No doubt. It's insane the NCAA tells us that the rock (a natural rock native to campus which has zip to do with sports and has served as a student message board for well over 50 years and only occasionally mentions sports at all) is an unfair recruiting advantage (imho, if it were challenged the NCAA would lose as it would fall under several free speech cases/rulings by SCOTUS) but says nothing about Memphis regularly playing on a NBA court - not occasionally but regularly! You can't tell me that's not a BIG recruiting advantage. Yet UT paints over that rock because any time students happen to mention sports when recruits are on campus because of the NCAA. WTF.

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This made me think of some of the big name kids from here and your point is actually pretty damn true. Stokes was at the same private school I went to before he blew up as a basketball player.

When I was playing the big matchup was Leslie McDonald (UNC) vs. Elliot Williams (Duke) & Laurance Bowers (Mizzou). All private school kids, which made Nichols' decision all the more surprising.

Was Nichols a scholarship kid or did his parents pay for him to attend?

The boom of private schools in Memphis and Nashville to keep rich kids away from all the poors baffles me but the gap between rich and poor here isn't nearly as wide either and we're less classist in general, imo. We don't have blue blood societies going back ages whereas Nashville and Memphis have had them since the 1800s for both white blue bloods and black blue bloods. I guess we've always been too poor for that.

At the same time, our lack of private schools has held back developing big pools of basketball and football talent like Middle and West, TN have even though as a division East, TN has the population to support them especially since most of the pop no longer lives in the boondocks and is quite near the bigger cities and def close enough to support several districts playing one another and raising the overall talent but you know how TN is - we hate spending $ on anything and without an income tax I don't see how E. TN can get to where it should be.