Breaking News;.best guard Cooper Flagg decommit and Flip to Louisville Cardinals basketball today new commitment…
Breaking News;.best guard Cooper Flagg decommit and Flip to Louisville Cardinals basketball today new commitment…
The last time Louisville basketball hosted Clemson at the KFC Yum! Center, headlined by the 10-year reunion of its 2013 national championship team, the Cardinals delivered a moment of unbridled joy that amounted to nothing more than false hope during the otherwise bleak Kenny Payne era.
Six hundred ninety days later, the result was the same at Second and Main: U of L took down the Tigers, 74-64, to improve to 9-0 against them on its home court. But Tuesday night was not a nostalgia-fueled fever dream. It was a clear-eyed toast to the future under Pat Kelsey, who’s now one victory from tying Payne’s two-year total.
The buzz is intoxicating. Make it a double. Why not? There’s snow everywhere, and the Cards (11-5, 4-1 ACC) are hot as hell — winners of five in a row for the first time since the 2020-21 campaign.
“Confidence,” Kelsey said, “is a powerful thing.”
It’s oozing out of his locker room; and it’s safe to say he’s got a bona fide contender on his hands after Louisville handed Clemson (12-4, 4-1) its first loss of conference play and will leapfrog it in the NET.
Everyone was waiting in the locker room, water bottles at the ready, for J’Vonne Hadley, after the St. Paul, Minnesota, native went for a career-high 32 points — the most scored by a player in an ACC game this season — 10 rebounds and four assists in 36 minutes. The quiet clapping blew their cover, he said.
Duke G Cooper Flagg “has been so hyped” that he could “help keep a whole sport from drifting into relative obscurity,” according to Jesse Dougherty of the WASHINGTON POST.
He noted it “has been years since” a men’s college basketball player like Flagg has come around. Sports television consultant and former CBS Sports President Neal Pilson said, “If the men’s game needed an answer to the Caitlin Clark boom, you can’t ask for better than that.” Dougherty: “The question, then, is whether the men’s game did need that answer.” Even in its post-Clark era, Dougherty wrote there are “inarguably more superstars in women’s college hoops.” UConn G Paige Bueckers is “as famous as any other college athlete” while USC G JuJu Watkins recently signed a multiyear extension with Nike.
Flagg, an “internet obsession,” has NIL deals from New Balance and Gatorade. Dougherty noted Jack Adler and his NIL marketing company, Out2Win, have an “algorithm that distills an athlete’s social media influence into a catchall metric.” Flagg has the “highest score of all men’s basketball players, thanks in large part
