Mizzou Links, 7-31-07

• Dave Matter decides that Baylor deserves some coverage too. Plus, he covers #11-13 in his Top 25 countdown.
• Meanwhile, Matter's basketball counterpart at the Trib questions Dickie V's talent evaluation...blasphemer...
  
• Congrats to Tim Jamieson, ABCA Midwest Region Coach of the Year! Needless to say, I strongly agree with this selection. Mizzou wasn't supposed to do anything this year.
  
• Good luck to the 6 Mizzou swimmers (Bennett Clark, Bryan Difford, Jill Granger, Colleen Gordon, Lori Halvorson, and Jill Bastien) competing at the US National Championships. The competition starts today at IUPUI (Go Ooo-wee-poo-wee!).
• Tyler Wilson, Mizzou's new #1 QB target, will decide on a school before his season starts. Meanwhile, a "top JUCO forward" names Mizzou his favorite.
• And finally, this is a bit insane. As The Beef put it to me last night, Minnesota is now on the other end of a Herschel Walker deal. The Celtics are now a contender in the East, but their window of opportunity is about two years, max. Meanwhile, they traded away every single building block of the future. Knowing how much he liked Al Jefferson, I figured Bill Simmons would be pretty upset by all this...he's not. I realize that the NBA's different--trading away your future in a sports like MLB, with no salary cap, wouldn't make much sense--but in the NBA it's really really hard to build a young nucleus and keep all the cogs for years at a time thanks to the luxury tax and relatively short rookie contracts. Still, though, this deal would make me QUITE queasy if I were a Celtics fan. Ray Allen's got 1-2 years left in him and Pierce has about 165,000 miles on his tires (though he's somehow only 29).