There's no such thing in Kentucky as a Wildcats player nobody knows much about.
But for plenty of folks elsewhere, when Jodie Meeks scored 54 points against Tennessee -- the most by a player in 106 seasons of Kentucky basketball -- the reaction was, "Who?" or a furrowed brow. "Is he a freshman? Sophomore?"
Meeks is a junior, but in his first two seasons at Kentucky, the 6-foot-4 guard from Norcross, Ga., averaged 8.7 points a game. This season, he is averaging 25.8 a game.
He has scored at least 45 three times this season, and at least 30 seven times. Pete Maravich's Southeastern Conference records are safe -- he scored at least 50 for Louisiana State 28 times -- but no SEC player had scored close to that since Shaquille O'Neal scored 53 for LSU in 1990.
"I've never seen anything like what he's done for us this year," Kentucky Coach Billy Gillispie said after Meeks scored 45 against Arkansas on Saturday, four days after scoring 23 and making a game-winning three-pointer against Florida. "He makes the same cuts at the beginning of the game that he does at the end of the game. He runs just as hard at the beginning as the end."
Meeks missed 20 games last season because of a series of injuries that culminated in off-season surgery for a sports hernia. As a freshman he was often the first player off the bench, but never had more than 18 points in a game.
The way Meeks is playing now, it's time to nudge the likes of Oklahoma's Blake Griffin, Davidson's Stephen Curry and North Carolina's Tyler Hansbrough to make room for him.
"He's definitely a national-player-of-the-year-candidate in my mind," Tennessee Coach Bruce Pearl said. "If he's seeing it, he's making it."
Griffin remains the leader for player of the year, especially after his monster 40-point, 23-rebound game against Texas Tech on Saturday. Curry is the nation's top scorer, at 29.0 points a game, and still an NCAA tournament darling. Hansbrough is the defending player of the year, and Connecticut's Hasheem Thabeet is a force despite being outplayed by Pittsburgh's DeJuan Blair on Monday.
What's intriguing about Meeks is that in an era when college players are trumpeted long before they arrive and often leave before they play a second season, Meeks has emerged in his third.
He wasn't a McDonald's All-American, but he led Norcross High to the Georgia Class AAAAA title, scoring 32 points in the final game. Kentucky only had to beat out Alabama and a few others on the recruiting trail.
