• Wooden Award Website
After being named to the Top 25 watch list for the John Wooden Award, Murray State's
Ja Morant has now made the cut for the top 20 as announced by the Los Angeles Athletic Club.
Chosen by a poll of national college basketball experts based on their performances during the first half of the 2018-19 season, the list is comprised of 20 student-athletes who are currently the front-runners for the Wooden Award.
Morant is trying to follow former Racer Isaiah Canaan who was named to the Wooden All-America team in 2012.
A sophomore from Dalzell, S.C., Morant wasn't on the Wooden preseason top-50 list, but played his way to the top-25 list when it was announced Jan. 9. You can read about it here on GoRacers.com.
The MSU star has since kept his great play going and Monday learned that he has also been named to the list of those being considered for the Bob Cousy Award, regarded as the award for the best point guard in collegiate men's basketball.
Heading into this week's home games with Eastern Illinois and SIUE, Morant is leading the Ohio Valley Conference in scoring with an average of 24.1 points per game (eighth nationally) and first with 10.3 assists which is also tops in all of NCAA D-I. He is trying to become the first player to average 20 points and 10 assists per game since the assist became an official NCAA statistic in the 1985-86 season.
From this point, nearly 1,000 voters will rank their top-10 of these latest 15 players when voting opens prior to the NCAA Tournament. The Wooden Award All American Team will be announced the week of the "Elite Eight" round of the NCAA Tournament and the winner of the 2019 Wooden Award is revealed during the ESPN College Basketball Awards Show on April 12.
Created in 1976, the John R. Wooden Award is one of the top individual honors in college basketball. Past winners include Larry Bird (1979), Michael Jordan (1984), Tim Duncan (1997) and Kevin Durant (2007).