From the department of the dim

Stopped in this morning at my Publix and saw a magazine I’d never seen before, the Yahoo! Sports college basketball preview, and so I dropped $7.99.

The Southern Conference section calls Stephen “the face of the Southern Conference the past three seasons” and declares that No. 30 “will be missed, unless you’re a fan of the College of Charleston, Western Carolina, Wofford ... ”

Scattershot thoughts:

1. The predictable but still disappointing SoCon storyline the preview mags are peddling seems to be this: Stephen is gone, so Davidson isn’t any good anymore, and the rest of the teams in the league all of a sudden have a chance again. It’s lazy, it’s uninformed, and it’s insulting to the parties on both sides of that far too simplistic equation.

2. There are no Wildcats on the all-conference team. Not unlike most of the other preview mags. That’s not going to happen. Will, Ben, Steve, Frank, JP -- one of them, at least, will be all-conference. Mark that down in ink.

3. So the folks at Yahoo! ranked the Division I basketball teams, every one of them, Nos. 1 through 347. Pretty much all rankings are ridiculous on face, coaches’ polls, writers’ polls -- they’re silly fan candy, and astonishing conflicts of interest -- but this little endeavor is especially impossible. Anyway, Charleston (85) is ranked ahead of Davidson (177), which heading into this year is certainly justifiable, but from the SoCon so are Western Carolina (131), Samford (162), Wofford (165) and The Citadel (175), which is not. That’s just stupid.

4. Someone wrote this: “Where have you gone, Stephen Curry? A sad fan base turns its lonely eyes to you.” We know where he’s gone, and we’re not sad, we’re proud of him, and our eyes aren’t lonely, and they’re still focused on Belk Arena, where we’ll watch the continuation of the last decade and a half of the consistently fine basketball being played at Davidson College. Love, me.