Who is Philip Jurick?

By now you’ve probably read about the 9.5 blocks/game and near triple double average Philip Jurick averaged while at Chattanooga State.

You’ve probably heard about how he was an emotionally-plagued “bad kid” at Tennessee after coming out of high school but has transformed himself since transferring to Chattanooga State.

You may have even scribbled down all the schools he received scholarship offers from: OU, Auburn, Ole Miss, Georgia, and West Virginia.

But let’s run through a quick list of things you might not know (but could very easily if you typed a certain string of characters into www.google.com) about the 6’11 Jurick:

• Jurick’s father played basketball at Wisconsin, which explains the heavy emphasis on defense.
• He didn’t start playing basketball until high school
• He, Bobby Maze, Renaldo Woolridge, Daniel West, and Scotty Hopson (Tennessee’s highly successful hoops class of 2008) used to call themselves “the Fab 5.”
• His Juco coach calls him someone who’s “at the top tier of anybody I saw or played against in the SEC.”

And it’s only because of a failed speech class (of all things) that he’s headed to Stillwater.

After transferring from UT to Chattanooga State and playing there for a year he began the process of enrolling at UT – Chattanooga (a D-1 program) but realized along the way he was going to come up one class short (speech) to qualify. So he went back to Chattanooga State for another year of seasoning in the Juco ranks.

Travis Ford jumped all over the opportunity and yanked him from the likes of Huggy Bear, Lon Kruger, and Mick Cronin.

It’s a huge play for the short-on-depth-in-the-middle Cowboys looking for an athletic five to take the place of Moses and Pilgrim. It’s a good move too – snagging a guy who doesn’t have to have the ball in his hands to make a difference in the game. I’m not sure there’d be enough shots to go around with Nash, JPO, Markel, CJ, and Keiton running and gunning from the outside.

Hopefully Jurick can get his seemingly emotional life together and become a fan favorite in GIA. The guy he’ll be trying to replace sure did.

Oh, and one last thing, the newest Cowboy is on Twitter, but hasn’t tweeted since October in case you were thinking about following him.