Last year's practice stars ready to lead UAB in real games

At times Mike Davis was confused.

He'd watch practice and see one thing.

Strangers would watch practice and see something else.

Mike Davis led the short-handed Blazers to a 15-16 record last season. (US Presswire)

"People would come watch us and go, 'Man, I'm really excited about the team; we should win 20-something games.' And I was like, 'Maybe there's something I'm not seeing,'" Davis told CBS SportsLine.com with a laugh. "But then I realized after a while they were watching practice, but they didn't know some of the guys weren't eligible."

Those silly NCAA transfer rules.

They teased uninformed fans and produced unreasonable expectations. Then Davis suffered through a season featuring more losses than wins because arguably his three best players were ineligible to compete. Instead, all they could do after transferring from other Division I institutions was dominate practices and watch their teammates get dominated in games.

Those times are now officially in the past. After a one-year hiatus from relevance, UAB is positioned to shoot up the Conference USA standings while perhaps forcing Memphis to focus just a bit from January to March.

Credit Robert Vaden (from Indiana) as the reason.

And Walter Sharpe (from Mississippi State).

And Channing Toney (from Georgia).

Those are three top 100 prospects from the Class of 2004, all of whom have transferred into the UAB program. Packaged with a recruiting class that features another top 100 prospect (Keenan Ellis) and a junior college All-American (Reggie Huffman), UAB is the wise man's pick to jump from eighth to second in the C-USA standings given how it's no secret teams with better players typically do better.

I'm not trying to oversimplify things.

But sometimes analysis becomes too complex.