{"id":555,"date":"2010-02-11T06:00:20","date_gmt":"2010-02-11T12:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/67.227.157.91\/~kenpom\/wp_blog\/the-loneliest-number\/"},"modified":"2010-02-11T06:00:20","modified_gmt":"2010-02-11T12:00:20","slug":"the-loneliest-number","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/the-loneliest-number\/","title":{"rendered":"The loneliest number"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Friday, it was announced that Wyoming’s A.J. Davis would be leaving the program<\/a> to pursue playing time elsewhere. On the surface, this was not big news. Davis was a solid player and will make a nice transfer for some mid-level program out there, but Wyoming is battling it out with Air Force to determine which team will wear the white jerseys in the 8\/9 opening round game of the MWC tournament.<\/p>\n

No, the real significance of Davis’ departure was that we are on the the verge of having a uniform number retire itself. Davis wore number 51 for the Cowboys, one of just four 51’s nationally who got meaningful (at least 10 percent of his team’s) minutes. And now we won’t see Davis for the remainder of the season. That leaves three active 51’s: Utah’s David Foster, JMU’s Pierre Curtis, and Campbell’s Preston Dodson.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure why 51 is on the verge of extinction. Curtis is a senior, and with Davis out of action for next season, we could be down to just two players wearing the number during competitive play in 2011. There are actually five benchwarmer-types wearing it this season, so there’s still hope. The problem is there’s no role model that wears 51 – the list of NBA players to wear it<\/a> is not exactly loaded with all-stars. Actually, it’s not loaded with any all-stars. It appears the best 51 of all-time is a toss-up between Michael Doleac, Lawrence Funderburke, and Michael Ruffin<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Here’s the list of players by number this season (10% of minutes played to qualify)…<\/p>\n

No.  Players\n 1     219\n 5     201\n 3     193\n23     170\n21     164\n24     162\n32     161\n 2     154\n11     149\n22     147\n15     147\n10     139\n33     137\n12     137\n 4     125\n 0     111\n20     109\n34     104\n13      93\n25      88\n44      84\n30      80\n14      78\n42      69\n31      69\n45      51\n35      42\n41      38\n50      34\n40      30\n55      29\n54      18\n52      18\n43      11\n53       7\n51       4\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last Friday, it was announced that Wyoming’s A.J. Davis would be leaving the program to pursue playing time elsewhere. On the surface, this was not big news. Davis was a solid player and will make a nice transfer for some mid-level program out there, but Wyoming is battling it out with Air Force to determine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}