DeMarre Carroll

The Utah Jazz is a professional basketball team based in Salt Lake City, Utah. They are currently a part of the Northwest Division of the Western Conference in the National Basketball Association . The franchise began in 1974 as the New Orleans Jazz, in New Orleans, Louisiana, but the team moved to... Utah in 1979 after just five seasons. The Jazz were one of the most unsuccessful teams in the league in their early years, and it would be 10 years before they made a playoff appearance . They would not miss the playoffs again until 2004. During the late 1980s, John Stockton and Karl Malone arose as the franchise players for the team, and formed one of the most famed point guard–power forward duos in NBA history. Led by coach Jerry Sloan, who took over for Frank Layden in 1988, they became one of the powerhouse teams of the 1990s, culminating in two NBA Finals appearances in 1997 and 1998, where they lost both times to the Chicago Bulls, led by Michael Jordan. Both Stockton and Malone moved on in 2003. After missing the playoffs for three consecutive seasons the Jazz returned to prominence under the on-court leadership of point guard Deron Williams.
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The University of Missouri is a public research university located in the state of Missouri. In 1839 the university was founded in Columbia, Missouri, as the first public institution of higher education west of the Mississippi River. The largest university in Missouri, MU enrolls 33,805 students... in 20 academic colleges in the 2011–12 year. The university is the flagship of the University of Missouri System which maintains campuses in Rolla, Kansas City and St. Louis. MU is one of 34 public universities to be members of the Association of American Universities and the only one in Missouri. There are more than 262,000 MU alumni living worldwide, with almost half continuing to reside in Missouri. The University of Missouri was ranked 90th in the 2012 U.S. News & World Report among the national universities, up four spots from 2011. It is the highest-ranked public school in the state and second overall . The campus of the University of Missouri is 1,250 acres just south of Downtown Columbia and is maintained as a botanical garden. The historical campus is centered on David R.
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Birmingham is the largest city in Alabama. The city is the county seat of Jefferson County. According to the 2010 United States Census, Birmingham had a population of 212,237.[2] The Birmingham-Hoover Metropolitan Area had a population of about 1,128,047 according to the 2010 Census, which is... approximately one-quarter of Alabama's population. Birmingham was founded in 1871, just after the American Civil War, through the merger of three pre-existing farm towns, notably, former Elyton. It grew from there, annexing many more of its smaller neighbors, into an industrial and railroad transportation center with a focus on mining, the iron and steel industry, and railroading. Birmingham was named for Birmingham, one of the major industrial cities of the United Kingdom. Most of the original settlers who founded Birmingham were of English ancestry.[3] The city was planned as a place where cheap, non-unionized, and African-American labor from rural Alabama could be employed in the city's steel mills and blast furnaces, giving it a competitive advantage over industrial cities in the Midwest and Northeast.[4] From its founding through the end of the 1960s, Birmingham was a primary industrial center of the South. The pace of Birmingham's growth during the period from 1881 through 1920 earned its nicknames The Magic City and The Pittsburgh of the South. Much like Pittsburgh, Birmingham's major industries were iron and steel production, plus a major component of the railroading industry, where rails and railroad cars were both manufactured in Birmingham. In the field of railroading, the two primary hubs of railroading in the Deep South were nearby Atlanta and Birmingham, beginning in the 1860s and continuing through to the present day. The economy diversified during the later half of the twentieth century. Though the manufacturing industry maintains a strong presence in Birmingham, other businesses and industries such as banking, telecommunications, transportation, electrical power transmission, medical care, college education, and insurance have risen in stature. Mining in the Birmingham area is no longer a major industry with the exception of coal mining. Birmingham ranks as one of the most important business centers in the Southeastern United States and is also one of the largest banking centers in the United States. In addition, the Birmingham area serves as headquarters to one Fortune 500 company: Regions Financial. Five Fortune 1000 companies are headquartered in Birmingham. In the field of college and university education, Birmingham has been the location of the University of Alabama School of Medicine and the University of Alabama School of Dentistry since 1947, and since that time, it has also become provided with the University of Alabama at Birmingham , one of three main campuses of the University of Alabama, and also with the private Birmingham-Southern College. Between these two universities and Samford University, the Birmingham area has major colleges of medicine, dentistry, optometry, pharmacy, law, engineering, and nursing. Birmingham is home to three of the state's five law schools: Cumberland School of Law, Birmingham School of Law, and Miles Law School. Birmingham is also the headquarters of the Southeastern Conference, one of the major United States collegiate athletic conferences.
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