When it rains, it pours. Just over two months after senior guard Tony Hicks announced he was leaving the Penn basketball program, Penn Athletics announced Saturday that sophomore guard Antonio Woods has been declared ineligible for the remainder of the 2015-16 season due to insufficient academic progress under University policy.
Woods will not be allowed to re-enroll in the University until the start of the 2017 spring semester.
Woods is averaging 10.7 points, 3.3 assists and 2.2 rebounds per game. Losing Woods is a huge setback for a young Penn squad still trying to find player combinations under first-year Quakers coach Steve Donahue, as Woods ranked fifth in the Ivy League in minutes played.
In other news, Penn sophomore guard Antonio Woods announces that he is transferring to Harvard, where he has just been named to the Dean’s List.
Oh snap!!
Last year, Penn had 4 different players named Ivy League Rookie of the Week:
– Antonio Woods is no longer with the team and may never return. While he appeared to play a much bigger role on this year’s team, his statistics seemed similar to last season.
– Sam Jones scored 0 points in 18 minutes against Princeton. He only played 4 minutes between the second half and OT. In his last 5 games against Division I opponents, he has scored a total of 19 points (0, 3, 3, 8 and 5) with 5-27 three-point shooting (18.5%). While he has been in the starting lineup most of the year, he has been replaced in two of the last three games and it appears he is falling out of favor.
– Mike Auger, who was a very positive contributor to last year’s team, has become non-existent on the court for this year’s team (to his credit, he does seem to be a very positive high-energy guy on the bench supporting his team mates).
– Darnell Foreman has basically stayed the same in his stats between his first year and the first half of this season.
There was much hope with last year’s class, when Coach Allen brought them into Philly. There was even hope for this group with Coach Donahue at the helm. However, after the first half of this season, with a new coach and system, it, sadly, does not seem that this group will make much of a contribution to the future success of the Quakers.
The present crop of new Freshman have, like year’s incoming class, have shown grit, hustle, and flashes of talent. Unfortunately, the results from the last few years and the first few months of this season do not give me great confidence that there will be much improvement over the next few years from Coach Allen’s recruits.
Maybe we will have to see what happens with Coach Donahue’s own recruits. If that is the case, then our return will be delayed by one more year.