November 6th, 2013 Morning News: South Korea, Oregon Suspensions & Biedscheid Redshirt

The first road trip of the season: The regular season opens up on Friday, November 8th, and one of those games will be the Armed Forces Classic, played in South Korea. Georgetown will play Oregon. And actually, before you correct me, the game will actually be played Saturday morning local time in Korea, but 8 PM eastern time on Friday in the US. Forgive the confusion, as college basketball games aren't usually played in time zones that are 14 hours ahead of eastern standard.

Even though the game is more than 60 hours away, the teams have already left, getting on a plane yesterday. So the season might seem to still be far away, but the first road trip is already under way. And speaking of one of the teams in that game...

Oregon suspends Artis and Carter: Oregon's got a little bit of a dicey situation as star Dominic Artis and Ben Carter will be suspended for "multiple games" for selling apparel. These guys should be back in time for Pac-12 play, but this suspension means that the Ducks might drop from their lofty preseason ranking earlier than even I expected.

I've been saying for months now that I just don't believe the Oregon hype. They had a nice NCAA Tournament run, but they were a bubble team for basically the entire regular season and lose four of five starters. Artis is a really good player to build around (though this suspension is worrisome), but there remain a lot of roster holes. We see every year that teams which have fluke NCAA Tournament runs get themselves overrated in the next season's preseason polls, and Oregon seems like the most extreme example this season.

Cameron Biedscheid will redshirt for Notre Dame: I haven't been able to find this news officially reported anywhere, so there's a tiny chance I'm going to have to retract this story, but there had been murmurings about a Biedscheid redshirt for a few weeks now and it's being reported as a done deal in at least a few places.

This isn't a huge loss for the Irish, as some new freshmen meant that Biedscheid probably wasn't going to earn more than around 15 minutes per game, and he wasn't exactly a superstar as a freshman. But it's a bizarre decision. I never got the sense that Biedscheid wasn't physically able to compete at this level, which is usually the reason for a redshirt like this. I've been trying to get the pulse of Irish fans on this one, and they all seem to be as perplexed as I am. The Irish have a history of really successful fifth year seniors, and maybe Biedscheid will be the next one in a few years, but maybe he won't. We'll see him next year, I guess.