Tag: Malcolm Dandridge

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Sports Tiger Blue

Friendly Fire

Mario Anderson (photo by Wes Hale)

Memphis Tiger football would not be where it is today — and Ryan Silverfield would not be in charge of the program — were it not for Mike Norvell. The Tigers travel to Tallahassee this week for a Saturday confrontation with Norvell’s current team, the Florida State Seminoles. It’s hard to imagine a more poignant game against a former coach in the history of the Memphis program.

Should your memory be unusually short, Norvell arrived in Memphis as a rookie head coach before the 2016 season (with Ryan Silverfield a member of his staff). If you were familiar with the 35-year-old Arizona State assistant then, you frankly spent too much time on college football. But in just four years, Norvell won 38 games, led the Tigers to three appearances in the American Athletic Conference championship game (winning in 2019), and earned the most prestigious bowl berth (the 2019 Cotton Bowl) in Tigers history. That’s how you get the Florida State gig before your 40th birthday. Last season, Norvell’s fourth at FSU, the Seminoles went 13-0 but were somehow left out of the four-team College Football Playoff. (After several players opted out of the Orange Bowl, Florida State was crushed by Georgia.)

Florida State will not go 13-0 this season, having lost its first two games, to Georgia Tech and Boston College. Memphis will not be facing a Top-10 team this weekend, a disappointment for a program favored to win a “Group of 5” league but thirsty for an early-season attention grabber. Blowout wins over North Alabama and Troy go only so far.

Last July, I asked Silverfield about facing his former boss early in the 2024 schedule. “I’m gonna treat it like any other game,” he said. “I’ll see some of my closest friends down there. I’m from Jacksonville. If I didn’t get this job, I might still be sitting next to Mike, coaching his offensive line. But once training camp starts, I won’t give that game a single thought until the Sunday [before].”

To translate, it will be an emotional game for those with fond memories of Mike Norvell in Memphis (read: anyone who saw a game from 2016 to 2019). But for Ryan Silverfield and the current Memphis Tigers, the contest has to be treated like a step — among 12 games on the schedule — toward a higher goal. And the only way to stack wins toward a conference championship (and playoff contention) is going 1-0, week after week. Thus Florida State is “any other game.” 

The Seminoles will play better than the 0-2 team they are. The Tigers will likely fall short of the standard they’ve set by outscoring two teams 78-17. But quarterback Seth Henigan is climbing the Tiger and AAC record charts with every contest and the Memphis ground game seems to be in the capable hands of Mario Anderson (125 yards on 17 carries against Troy). This Saturday’s showdown in Tallahassee will be a fun and, yes, sentimental showcase for a Memphis team still rising.

• As for the U of M basketball program, coach Penny Hardaway is once again surrounded by smoke. (Didn’t he ask for this upon taking the job six years ago?) An anonymous letter to the NCAA alleges both financial and academic misdeeds on Hardaway’s watch. You can safely ignore the padding of recruits’ wallets. (See the $20 million it has reportedly cost Ohio State to build its current football roster.) But if academic fraud involving Malcolm Dandridge can be traced to Hardaway, it will be a sad and awkward exit for a local legend. That’s a big “if,” of course. Here’s to a day we can again discuss Tiger basketball without a cloud of scrutiny growing thicker and darker. 

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Sports Tiger Blue

Tiger Hoops Scandal? Ho-hum.

Malcolm Dandridge (photo by Wes Hale)

Larry Kenon is a certifiable Memphis basketball legend. In his one season as a Tiger (1972-73), Kenon established a single-season rebound record (501) that will never be touched. He helped another Larry legend (Finch) lead Memphis State to the NCAA championship game, where the Tigers fell to mighty UCLA. Kenon’s number 35 is among ten retired numbers that now hang from the rafters at FedExForum on Tiger game days.

A detail you might now know about Larry Kenon: Among the conditions he insisted upon before committing to the Tiger program: He didn’t have to attend a class. (I was three years old in 1972, but I have this nugget from a reliable source who was near the program for that unforgettable season.)

The Tigers won their biggest conference game of the season Sunday afternoon at FedExForum, beating FAU, 78-74. But they did so without one of only two players still on the team from FAU’s upset of Memphis in last year’s NCAA tournament. Center Malcolm Dandridge sat out the game as the university investigates chatter of academic misdeeds involving the fifth-year senior. It’s a deflating cloud over a program that has reached the heights of a Top-10 ranking and the lows of a four-game losing streak this winter. But you know what? These cloud conditions are part of Memphis Tiger basketball, every bit as much as the blue and gray of their uniforms.

If you’re too young for memories of Larry Kenon, perhaps you recall Keith Lee, the record-shattering power forward from West Memphis who became a Tiger in 1981 upon receiving a shoebox — between a size seven-and-a-half and a nine, according to Lee himself — full of cash. You’ve likely forgotten the Tic Price tryst. Finch’s successor as Tiger coach resigned abruptly before the 1999-2000 season when he was discovered to have been playing some bedroom ball with a U of M student. It’s easy to forget this scandal, as all it cost Memphis was a mediocre coach.

Arguably the greatest team in Tiger history reached the championship game in 2008, but there’s no banner to celebrate the squad because star freshman Derrick Rose, the NCAA determined, had someone else take the standardized test that qualified him to play at Memphis. James Wiseman was the most heralded freshman to suit up for the Tigers since Rose, but played in only three games early in the 2019-20 season before the NCAA ruled he had taken improper payments from his future coach — Penny Hardaway — when his family moved to Memphis before his senior year at East High School. And just last November, Hardaway served a three-game suspension for what the NCAA deemed an improper recruiting visit. 

It’s exhausting to read all together, isn’t it? One ugly “distraction” after another, almost as regular for the Memphis program as visits to the Sweet 16. Making the current Dandridge matter especially troubling: The player is as Memphis as Hardaway, no import (like Kenon, Rose, or even Lee, from West Memphis). Dandridge surely has a sense of those historic “clouds.” If not, the man who coached him at East and now for five years at the U of M could certainly draw a picture.

Maybe it’s all a misunderstanding. Maybe it was one or two bad decisions made by one young man, and the problem can be sliced cleanly from the larger basketball system this city celebrates and its favorite son, Hardaway, manages. Hardaway had little to say about the matter following Sunday’s win: “I’m gonna learn as [everyone else] learns.” And that’s a component to the problem: If Hardaway truly knows nothing about a fifth-year player breaking rules, the coach is part of that problem.

FedExForum splashed an awkward promotion on the scoreboard and concourse screens as fans departed Sunday’s game. “Senior Day” will be celebrated when the Tigers host UAB on March 3rd. The player staring from those screens, representative of this year’s Memphis senior class: Malcolm Dandridge. The guess here is that a Dandridge appearance for Senior Day is a 50/50 proposition, at best. 

The Tigers have now won 20 games under Hardaway in each of the coach’s six seasons. Feels like something to celebrate, especially in an up-and-down campaign. But with the scent of scandal in the air? We pause the celebration. Yet again.

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Sports Tiger Blue

2020-21 Tiger Hoops Preview

If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.

If the Almighty pays any attention to college basketball, He must have lost His breath by the end of the Memphis Tigers’ 2019-20 season. Penny Hardaway’s second winter as head coach was to be the revival of a once-proud program, and then some. The country’s most heralded recruiting class arrived. Surely a deep NCAA-tournament run awaited come March.

HA! The country’s top freshman — James Wiseman — departed the program after three games, neck deep in NCAA investigative eyes after a financial exchange between Hardaway (then East High School’s coach) and Wiseman’s family in 2017. The team’s second-leading scorer, D.J. Jeffries, went down with a knee injury the first week in February. Then just as the Tigers completed a second straight season in fifth place among American Athletic Conference teams . . . a pandemic eliminated March Madness. Pin that among your Memphis basketball seasons to remember.

Landers Nolley II

But Tiger basketball is back, pandemic be damned. Gone, of course, is Wiseman, along with Precious Achiuwa, the electric forward who became the first Tiger freshman to earn conference Player of the Year honors. (Wiseman and Achiuwa were the 2nd and 20th selections, respectively, in last week’s NBA draft, the first former Tigers chosen since 2012.) The U of M’s top three-point shooter over the last two seasons — Tyler Harris — transferred to Iowa State, two seasons of Hardaway’s tutelage enough for his ambitions. When the Tigers open play Wednesday in the Crossover Classic in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, they’ll do so against the Saint Mary’s Gaels and not the Ohio State Buckeyes, the latter having pulled out of the event over, you guessed it, coronavirus concerns. (Duke also pulled out of the tournament. Positivity rates in South Dakota have recently topped 50 percent.)

Last year’s acclaimed freshmen — at least the five who remain — are now sophomores: guards Boogie Ellis, Lester Quinones, and Damion Baugh, and forwards Jeffries and Malcolm Dandridge. Hardaway expects, with a season behind them, these young veterans will make a larger impact than they did as college rookies. Add to this group a pair of significant transfers: sophomore Landers Nolley II (from Virginia Tech) and DeAndre Williams (from Evansville, pending NCAA approval to play this season). Nolley averaged 15.5 points per game for the Hokies last season and will be asked to fill the sharp-shooting role vacated by Harris. He hit 68 three-pointers as a freshman, but shot an underwhelming 32 percent from long distance. Williams started 15 games for the Purple Aces and averaged 15.2 points.

A pair of juniors — guard Alex Lomax and forward Lance Thomas — bring more experience to the floor for Memphis, though neither has found the consistency Hardaway would like to see. Having played for Hardaway since middle school, Lomax has adopted the “glue guy” role and will be expected to blanket opposing ball-handlers and shooters. Thomas teases with his height (6’9″) but averaged only 2.5 rebounds in 15 minutes per game last season. (He made 13 starts.)

Moussa Cisse

The star of Hardaway’s third recruiting class is center Moussa Cisse. A native of Guinea, the 6’10” Cisse averaged 18.4 points, 15.3 rebounds, and 9.2 blocks in leading Lausanne Collegiate School to a 2020 state championship. He was the top-ranked prospect in Tennessee after reclassifying last summer to the 2020 class. He’s the kind of interior defensive presence the Tiger program has lacked, for the most part, over the last decade. And nothing starts a fast break better than a blocked shot.

The Tigers are projected to finish second (behind Houston) in the preseason AAC coaches poll. They did not place a player on the first-team preseason all-conference squad (Jeffries and Nolley made the second team), and they are outside the Top 25 looking in. Cisse is picked to win the league’s Rookie of the Year honor, but Hardaway, needless to say, is aiming for loftier achievements.

“It’s refreshing to have [last year’s] freshmen understand their roles now,” says Hardaway. “They put a lot of pressure on themselves last season. And to see how good Landers and DeAndre are . . . they’re great additions. We feel like we have the talent, but we haven’t proven anything yet. We’re going to have to earn everything.”

After three games in Sioux Falls, the Tigers will open their home schedule December 2nd when Arkansas State visits FedExForum. (Attendance will be limited to between 3,000 and 3,500 fans, at least at the season’s outset.) There will be only two other nonconference foes (Mississippi Valley State and Auburn) before the Tigers embark, fingers firmly crossed, on a 20-game league gauntlet.

“The two years I’ve coached [at this level] have taught me a lot,” says Hardaway. “I don’t think anything we’ll surprise me. We’re ready for every situation, any scenario. After two years, I’ve seen what I need to do as a coach. In the beginning, I was fast-tracking everything. But I’m caught up, and looking at things better on and off the court.”

The University Memphis has somehow played six seasons without reaching the Big Dance, and the program hasn’t gone seven years without proper Madness since the days when the tournament invited fewer than 30 teams (1963-72). Will there be a 2021 NCAA tournament? Will it be played in a single-city “bubble” for pandemic protection? A bigger question for a long-frustrated Tiger fan base: Would a return to the tournament bring jubilation, or merely a sigh of relief? Take a few deep breaths and grab your face coverings, because we’re about to find out.