Kansas Jayhawks News
On the basketball front, it’s all portal news and tracking. Such a crappy time for college basketball and I have no idea how this ever gets reined in or fixed in a way that’s not detrimental to the athletes. Anway, I won’t get up on the soapbox today.
We’ll start with a Flory Bidunga update as 247 Sports says he’s 100% to Texas Tech and over at SI, they call it a huge loss for Duke:
When he was coming out of high school, Duke was in Bidunga’s final four schools before he ultimately committed to Kansas.
For a program like Duke, missing out on the top big in the portal, especially when it’s such a dire need for the team, is a major hit.
Through the Phog has their portal tracker posted:
Some Kansas players, like others around college basketball whose seasons are over, have already announced their intention to enter the portal. For Kansas, Self could be looking for an entirely new starting lineup for the 2026-2027 season.
And 247Sports has their tracker here.
The Lady Jayhawks also have a couple guards that have entered the transfer portal:
Kansas women’s basketball guards Laia Conesa and Keeley Parks are entering the transfer portal.
Conesa went into the portal on Monday, a KU Athletics spokesperson confirmed. The 5-foot-11 guard from Barcelona, Spain, averaged 3.7 points, 3.0 rebounds and 2.1 assists in 20.0 minutes per game as a junior with the Jayhawks. She played in all 36 of KU’s games and started five.
Matt Norlander seems to think that Ben McCollum turning down UNC doesn’t close the door on potentially taking over the Jayhawks in the future:
McCollum has been in the Midwest nearly his entire life, actually being born in Iowa City. His college playing days took place at North Iowa Area — a JUCO program — before moving to Northwest Missouri State. They then gave him a spot on staff as a graduate assistant, only to hire him as the head coach in 2009. Success followed for McCollum over a prolonged period of time, winning four Division II national championships.
For those of you wanting to wash the basketball season away, the football team is holding an open practice on Saturday at Lawrence High School:
Fans will have an opportunity to see the Jayhawks in action beginning at 11 a.m. at Lawrence high school as construction continues on phase II of David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium. Gates will open at 10 a.m. and practice will run until approximately 1 p.m. The practice is open to the general public and free parking is available at Lawrence high school.
I have no idea why that F is big and can’t get it to go away.
Other Links!
Charlie Wartzel over at The Atlantic writes about trying to process both the wonder of space alongside the…other stuff going on in the world.
“You don’t see borders, you don’t see religious lines, you don’t see political boundaries. All you see is Earth, and you see that we are way more alike than we are different,” Christina Koch, one of the four astronauts on the Artemis II mission, told NASA recently. Jim Lovell, describing the view on Apollo 8 from the dark side of the moon back in the late 1960s, told Chicago magazine that he could put his thumb up to the window, and in that moment, “everything I ever knew was behind it. Billions of people. Oceans. Mountains. Deserts. And I began to wonder, where do I fit into what I see?”
TechDirt is becoming one of my most common stops online these days and it’s for posts like this one calling out the New York Times for doing straight up PR work for AI and not really letting readers know the company is basically a fraud.
The story is making rounds, and giving people the impression that with a ChatGPT account and a little bit of marketing know-how, you too could be raking in millions every month.
The problem is that most of the story is utter nonsense.
Final link of the day is Barry Petchesky writing on Artemis and the astronauts on board:
NASA struck gold with these astronauts, who have endeared themselves with their emergent idiosyncrasies—Wiseman’s quiet, no-nonsense competence; Glover’s gentle faith; Koch’s playfulness; Hansen’s, uh, Canadianness—to anyone watching for any real length of time. We mostly send scientists to space now instead of test pilots, but personality is a big part of the astronaut selection process. That’s not just the ability to get along with each other in a confined space, or to solve problems in an emergency, but how easily viewers back on Earth can connect with them and root for them. This is because Artemis has to sell itself.
QOTD: What’s a nerdy thing that you’d think you would be into but you’re not and why do you think that is?
We’re all basically nerds in various ways if we’re commenting and participating here, right? Space is one of those nerdy things that people always tried to get me into but it just never clicked for me at all. Anything in the air didn’t really intrigue me until I became an adult. I grew up around Kansas City but it was on the south side so I didn’t see a lot of planes unless they were still pretty high in the sky. Never really saw fighter jets flying around. The space shuttle was about the most boring space vehicle imaginable to me. I’m guessing this was just a lack of exposure for me and it always makes me wonder how different my interests might be if I grew up somewhere with that in my environment.
Fantasy sports would be the runner up for me. Love stats and following sports from box scores but it just bores me to death.
