Lost Lettermen via Docksquad Sports

Our friends over at Docksquad Sports had a link up to a site called Lost Lettermen last week and it is worth checking out if your an college basketball fan. With the Final Four in play, I looked up former Boston College and OSU Buckeye great, Scoonie Penn - who I was wondering about since referencing him last week in the BJ Mullens post.

According to Lost Lettermen, Scoonie Penn is currently playing for a professional team in Turkey, and has played in Italy, the NBDL, Serbia, Croatia and Greece since leading the Buckeyes to a Final Four in 1999. I loved watching him with the Buckeyes, and I am sure that the Italian, Serbian, Croatian, Greek, and especially Turkish fans everywhere feel the same way.

BJ Mullens Cashing In On Potential

What BJ Mullens is as a basketball player is a young guy, with size, some skills, and a lot of potential. What he's not is the Georgetown version of Patrick Ewing. Whether Mullens plays (1) year for the Buckeyes or (10), he'll never develop into that type of player.

Out of high school BJ Mullens' draft stock couldn't get any higher, this year it dropped; he had to play this year. The next three he doesn't. Every year from here on out will serve to do the same thing his freshmen campaign did; expose one aspect or another of his game as being less than perfect, and the unknown potential that made him a number one prospect, will turn into a known commodity, and his draft stock will suffer because of it.

I don't blame the kid for leaving early. He probably won't be an All Star, but who's to say he ever would have? In this economy, jobs are hard to come by for anybody, and if you can cash in on the 'unknown potential' that the NBA pays big dollars for I say you do it before you can't. The longer he stays, the longer the book on him gets, the more telling the tape on him becomes, and the quicker the notion of 'untapped, superstar, potential' disappears.

From Bucknuts.com:

"B.J. Mullens was expected to turn pro and on Thursday he made it official. The 7-foot freshman center will forego his final three seasons of eligibility at Ohio State and will enter the NBA Draft. Mullens is expected to be a first-round pick, but there is a debate in terms of how high he will go. Once projected as a high lottery pick -- perhaps the top overall selection of the draft --Mullens' stock has dropped."

As a Buckeye Fan, of course you'd like to see Mullens play at least his Sophomore season. But you'd have liked to Kosta Koufas do that, Mike Conely, and Daquean Cook too. The fact is, you wouldn't have gotten Mullens for (1) year if David Stern didn't mandate it, and you wouldn't have gotten Oden, or maybe even Cook too. Its about money, as it always is, and I say get that money and run, just like Darius Miles and Kwame Brown did before him. Scoonie Penn came back to school after going to the Final Four as a Junior, how'd that work out for him?