Who knows how Mompremier will do?

Who knows how Wadley Mompremier will do this next season? Will he start? No idea. Will he play significant minutes? Probably. But here is the thing about Wadley: he may be just now coming into his own. He has played a total of only 488 minutes in his entire career, and 262 of those were in 2015-16, his most recent season.

What will his value be to the team? Rebounding and defense. He is not going to score many points, and at this late point in his career, it is probably pie-in-the-sky to think that he is going to develop much in the scoring area.

But consider this: last season Lis Shoshi led the Sun Belt in blocks with 41, or 1.5 per game. That comes out to 0.062 blocks per minute played. Wadley had only 34 blocks, but he played only 272 minutes, so that comes out to 0.125 per minute, or right at twice as many as the SBC leader. And that was in the only season in which Wadley has played significant minutes thus far. Think about it! At that rate of blocks, Wadley only has to average 12 minutes per game in order to lead the conference in blocks (if all else remained equal). How long has it been since we had that kind of an eraser underneath the basket?

Rebounding? Wadley averaged only 3.1 rpg the last season he played for Ohio. However, that was in only 9.1 minutes per game. Our leading rebounder last season was Shoshi with 6.4 per game. At the rate he rebounded, if Wadley had had Shoshi’s minutes, he would have averaged 8.4 boards per game, which would have been third in the SBC last season. And in case you are wondering about the relative level of competition, the Mid-American last season was ranked 14th to the SBC's 13th, just a fraction behind us, so we are comparing apples to apples.