Can John Wall's first assist at UK be C.J Leslie?

There is buzz that Memphis may find it's way to future UK basketball schedules, but first this. Even though the season does not start until November, John Wall is working on his first major assist for John Calipari's Wildcat's. He has been a chief recruiter for his old Word of God Academy team mate, C.J. Leslie, and has been "constantly in his ear about UK" and urging him to commit to the Cats.

And it appears that insistence may be paying off. C.J. will be making an official visit to the UK campus, hopefully around August 22. This is in addition to several "unofficial visits" he plans to make to Rupp Arena during the basketball season to watch his buddy John play.

All of this seems to paint Leslie as a UK lean and I just wonder how the Tarheel nation will react to two top in state recruits playing for the Wildcat Blue. As I have said before, I think C.J. would be UK's top big man target and think both he and Adreian Payne are very viable at this point. In addition to both being beasts in the paint, both look to be shot blocking machines. In case we forgot, here is some C.J. in action:

Apparently when John Calipari left Memphis, he not only took Cousins and Dodson, but the bulk of the schedule as well. Being a mid major school, Calipari did a great job of building up the Tiger's out of conference schedule to make up for the less than stellar Conference USA opponents. Even though UK plays in the SEC, he is also working on the out of conference schedule because lately it is all about the RPI and WHO you play when it comes to the NCAA seedings.

For their credit, Memphis does have five bigtime games on the slate for 2009-2010: Kansas, UMass, Syracuse, Gonzaga, and Tennessee. But the new Tigers schedule does reflect four games against teams with a RPI of 250 including the stellar RPI's of Houston Baptist (313), Central Arkansas (319), and Southeast Missouri State (339).

Memphis writer Dan Wolken and "friend" of the blog had these thoughts:

But it's also true that Pastner turned down some opportunities to play some tougher teams because he didn't want to overload the Tigers -- or himself, as a first-year coach -- in trying to establish the new era.

Those were the kind of teams Memphis avoided playing under John Calipari the last four years, which is one major reason the Tigers had four consecutive finishes in the RPI top 10.

Wolken went on to mention the fact that games with Kentucky remain a possibility for future Memphis schedules, something that Calipari has said in the past. So it looks like future UK schedules will have the Tigers and Josh Pastner ... provided of course Memphis can keep their RPI up.