IUPUI's George Hill has decided to stay in the NBA draft and has hired an agent. I got a chance to see Hill play a few times and I'm not surprised he impressed NBA scouts enough to decide to come out this year. He seemed like a nice guy during the press conferences so I wish him the best.

This is obviously good news for Oakland. Hill would have been the favorite to win the Summit League Player of the Year award had he elected to come back. Now the likely favorites are Oakland's Derick Nelson, Southern Utah's Geoff Payne, Oral Roberts' Robert Jarvis and North Dakota State's Ben Woodside and Brett Winkelman, who were all first-team selections last season.

IUPUI will still be solid and looks like it has a pretty solid recruiting class coming in. If I had to turn in my preseason ballot today my top six would be 1. Oakland 2. Oral Roberts 3. North Dakota State 4. IUPUI 5. Southern Utah 6. IPFW Maybe I'm being a homer picking Oakland, but I think this team has a ton of potential.

I haven't had a chance to really blog about Oakland's busy spring signing period, but it's been pretty impressive. It's really hard for me to comment too much since I haven't seen Matt Samuels or Ilija Milutinovic play and very little of Larry Wright, but the coaching staff seems really excited. My only question is will there be enough minutes to go around. I'll blog about this later in the week. Just wanted to get at least one Oakland entry up with all the news that has broke in the last few weeks.