Alexander, Diallo...Preston?
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Is Self facing a run of bad luck with reputed OAD inside players?
Or are apparent recruiting asymmetries forcing Self to gamble on signing certain OADs that are riskier than some others?
Given the failure of Alexander and Diallo to excel in the NBA, so far, it seems unlikely that Self’s coaching is the cause of the unexpectedly modest performances of these players at KU.
What gives?
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Both were players with high athletic ability but with very low basketball IQ. They can dominate in HS but Division I is a different beast with most players being superior athletes.
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JB, come join us on Slack!
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@wissox Kind of defeats the purpose of this site to have to sign up for and log into another one…
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Slack runs very smoothly. Not the end of the world to do game chats there. Come on and try!
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Will do next game. Tonight I’m stuck in a social engagement and cheating a little here
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@jaybate-1-0 whats with the negativity today? Have a better day tomorrow buddy.
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Preston’s career is trending similar to Bragg, another McD 4 spot player who can’t seem to stay away from trouble, not a good sign.
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we really shouldn’t be surprised about Preston. He came in with issues and he still has them.
Another season, another big man issue
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kjayhawks said:
@jaybate-1-0 whats with the negativity today? Have a better day tomorrow buddy.
Will do and back to ya.
Rock Chalk!
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SO - -Billy tweeted post game last night I see. - -" Seeing Everyone’s opinion on my life when they don’t even know me - - IS COMICAL. - - I love it lol."
Oh ok, so this is Comical to you is it Billy? - -you think this is funny huh? - No policer report was found on this either? - -WTF ? - Why is it I’m not laughing? - - please enlighten me. - - -ROCK CHALK ALL DAY LONG BABY
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One car non injury accident, lets say he backed into a tree or something similar there is no mention of other property being damaged. Been there done that, never bothered with calling the police. If no property is damaged other than my car i just file a report with insurance if it isn’t something I can fix myself. Started doing this after an officer asked me why I called as there was really no reason for him to be there. Now I am talking minor dents and scraps, not wrapping it around a tree! I kinda sounds like Billy was responsible and reported a minor incident to coach and then it blew up.
I kinda do see Billy’s point there has been some wild comments basically assuming the car is something he’s been given. The situation is not comical, but some of the comments are pretty out there, particularly if all is good and KU is just being paranoid in light of current events. I’m playing wait an see on this one as it is understandable that any little thing that crops up is going to be over examined as long as the FBI is still investigating.
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@kubie the details are out. He hit a curb. I don’t have a link handy but not hard to search for.
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@BShark Ah, thanks I’ve had a long day and haven’t had much search time. Did he break the curb or just the car?
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Wasn’t a big deal from the sound of it, very minor damage.
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Minor tire damage
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@Kubie The announcement yesterday, plus holding him out indefinitely to investigate the “financials”, invited speculation.
The accident may have been minor, but he was not held out because of the accident. He was held out due to fear he had received impermissible benefits. And that is not minor.
No one that I saw speculated that it was about the accident, so, no, his being amused IS out of place.
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@jaybate-1.0 Personally I think with Preston, its just been some dumb luck with regard to the car accident. I don’t know all the details but if Coach Self said everything is gonna be fine then I believe him. I think this stuff with Preston will go under the bridge and get forgotten about.
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Fingers crossed.
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Keen appraisal.
Deep dark cloud appearing in timely correlation with game in gambler’s Gotham with UK Defiledcats—the apparent darlings of the D1 Deep State.
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Billy, I am not amused at your “comical” accusations. Time now to get your act together and fulfill the hoops promise which surrounded your recruiting and arrival at KU. Personally, I am much more interested in you as a Jayhawk basketball player than as a private person with a growing set of problems which prevent your representing this fine program on game nights. You are in command of your own destiny. Please give your fans a break and actually show up to play in the next game.
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With Preston, I don’t recall there being “financial questions” regarding another player’s vehicle in the Bill Self era at least. Certainly not missing a game. Following missing a game for missing curfew and missing class. I agree with @REHawk. Actually show up and play, since that is what you are getting compensated for (full scholarship, etc).
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Billy I’m sure wants to play. He wants to show up. Its now the University that is stepping in and questioning his status.
Why is he driving a newer model Dodge Charger? If it was simple I’m sure this would have been cleared up Tuesday. 2 days have passed, no resolution. There’s obviously more to this for better or worse. Typical, typical, typical
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Lester Earl drove a very nice suv. I can’t remember which school bought it for him. I don’t recall any players getting in trouble for cars at KU though.
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Fwiw Billy’s mom is fairly well off. Which I guess shouldn’t really be a surprise given how he moved across the country to different high schools.
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BShark said:
Fwiw Billy’s mom is fairly well off. Which I guess shouldn’t really be a surprise given how he moved across the country to different high schools.
that’s important to note in regards to the car. It just seems weird that this is holding him up
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this could also be KU being extremely tight about anything right now because of the FBI.
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BeddieKU23 said:
this could also be KU being extremely tight about anything right now because of the FBI.
I would say this has to be some of it. Extra caution.
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@dylans As I recall, there were major rumors about Wilt. @jaybate-1-0 tends to know those things about KU’s legends.
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dylans said:
Lester Earl drove a very nice suv. I can’t remember which school bought it for him. I don’t recall any players getting in trouble for cars at KU though.
Didn’t Jeff Hawkins have a fender-bender in a drive-thru once? Not quite the same scenario as Preston’s, but that could be deemed “car trouble”, I suppose.
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I was thinking Jeff graves had a really nice black SUV. Cadillac Escalade?
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I have the little man on one shoulder telling me these same fears.
Fortunately, I have the other little man on my other shoulder keeping it positive about Billy. This is backed up with quite a bit of knowledge coming from people close to the situation. From what I have heard and read, we don’t have anything to worry about. This is all about the compliance office making sure Billy’s car is “legit.”
Let’s all feel good about our compliance department. With all the cr@p going on in the D1 world, feel good that we have perhaps the best compliance department in college and from this current situation with Billy, we now know that our compliance department takes priority over everything! Like it should be!
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@mayjay et al
To talk about Wilt’s time you have to index expectations and dollars. A $60k Corvette today ranged from $2.5-4K in the 50s to early 60s. Even by the late 60s, as an ordinary student, I could pay for half my tuition, books, room and board for two semesters making $2.08/hr on a union summer job for only 2.5 months with some OT. 15 years before me, in Wilt’s time, similar wages would likely have been $1.25-1.50/hr. Doesn’t sound like much, but…
In that era, a union wage was often able to sustain a family of four with Mom staying at home in a small, blue collar neighborhood house with two bedrooms, 1 bath, and one new car and maybe one old one, while still saving for college and retirement, if the parents were thrifty. Kids borrowed the parents cars, or drove wrecks.
My point here is things could be made easily affordable by an alum giving a player a real summer job that he only clocked into and out of without actually doing the job. The rest of the time he worked out, swam, or goofed. This form of support was fairly standard for all football and basketball players From the 50s to the 70s at all the schools I ever heard of. This support was further supplemented by then significant cash sums (distributed creatively) that seem paltry for today but which had considerable purchasing power.
To put this in perspective, at the Big Eight Christmas tournament in the mid 1960s one always saw the teams in street clothes hanging around the concourse, when not playing. The players were always better dressed than most of the fans. The players wore cashmere over coats and top quality hats and Florscheim and Nunn Bush and Allen Edmonds shell cordovan shoes that were top quality in those days. Jo Jo White was the handsomest and snappiest dresser I ever saw in those days and he was from a modest St. Louis background.
I don’t have first hand knowledge of cars but it was believed by many that most players got preferred deals on leases, or loans on new or used cars from local dealer/boosters. Every athlete I ever recall could always afford a good late model Chevelle or GTO or Charger no matter how poor of a background he came from, because of the summer job income plus the willingness of boosters to accept the credit risk of a player in a way they likely would not have on an ordinary student. This was envied by regular students but never thought scandalous that I recall.
Before my time, In the 1950s, and back east, top high school players played in the Borscht Belt hotel summer leagues and reputedly made the money necessary to “afford” travel and clothing for recruiting trips AND cars. They also reputedly actually did scutt work around the hotels for pay, when they weren’t balling, talking to NBA coaches, agents, or gamblers. Wilt wrote about this time in his life in one of his books. The better players likely got the better jobs and worked less. There is a famous picture of Wilt and Red Auerbach at one of the hotels. Red reputedly mentored Wilt some during those summer leagues, but I reckon Red was scouting him both if one day he signed him, and if one day he had to coach against him. Doubt much money changed hands between coaches and players, but I suspect lots of gifts from agents and gamblers were common.
I’ve only heard rumors about Wilt at KU. My dad said in those days it was discretely assumed most players got cash gifts from alumni. But the cash was not supposed to make them independently wealthy or pave the way to a shoe contract. It was just supposed to enable the guys to have snappy cars, flashy coats, pay for travel and dates, take some ski trips and cover party expenses.
Did Wilt get more than that? Well, I reckon some more, but probably not a lot. He likely got what he would have gotten at any school not run by gamblers.
IMHO Wilt would have gotten a lot more at a school largely run by numbers racketeers.
You have to understand the different kinds of booster groups in that era.
KU sports was built largely by James Naismith and Allen schmoozing with boosters in Lawrence and KC. They are rarely described this way, but my reading suggests that the boosters came to Naismith and said if we work this amateur athletic stuff right, we can turn these games into huge money makers for the towns where the games and tourneys are held. And Naismith saw it as a way to find physical education and it’s infrastructure. Hoteliers and restaurateurs and bar owners and strip club/whore house operators, plus cab companies, and the railroads all saw sporting events as a clean, fun, popular way to spike their revenues that had several multiplier effects. Construction companies got work for arenas, stadia, and hotels. And the sports infrastructure lead to more events—boat shows, car shows, concerts etc. it all helped put a place on the map. And it helped your university and it helped the poor kids getting a shot at degrees by playing sports.
This of course lead inexorably Into involvement with machine politics and state politics and with the New Deal federal politics.
KU cannot give up football, because of the game weekend revenues generated for Lawrence. Period. Losing is profitable. Winning is more so. TV Revenue is sweet for the Chancellor, but the political support for KU football of football game day revenues is really long. But I digress.
Early in KU sports Kansas City was a Pendergast machine town backed silently by the Mellons of Pittsburgh, PA, needing to control Kansas to ensure SE Kansas coal to crack Oklahoma crude in the Mellon’s own personal state—Oklahoma. The Mellons protected KC and Kansas, and enabled KU by connecting it to Rhodes Scholarships (and so the Round Table), and Western Missouri from being overrun by the Rockefeller/Morgan folks and by Jewish and Italian mafias back east for quite awhile. A different, more provincial and local underworld flourished supplying bootleg booze to “the territories.” But by the time of FDR in the 1930s, while he first built his base on the big city machine politicians including Boss Pendergast, in control of the KC Democratic Party, FDR then later began expediently clearing his wake of the machine politicians—a political sacrifice to satisfy the increasingly stronger Jewish and Italian mafias’ desires to expand westward and to satisfy the central banker owners that enabled the eastern mafias. FDR had only briefly been able to hold off the central bankers and their eastern mafias with his unholy alliance of city machines that were 19th century legacy holdovers in the by then Anglo-American central bank centric 20th Century. And lord knows the Roosevelt’s had been no angels themselves with their Dutch and German ties.
In this context, KU sports were buffeted by this migration of power and saw their booster base evolve away from local promoters to promoters like KC banks (locally owned but increasingly creatures of central bank centrism and also of the central bank owners’ Anglo-American oil refining oligopoly dynamics. Banks and Big oil players were becoming the heart of KU boosterism even by Wilt’s time, though the good old boys in Lawrence still hustled and promoted too. .
This second and transitional phase of KU sports was what the Phenom from Phillie walked into as a young man to play for the game’s greatest non gambling assisted coach—Phog Allen. The Mellons by Wilt’s time had peeked in national oligarchic power and were in some eclipse by the Rockefeller-Morgan and Harriman folks for myriad unsightly reasons tracking back to Andrew’s dealings as SecWar in WWI. But their empire still included Pennsylvania, where Wilt grew up, Kansas, where Wilt chose to play, Western Missouri and Oklahoma, as of the late 1950s.
Wilt came to a place grounded in a boosterism different from Rockefeller-Morgan and Harriman regions of the country. It’s not that there was no corruption. Kansas has had plenty of corruption. But it was a different scale and type and descended from a different private oligarchy.
Things were done differently in Pennsylvania than the New York-Ohio axis of oligarchy did them.
Did wilt get perks? I suspect so. Muck raking books on sports make clear all schools committed to cultivating big game day revenues paid players.
Was Wilt owned by the numbers racketeers that haunted and at times appeared to control college basketball in so many other regions? I doubt it. He and his family and his mentors, like Phog Allen and Red Auerbach has wised him up to how much he stood to make if he kept their hooks out of him.
I have always argued KU has apparently been the lepper with the most fingers, not a saint.
The game was born in the YMCA. But shortly after it began to be a creature of the promoters that in the early days promoted prize fighting, theater, vice and gambling. Naismith fought to retrieve some part of the game into a more sheltered part of the economy—university amateurism. The only Eden for basketball was in Naismith’s mind, when he first thought of it. From the moment the boys tried playing it, fighting broke out and rules had to be revised. Shortly the promoters and gamblers took it over. Fortunately Naismith and some other good men shepherded part of it in another direction. But outside Eden life is a dog fight between those that love a thing and those that wish to debase it just to make a little more money. There is never a decisive winner, or loser, except when the good guys give up.
Rock Chalk!!!
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@jaybate-1.0 Well, I knew I could count on you! Excellent history lesson!
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@jaybate-1-0 To add to your review of Wilt during his tenure at KU from '55 to '58 , I witnessed much of that time. As a graduate of Topeka High School in 1958, I had the opportunity to be at his first varsity game vs. Northwestern when he scored his career high of 52 points, his NCAA championship game against North Carolina at the old municipal auditorium in Kansas City and numerous other games during that time frame. Additionally, during his off time, he was frequently in Topeka at various locations of “extracurricular activity”. During his last two years at KU, he drove a new Cadillac Eldorado convertible. I’m sure he had a great summer job!!
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Awesome recall!!!
Thanks for being a little older than me and telling youngsters how it was.
Rock Chalk!
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@jhawknc1 Eldorado convertible was probably the vehicle wilt would fit in
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No change in prestons status after over 2 days. Yeah this isn’t good
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I don’t expect Preston to play an actual game in a KU uniform. Ever.
Silvio is required now.
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@BShark That’s what I’m thinking. Wow… talk about no depth…
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The car being registered in Florida is a big concern.
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Uggggggggggggggggggggggggggh
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Assuming Billy’s mother bought the car for him, the financing info is in her hands. It will take time to get that to KU, verify she has adequate income and (I’ll bet) search her financial records to make certain no one fronted the money or inappropriately co-signed a note. This all takes time.
Anyone know what year/make/model he was driving?
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Heard a rumor that he is done for the year and there will be an announcement on it before tomorrow’s game.
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@Gorilla72 yes what type of car was it? We know now it was registered in Florida. I’m a little worried it could be cliff 2.0.
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@BShark from a friend?
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@Crimsonorblue22 Seems to be circulating, have heard it from more than one person. I think there is validity to it unfortunately.
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Getting Cunliffe after the ASU game is even bigger now, really just need another remotely playable guy. Then best hope it works out with Silvio (which it should).
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@BShark so when Self says he expects him to be cleared sooner than later, he is lying?
