Spotlight on... Baylor's Pierre Jackson

Pierre Jackson has been a star wherever he's played. During his senior year at Desert Pines High School in Las Vegas, all Jackson did was score 736 points, dish out 263 assists, earn first-team all-state honors in Nevada and win the Las Vegas All-Star Game MVP. After that kind of season, Jackson expected schools to chase after him, but since he failed to meet NCAA academic requirements, he spent his first two years in junior college. 

This wasn't like any other junior college, Jackson attended the College of Southern Idaho. Their men's basketball program was founded by Hall of Fame coach Eddie Sutton in 1966 and is one of the winningest junior college basketball teams in the country. In his second season, Jackson averaged 18.6 points a game and shot 38% from three-point range to lead the Golden Eagles to the school's third juco national championship.

Jackson joins the point guard fray at Baylor which was largely inconsistent in the 2010-11 season. He certainly has the skills to stabilize the position. Jackson's a scorer who wows in transition and has no difficulty distributing the rock. He may be 5-10, but a YouTube video of him dunking at BU's Moonlight Madness suggests his height is no problem at all.

This year's Newcomer of the Year Award in the conference will be one of the more hotly contested in recent memory as Jackson will compete with the likes of Iowa State's Royce White, Texas' Myck Kabongo and Kansas' Kevin Young among many others.