Porter plays up big for Oregon
The biggest freshman debut of the season will come when 7-foot-1 Greg Oden plays his first game at Ohio State come early January, if not before, after recovering from wrist surgery.
One of the littlest freshmen in the country already has made his mark.
Tajuan Porter, Oregon’s 5-6 starting point guard, is the Ducks’ leading scorer after five games, highlighted by a 38-point performance against Portland State in which he made a school-record 10 three-point baskets.
Porter hasn’t been quite as spectacular since opening with scoring totals of 27, 28 and 38 points. But after scoring 12 points in Oregon’s easy victory over UC Irvine, he had 15 in the Ducks’ overtime victory over Rice on Monday -- including three three-pointers in the final 1 1/2 minutes of regulation.
“When a guy this size is able to do what he does, you have to call him a special, unique player,” Oregon Coach Ernie Kent said.
People are going to think of former Washington guard Nate Robinson.
But Robinson, listed at 5-9 with the New York Knicks, is a different sort of player -- and a good bit taller.
“Nate was a strong, powerful player. This kid is a pure point guard and pure shooter,” Kent said. “Nate’s a big-time athlete. Tajuan is not a big-time athlete who is going to throw down alley-oops. This kid was born to play point guard.”
Porter might have been born to play the point, but he used to try anything to grow.
“My uncle and my grandfather told me to stretch by hanging from a pole. They said if I did that for a minute every day, I’d grow within the next couple of days,” Porter said. “Nothing.”
He was lightly recruited out of Detroit Renaissance High, where he was a teammate of Oregon junior Malik Hairston.
It helped Kent to hear what Hairston -- who hasn’t played during Oregon’s 5-0 start as he recovers from a groin injury -- had to say about Porter, a first-team all-state player who helped Renaissance to a four-season record of 93-10 and state championships in 2004 and 2006.
After seeing Porter play against the top players in the nation during summer basketball, Kent said he was no longer worried about Porter’s height.
“Why have a 6-5 point guard who can’t shoot and is not effective?” he said.
Defense might well be the challenge for Porter during the Pacific 10 Conference season.
“At that size, you’ve got to be a pest,” Kent said, adding that he is willing to make adjustments on the other end because Porter is so effective running the offense and brings intangibles to the game.
“He has an infectious and contagious way about him that affects the other players on the floor,” Kent said.
Still, expect some rough spots.
“I don’t think he’ll keep playing this way night in and night out. There are going to be some down games,” Kent said.
Porter, averaging 24 points and shooting 54% from three-point range -- 26 of 48 -- has another opportunity to make an impression in the Ducks’ next game, Nov. 29, when they play at No. 14-ranked Georgetown.
“I’m not trying to get taller now,” Porter said. “I can do this at this height.”
A change of seasons?
Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo finally shot down the bizarre talk he might become the Spartans’ next football coach, but not without giving the rumors some credence with comments in the Detroit News.
If someone asked if he’d be interested, “I would have to say no, but I’d probably deep down have to say yeah, I would,” Izzo said.
“Would I leave Michigan State basketball for football right now? Nah, I’ve got some business I want to finish.”
Earlier, Izzo tried to entice former Detroit Lions coach Steve Mariucci, a boyhood friend, to Michigan State. Now he says that won’t happen.
The idea that a basketball coach could make the jump to head football coach in the Big Ten Conference without a considerable adjustment period is mind-boggling, even if Izzo tries to teach his basketball players to rebound like defensive linemen might.
Izzo said he turned down a chance to be an assistant coach for the now-defunct football program at Cal State Fullerton in the early 1980s, when Mariucci was an assistant there.
This time, he granted the football rumors have been “somewhat embarrassing,” but also said, “I’ve been honored that my name would even be brought up.”
Heavy heart
Expect to see the difficult days Alabama center Jermareo Davidson has faced to be played prominently among the heart-tugging stories of the NCAA tournament.
Davidson was a passenger in a recent car accident in which his girlfriend, Alabama student Brandy Nicole Murphy, was killed. They were on a trip to Atlanta visiting his brother, who was hospitalized after a shooting the previous week.
When the Alabama team left for the Paradise Jam tournament in the Virgin Islands, Davidson remained behind to attend the funeral of Murphy, the driver in the accident.
He rejoined the team after sitting out one game, and had double-doubles in two tournament games for the No. 8 Crimson Tide, including the title game against Xavier.
“I was looking forward to getting back to my team, just getting back in the rhythm of everything,” said Davidson, who told reporters he would dedicate his career to his girlfriend and brother. “I learned it can be over at any time.”
United front
As if anyone needed more evidence that colleges and the NCAA have legal difficulty enforcing rules and penalties against coaches and athletes -- particularly after they’re gone -- consider the ongoing case at Ohio State.
The school, fighting a judge’s ruling earlier this year that Ohio State must pay former coach Jim O’Brien $2.4 million even though he was fired for giving $6,000 to a recruit, received support from some of its competitors.
Eighteen universities -- USC among them -- along with the Big Ten, Pacific 10 and Big 12 conferences, signed a brief filed in state appeals court arguing that the Ohio Court of Claims’ ruling limits their ability to comply with NCAA rules and discipline employees who violate them.
“NCAA member institutions must now choose between taking meaningful action to correct NCAA rules violations and avoid further violations, and avoiding contract damages to a coach who has shown a blatant disregard for the best interests of the institution,” the brief argues.
Judge Joseph Clark said the university had to pay O’Brien -- even though he broke NCAA rules by giving money to Serbian prospect Aleksandar Radojevic, who never played for the school -- because it did not follow the terms of O’Brien’s contract when it fired him in 2004.
Pac-10 spokesman Jim Muldoon said the conference was “requested to join in an amicus brief in support of Ohio State’s position in this case and agreed to do so.”
All the Big Ten schools agreed to the request, and Arizona, Arizona State and Stanford added their names from the Pac-10, along with USC. A UCLA spokesman said neither Athletic Director Dan Guerrero nor a university counsel was approached about the brief.
The bottom line is that, again and again, schools are often left holding the bag when rules are broken. Ohio State was put on probation and ordered to repay hundreds of thousands in NCAA tournament earnings because of violations during the O’Brien era. As usual, the coaches and athletes move on.
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The Associated Press contributed to this report.