Busy day.

The Jonathan Milligan transfer is real.

The University of Pittsburgh men’s basketball team has added JUCO guard Jonathan Milligan for the 2015-16 season head coach Jamie Dixon announced Tuesday.

“We are fortunate to be able to add a guard of Jonathan’s caliber at this point in the year,” said Dixon. “He is a promising combo guard who received a lot of high major interest out of high school and while he was at Kilgore College. He has the ability to score from a variety of spots on the floor and break down defense by getting into the lane. He also has the quickness and instincts to be an outstanding defender in our program.

Milligan averaged 14.3 points, 2.6 rebounds and 3.7 assists per game last season while leading the Kilgore College to a 21-9 record and a Region XIV Tournament appearance. He increased his scoring to 17.5 points per game in conference play en route to claiming first team all-region and Region XIV all-conference accolades.

I love that the press release manages not to mention that he had to be released from his NLI with FGCU.

How did Milligan get into Pitt, but not FGCU? The ambivalence appeared at first blush to be related to the NCAA Clearinghouse. That was not the case. It was a matter of which JUCO credits were approved by each school.

Milligan had the 2.5 grade-point average required by the NCAA for a junior college player to transfer to a four-year school, FGCU Director of Compliance Alex Masse confirmed. Junior college transfers also much have a high school or Associate of Arts degree. Milligan also was good there.

The current eligibility GPA for Division I athletes not transferring from a junior college is 2.0, but that will move to 2.3 next year.

But Milligan didn’t have enough credits that FGCU would accept from Kilgore College. Pitt apparently accepted more of those.

“That’s basically it,” Masse said. “Each institution in the country determines what’s transferable. That’s not the athletics department. That’s the institution, either the Registrar or (Dept. of) Admissions. And in our case with athletics, Admissions.”

FGCU athletic director Ken Kavanagh declined to comment on Milligan’s situation Tuesday morning, citing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which protects the privacy of student education records.

Third-year FGCU coach Joe Dooley also declined to comment on specifics, but was happy to talk about Milligan’s second chance.

“This is good timing for him, and I hope for Jonathan’s sake he has a good experience and a good career,” Dooley said. “And I’m a big Jamie Dixon (Pitt coach) fan, and I hope it works out for both of them.”

…

Coming out of high school in 2012, ESPN called the Word of God Christian Academy product the 25th-best point guard in the nation.

Suddenly Pitt has some major depth in the backcourt as the team gets healthy from an offseason filled with surgeries.

Pitt junior guard Chris Jones, who underwent offseason toe surgery, is expected to participate in workouts beginning Tuesday.

Senior guard James Robinson, who had foot surgery in May, will join workouts next week, Pitt coach Jamie Dixon said.

Another guard, graduate transfer Sterling Smith, had offseason ankle surgery.

“We think Chris will be able to go full speed, full contact,” Dixon said. “James may be another week away, but I feel good about him.

“They’re all going to be 100 percent, cleared to go.”
…
Another Pitt player who had surgery, 6-foot-8 guard Cameron Johnson, has recovered from a shoulder injury that limited him to eight games last season. Johnson was redshirted.

“He’s interesting,” Dixon said. “He was our third leading scorer in the Bahamas (tournament) last year, and we were excited about him. He surprised a lot of people how he played in the summer. The shoulder surgery was a setback for us and for him. But it’s a new year, he’s healthy and ready to go.

“He’s put on 30 pounds since he started with us, and he’s up to 6-8. But we’ve got to see him play live. We haven’t seen that.”

How well Milligan and Smith play overall as they step up in competition remains to be seen. The key thing, though, is that both are good shooters. If that remains close to the same, that is a big deal for Pitt. It opens things up even more inside and takes some of the pressure off of Mike Young and Jamel Artis.

As an aside on the Josh Newkirk abrupt change from going “closer to home” to Indiana. The reason Indiana and Tom Crean made that call speaks to their own situation with recruiting screw-ups.

The news came Monday afternoon, via a release from Indiana’s sports information department, and it was hardly a surprise. Emmitt Holt’s time as a Hoosier is over — the result of an incident last weekend in which he was cited for illegal possession of alcohol.

Simply put, Indiana had to do this.

The school didn’t have any choice, all things considered.

Indiana athletic director Fred Glass basically said as much Monday.

“In Emmitt’s case, he had a situation … [where he hit] Devin Davis [with a vehicle last year after] … he had been drinking. It wouldn’t have been a violation if he was 21, but he wasn’t and he was cited,” Glass told Peegs.com, a website dedicated to covering IU sports. “It probably wasn’t his fault he hit Devin, but the fact remains that he ran into his best friend, splatted blood all across the asphalt. If that doesn’t scare a guy straight, what does?”

Fair question.

Regardless, fast-forward roughly 10 months, and …

“There he is with two freshmen with booze in a car, teaching them the wrong way to be an Indiana basketball player,” Glass continued. “He’s a veteran. Not only was he a part of [the incident last year], he heard me talk to him about it. He heard [IU coach] Tom [Crean] talk to him about it — that we weren’t messing around, that there would be serious consequences if something happened again.”

The school had also dismissed two other players in the spring for off-the-court problems. Crean needed to bring in another guard for next year, preferably an older player who isn’t a screw-up. Newkirk is a good fit for them. He was not a problem at Pitt off-the-court. The surgery does make him a question mark for the future, but the guy he’s replacing [Holt] hardly was an impact guard. He averaged 3.6 points and 3 boards per game last year.