friday and damp, miserable conditions on Sunday. Just getting three games in was a chore in itself for Ole Miss and schools all over the country this weekend, prompting some to call for a later start to the college baseball season.
In theory, starting the season in March and going through July is likely the way to go, but it would create an entire new set of problems for the sport. Major League Baseball is willing to push its draft back a couple of weeks, sure, but it won't push it to August. Further, college players want to spend their summers playing in independent wood-bat leagues such as the Cape Cod League, preparing themselves for the pro game.
Reality is the college game is likely going to remain a bit of a niche sport. It's big, relatively, in the Southeast and Southwest. Schools up the Atlantic coast produce solid programs most years, as do a number of California schools.
Changing the fabric of the game due to a few weeks of unseasonably cold weather would likely be a major mistake, one that would derail some of the momentum college baseball has seemed to generate over the past few years.
6. The SEC Network is still very new, but it's already paying off, even more than the league expected.
As reported by NBCSports.com, during a meeting with both the media and the Intercollegiate Athletics Committee Friday, South Carolina athletic director Ray Tanner revealed that the SEC Network is expected to pull in a profit of $5 million per school in its first year. Tanner called that $5 million per school figure "conservative."
"This is my third academic year, so I was on the ground floor when (the idea of) the SEC Network was launched," Tanner said. "Right after I became AD this was formulated in our meetings that we were going to do this SEC Network. So, I was there from the beginning.
"You sit there and listen to the proposals and programming going forward and the dollars involved, but as they said, it could be Year 3 before we realized any financial gain. But when we launched and distributors started getting on board, we said maybe two years. Before you knew it, we had enough to realize a profit in Year 1."
Rivals.com reported Saturday that if Tanner's figures are accurate, each SEC school should expect a payout of approximately $26 million when the league conducts its annual spring meetings in Destin, Fla., in late May.
In 2014, the total revenue distributed by the SEC to its members schools was $309.6 million, a little more than $22 million per school, som $8 million more than was distributed per school five years earlier ($13.8 million in 2009). If Tanner's projections hold, in a span of just six years, the SEC will have nearly doubled the annual payout to its membership.
Good call, Texas.
7. The San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders will continue to seek public subsidies for new stadiums in their home markets, but they are developing a detailed proposal for a privately financed Los Angeles venue in the event they can't get deals done in San Diego and Oakland by the end of this year, according to a report in Friday's Los Angeles Times.
In a statement given to The Times on Thursday, the Chargers and Raiders said: "We are pursuing this stadium option in Carson for one straightforward reason: If we cannot find a permanent solution in our home markets, we have no alternative but to preserve other options to guarantee the future economic viability of our franchises."
The teams are working with "Carson2gether," a group of business and labor leaders. The coalition announced the project Friday at a news conference near the 168-acre site, a parcel at the southwest quadrant of the intersection of the 405 Freeway and Del Amo Boulevard.
They plan to immediately launch a petition drive for a ballot initiative to get voter approval to build the stadium.
Per the Times, "this latest high-stakes move was precipitated by St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke, who announced in January his plan to build an 80,000-seat stadium on the land that used to be Hollywood Park.
"That put pressure on the Chargers, who say 25 percent of their fan base is in Los Angeles and Orange counties. The Raiders, among the most financially strapped NFL teams, joined forces with the Chargers because they don't have the money build a stadium on their own.
"Like the Rams, the Chargers and Raiders are on year-to-year leases in older stadiums. Prospects for new venues in San Diego and Oakland are bleak and, as is in L.A., there is no appetite to commit public money to build a stadium. The Carson proposal calls for the teams to be equal, as opposed to one's acting as landlord to the other.
"The long-vacant Carson Marketplace site is part of an old municipal landfill and has been the subject of significant cleanup efforts in recent years. The NFL has looked into buying the site at least three times.
"In the late 1990s, entertainment executive Michael Ovitz wanted to build on that site and bring in an expansion franchise. In 1999, Houston oilman Bob McNair outbid two competing L.A. groups, paying $750 million for the team that would become the Texans.
"The Chargers and Raiders have entered into an agreement to develop the land with Starwood Capital Group. A subsidiary of Starwood Capital bought the land for $30 million in 2006, according to real estate data provider CoStar Group. The Chargers and Raiders have obtained control of the property, and Starwood intends to divest its ownership, an NFL source said."
The Chargers have been seeking a stadium solution in the San Diego area for nearly 14 years, a period spanning seven mayors and nine proposals. The relationship between the club and the city has grown especially strained in recent days, as the Chargers have pushed the city to contribute to a new stadium.
The Raiders, meanwhile, have been working on a stadium solution with Oakland and Alameda County for about six years but have not made much progress. The club, which has said that remaining in the Oakland market is a priority, has venue concepts but no taxpayer money has been committed. The Inglewood and Carson proposals do not involve any public money, per the Los Angeles Times.
Per the Times, "the reason the franchises would be able to privately finance a stadium in Carson, as opposed to their own cities, is that the L.A. market could better support the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars of preferred seat licenses, one-time payments for the right to buy a season ticket. The teams would also get revenues from naming rights; sponsorship and advertising would be far more lucrative than in smaller markets.
"It's widely speculated in NFL circles that a franchise that moves from a smaller market to L.A. could end up being worth 150 percent of its current value. Franchises would probably have to pay a hefty relocation fee, although the league has never specified an amount."
8. I was prepared to write in this space that the Miami Heat won the NBA trade deadline Thursday with its acquisition of former Phoenix point guard Goran Dragic. A day later, however, reports surfaced that Heat all-star forward Chris Bosh was hospitalized with blood clots in his lungs. That diagnosis was confirmed on Saturday, and Bosh will miss the remainder of the NBA season. Dragic is good, but he's not good enough to allow the Heat to survive the loss of Bosh.
My new winner of the trade deadline is the Portland Trailblazers, who picked up Arron Afflalo from Denver hours before the 2 p.m. deadline Thursday.
Portland (36-18 entering Sunday night's date with Memphis) will bring Afflalo off its bench, backing up Wesley Matthews. Afflalo is a plus defender who can serve as a primary scoring option when the Blazers go to their second unit. If the playoffs began today, Portland would be the No. 4 seed in the Western Conference. Afflalo gives the Blazers a chance to move up to No. 2 or 3 in the playoff seedings, and he also shores up Portland's primary pre-deadline deficiency --- a weak bench.
I thought about naming Oklahoma City the deadline winner. The Thunder eliminated a distraction by trading Reggie Jackson to Detroit and completely rebuilt their bench in the process, adding a scoring center in Enes Kanter from Utah, a reliable back-up point guard in D.J. Augustin from Detroit and a solid reserve wing in Kyle Singler from the Pistons as well.
However, the news Sunday that Kevin Durant required yet another procedure on his surgically repaired foot negates all of that, unless the Thunder's insistence that Durant will be back soon turns out to be true. Durant can only hope that while he heals, Russell Westbrook continues to play MVP-caliber basketball. No one has been better on the floor this season than Westbrook. His statistics bear that out, even though so many lazy media types refuse to acknowledge the growth in Westbrook's game.
9. Spring training is going full speed in both Arizona and Florida. The New York Yankees are training in Tampa, and Alex Rodriguez, fresh off a one-year suspension, is competing to be the Yankees' designated hitter. Rodriguez released an awkward, hand-written apology last week, one that was received with a predictable amount of eye-rolling skepticism.
I'll admit my eyes rolled as well. Then I read J.R. Moehringer's story, "The Education of Alex Rodriguez" in ESPN The Magazine, and my opinion changed --- at least a little bit. I've included the link to the story at the bottom of this post. It's worth the read, regardless of your thoughts on Rodriguez or PEDs in baseball.
10. Sunday marked the 35th anniversary of the "Miracle on Ice," the United States' 4-3 win over the Soviet Union in the medal round of the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y.
I was 10. I remember watching the game at another family's house in Ruston, La. It was the heart of the Cold War, and even at my age, there was already a fear/hatred of the Soviets. I remember two days later going to early church so we could get home in time to see the gold medal game against Finland, one the American won, 4-2.
Thirty-five years later, the win over the Russians is widely considered the greatest upset in sports history. ESPN's acclaimed 30-for-30 series recently released a documentary about the game and its aftermath from the perspective of the Russian team. If you haven't seen it, it's well worth your time. Be forewarned, however: If you still hate the Russians Rocky IV style, the program will likely soften your stance a bit.
