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Home > Jeff Schultz > Archives > 2008 > December > 27
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Expectations about Tech hoops face reality
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In October, the team’s best defender and captain was shelved with a spinal condition. In November, the top scorer was declared academically ineligible. Two weeks ago, the starting point guard’s nose predictably lost a collision with somebody’s elbow.
If you are Georgia Tech basketball coach Paul Hewitt, this probably isn’t the backdrop you would have wanted before the Jackets played even their first ACC game of the season. But isn’t that kind of the way things have gone?
As it turns out, a Final Four appearance five years ago didn’t come with guarantees. Go figure.
“We’ve gone to the tournament two of the last four years,” Hewitt said. “Would I have liked to have gone all four years? Sure, but we haven’t. So we’re going to work to get there this year. If we’re judging, ‘Is Georgia Tech basketball doing a good job?’ that’s really not for me to answer. What’s the standard? You can make that standard anything whatever you want. But I believe we’re doing a good job. If you’re asking me — on the court, I think we can do better. But if you judge us a whole and completeness as a program, I think we’ve done a good job.”
This shouldn’t even be an issue. I think I’ve just let too many e-mailers and message-board lunatics get to me. But Hewitt well knows that when a team wins, expectations are raised. When the Jackets advanced to the championship game of the 2004 Final Four, before losing to Connecticut, some folks — fans, media, whomever — apparently perceived that kind of thing would become commonplace.
That hasn’t happened. Tech (7-3), which opens ACC play tonight against Virginia, has reached the tournament twice in the past four years, winning one game. What people don’t talk about are all of those things coaches don’t like to talk about publicly because they come off as whiny excuse factories: injuries, academic casualties, defections to the NBA. Everybody has to deal with those issues, some more than others. Yes, even Duke.
Two tournament appearances in the past four years aren’t up there with North Carolina (four), Duke (four) or Boston College (three). But it beats just about everybody else in the ACC. Only N.C. State also has two.
Four ACC teams reached the tournament last season, and two of them were Miami and Clemson. What does that say about today’s landscape?
Hewitt has felt no heat internally. He shouldn’t. He does it the right way and always has. He raises men, not athletes. He preaches academics. And yes, he can coach. Teams don’t go to the national finals by accident.
“When I recruit, I’ve never said to a player, ‘Come help us win,’ ” Hewitt said. “I tell them to come here to get a great education. Come here and hopefully you can be a good enough basketball player that you can earn a living. I know from experience that winning games for these guys in the long run really means nothing. You have a degree. You have a skill. Our job is to try to help them make the most of those two things.”
The lost art of collegiate athletics.
The college football coaching circus has become the extreme example of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately, particularly in the South. Basketball isn’t there yet. But things have moved in that direction.
Hewitt shrugs.
“It’s the coaching business. It’s the way it is. I love my job. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
He likes his team this season. He probably liked it better two months ago. But then: D’Andre Bell, a senior, was diagnosed with spinal stenosis and lost for the season; Lewis Clinch was declared academically ineligible for the fall, mandating he miss the team’s first seven games; point guard Moe Miller suffered a nasal fracture and concussion when he was elbowed in the nose in a loss to Illinois-Chicago on Dec. 14.
But the team is in recovery. Clinch is back, eligible and thriving (three game average: 18.3 points). Miller has missed three games and will miss only a few more.
Expectations? Tech was picked to finish eighth by ACC media members. Perceptions have taken a hit.
But we’ve seen the upside with Hewitt. What happened in 2004 wasn’t an accident.
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