☕ Morning Coffee
Ben Henshall is 22 years old. He played three professional seasons for the Perth Wildcats. He averaged 8.9 points, 3.5 rebounds and 2.9 assists in the NBL last year. He has been paid to play basketball on the other side of the world.
This week the NCAA told him he could play college basketball, and here is what he said:
I’m just so thankful to be here, man. I never thought I’d be playing college basketball.
Ben Henshall
He got two years. Not one. Two.
And the sequence of how he got here is the part worth sitting with. Asked whether he had been optimistic or on edge, he said: “My thing was I’m not going to think it’s real till I get on a plane and I’m out here. Then, you know, I still wasn’t eligible once I was out here.”
He refused to believe it until the plane. He got on the plane. He landed in Oxford. He still wasn’t eligible. He enrolled and practiced in that condition for weeks.
Chris Beard was never worried about the answer — only the clock. “Kind of puzzled why it took so long,” he said, and “I was hoping it wasn’t going to be delayed even more.” The ruling landed in time for preseason, exhibitions and scrimmages. That was the actual stake.
Then he said the thing that will get clipped: “I think Ben’s going to be one of our best players.”
⚖️ The Two Who Are Still Waiting
Corey Stephenson and Micah Handlogten are on campus, in class, in practice, and nobody can tell them anything. Asked whether he felt the same confidence about those two, Beard was blunt: “Totally different, totally different pathway, totally different kind of process.”
And then, with nobody asking him to, he made an argument:
2021 guys get the 5th year because of COVID. NCAA comes out with a rule, and the timing of the rule is interesting that the 2023 guys are going to get it. So why not let the 2022 guys get it that aren’t under pro contracts? And our 2 guys aren’t under pro contracts.
Chris Beard
That is not a vague gripe. He is standing inside a specific case, and it is worth laying the dates out, because they explain everything else he said.
| June 23 | NCAA adopts “five-for-five” — four seasons inside five years. The high school class of 2022 is excluded. |
| July 31 | Judge Charlotte Sweeney, District of Colorado, issues a nationwide injunction in Wisne v. NCAA. The 2022 class can pursue a fifth year. |
| Aug 21 | The Tenth Circuit stays that injunction, 2-1, pending expedited appeal. The NCAA’s original rules snap back the same day. |
What survives the stay is not a rule. It is a map. Athletes who went and won their own relief in state court kept it — California, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee. Ohio’s was separately stayed. Whether a class-of-2022 player suits up this season depends in part on which courthouse he walked into.
Mississippi is not on that list.
Both Stephenson and Handlogten are listed as fifth-year players on the official roster. They are, precisely, the gap class. Beard’s position on the summer-league question is narrow and clean — “The rule says pro contract. Neither one of these guys signed a pro contract” — and what he is openly hoping for is not a clean clearance but a priced one: “There’s been players in the past that maybe played a game in Portsmouth and then they were penalized a game. One game for one game.”
On timing he did not pretend: “Yeah, there’s no timeline.” Then he pointed across the hall at football — “Some of those 2022 guys are playing, then they can’t play next week, they play the next week.”
Play, then don’t, then play. That is an accurate description of what a stayed injunction does to a roster in October.
🏀 Respect, Then Trust
Santiago Trouet scouted himself this week and got to the interesting part fast: “I’m starting to add my 3-point shot now in practice. I think it’s going to open up my game because I’m faster and more agile than most bigs. So taking them off the dribble, I think that’s going to be the main thing this year.”
He says he can play 3 through 5. And he explained why in one sentence: “I grew up playing as a 3, and then once I went past 6’8, I just turned into a 4.” Guard footwork in a 6-11 body, because the body showed up after the skills did.
Beard’s version of the same player is about something else entirely, and he volunteered it:
We’ve been hard on Santi. Maybe as hard as any new player we’ve had because we have such high expectations for him. But he’s slowly really earning my trust. I’ve always respected him, but I’m starting to kind of trust the guy a little bit.
Chris Beard
Respect, then trust, in that order — and he was careful about the order. Nobody doubts the talent. That was never the question.
One more thing, because it is the tell on this roster. Trouet, on his competition: “I feel like 1 through 15, everybody’s a Power 5 player here.” Beard, in the same week, used the identical number to make the opposite point: “It’s not always about just getting the most talented players 1 through 15. It’s about putting a puzzle together.” The players are selling the floor. The coach is selling the fit. If Stephenson and Handlogten never clear, the coach’s version is the one that has to carry it.
🏈 Fourteen Days, And What To Do With Them
I went on The 24th Floor yesterday and gave the bye week answer I actually believe, which is that the fix is subtraction.
Cut the call sheet to five to ten plays. Man up. One gap. See ball, go get ball. None of the exotic stuff. That is not a shot at the scheme — Pete Golding runs the system Nick Saban built, and when pattern matching works it is the best defense in the sport. But Florida ran for 302 yards, found something in the C-gap and attacked it all afternoon, and you do not fix gap integrity by adding checks. You fix it by reducing the number of things a defensive lineman has to think about before he moves.
The other half: let Trinidad be Trinidad. He took real shots in Gainesville and left the game for a stretch. The instinct is to wrap him up. Don’t. If you take away his legs because you are afraid of the next hit, you make the football team worse — not slightly, structurally. Protect Kewan Lacy, who has shown he needs it. Turn the quarterback loose.
And the four running plays that opened the game were the wrong four. This is a pass-to-run football team; the threat of the throw is what makes the handoff work. They came out and did it backwards with the starting back hurt and a true freshman in the backfield, and were down 10-0 five minutes later. Then in the third quarter they threw it and cut a two-score game to three. Twice.
Even on a bad day: 25-of-34 for 298, a passing touchdown, 64 yards and two scores on the ground, and the 100th touchdown of his college career. That is the floor.
🔎 The Hard Part
I said it again.
On The 24th Floor yesterday I said Vanderbilt “50-burgered” Tennessee at Neyland. It is 45-24. It has been 45-24 every single time.
That is the fifth time. Twice on the Flagship, once on the Todd Wade episode, once more on the Flagship, and now once in somebody else’s studio. I corrected it in this newsletter on Thursday. I corrected it in this newsletter before that. Two of those five came after the correction had already run in print twice.
So I am going to stop promising and name the actual problem. Print does not fix this. The only thing that has ever fixed a repeated error on this show is putting it in the prompter in red — that is how a URL I had wrong six times across three episodes got fixed, and it has been clean ever since. That mechanism is going on the prompter through October 10.
But yesterday exposes the hole in it: I was in a guest chair. There was no prompter in the room. A red word on my own script cannot reach me when I am on someone else’s show, and three of my last four weeks have included an outside appearance. So there is now a one-page numbers card that goes with me on every outside hit, and Vanderbilt 45-24 is the first line on it.
Forty-five to twenty-four. No. 14 beating No. 19 on Tennessee’s senior day, in Tennessee’s building. It is a better story than the one I keep telling.
🔮 Next
| Oct 3 | Open date |
| Oct 10 | at Vanderbilt, FirstBank Stadium |
| Oct 17 | Missouri |
| Oct 24 | at Texas |
| Oct 31 | Auburn |
| Nov 7 | Georgia |
Eight days to Nashville. Vanderbilt is 3-1. They beat NC State 35-31 on a goal-line fumble recovered in the end zone in the final seconds, then lost 21-15 at Auburn. Clark Lea is in year six. The quarterback is Jared Curtis — a five-star true freshman, which is the single most important fact about that game and the one Ole Miss should be building its bye week around.
And the throughline from Thursday still holds: Buster Faulkner, who just put 302 on this defense, is Florida’s coordinator. Vanderbilt runs a lot of the same misdirection with Jerry Kill as chief consultant. Vanderbilt is not a new problem. It is the same problem arriving again.
📋 Roster Desk
Housekeeping, because a basketball release that misspells a current player is worse than one that names fewer of them. Five names I have been holding are now locked against the official roster:
| Stefan Cicic | C · 7-0 · Jr. · Riverside, Ill. / Pepperdine (I had “Sitsic”) |
| Dasear Haskins | G · 6-8 · Sr. · Willingboro, N.J. / Saint Joseph’s (I had “Desir Hankins”) |
| Christian Brown | F · 6-8 · So. · Franklin, Tenn. / James Madison |
| Adam “Budd” Clark | G · 5-10 · Sr. · Philadelphia, Pa. / Seton Hall |
| Roman Siulepa | F · 6-7 · So. · Brisbane, Australia / Pitt |
That last one is quietly the best roster-building story on the team. Henshall never named him — he just said “my Australian brother was here, so we had a connection. I reached out to him early on and he said nothing but great things about this place.” There are exactly two Australians on this roster. Beard took a Brisbane forward out of the portal, and the Brisbane forward became the closer on a Perth guard. Roster building compounds when you do it in the right order.
📻 The Day on Locked On Ole Miss
The Flagship — the bye week reset, and the three things I would do with fourteen days.
The 24th Floor. I joined Reuben and the crew in Memphis to put the Florida loss in order: what missing the third ranked September win actually cost, why the first four plays were the wrong four, and the Vanderbilt nobody in Oxford has met yet.
On the site today: Ben Henshall at 10 a.m., Santiago Trouet at 3 p.m. Chris Beard on the whole eligibility mess is already up.
🔗 Five Clicks
1. Beard got the ruling he expected. The other two got a court fight.
The full availability, with the Wisne timeline laid next to what he said.
2. The Tenth Circuit stay, explained by lawyers
Where the four surviving states come from, and why the map replaced the rule.
3. The official men’s basketball roster
The spelling source of record. Bookmark it; I should have sooner.
4. Vanderbilt 45, Tennessee 24
The box score. Linked permanently, for my benefit more than yours.
5. Golding kept the defensive play-calling
On Brent Venables’ advice. Which is why “Pete Golding’s defense” is accurate and not loose talk.
💬 Join the Everydayers
The bye week thread is still open in the LOOM Private Discord — free to join. Today’s argument: if you get fourteen days and one change, do you spend it on the defensive call sheet or on turning the quarterback loose? You only get one.
Everything else lives at olemisshub.com, and if you want the show ad-free plus the members-only room, take your fandom to the next level with the Everydayer Club.
Hotty Toddy. 🦈
