Good news and bad news for people who love good news and bad news... or something: Okay, bad news first: Anthony Salter, the heavily recruited juco PG who had visited Iowa the weekend before last, will not be coming to Iowa. Tough shakes, but he was a 4-star prospect, so we're sure he went to a fine, storied program that... oh you have got to be kidding me:
The University of Hawai'i men's basketball team added yet another new recruit to its roster today.
Anthony Salter, a coveted point guard at Iowa Western Community College, said today he is committed to playing for the Rainbow Warriors next season.
"Why not Hawai'i?" Salter said. "It's beautiful here. What's not to like? The campus, the facilities, the people, the coaches, the players. I saw all of that and it just felt like a good fit."
Hawaii? Hawaii over Iowa? Listen. Fran McCaffery's been here for over a month, and he's had his full coaching staff in place for literally days. That's more than enough time to seal your reputation, and Frandom Task's legacy is that he can't land the big recruit. Thus, we must come to one inevitable conclusion: Iowa must fire Fran McCaffery at once. He's destroying this program!
But all is not lost, as Iowa did, technically, pick up a new recruit: Steven McCarty, a point guard from Detroit, committed to Iowa yesterday as a walk-on. The announcement was made (where else) on Devyn Marble's Twitter feed:
#iowa #hawkeyes follow my cuz @SteveD1Skills who will walkon at #iowa for basketball nxt season. Show em some love
Also, McCarty's got a highlight reel from a few games:
A few observations:
- No way is he 6'0", unless he's wearing Hasheem Thabeet's shorts.
- Even if he is 6'0" (he's not), he doesn't play that tall. His release on his jumper is extremely low, and we saw some shots that would get swatted back into McCarty's forehead against Big Ten competition.
That said, he plays disruptively low on defense, and his first instinct seems to be to press. While that would send Todd Lickliter into convulsions--perversely entertaining as that may be--it's probably something Frannie Mac can use, even if it's just in practice.
This is the second walk-on that the Iowa program has taken on recently--the other being former Hawkeye great Greg Stokes's kid--and odds are that McCaffery will use as many as he can get, just because there's no downside.
In fact, for as much as McCaffery has talked up returning the Iowa program to its traditions from the prior eras of success, we're actually surprised he hasn't said the two other words* that would make Iowa's middle-aged fanbase cream their khakis on command: "gray team." Dr. Tom's ubiquitous stable of bright-eyed walk-ons were as much a mainstay of his program as was the wheel offense late in games and the second-round NCAA loss.
But more than that, it represented program stability, that his scholarship players would always have five fresh bodies to scrimmage against, and that in the event of disaster, someone would be able to step in and contribute. Sure, Jason Bauer and Darryl Moore were exceptional cases, but so much the better, because they represented a best-case goal that wasn't altogether unreasonable for the rest of the walk-ons that came through the program. And having five to eight players of limited talent busting their butts in practice on their own dime--even if only in the selfish pursuit of some garbage-time tick--is quite the luxury, and one that we hope McCaffery invests in. It's worth noting that Alford famously did away with the gray team upon his arrival in Iowa City, and only rarely did his or Lickliter's teams look well-drilled. Maybe there's no causality there. And maybe there is. That's up for you, reader, to decide.
Hey speaking of Twitter: Tyler Sash is at @TSash and incoming LB James Morris is at (really) @darealmelgibson. They have one tweet total between the two of them, and considering the leash Ferentz apparently put on DJK's Twitter, we don't expect that total to rise much unless Sash stays more vanilla than KOK facing a MACrifice. Morris' South Park-inspired account, on the other hand, has probably already gotten him kicked out of the two-deeps until his junior year. We're kidding. Mostly.
Our Twitter accounts, on the other hand, are subject to no censorship at all from the Ferentz coaching staff, and the only trade-off is that we offer no insight to the lives of Iowa football players and we mainly tweet about Monday Night Raw and illegal pot drugs. Oh, and sometimes we swear too.
FOURTH AND GOAL SLANT ROUTEZ:
- The Rivalry, Esq. has begun their week-long profile of the Iowa football team. If they don't profile up-and-coming DT Luke Halstad, then they're just as superficial and uninteresting as the newsstand-spam college football preview magazines. We expect more.
- HS and I will be attending Blogs With Balls 3.0 in a few weeks in Chicago. We're not presenting or anything, but if you're also attending, let us know in the comments or over email or whatever.
- Bryan Bulaga apparently hit 14 home runs during batting practice a few days ago in Milwaukee. We saw this note on Friday, and we were going to write about it--but there was no video. So, whatever, onto the trash heap of bullcrap, right? Oh ho ho, no; it even made the local news here Sunday night, complete with... no video. Look, people. You can't run stories about feats of physical strength without video proof. In that case, RossWB bench pressed your mom yesterday. And your mom is like 600 pounds. 600 stinky, hairy, sweaty pounds.
- And finally, we see you, World Cup fans. It's a lazily kept secret that the editorial staff of BHGP are ardent soccer fans, and it's going to take a mountain of restraint not to flood this site with World Cup news. We so shall restrain, though, because sending people to BHGP for World Cup updates is like sending people to ESPN for updates on the latest Doha Round.
And yet, we are in love with this promotional video:
We'll blog about the games as much as circumstances allow us, and if that's not much, then that's all right. If you're able to watch, put those game threads in the FanPosts or FanShots, and we'll try to join in. And if you think soccer is for stupid people, just watch and learn.
*the first two magic words are, of course, "up tempo." We probably didn't need to tell you that.