After a solid start in the Stren Series event on Lake of the Ozarks Wednesday, Bartlett angler Lloyd Pickett, Jr., caught just two fish Thursday and slipped to 43rd place.

With a two-day total of 19-15, he’s nearly 16 pounds behind Oklahoma angler Jason Christie, who leads the event with 36-10.

I don’t envy the guys who fish these major four-day bass tournaments. It’s hard enough to catch a good string of bass one day. To catch a good string four days in a row, is just ridiculously tough.

Hopefully, Lloyd can rebound Friday.

Though coach John Calipari openly discussed the possibility of his new relationship with the Chinese Basketball Association eventually repeating benefits in recruiting, he was far from certain it would happen.

Don’t be fooled. Memphis will have a Chinese player on its roster, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens within three years. Keep in mind, the coach who is staying in Memphis all year long as an intern is a junior national team coach, meaning someone who will go back to China and coach some of the best teenage players in the country. One of the biggest hurdles to recruiting a player from China is getting government approval, as evidenced by the hassles involved in getting Yao Ming and Yi Jianlian into the NBA. Just a guess here, but those issues probably get solved pretty quickly if Calipari and the University of Memphis already have a relationship with the government and basketball federation. Moreover, if the Chinese government thinks it’s a good thing for some of its top players to play college basketball in the United States, you can bet it’ll happen.

A couple other notes:

– The Tigers held a two-hour workout Thursday run by assistants Derek Kellogg, John Robic and Chuck Martin. The NCAA lets coaches have two hours a week with their players before the official start of practice. It was a fairly routine workout, mainly just re-acquainting playes with drills.

– Fairly big news in the recruiting world today, as power forward Terrence Jennings de-committed from Maryland. Jennings is an Amare Stoudemire-type athlete who the Tigers recruited earlier this summer, and you can bet that Memphis will try to get back into the race now that Jennings has re-opened his recruitment.

So what did you make of University of Memphis football coach Tommy West’s response to the opening of an on-campus stadium at Central Florida?

Throughout the debate the past few months on the merits of an on-campus stadium at the U of M, West has given the same response when asked. He’s said whether or not the school has an on-campus facility will not hinder his dreams for the program winning Conference USA titles and earning a BCS bowl invitation.

But when asked this week — the week the Tigers play at Central Florida — he tweaked his response. In Thursday’s paper, West responded with these carefully chosen words followed by a slightly raised eyebrow: “Let’s face it, you get out of it what you put into it. If you didn’t, everyone would be a big-time football program. But you’ve got to be willing to put into it what you (want) out of it. Central Florida is in a great location like I think we are. I think they have a great city. I think we have a great city. I think they are putting a lot of money into (their) program . . . we’ll see what happens.”

The inference? I believe it was `We’ll see what happens here.’

And what should happen? It’s a continued march toward exhausting every means possible to make an on-campus stadium a reality.

To put $20 million toward a short-term renovation of Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium doesn’t make sense. To spend more than $200 million to construct a new stadium at the Fairgrounds doesn’t make sense either, especially when an on-campus facility, according to the estimates of Tiger booster and on-campus stadium proponent Harold Byrd, would cost less than $100 million.

THE BIG STORY

Is South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier setting another trap like he did against Georgia? Spurrier’s team is a 16-point underdog at No. 2 LSU on Saturday, and Spurrier acknowledges that.

“We don’t have to beat LSU to still be in contention,” Spurrier said at press luncheon on Tuesday. “And I told our guys that. We’re not going to go down there and, if we get beat, hang our heads. There’s a lot of ball left.”

On Wednesday a reporter from a South Carolina fan magazine on the Southeastern Conference teleconference told Spurrier that that was an uncharacteristic comment for him.

“Well, I haven’t been quite this big an underdog going somewhere,” Spurrier said. “I don’t want our guys to go down there with false belief that, you know, we got a great chance to win this game. In other words, sometimes you’ve got to be realistic, and I always like to tell our team if we’ve got a chance to win the game, I want to be honest with them. And if something happens that it doesn’t work out, we’ve got Mississippi State, we’ve got Kentucky, we’ve got Vanderbilt. We’ve got a whole bunch of teams coming up that we match up pretty evenly with if you know what I mean.

“So you always coach one game at a time, but in the back of your mind you just sort of mentally got to say, ‘We’re not going to be devastated if it doesn’t work out.’ And now on the other side, we hope the ball bounces our way and we get in the type of game that maybe comes down to a field goal here or there. Maybe I didn’t say it the right way, but our guys will come down there ready to compete. OK, just being a little realistic with our guys.”

Carolina running back Cory Boyd has seen this Spurrier act before.

“He said some of the same things going into the Georgia game,” said Boyd, who gained 76 yards on 14 carries in a 16-12 upset of the then-No. 12 Bulldogs in Athens, Ga. “He didn’t think we performed very well in our first game so he started saying things like we didn’t have a team good enough to beat Georgia. I think he wants to get us riled up for the game.”

“Everybody always thinks we’re a big underdog. It doesn’t take much to rile us up — just look at TV and everybody says we’re not that good. The coaches saying it is just more icing on the cake.”

“We’re not thinking about losing. A coach is always going to do some kind of a mind trick to get you going. It’s up to us as leaders to go check the rest of the team after he says that. Then we’ll see what kind of leadership we have. That’s what he’s doing. He’s trying to get us riled up to see what kind of team we have.”

A look at the league: Read the rest of this entry »

I just got home after a long drive from Birmingham to Memphis and noticed that Lloyd Pickett, Jr. of Bartlett had a good opening round in the Stren Series event on Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks.

He caught five bass that weighed 15 pounds, 7 ounces - good enough for sixth place.

The tournament continues Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Keep it up, Lloyd.