BATON ROUGE — Like the absentee votes from an election, the voting from Tuesday night’s 100th anniversary tipoff party may be showing a few trends in the voting for the LSU basketball All-Century team that will be announced in late January 2009.
Those season ticket holders who attended Tuesday night’s tipoff party to visit with present and past LSU basketball members had the first chance to vote for the 15-member LSU All-Century team that will be announced on Jan. 31, 2009 at halftime of the Centennial game against Arkansas.
Those ballots have been counted and these totals will be added to the online voting that began at 10 p.m. on Tuesday night and continues through the end of November. The ballots were counted on Thursday by members of the LSU Sports Information staff and 10 ballots from Tuesday were thrown out for voting for more than 15 of the 82 candidates.
Of the votes tallied, 77 of the 81 players on the all-century ballot received at least one vote.
Leading the early tally was the late Pete Maravich (1967-70) along with Shaquille O’Neal (1989-92) with 200 votes apiece. Each was a national player of the year. Robert Pettit, along with Maravich and O’Neal with their jerseys hanging from the catwalk of the Maravich Center, picked up 197 votes for third in the voting followed by Durand Macklin of the 1981 Final Four team with 177. Chris Jackson tallied 156 votes for the fifth spot, followed by one of the heroes of the 1986 Final Four team, Ricky Blanton with 148 votes.
The rest of the top 10 in the voting were Glen Davis (128 votes), Sparky Wade (LSU’s first All-American in 1935 on the mythical national championship team) with 126 votes, Ethan Martin (1981 Final Four point guard) 96 votes and Collis Temple, Jr. (1971-74) with 93 votes.
The voting continues through midnight on Nov. 30 with the total fan vote serving for 50 percent of the final voting with the centennial committee’s vote serving as the other 50 percent that will determine the All-Century team for LSU basketball’s first 100 years.