Thoughts of the Day: June 16, 2026

(Photo by Chris Spears)

A few thoughts to jump start your Tuesday morning:

The roster is the deepest and most talented top-to-bottom in the entire country. Todd Golden has 15 very talented players that includes an unmatched starting five and a second unit that could start for all but a handful of teams in any league.

This kind of depth and talent is a blessing, but with the blessing comes the dilemma: There are only 40 minutes in a college basketball game. Obviously, when you have depth you can always have fresh players on the floor, but Golden has so many good players and only so many minutes available. How does Golden go about keeping everybody happy?

Dean Smith had a similar problem back in the early 1970s at North Carolina. His rosters were loaded and very few teams could match the Tar Heels’ depth. Dean’s solution for finding minutes was to give the bulk of playing time to a rotation of seven or eight players but for short stretches in each half bring in the Blue Team. The Blue Team concept was five reserves who knew they would enter the game in a wave for short stretches in each half. Their job was to create chaos at both ends of the floor. The Blue Team concept worked because players bought into their roles. They understood they were contributing to winning right now but they also understood that they were staying fresh and ready to be the next man up in the event of an injury. Guys like Kim Huband and Steve Previs would have been starters for 95 percent of all the teams in the country but as key members of the Blue team they embraced their role of coming off the bench to spend two, three or four minutes wearing down opponents with their energy. Lefty Driesell, who was building Maryland into a national power, would confide that he dreaded how the Blue Team scrambling and pressing so often left the Terps gasping for air.

This concept worked well for Dean Smith, but that was then and this is now. Like those UNC teams of more than 50 years ago, Todd Golden has to find a way to spread out the minutes and keep everybody happy. Some experts are already saying that the only thing that can derail the Gators is too much talent to keep the entire roster happy, but in saying that, they may be under-estimating Todd Golden, whose ability to build teams that embrace the brotherhood of being Gators is one of the key secrets for his success.

The perfect example of Golden’s team building is the relationship between Tommy Haugh and CJ Ingram. Haugh is an All-American and a legitimate candidate for national player of the year. When he chose to return to Florida for one more bite of the championship apple, it meant diminished minutes for Ingram, who would be a starter on most teams in the Southeastern Conference. But there is a big brother/little brother relationship between these two.

When Haugh made the decision to forego the NBA Draft to return to Florida, one of the first calls he made was to Ingram. Last week when he met with the media, Haugh talked about the conversation he had with Ingram.

“I didn't want to take anything away from CJ and stuff like that, but I told him, like, dude, I want you to go out there and be like I was my sophomore year …  come off the bench, and just be one of those dogs, you know, come in there, change the game,” Haugh said. “Make sure instead of like when somebody gets subbed out, it [the effort, momentum] goes down. Make sure it goes back up, and I think he's taken on that mindset. Already, in his last couple of just pickup games and stuff I've been watching, like, he's going to be great for us this year, too.”

If this is the example of the relationships that Golden cultivates from top to bottom of his roster, then there is no need to be concerned about teammates disgruntled and unhappy about their playing time.

Projected starting lineup: Tommy Haugh (6-9, 215, SR); Alex Condon (6-11, 236, SR); Rueben Chinyelu (6-10, 260, SR); Boogie Fland (6-3, 185, JR); Denzel Aberdeen (6-5, 195, SR)

The bench: Urban Klavzar (6-1, 190, SR); Isaiah Brown (6-5, 210, JR); AJ Brown (6-4, 210, RJR); CJ Ingram (6-7, 210, SO); Alex Lloyd (6-4, 180, SO); Viktor Mikic (6-11, 260, JR); Alex Kovatchev (6-5, 195, RJR); Arturas Butajevas (6-10, 220, FR); Domen Petrovic (6-8, 220, SR); Jones Lay (7-0, 240, FR)

SORSBY DECLARES FOR THE NFL

Brendan Sorsby had no fear of going toe-to-toe in court with the NCAA but he backed down Monday when the other 15 members of the Big 12 Conference stood unanimously opposed to him suiting up for Texas Tech in the fall. In his close encounter with the NCAA in a courtroom, Sorsby emerged victorious with an injunction that would have allowed him to play quarterback this fall for Texas Tech. His timing was as impeccable as one of those slant patterns he throws so well because the NCAA was not only beaten in court but forced to scramble and ask for an expedited appeal prior to the start of the 2026 college football season. Given the NCAA’s track record in court cases, there is a very good chance the request for an appeal hearing would have been denied.

The wrench in the works for both Texas Tech and Sorsby came in the form of a lawsuit by the Big 12 Conference in Federal Court Monday. The Big 12 took on state of Texas attorney general Ken Paxton as well as Texas Tech prez Lawrence Schonovak, athletic director Kirby Hocutt and a list as long as your leg of people involved who were trying to sugar coat Sorsby’s gambling on ball games. This was nothing short of brilliant legal work by the attorneys of the Sidley Austin firm, who, rather than challenge the legality of the injunction issued by Lubbock County judge Ken Curry, targeted Paxton and Texas Tech for the right to enforce its own rules. Filed in the United States District Court for Northern Texas, the Big 12 sought no damages but asked instead for a declaratory judgment that would allow the conference to enforce its own rules. It was a powerful enough argument, particularly with the unanimous backing of the other 15 Big 12 schools that Sorsby backed down. Monday night he declared for the NFL supplemental draft.

Texas Tech mega-booster Cody Campbell, whose fingerprints were all over the lawsuit against the NCAA, released a statement that conceded the win to the Big 12, but again tried to paint Sorsby as a victim: "This decision was made with Brendan and his family and is purely an output of practical analysis of the situation. Brendan and Texas Tech stand on very solid and legitimate legal ground, but he faces a June 22nd deadline to be eligible to enter the NFL's supplemental draft, and there is no practical way to resolve all the various pending legal disputes and ensure his eligibility prior to this date. This is the only viable and fair path for Brendan and his future, as well as for his teammates, and our university." 

Cody Campbell can choose to spin this any way he wants, but the reality is if Texas Tech had thought for one second that it would win in the Big 12 case, it would have fought on. By capitulating it’s an admission that the Big 12 had both Texas Tech and Sorsby by the short and curlies.

ONE FINAL PITHY THOUGHT: Let’s start with the lingo. In soccer-speak, it is football not soccer, a match and not a game, a tie is a draw and a zero is a nil. So Monday in the World Cup four matches produced four draws, one of which ended nil-nil.

Through the first five days of the biggest event in the world, half of the 16 World Cup matches have ended in a draw, six of them with a 1-1 final score, one a 2-2 and the other that nil-nil final between Spain, which is supposed to be one of the favorites to emerge out of this month-long soiree as the champs, and Cape Verde, a nation of fewer than 500,000 citizens located 385 miles off the coast of Africa in the Atlantic Ocean. The folks in Cape Verde celebrated the outcome. Diehard fans in Spain contemplated throwing themselves off a roof. Those in the United States who actually watched all 90 minutes were left shaking our heads as Cape Verde got the outcome it wanted – 0-0 or as the announcers are educating us, nil-nil. Cape Verde didn’t even attempt to score. It’s entire strategy was to pack it in around the goal to prevent Spain from scoring. That might sell in Sheboygan but in the rest of the United States it was pure boredom. No risk, no reward. Another draw.

Someone once called what is on showcase for the next month “the beautiful game” and most sports fans in the world would agree, even some in the United States where the overwhelming majority of sports fans find something fundamentally un-American about a game in which there is a loose ball and nobody scoops it up and starts running with it. This is the world’s game, not ours and there is nothing wrong with finding scoreless or 1-1 outcomes sufficiently boring.

There is also nothing wrong with growing weary of the endless number of flops in which no contact produces someone writhing in agony while holding a leg, trying to convince the referee to hand out a yellow card for a foul. Most of what constitutes as contact is about as violent as one of those Blaine and Antoine cat fights that we used to love on “In Living Color.” There are no Lawrence Wright hit heard ‘round the world moments when Joey Kent was separated from the ball and his voluntary life functions before God, 90,000 faithful at The Swamp and several million fans watching on CBS. The final score of that game was Florida 62, Tennessee 37, which made it a teensy bit more exciting than nil-nil and all the flops in the four tie games – yeah, I said it, tie games and not draws – that were Monday’s World Cup.

The late great Dan Jenkins wrote this in his book “You Call It Sports, But I Say It’s a Jungle Out There” – “Take soccer. Please.” I’m willing to absorb the wrath of soccer purists. I agree.