As you hopefully read in Tuesday’s edition of The Commercial Appeal, John Calipari on Monday suspended sophomore center Kareem Cooper from the team.

The news wasn’t surprising. When Cooper missed Thursday’s practice — along with freshman Hashim Bailey — Calipari said they could be back Friday. But only Bailey came back Friday, and Cooper was gone all weekend.

Though Calipari didn’t talk about why he suspended Cooper, he did characterize it as “all-compassing.” A lot of other folks around the program have told me that there wasn’t necessarily one specific thing that led to the suspension.
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In the last couple of years, the SEC football race has been decided by the second week of November.

It may last a little longer this year. There are so many key games left, such as Arkansas at South Carolina, LSU at Tennessee, South Carolina at Florida, Tennessee at Arkansas, Georgia at Auburn.

Even crazier is the fact that the SEC could have as many as nine bowl-eligible teams. The last few years, the league hasn’t been able to fill all of its bowl spots.

This is the way I look at the league heading into the last month of the season, team-by-team:
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Hi Folks,

I’m going to try to use this blog platform to occasionally discuss the inner workings of the office and how things get done here at 495 Union Ave, third floor, southern territory. I’ll be happy to answer all questions you want to shoot my way.

One of our tasks today — besides putting the finishing touches on the Grizzlies special section (shameless plug department: this comes out in Wednesday’s paper) — was trying to figure out how to get to all the big prep football games Friday night. We started a heavy zoned-prep initiative this year, so that each of the five main zones — DeSoto County, Millington-Tipton, Bartlett-Cordova, Germantown-Collierville and the city of Memphis — had personalized prep football coverage on Friday nights. If you live in Bartlett, for instance, the feature game in your Sports section on Saturdays was different than the paper delivered in Millington or Olive Branch.

So getting all these important playoff games lined up for the various zones this week has been a challenge, one we’re still working on.

And for those of you looking for prep basketball, just as soon as we can get football to quiet down a bit, we’re already planning how we’re going to get everyone up to date for the state of the basketball season. The football-basketball overlap is a real circus!!!