On his radio show Thursday evening on 840 WHAS, Rick Pitino dropped some unexpected news about next season’s class. Currently, the Cards will be bringing in three freshmen: Donovan Mitchell, Deng Adel, and Ray Spalding. But the new news is that Pitino said that they are also “looking at two fifth-year transfers” to add next season.
This would be like the situation with Jared Swopshire a few years ago. Swopshire only played for 3 seasons at UofL, but he was here for four seasons because of injury. Either way, he graduated so he was able to leave and play one more season. When you enter college, you basically have 5 years to play 4 (years). Swopshire played the 2012-13 season at Northwestern.
A similar case was with former Duke guard Greg Paulus, who played basketball for the Blue Devils from 2005-09. He graduated and had one year of eligibility left to play a sport, but not basketball since he already played 4 years of that. He went to Syracuse and ended up being the starting quarterback. That probably says a lot about the state of their football program at the time. But we can’t say too much. It took a touchdown in the last two minutes by Josh Chichester to beat that Syracuse team 10-9 at home…
So it will be interesting to see who, if anyone, Coach Pitino brings in next season. Whoever it would be would undoubtedly bring some experience, something that this team will need next year.
There are already some names floating around about it, but when we dig a little deeper into that, we will make a post of the possible guys that we are hearing.
It is strange to me why Rick cannot sign a true pg, or a good center or an athletic forward, even a good shooter. I see so many of these players on other teams but not on UL. And they are contributing right now on their teams.