The Morning Stake | 2020.05.01

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Oh my goodness, it’s May 1st. Time flies when you’re having fun.

Remember Grantland? Me too. I was thinking about movies when I posted the timeline from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Grantland’s Alex French and Howie Kahn did an oral history of Swingers, one of my all-time favorite movies. It has Jon Favreau’s sketchbook, which I have never seen before, and it is so funny to see someone have a vision and then create that in film. I don’t think that way, but I’m really glad that people do think that way.

Vaughn: We thought, Oh gosh, we’ll go to Sundance. They love independent films. They’re supportive of people who are getting their stories made and Jesus, this thing is really that. But it wasn’t in their wheelhouse of what they deemed to be important or artistic. So we didn’t get in.
Favreau: We didn’t make it. We were really depressed.
Livingston: It felt like the bottom dropped out. But the producers were really smart and they said, “We’re not worried about that. We think we’ve actually got a commercial movie here. We don’t even think this is a festival movie — it’s not dark or it’s not brooding. We think this is a feel-good crowd pleaser.”
Favreau: We didn’t have any distribution. So we were just sitting on a $200,000 piece of film. There was no guarantee of getting the money back. There was no guarantee of it ever being seen.

Texas Tribune talked with Texas Tech president Lawrence Schovanec, who said that Texas Tech, in addition to resuming fall classes, is planning for sports in the fall, but acknowledges that it will take the rest of the conference to be in agreement. Those deposits are incredibly important to a university actually being able to continue as a university. I believe that with Texas Tech, TAMU, UNT, and SMU, have said that they would have fall classes.

ESPN’s John Gasaway ranked the hirings over the past 25 years and Texas Tech hiring Chris Beard is 9th overall:

Before hiring Beard, Texas Tech had never appeared in an Elite Eight. With Beard, the Red Raiders played in regional finals in both 2018 and 2019, famously coming within mere seconds of a national title in the latter year. Few if any coaches have done more with less in a shorter period of time.

CBS Sports’ Gary Parish has his offseason Top 25 and moved Texas Tech up a few spots to #14 with the addition of Marcus Santos-Silva:

Texas Tech is losing another player early to the NBA Draft – this time one-and-done star Jahmi’us Ramsey. It’s a development that hurts, sure. But Chris Beard is still returning three of the top four scorers from a team that finished 21st at KenPom, and he’s combining that nice nucleus with a top-15 recruiting class highlighted by 4-star prospects Nimari Burnett and Micah Peavy, plus VCU grad-transfer Marcus Santos-Silva. So Texas Tech should operate in the top half of the Big 12 again and even compete for the league title.

Hey.

Pssssssst. That’s not high enough.

NBC Sports’ Rob Dauster makes up for this a bit and has Texas Tech 7th overall, which I think feels right.

WatchStadium’s Jeff Goodman asked a bunch of NBA folks about who was likely to stay in the NBA Draft and based on those NBA people, Jahmi’us Ramsey is almost assuredly going to enter the NBA Draft. This is not a surprise. There are still scholarship issues, as we discussed the other day, the roster is still one over where it should be, but Beard always figures it out before it’s all said and done.

I love this man.

Texas Tech added a Duke transfer, Jacob Morgenstern, who is a linebacker and safety type, who was named Duke’s top special teams player (named the Bill Keziah Award). If you scroll down Morgenstern’s twitter feed, he actually had previously committed to Kent State in March, which Morgenstern discusses with RedRaiderSports’ Ben Golan. I don’t want to either over-hype this or down-play Morgenstern’s commitment, but he had 7 tackles all of last year, mostly on special teams is my guess. And make no mistake that special teams needed some assistance there, so if Morgenstern is going to be a guy that leads that group, then I’m all for this.

Here are some tweets.

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