I can give you a couple reasons.
-- We were finalists on two of their likely starters. Being curious about what happens to guys who do not ultimately choose the Cyclones is pretty typical. It is interesting for its own sake when you have already learned something about the player and you are curious how they will develop, it helps you benchmark the staff's ability to identify talent (even if they do not eventually land it), and it is fun. There are definitely those two take it too far with those that spurn us, but I find it interesting to see how guys' careers go once I know about them.
-- Penny and Memphis is an interesting story for college basketball even disregarding those particular Iowa State connections (including the conspiracy theory that THT was going to flip to Memphis last summer). You have a local, hometown hero who rocked the AAU circut and, before that, was one of the coolest NBA players of the past 20 years ripping it up on the recruiting trail nationally. The guy just pulled a class -- legally or not -- rivaling or exceeding the blue bloods of the sport. Wondering how Penny will do as a coach with all that talent and how Memphis' season will go on its own is a reasonable curiosity for anybody interested in the sport.
-- The stat nerd in me likes looking over these projections of lineups and results, particularly for such a hard thing to forecast like a new coach without much of a track record and essentially a new team with so much coming in from the transfer market or 5* freshmen.
Memphis is one of the most interesting teams in the country next year on a couple of levels.
