Some were puzzled about all the chalk talk yesterday. What does "chalk" mean in the sports context? It's from horse racing. Back in the day, the bookies would write the odds on a chaklboard. As bets came in on the favorites, their odds would be decreased repeatedly leading to smudged chalk. Put another way, the horse with the odds in a cloud of chalk was the favorite. 

I got some things wrong about Utah State on Friday. Their fans are known as the HURD not the Herd. The HURD is not all Utah State fans, however; just the students who sit together in a huge portion of the arena at home games. The HURD come up with clever taunts that are distributed ahead of time; they are the ones who decided to start wearing rubber gloves. But what the hell is a hurd? The app just put a line under hurd meaning it’s misspelled. The official HURD web site doesn’t define it, ditto the Utah State Wikipedia entry. Google wasn’t much help either. I removed Utah State from the search and discovered that hurd is a derivative of herd, but typically meant someone who tends livestock (in Old English). Utah State is an ag school, so that tracks. That was a journey! Anyway, they are a passionate bunch who travelled to San Diego en mass for the game today against the desert wildcats of Arizona.

BYU and the University of Utah view Utah State dismissively as little brother. BYU just spent $6 million on a single player and couldn’t win a tournament game. Utah hasn’t made the tournament at all since 2016. Utah State has gone dancing the last four years straight (4 of the last 5).

This level of success was achieved despite a continual coaching carrousel (Craig Smith left for Utah, Ryan Odom moved on to VCU, Danny Sprinkle departed for Washington), roster turnover (Great Osborn left for Washington, Steven Ashworth to Creighton) and no big donors like BYU and Utah and most everyone else. The Aggies spent a modest $2.4 million on the current roster. Doesn’t matter. They just keep winning.

Current coach Jerrod Calhoun gets it. Let’s say the quiet part out loud. Utah State would prefer a coach who worships one religion in particular. Calhoun has gone out of his way to befriend local bishops, convincing them that he shares their values if not their beliefs. Calhoun himself is the second largest donor to the basketball program, at $150,000. That’s putting your money where your mouth is. I don’t think you’ll find the name of Tommy Lloyd on the Arizona donor list.

Rumors of interest in Calhoun from Cincinnati have already morphed into the possibility of moving on to the Kansas State job. The ceiling may be higher still. Chances are Jerrod Calhoun has a new job by the end of the week, and more power to him. Still, I bet he’ll miss his experience in Logan.

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New Miami coach Jai Lucas and the Kentucky fan base have some history, even though Lucas has barely been to Lexington. [Editor's Note: One sentence into this post and I'm about to go on a tangent. This story will get back to Jai, I promise. Back to the Notes.] If you've spent any time around me at all, I've probably bored you with my Matt Jones fanboydom. In 2007 blogs were not really a thing. Fans swapped stories on message boards, where Jones was a frequent poster. Back then, he was a recent graduate of Duke law school (irony alert) practicing his trade at a small firm in Louisville. What he really wanted to do was host a sports radio show. Really. He set up a web site, kentuckysportsradio.com, even though there was no radio show. He started directing posters on the Cat's Pause message board to his web site, where he established what would be come to be called a blog. Why did anyone care? Because Jones knew things. Because he knew the recruits (Kentucky fans are obsessed with recruiting). In the summer, when the legecy media were vacationing in the Florida panhandle, Jones as at the summer all-star basketball leagues. Jones is a somewhat goofy 6'4" white dude with a serious Eastern Kentucky accent. Somehow, he got to know some of the best prep players in the country well enough to get their phone numbers. When the local papers would publish a recruiting scoop (based on rumors), Jones would give the player a ring. He then quoted them on his blog, oftentimes contradicting the written reports. The local sports writers just loved that.

The blog (now knows simply as KSR) gained more widespread note with the recruitment of Patrick Patterson and Jai Lucas. They were rumored to be a package deal, although that ended up not being the case. Kentucky was at a low point, in a transition between coaches Tubby Smith and Bill Gillispie. Kentucky fans were convinced that Patterson and Lucas would lead their team back to the promised land. It became a mantra in the bluebrass: heard anything about pattersonandlucas? Guess who had their phone numbers? To make a long story short, Patterson ended up a UK and Lucas went to Florida. Patterson was an All-American his freshman year. Lucas was far less successful (he's only 5'10") and ended up transferring to Texas. In 2020, John Calipari hired Lucas to be his lead recruiter. He soon established himself as one of the best, second only to Duke's assistant John Scheyer. When Scheyer took over the Duke program, he immediately hired Lucas as his head of recruiting,

Braden Smith is college basketball’s new assist king.

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