Waiting for the weekend while wondering if Wednesday’s Iowa State-Missouri men’s basketball game in Columbia, Mo., will be designated “Larry Eustachy Day.” …

• News that Kansas University will play Toledo in football this fall brought back memories of one of the sweetest sweetheart deals in KU revenue-enhancing annals. In 1991, Toledo was so eager to lure a Big Eight Conference team to town, it offered Kansas $215,000 plus an extra $10,000 for KU’s motel and ground transportation at a time when the most money the Jayhawks could command in a conference road game was $175,000. Bottom line: The Toledo athletic director made an offer Kansas couldn’t refuse. His name? Al Bohl, who later became AD at KU.
• Have you noticed that Sunday’s Kansas-Nebraska basketball game in Lincoln and the Daytona 500, the Nextel Cup circuit lid-lifter, each start at 12:30 p.m.? All I can say is, if you’re a fan of both KU basketball and NASCAR, I hope your television has picture-in-picture.
• Approximately an hour and a half after the KU-NU basketball game, you can turn to CSTV and watch the premiere of a documentary about Dean Smith, the former Kansas University basketball player who later became a coaching legend at North Carolina, then stole Roy Williams from Smith’s alma mater to resurrect the Tar Heels’ program. CSTV, which televises mostly obscure events like hockey and wrestling, is available on Sunflower Broadband channel 147.
• If you’ve been to a KU men’s basketball game, you’re aware the pep band is situated halfway up on the south end of Allen Fieldhouse. The band is in the same place during KU women’s games, which doesn’t make much sense when plenty of seats are available on the lower level. Why not place the band in the southwest corner wedge near the opponent’s bench during women’s games? It might not help, but it couldn’t hurt.
• The “Beware of the Phog” sign warns all opponents who would dare to enter Allen Fieldhouse to tread lightly. Obviously, that’s not the same fog that seems to fall over the KU men’s and women’s basketball teams when they shoot from long range. KU’s men rank 11th in the Big 12 Conference in three-point accuracy at 31.7 percent, while the KU women are dead last in the league at 28.5 percent.
• David Harrison watchers no doubt noticed the petulant Colorado seven-footer downgraded his NBA stock to junk-bond status when he missed nine of 11 free-throw attempts, including seven in the last 10 minutes, in Wednesday night’s loss at Missouri.
• Baylor’s Scott Drew won’t be the Big 12 coach of the year, but Drew should receive votes for the Bears winning two league games already. That’s two more than everybody thought they would win. Now it’s beginning to look like Texas A&M could go 0-16 in the league — a possibility that could cause coach Melvin Watkins to call a College Station real estate agent. The Aggies have only three more home games — Oklahoma Saturday, then Baylor and Colorado — and they aren’t exactly road warriors.
• Merlene Aitken, who was on the compliance staff at the University of Washington during the Rick Neuheisel basketball pool brouhaha, has joined the KU athletic staff as compliance auditor. Aitken, a native New Yorker, graduated from the Massachusetts School of Law in 2000. She replaces Andy Steinberg, now the KU athletic department’s director of marketing.
• My apologies to Oklahoma City. I wrote not too long ago that Oklahoma’s capital city wasn’t likely to land the Big 12 basketball tournaments because it didn’t have an arena for both the men and the women. That’s incorrect. The new Ford Center, where KU made its first NCAA stop last season, is adjacent to the older Myriad, site of the Jayhawks’ stunning NCAA loss to Rhode Island in 1998.