"Part of being a young man is accepting consequences for your actions, not compounding them." And with that, Mike Anderson officially kicked Stefhon Hannah off the Mizzou basketball team. He can retain his scholarship and continue to work toward his degree (he supposedly has 25 hours remaining), but honestly, that seems unlikely. I mean, a) he's missed three freaking weeks of classes, so this semester's pretty much a waste, and b) he doesn't appear to care too much either way. According to the Post-Dispatch, he has until February 25 to officially drop his courses. If he does, we'll likely get dinged for academics, but we probably won't lose a scholarship. If he doesn't, it appears we will. I doubt Hannah's mom will let him just plain flunk out, but I've been surprised before. And this is Mizzou, so I'm sure we've got 13 lawsuits and an embarrassing Vahe Gregorian expose still to come.
Scholarships aside, this offers at least a little bit of closure for Mizzou players. And I think it shows a bit of strength from Mike Anderson. Granted, nobody got kicked off for breaking curfew or fighting (or continuously finding himself at the wrong place at the wrong time, an apparent specialty of both Hannah and Jason Horton), and that might have been an even stronger step for Anderson, but I don't necessarily have a problem with that, other than the fact that I'll just get pissy seeing Horton or Darryl Butterfield on the court the rest of the year. I guess the main thing I want to see from Anderson from here on out is the recruitment of higher-character kids. Three of the "Athena Five" were Quin recruits (not to mention Grimes, who got kicked off last summer), and the other two (Butters and Hannah) were 'stopgap' measures, and that's fine, I guess...but entering Year Three of his tenure, there's no excuse for any more stopgaps.
Here's the official release for tonight's game, which will once again be shown on TV via tape delay. Hello, ESPN360.
Two other happy-go-lucky basketball stories: Matt Lawrence is strug-a-ling even more without Stefhon Hannah, and Demarre Carroll continues to hobble badly.
PowerMizzou has begun a "Top Recruiting Stories of 2009" series for next year's football recruiting class. Up first, #10: Can Missouri go JUCOless again? And if you want a little more recruiting news, Illinois' Rivals site has a Ronnie Wingo article up at the moment.
Finally, here's what The Beef said about Mizzou Gymnast Sarah Shire the other day: "Sarah Shire, who put up as impressive a performance as I can remember for Mizzou, won the all-around with a score of 39.500 (which would also be good enough for 3rd nationally right now). She also won 2 of the events outright, with a HUGE 9.925 on the floor exercise." Sounds like the Big 12 Gymnast of the Week to me!