Hey, They Won't Let the Tall Kid Play.
Next year, America
Thanks for being here. We are entirely supported by Paid subscriptions. Jump on board if you can.
Sadly under-entertaining news out of the University of Florida: The men’s basketball coach says the 7-foot-9 kid won’t play this season.
The kid has a name, Oliver Rioux, and an interesting back-story: Born in Canada, mom’s 6-foot-2, dad’s 6-8, has a brother who clocks in at 6-9. Rioux, who’s called Oli by almost everyone, was 6 feet tall by the time he was 8 years old. He hit 7 feet the year he entered seventh grade and then, I don’t know, had another growth spurt.
Rioux, 18, holds the Guinness World Record as the tallest teenager on the planet. But coming out of the hoops factory that is the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., he still received only modest Division I college interest, with scholarship offers from UC Irvine and Morehead State. He was very tall but under-developed, and those facts go hand-in-glove in the context of trying to play D-1 level basketball.
So Rioux instead accepted a preferred walk-on spot at Florida, meaning no basketball scholarship but a chance to grow. (His game. Grow his game. Stay with me here.)
Boringly, that’s exactly what Florida coach Todd Golden is planning. Golden said this week that barring a late change of plan — and in consultation with Rioux’s family, his AAU coach and various others — Oli will redshirt the 2024-25 NCAA season, leaving him four years of eligibility starting next year.
The coach was reasonable and all that. "Honestly, it's put him in a tough situation,” Golden said. “He's sitting over there at the end of games and everybody's yelling at him and trying to get him out there. They just hadn't understood that that was our potential plan for him.”
Golden was referring to Florida fans who, like the rest of us, really love the idea of seeing Rioux play in a college game. I haven’t known that many people who could dunk a basketball without their feet leaving the ground, put it that way.
Also, and not to put too fine a point on this, Golden (the coach) could use the distraction. The married father of two was recently named in a Title IX complaint that accuses him of all sorts of creepy behavior, including stalking and cyber-stalking a number of female Florida college students.
The university’s student-run campus newspaper, The Independent Florida Alligator, whose name I am not making up, first broke this story. I’m including the link to The Alligator’s work here, but I will caution you that it’s pretty unsavory stuff, with references to people texting photos of their Johnsons and so forth.
Suffice it to say, not a great moment for Todd Golden. At this point, the coach is making a plan for Oliver Rioux that involves a future Golden may never see.
At any rate, Rioux is pretty savvy about caretaking his own journey — pretty unruffled. He knows he needs to hone his basketball skills and essentially catch up to his own height, and that does take time, and there aren’t a lot of useful shortcuts. A year spent just learning and working on stuff sounds about right to him; it’s the rest of us who’d like to see the timeline sped up.
I doubt that anyone needs to make sure Oli keeps all four years of college eligibility intact. He’ll be gone to the NBA’s G-League long before time expires. Maybe he’ll become Manute Bol; maybe Shawn Bradley.
Gheorghe Muresan, the Romanian former NBAer, was 7-foot-7 and 303 pounds. Yao Ming stood 7-6 and weighed 311.
Oli Rioux, 7-9 and 305 pounds, fits that mold. About the rest, though, we have to wait and see. It’s really too bad! Could’ve used the entertainment right about now.
Welcome to the circus, kid.....