When wishful thinking is combined with exceptionally vague reporting, the imagination can run wild.

And so it was on Thursday, when the city of Memphis and blogs nationwide were buzzing about Fox 13’s Wednesday night newscast claiming that Memphis was in talks with the Big East about joining the mega-conference.

Immediately, the Commercial Appeal called athletic director R.C. Johnson and Big East officials for the standard denials. Meanwhile, the mere idea of a move was enough to light up message boards and talk radio shows, trying to fill the vast empty spaces left by Fox’s report. How would such a move happen? When would it occur? Those are just two of the many questions that were conveniently left unanswered.

Based on numerous conversations over the course of many weeks, I will offer the following:

Do I think there is merit to the idea that powerful forces representing the interests of Memphis have made overtures to the Big East? Absolutely. In fact, that notion isn’t very new. This is a passage from a story I wrote last March — a somewhat controversial story in Conference USA circles on the day the 2007 league basketball tournament began.

While the Tigers have indeed blossomed into a national power the past two years, the biggest concern among those close to the program is whether that could continue in C-USA should Calipari leave. Calipari nearly took the North Carolina State job last spring and will likely continue to be hotly pursued by major programs that have openings in the future.

“You’ve got Tennessee and Ole Miss, so you wouldn’t think they’d want Memphis in the Southeastern Conference. You hear some about whether Arkansas is leaving or not. You hear a lot of rumors from time to time. Obviously, we’d never be in the Big Ten, but they only have 11 teams and would probably like a 12th, so there are things you could see out there starting a sort of chain reaction.”

In August, my colleague Geoff Calkins reinforced that idea:

But if (R.C.) Johnson is smart, he’ll call (Dave) Bronczek or FedEx CFO Alan Graf before the week is out. The conversation should go something like this.

“I have told both Shirley (Raines) and R.C. — who need to lead this effort — that FedEx thinks we should do something more formal,” he said. “We would be ready and willing to be involved.”

So, in other words, I (and well-connected sources I speak with regularly) have no doubt that some of this has taken place.

But the devil’s in the details.

At this point — at least until there’s some evidence that the entire college sports landscape is about to change — it’s hard to see these supposed conversations as anything more than jockeying for position.

Given the Big East’s current configuration — 8 for football, 16 for basketball — there simply isn’t room for a Memphis all-sports membership unless somebody like Rutgers, Syracuse or Notre Dame leaves for the Big 10 or the Big East is getting ready to split up into a 9-team or 12-team all-sports conference. And if that’s about to happen, Fox 13 is way, way, way, way, way out in front on the nation’s biggest college sports story of the last couple years and doesn’t even know it. And even at that, it’s practically impossible for the conferences to start the revolving door until 2010.

Here’s what Memphis fans should be focused on right now. Given what happened in the last round of conference realignment — the perception among people that matter is that Memphis didn’t necessarily put it’s best foot forward in its argument to get into the Big East — I have no doubt that the school is going to be extremely well-prepared the next time.

The general speculation is that there will be a comprehensive push, once the sands begin to shift, which would probably include the Liberty Bowl and a major FedEx sponsorship package. Until then, there’s not much to do but wait for the dominoes to start falling.

One thing I’ve learned in all my years as an outdoors writer is that you can’t go wrong writing about snakes.

Whether people love them or hate them, everyone seems to be fascinated by them - and for that reason, stories like the one I published May 11 are always well-read.

Personally, I hate snakes - and I have for a very long time.

I know they’re good for the ecosystem, and they play a positive role for the environment. But I get shaky at the mere thought of snakes because of several incidents that took place when I was a child.

When I was seven or eight years old, my grandfather used to let me swim in the Cahaba River that flows through the heart of Birmingham, Ala. We also did some trotline fishing for catfish on the river, and one night he put out a minnow trap to catch small fish for catfish bait in the same spot where I had always swam.

When we came back the next morning, the trap was filled with small bluegill. But it was also holding a giant banded water snake.

The snake had swam into the trap and swallowed one of the bluegill whole. But with the big lump in its mid-section, it couldn’t get back out of the trap and it drowned.

Needless to say, that was the last time I swam in that spot - and that incident was the source of many snake-related nightmares.

A few years laters when I was about 10 or 12, I went blackberry picking with my grandfather. Snakes were a common occurrence on blackberry-picking trips because they like to sit near the bushes and catch birds that come to eat the berries.

On our way to the blackberry bushes one day, we encountered a snake so big that it stretched completely across the dirt road we were riding on. It had to be at least 10 to 12 feet long, and I’ll always believe it was someone’s pet python or boa constrictor that they had just released into the woods.

My grandfather ran over it with his Volkswagen, and the snake didn’t even slow down. When we rolled over the giant reptile, it was like rolling over a concrete speed bump. But the snake kept going. It crossed the road, crawled into the woods and disappeared. Even four tires and the weight of a car weren’t enough to stop it.

I demanded that my grandfather take me home right then - and now, more than 20 years later, I never take a bite of blackberry cobbler without thinking of the incident.

Like I said, I know snakes serve a purpose. I would never kill one just for the sake of killing it.

But every time I see one, I get chills.

Even as a seasoned outdoorsman, they are one of my greatest fears.

They have been for a long time - and they probably always will be.

Hey folks,

Sorry I’ve been off the blog for a while. But I had some surgery in late April, and the recovery was a bit tougher than I expected.

Anyway, I’m back near full strength now, and I wanted to update you on a couple of things.

Since my May 4 story on tilapia, I’ve gotten a lot of calls from people wondering where they can find these truly fascinating fish. The company I mentioned in the story, Southeastern Pond Management, can be reached at (888) 830-POND.

I haven’t heard about any public stockings of tilapia in Arkansas or Tennessee yet. But when I do, I will certainly publish an update.

Meanwhile, the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission did recently stock 180,000 pounds of other fish species into public lakes around the state.

Courtesy of the AGFC, here’s a complete breakdown of the species they stocked:
Read the rest of this entry »

Orlando Antigua, an assistant coach at Pittsburgh, is highly likely to be named to the University of Memphis staff within the next several days, according to various sources close to the situation.

Antigua will essentially take the place of Chuck Martin, who left last month to become head coach at Marist. Like Martin, Antigua grew up in The Bronx. He is a native of the Dominican Republic. He’ll join Josh Pastner and John Robic on John Calipari’s revamped bench.

Antigua played at Pittsburgh from 1991-95 and until 2002 was a member of the Harlem Globetrotters. Assuming his hiring goes through as expected, he’ll serve mainly in a recruiting role with the Tigers, especially in New York, where Martin had made inroads with some of the top players in the area.

With the hiring of Antigua, Calipari will have pulled in assistants from Pittsburgh and Arizona, a pair of major-conference programs.

There are a lot of O.J. Mayo’s in college basketball. There are a lot of Ronald Guillory’s, too. And because it’s an arrangement that benefits everybody — including the player, his handlers, agents, college basketball progams and the NCAA — and hurts practically no one, nobody says much.

But the whistle got blown on Mayo and USC today, when a former member of his inner circle spilled the beans to ESPN in a remarkably thorough Outside the Lines report detailing how an agent funneled roughly $200,000 to Guillory, who in turn spent $30,000 on Mayo. The whole arrangement went sour, however, when one of the hangers-on who stood to profit from Mayo’s future NBA millions was pushed aside, prompting him to talk to ESPN and provide numerous receipts and documents. I imagine Guillory’s greed and arrogance ultimately led to Louis Johnson’s airing of grievances.

But forget that, for a minute. This pimping of young basketball stars is the kind of thing that can happen — and is happening, probably at several colleges around the country — when the NBA and the NCAA conspire to force players into college basketball but only for a year.

It’s not fair to blame the kids. They’re just doing what they’ve done all their lives, which is to take whatever is offered to them from the time they enter AAU basketball. It’s probably not even fair to blame the coaches. Tim Floyd is getting paid a lot of money to make the NCAA Tournament and won’t last very long in his job if he doesn’t. I highly doubt he was going to tell O.J. Mayo, “Thanks, but no thanks. Go help some other program win a lot of games.”

The fault primarily lies with agents, who use runners to get their hooks into kids once it’s clear they’re going to become highly-paid professionals.

I’m not sure there is an answer to this, as long as the NBA insists on players going to college for a year and the NCAA insists on not allowing players to share in their remarkable profits. But here’s what I would propose (though it’ll never happen):

1) Set up an NCAA-run loan program, based on the NBA underclassman evaluations that are available for every player. If a player grades out as a first-round pick, they can get, say, a $40,000 loan per year they elect stay in school, which would be paid back at a significant rate of interest once the player makes the NBA. If a player grades out as a second-round pick, they qualify for a $20,000 loan. They can use that money to buy clothes, phones, plane tickets for their family, cars, whatever and won’t be forced to accept money from people like Guillory to pay expenses. Make it completely transparent who is asking for and receiving the loans. If the player never signs an NBA contract, they don’t have to pay back a dime.

2) Go after agents hard for illegal contact with players, either directly or indirectly through runners. I’m not sure what mechanism the NBA could use (perhaps in its collective bargaining agreement with the players union or agent agreements), but a $1 million fine should do the trick. And for good measure, the agent is banned from representing any NBA players or collecting a commission for two years.

So Channel 3 “scored” the first big interview with former Tiger point guard Andre Allen since he was kicked off the team three days before the Final Four. The station even trumpeted its “exclusive” with Allen, which aired during the 10 p.m. news cast on Thursday night.

The truth is, there is only one question worth asking Allen, and it’s absolutely the first question I would have asked had I been in position to interview him: How in the world could he have failed a drug test during the NCAA Tournament?

Yet, Claudia Barr never asked that question. She didn’t even bring up the subject of drug tests. Or if she did, it wasn’t included in the on-air package. There was no discussion at all about why Allen was kicked off the team. WREG owes an apology to everybody it hoodwinked into watching that interview. Yes, Allen apologized for “what happened.” But what was the point of the interview if there was no explanation of, well, what happened?

As I wrote about on April 4, Allen was one of just two players in recent memory to fail a postgame drug test in the NCAAs. To have it happen right before the Final Four, on a team as high-profile as Memphis, was stunning. Allen said in the interview that “people make mistakes,” which is undoubtedly true. But given the nature of that mistake and the stage on which it happened, casting him as a sympathetic figure is uncalled for — at least, unless there’s a valid explanation he’s willing to talk about.

Instead, the most stunning revelation in the report was that Claudia Barr thinks that the Booker T Washington team in her day could have beaten Allen’s Booker T squad.

– No official word today on the Josh Pastner situation. The assistant’s job at Memphis is his if he wants it, but this obviously going to be a very emotional decision for him. Pastner has been involved in the Arizona program as a player and an assistant since he was a teenager, and leaving Tucson won’t be easy. Still, I have received no indications today that Pastner won’t take the job. Barring something unforseen, Pastner will be on the Memphis staff officially in the very near future. I expect a decision as early as Thursday.

– The Memphis basketball team wasn’t impacted by the release of the Academic Progress Ratings by the NCAA yesterday. Memphis was above the 925 threshold, as John Calipari predicted a year ago when the initial ratings came out. That’s a very significant thing for Memphis, given the academic mess Calipari inherited.

– I noticed today that Jeremiah Rivers is transferring from Georgetown. Could Memphis be in the mix for Rivers? I doubt it; I’m not sure Rivers is an upgrade from the kind of players Memphis would be recruiting for 2009. On the other hand, Calipari is pretty good friends with his father, Celtics coach Doc Rivers. And I’ve heard Doc Rivers has a younger son who is absolutely off the charts good.

– Talked to an NBA scout today who told me he sees no way that Chris Douglas-Roberts slips beyond the 20th overall pick. He thinks CDR could go as high as 10th or 11th. Still a long way until the NBA Draft, however, on June 26.

– The same scout told me he didn’t see Robert Dozier or Antonio Anderson as draftable at this point. Another interesting point on the Memphis players was on Joey Dorsey. The team this scout works for doesn’t have Dorsey on the board. At all. Unfortunately for Joey, his reputation off the court precedes him into the NBA. My sense is that a handful of teams, and possibly as many as 10, simply won’t consider drafting Dorsey period. At Memphis, he was better than his problems. In the NBA? Not so much.

– Speaking of players being better than their problems, that apparently wasn’t the case for Ramar Smith and Duke Crews at Tennessee, who were tossed out by Bruce Pearl recently. How desperate are the Vols for a point guard in the wake of Smith’s departure? They got a committment today from Bobby Maze, the former Oklahoma point guard who spent last year at the junior college level. Maze was committed to Maryland, but the Terps released him from that committment when they got one instead from Tyree Evans. What does it say about Maze that Maryland instead took Evans, who just in the last two years has been charged with felony possession of marijuana and pleaded guilty to an assault misdemeanor after being accused of statutory rape while in prep school? Talk about trading one headache for another.