2011-12 Final grades: Preston Medlin

Preston Medlin - Sophomore
37 games, 37 starts
 ________________________
Averages
35.2 minutes
17.0 points
4.4 rebounds
3.4 assists
49.6% - FG
42.8 - 3pt
80.1% - FT


So here we are... Start of July and finally finishing up what really should have been done by the middle of April. Today is the day though when the report card is complete though. And to top it off, I get one final 2011-12 gushing session for a dude I rarely, if ever, had a single bad thing to say about.

The fact that the comparison between Medlin and USU's all-time leading scorer Jaycee Carroll is even worthy of mentioning, if not completely deserved, is impressive enough on its own. When it comes down to the overall numbers, Medlin's sophomore season is better than Carroll's. And what's more impressive is that Medlin didn't have a big man like Nate Harris down low to balance the inside-out game, or really share the spotlight with. He also put up those numbers facing double-teams, pretty much the entire season as the team's biggest scoring threat by a significant margin.

2011-12 Final grades: Brockeith Pane

Brockeith Pane - Senior
37 games, 35 starts
 ________________________
Averages
32.3 minutes
12.6 points
3 rebounds
4.3 assists
40.5% - FG
30.2 - 3pt
77.7% - FT


Finally getting into the final two of these final grades in between recovery periods of wicked sunburns! Sure, it's almost July, but better late than never, right?

Grading Pane on his senior season is maybe the toughest one out there. On one hand, he had a really strong finish and was crucial in the team having as strong a finish. On the other hand, when he was slumping hard, the team was stuck in a massive rut. With him being the preseason WAC Player of the Year, expectations were obviously high, as was the pressure of being looked at as the go-to guy to start off the year with six seniors having graduated. Then when other would-be go-to guy Brady Jardine got injured, the pressure mounted even more.

The result was a total roller coaster, so let's break it down as best as we can.

2011-12 Final grades: Kyisean Reed

Kyisean Reed - Junior
36 games, 28 starts
 ________________________
Averages
25 minutes
10 points
5.1 rebounds
0.6 assists
61.4% - FG
0.0 - 3pt
67.9% - FT


Hey, back on the final grades finally as we near mid-June. Better late than never though, and eventually the three leading scorers on last year's team were going to get their big review. So let's put Kyisean on the hot seat and break down his roller coaster of a junior season.

First and foremost, the season was a roller coaster for everyone, which had to have made the task of fitting in as a JUCO transfer that much more difficult for Reed. Still, Reed made it six straight seasons in which the Aggies had a JUCO transfer among the team's top three scorers, joining some pretty impressive company in Brockeith Pane, Nate Bendall, Jared Quayle, Gary Wilkinson and Steve Ducharme. And while Reed's overall season numbers are lower than all of those guys, he put together a couple monster games that could easily stack up against the single best games played during any of these guys' junior seasons.

2011-12 Final grades: Morgan Grim

Morgan Grim - Senior
37 games, 37 starts
 ________________________
Averages
27.9 minutes
9.1 points
6.1 rebounds
1.1 assists
56.8% - FG
N/A - 3pt
66.7% - FT


 Grading Morgan Grim on this season is a tough one. There was a lot of very exciting highs mixed in with some frustrating lows, with some reports of nagging injuries complicating the whole thing. All said and done though, Grim had a very solid season. He was one of only a few guys with experience in the system returning this past season, however his minutes throughout his entire college career had been sparse at best.

Still, Grim stepped up to the challenge of taking a role much larger than anything else he'd yet faced, and for the most part, he excelled.

2011-12 Final grades: Danny Berger

Danny Berger - Sophomore
31 games, 25 starts
 ________________________
Averages
25.8 minutes
6.6 points
3.4 rebounds
2.4 assists
49.1% - FG
36.7% - 3pt
76.9% - FT


Now the grades really get tricky as we've worked our way into the starters. These are the guys we've seen the most of, seen their ups and downs, seen them play through slumps, and seen their big games that have raised the bar of expectations. In Berger's case, he made a really great impression early on and also had a pretty excellent finish to the season, leaving us all to wonder, "what happened in the middle there?"

It's unfair to ignore the fact that he came to Logan ridiculously fresh off a mission, but was expected to have the luxury of redshirting. When Adam Thoseby, Mitch Bruneel and Steve Thornton couldn't deliver on a consistent basis, Berger was thrown into the fire. The result was some stellar play in his first couple games that seemed to really inject life into the whole team. Still, with no time to get in the kind of shape demanded of a college athlete, fatigue seemed to takes its toll, along with the challenge of playing at a new level for the first time.

2011-12 Final grades: Ben Clifford

Ben Clifford - Freshman
36 games, 4 starts
 ________________________
Averages
16.8 minutes
4.4 points
3.5 rebounds
0.36 assists
50.9% - FG
38.9% - 3pt
72.9% - FT


I made no secret early on about my feelings toward Ben Clifford. He became my underdog that I wanted to see succeed after only a few games with his always solid rebounding, never half-assing his effort defensively and his overall motor playing out there. It seemed obvious that he cared as much as anyone else out there earlier on in the year, long before the team found the collective passion that drove them to finish the season as strong as they did (and hey, huge kudos to everyone on that one!)

With the chance to make a historical comparison or two, you know I'm going to! The last USU big man to play as a freshman without two years of growing up on a mission was the legend himself, Nate Harris. Harris, like Clifford, redshirted his first year at USU and was the primary big man off the bench as a redshirt freshman. How the numbers stack up are a bit surprising, keeping in mind that they somehow both managed to average exactly 16.8 minutes per game in their freshman years.

Harris:   5.1 ppg, 3.2 rpg. 16 assists, 39 TOs, 11 blk, 21 stl. - 60.9% FG - 0.0% 3pt - 60.3% FT
Clifford: 4.4 ppg, 3.5 rpg. 13 assists, 30 TOs, 17 blk, 16 stl. - 50.9% FG - 38.9% 3pt - 72.9% FT

2011-12 Final grades: Mitch Bruneel

Mitch Bruneel - Sophomore
36 games, 9 starts
 ________________________
Averages
14.9 minutes
4.1 points
1.8 rebounds
0.69 assists
49.1% - FG
40% - 3pt
60.7% - FT


 With USU coming off a historic season and stuck with the loss of six graduating seniors, bringing in a player fresh off a JUCO national championship looked like an ideal way to keep some winning momentum going. Bruneel was one of the key players during Southern Idaho's championship season was being looked at to provide some scoring punch, toughness and defense on the wings.

As was the case though with the majority of Utah State's team this season, Bruneel's play could only be described as inconsistent. Some games he looked like an all-around force, others he pulled the disappearing act.

Positives: Early on in the season, when this team was really struggling to find itself, Bruneel was one of the more consistent guys on the team. Through the first 10 games of the season he averaged 5.7 points and 2.5 rebounds per game on 53 percent shooting from the field and 40 percent from deep. He also punished the living hell out of San Jose State, hitting 8-of-10 3-pointers and scoring 27 total points over two games against the Spartans. Ever once in a while in a tense situation he'd seem to fly out of nowhere for a tip-in basket too, and really, was pretty good about finishing around the rim all season.

2011-12 Final grades: E.J. Farris

E.J. Farris - Junior
33 games, 1 start
 ________________________
Averages
9.2 minutes
2.8 points
1.2 rebounds
0.79 assists
34.8% - FG
19.4% - 3pt
95.7% - FT


As has been the case with everyone else so far, E.J. Farris' final grade will depend partly on what was expected of him going into this year. For a guy tasked with backing up the preseason WAC Player of the Year, the expectations weren't exactly through the roof for a guy most people are pretty sure is a walk-on (not dealing in absolutes there after the internet was all sorts of wrong about Morgan Grim being a walk-on).

Even with the low expectations, this season had a fair share of ups, downs and frustrations.

2011-12 Final grades: Jordan Stone

Jordan Stone - Freshman
34 games, 2 starts
 ________________________
Averages
9.3 minutes
2.1 points
2.5 rebounds
0.12 assists
60.5% - FG
N/A% - 3pt
48.6% - FT


Fair or not, I disclaimed from the beginning that part of Adam Thoseby's final grade was going to be judged partly on the early hype he carried, as well as his impressive showing in exhibition games. On the flip side of that, Jordan Stone gets a bit of leeway given the fact that coaches very much had hoped to redshirt him, but due to the lack of size down low, couldn't do it.

The thing that was tough about this was the fact that Stone very much looked in need of a redshirt year. Coaches had tabbed him as a project all along, and the last thing you want to have to do with a project player is pull a redshirt and thrust them into action. But when Brady Jardine got hurt and Igor Premasunac struggled to come along, Stone was needed. When Morgan Grim and Kyisean Reed had nagging injuries, Stone was needed more. On the bright side of that, he still got a decent amount of minutes for a true freshman, and all of it should help him for the future.

2011-12 Final grades: Adam Thoseby

Adam Thoseby - Freshman
28 games, 2 starts
 ________________________
Averages
8 minutes
1.6 points
0.4 rebounds
0.39 assists
27.1% - FG
31.3% - 3pt
37.5% - FT


I'm going to disclaim this now, but a big part of what is going to factor into the final grade for Tea-Time (fist pump for using that nickname for the first time in forever) is going to be the hype that followed Thoseby into the start of this season. Reports came out in the days leading up to the first exhibition game against UC San Diego that Thoseby was majorly turning heads, so much so that it apparently looked like a starting role could be in his very near future.

Whether or not that forecast was under the assumption that his grasp of the system was come along quickly, I have no idea. Regardless, things appear that they did not quite pan out as some had hoped for Tea-Time. Of his 225 minutes played this season, more than half of them came in the first eight games of the year. He played double-digit minutes in seven of those eight games, but only reached that mark twice in the team's 29 games from that point.

2011-12 Final grades: Igor Premasunac

Igor Premasunac - Junior
13 games, 0 starts
 ________________________
Averages
3.2 minutes
0.2 points
0.6 rebounds
0.08 assists
20% - FG
0% - 3pt
N/A - FT


What exactly is one supposed to say about Igor's season in 2011-12? Eight of his 13 appearances this season were stints of no more than two minutes and the statistics which he registered the most of were personal fouls, rebounds and turnovers, in that order. In the bigger picture of things, he never seemed to really click with anything within the system here.

Positives: He filled in with 10 minutes of play (nearly a quarter of his season total) when injuries had USU shorthanded against Idaho State. It also has to go mentioned that he did indeed score two points on the road at Louisiana Tech in nine minutes of play in that game. Maybe the biggest thing is that USU was 12-1 in games he appeared in, with the only loss being on the road at New Mexico State. Really though, all of this is a reach as far as finding positives.