Football notes: Brandon Bourbon, Mitch Craft and William Moore

Potosi junior Brandon Bourbon could wind up at Mizzou in 2010 after all — word came today that couch Gary Pinkel made the offer this week for Brandon to join the Tigers as a running back. The Tigers join Kansas, Stanford, BYU and Harvard on the list of offers so far.

Among area seniors, Farmington teammates Andrew Huhman and Zach Oyler signed to play football in the fall at Missouri Valley College. They're among dozens of SEMO athletes who have signed with schools for the 2009-'10 season; the full list is here.

• Mitch Craft, an all-state quarterback at Cape Girardeau Central who later played at Southern Mississippi, made his first start last week with the Acadiana Mudbugs of the new Southern Indoor Football League. Craft, playing as a linebacker with the new Louisiana-based team, had five solo tackles and three assists. The Mudbugs defeated Austin, Texas, 37-29.

• Hayti grad and Mizzou standout William Moore, who was picked by Atlanta in the second round of the NFL Draft on Saturday, became the second football player from Hayti to reach the pro level.

From Hayti historian Al Jackson: In 1961, G.W. Dean entered the pros when he signed with Toledo of the USFL; his career ended quickly after a knee injury during the exhibition season. At Hayti, Dean held rushing and scoring records after playing in just 17 varsity games; those records were later broken, but it took nearly twice as many games for it to happen.

Falcons pick Hayti's William Moore in NFL Draft

William Moore wanted Atlanta, and it looks like Atlanta wanted him.

Moore, an all-state safety from Hayti who played his final season at Mizzou back in the fall, was the 55th pick in the NFL Draft on Saturday. And before the Falcons ever said his name, Moore said he already felt Atlanta-bound.

"Everybody asked me where I’d love to go. I said Atlanta," he told the Alanta Journal-Constitution in a story published today. It’s like when I went to Missouri, I had the feeling, the players, the direction they’re headed. I know I can go in and make an instant impact.”

Read more of the AJC's story on Moore and his Mizzou days here.

And by the way, Moore is already angling to get to wear No. 25 at Atlanta — the same number he wore at Mizzou.

• With one Southeast Missouri athlete picked in one pro draft this year, another is likely to be picked in less than two months: Tyler Hansbrough of Poplar Bluff and the University of North Carolina is widely expected by NBA insiders to be a first-round or second-round selection. ESPN will broadcast the draft live from New York.

SEMO sets its 2009 football schedule

Southeast's football schedule is nearly firm for 2009, and the Redhawks are expected to make it official with an announcement soon.

Among the questions likely to come up before the season kicks off Sept. 5: Can Southeast find its defense, which went MIA for most of last season? Can the Redhawks keep focus on the game and out of the courts (case in point: Houston Lillard's public indecency charge)?

And maybe biggest question of all: Just how hot is that seat getting for coach Tony Samuel, whose teams have posted a combined three-year record of 11-23 — including last year's 4-8 season that included two wins in overtime. Will another 3- or 4-win season be enough to earn Samuel a fifth year leading the program?

This year's schedule highlights: an opener against Quincy University on Sept. 5, a payday game (likely worth $200,000 or more for Southeast) at Cincinnati on Sept. 12, and two final games at home against the Redhawks' biggest rivals — Nov. 14 against Murray State, and Nov. 21 against SIU-Carbondale.

None of this year's opponents are new to the schedule, but a couple haven't been around in a while. Southeast last played Quincy in 2001 (a 38-6 win), Southern Illinois in 2005 (a 58-23 loss), and Cincinnati in 2007 (a 59-3 loss).

The full schedule:

Sept. 5 — vs. Quincy
Sept. 12 — at Cincinnati
Sept. 19 — vs. Eastern Illinois
Sept. 26 — at UT-Martin
Oct. 3 — at Tennessee State
Oct. 10 — vs. Austin Peay
Oct. 17 — idle
Oct. 24 — at Tennessee Tech
Oct. 31 — at Eastern Kentucky
Nov. 7 — Jacksonville State
Nov. 14 — Murray State
Nov. 21 — SIU-Carbondale

Bourbon's first offer, and SEMO's best 10

Junior running back Brandon Bourbon of Potosi is on the recruiting list of a growing number of colleges, and one of them stepped up to make the first offer this week.

Stanford on Wednesday made Bourbon an offer to compete at the Pac 10 school in California at the running back spot starting with the 2010 season. Stanford is the first of several schools expected to bid for the 6-foot-1, 210-pound all-state pick. He led his team with a school-record 2,420 last season.

Mizzou is among the other schools already showing an interest.

Follow more offseason recruiting news, along with combine results, at Brandon's page on our site.

• A colleague and I were debating who should make the ultimate all-star roster for senior basketball players across our region. After some head-scratching, here's the list I came up with (in alphabetical order). On both the boys and girls list, the first three or four names were pretty easy to come up with. After that, the talent level is so balanced among about 12-15 athletes, it's hard to narrow it down to just 10.

If you were coaching a 10-person team of seniors, who would you pick?

BOYS

Austin Brewer, Eminence
Zach Curry, Bernie
Dustin Ferguson, Clarkton
Austin Greer, Notre Dame
Josh Minner, NMCC
Michael Porter, Sikeston
Riley Raulston, Poplar Bluff
Antonio Riggens, Charleston
Drew Thomas, Scott County Central
Byron Wright, Portageville

GIRLS

Molly Barnes, Farmington
Jeleea Drake, Portageville
Alex Fowler, Notre Dame
Debra Hall, Kelly
Katelyn Heil, Dexter
Chelsea Kight, Meadow Heights
Taylor Jansen, Farmington
Jodi Menz, Delta
Jill Temples, Dexter
Brittany Walker, Portageville

With Portageville and Scott Co. Central, it seems like old times

Put Jim Bidewell or Ronnie Cookson in a state championship game and it's hard to bet against them.

The two coaches are a combined 18-1 in state championship games, and both added to the total this week in Columbia. Cookson's Scott County Central team won 98-63 in the Class 1 final Saturday, and Bidewell's Portageville team won 60-55 in Class 2 on Friday.

It's the first title win for both coaches in more than 15 years (1993 for Central, '94 for Portageville), and it's the first time since 2004 that two Southeast Missouri boys teams returned as state champs.

Congratulations to both on a great weekend.

But the weekend puts a twist on our final SEMO Top 25 poll of the season — or does it? Scott Central, No. 2 in the Top 25, dominated the Class 1 playoffs, while No. 1 Sikeston lost in the quarterfinals to Borgia, the eventual Class 4 state champion.

Who ended the season as Southeast Missouri's No. 1 team?

Dickey Nutt looks like a lock for SEMO's job

It appears Southeast has its new men's basketball coach.

It's Dickey Nutt.

Feel free to go back to napping, washing laundry, filing your nails — any of the things that are bound to add more excitement to your day than the arrival of Dickey Nutt to the Cape Girardeau city limits.

The big announcement — if you can call it that — should formally come Thursday from athletic director John Shafer at a 2 p.m. news conference. It's the culmination of a quiet search that Shafer said produced piles of quality applications, rumored to include a lengthy list of former Division I coaches, assistant coaches and others with ties to the area.

And from that pile, we bring you Dickey Nutt.

Remember the "40 minutes of hell" basketball with fired coach Scott Edgar? Get ready for 40 minutes of "oh well" with Nutt.

By all accounts, Nutt's a nice enough guy. A solid nuts-and-bolts coach, a decent recruiter, a good ol' boy born and raised in Arkansas.

He came within three wins of becoming the all-time winningest coach at Arkansas State before he got the hint — a mostly loud, less-than-subtle hint — that he was no longer welcome. He resigned in February 2008 with a resume that included 13 seasons at the school (seven of them winning seasons), one conference championship, and one short-lived trip to the NCAA Tournament. His overall record: 189 wins, 187 losses.

But after Nutt's homecoming wore off at ASU, his teams had trouble drawing 2,000 fans to home games at ASU's Convocation Center. He always had trouble selling recruits on small-town life in Jonesboro, Ark., a city even bigger than the one he's been hired to build up.

And he hardly fits the original dream candidate described by Shafer, who said in January that "you can see there's a lot of enthusiasm and people are hungry. I want to do something to help that."

But the hiring of Nutt, who turns 50 in June, was a safe, stable choice for Shafer, himself a newbie on the SEMO payroll. And for a program still trying to argue its way out of impending NCAA sanctions left over from the Edgar era, maybe a safe choice was the best choice. It was certainly an easy choice.

Even if it has all the excitement of watching paint dry.

Class 1-3 sectional matchups should be good ones

The basketball playoffs showed potential for interesting sectional rounds once the new district assignments were announced several months ago, and it looks like they've delivered.

Twelve sectional games Tuesday and Wednesday feature Southeast Missouri teams, including a few potential to be classics.

The best bets:

Class 2 boys at TRCC, 6 p.m. Wednesday: Thayer, which reached the state football championship the past two seasons, will put a tough group of athletes on the floor against Portageville, but the Bobcats don't often pair off with Bootheel talent. Neither team made it out of their district tournament last year. The winner here gets the winner of ...

Class 2 boys at Park Hills Central, 6 p.m. Wednesday: Bernie and South Iron feature two of the area's best young coaches and two of the scrappier teams in the SEMO Top 25. South Iron, which reached the state championship game last year, has the edge in experience against Bernie, which hasn't been in a sectional game since 1992.

Class 2 girls at TRCC, 7:45 p.m. Wednesday: Portageville and Couch are two of the state's top five teams in Class 2, but one of them won't even be among the state's final eight. Together, they have 50 wins and five losses this season.

Class 1 girls at Park Hills Central, 7:45 p.m. Tuesday: How far can Meadow Heights carry the excitement of winning its first district championship? The Panthers face Bismarck, another relative newcomer to the playoffs.

Still looking for another game? Here's the rest of the Tuesday and Wednesday lineup:

Class 3 boys: Bloomfield vs. Charleston at Poplar Bluff High School, 6 p.m. Wednesday
Class 3 boys: West County vs. Maplewood at Jefferson College in Hillsboro, 6 p.m. Wednesday
Class 1 boys: Clarkton vs. Eminence at Poplar Bluff High School, 6 p.m. Tuesday
Class 1 boys: Scott County Central vs. St. Elizabeth at Park Hills Central, 6 p.m. Tuesday

Class 3 girls: Greenville vs. Scott City at Poplar Bluff High School, 7:45 p.m. Wednesday
Class 2 girls: St. Vincent vs. Canton at Troy, 7:45 p.m. Wednesday
Class 1 girls: Naylor vs. Bakersfield at Poplar Bluff High School, 7:45 p.m. Tuesday
Class 1 girls: Delta vs. Tuscumbia at Park Hills Central, 7:45 p.m. Tuesday

Which one of them will be THE game to see this week?