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Thursday, March 22, 2007
This time, Kansas will not be denied
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
San Jose, Calif. — At halftime, members of the Southern Illinois band suggested they knew something that nobody else did on Thursday inside the HP Pavilion. They eased into a lovely version of “Georgia on My Mind,” as in Atlanta, as in where the Final Four will happen next week.
As in, what were they thinking with their underdog Salukis trailing mighty Kansas heading into the second half?
They were thinking that Kansas didn’t look all that mighty on the scoreboard. We’re talking just a 27-24 lead for the Jayhawks, the No.1 seed in the West Region. This was before Kansas became the latest team to prove that the NCAA Tournament isn’t about appearances. It’s about surviving, advancing and forgetting after each round that you came so close to losing along the way to a national championship.
Just like that, the Jayhawks can become the Final One, because they kept discovering ways down the stretch against pesky Southern Illinois to survive a slew of Jamaal Tatum jumpers, the Salukis’ swarming defense and themselves.
“I thought we were able to grind it out, and we were very fortunate to win,” said Kansas coach Bill Self, the realist, who told his players before the game exactly what would happen. Whether they believed him is highly questionable. Inside the final 40 seconds, with Southern Illinois refusing to cooperate by folding, Self had to draw up a new play on the fly for star Brandon Rush, which worked to perfection. Then the Jayhawks had to hold their breath at the buzzer when Tony Young missed a three-pointer for a 61-58 victory.
The usually high-octane Jayhawks were forced to adopt to the rock-em, sock’em style of their opponent who nearly became a college basketball version of Buster Douglas to Kansas’ Mike Tyson. “I think that shows, I mean, whatever the circumstance is, we can adjust,” said Kansas guard Mario Chalmers. “Even though we like to play an up-tempo game, try to get into the 80s and stuff like that, we can slow it down, and we can take our time and slow it down with the best of them.”
More to the point: A win is a win, especially now, with Kansas actually doing another impression. Try that of Jerome Whitehead sending Marquette past UNC-Charlotte, or Ron Lewis sinking a three-pointer to push Ohio Sate toward an overtime winner over Xavier. The Jayhawks’ Whitehead and Lewis was Rush, with slightly less dramatics. “The new play?” said Rush, Kansas’ gifted sophomore, responding with raised eyebrows. “It was just to give it to the guard, let him try to penetrate or pitch ahead to our big guy. Posting up. [It] went on from there. If you get the chance, just pull up and take the shot.”
Rush was that guard, and Rush was the guy dropping home the layup for the Jayhawks’ final margin of victory with 25 seconds left to play.
Why the game was even close is only a slight mystery. In the end, Kansas outshot Southern Illinois from the floor 60 percent to 37 percent, and that margin was worse after the first half. Still, despite the Jayhawks shooting 62 percent to Southern Illinois’ 28 percent back then, the Salukis band was confident. Such things happen when you keep turning the ball over to an aggressive defense, and your opponent has a tendency to just hang around until you look up and discover that the Elite Eight is slipping away in a hurry.
As a No. 4 seed, Southern Illinois isn’t David, but nobody would classify any team from the Missouri Valley Conference as Goliath, either.
Well, Kansas would. Even now, Self still is haunted by the big and bad ghost of Bradley, another MVC team. The Braves knocked Kansas out of the first round of last year’s NCAA Tournament, and lowly Bucknell somehow did the same the previous year.
So Kansas got it right this time after obliterating Niagara (107-67) and pushing Tubby Smith closer to Minnesota with an 88-76 smashing of Kentucky. Then the Jayhawks did what they had to do against Southern Illinois, and that was just win.
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Only Vandy would abolish AD
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
East Rutherford, N.J. — Less than four years ago, Vanderbilt announced it was going to move to another planet. It’s true that most SEC schools already viewed Vanderbilt as being from another planet, but, well, when the hoity-toity university said it was dissolving its athletic department, that was as good as a positive alien blood test.
“I was like everybody — I didn’t know what it meant,” Commodores coach Kevin Stallings said Thursday. “All I knew was we didn’t have an athletic director anymore.”
Turns out that’s quite the overrated position.
There are four schools in this East Regional. North Carolina has cachet with its history, its conference and a No. 1 seed. Georgetown is a former Big East power that has been resuscitated by another John Thompson. USC is not UCLA but it is West Coast glitz and part of one of the nation’s most dominant athletic departments.
And then … there’s … Vanderbilt.
Are they still here?
March Madness in Atlanta:
“We haven’t been the kind of team that has commanded, nor maybe even deserved, the same level of respect that the Georgetowns and some of the others have,” said Stallings, whose 22-11 team actually started the season 1-3 and lost to Furman. “I would think the mere fact we’re in the Sweet 16 with a chance to play into the next round would be motivation enough. But if the fact we’re given little chance to win this game works to our players’ advantage, then so be it.”
Some would say they already have overcome the odds. In September 2003, Chancellor Gordon Gee shifted scholarship athletics under the same tent as intramurals. The athletics director, Todd Turner, lost his office and eventually left for Washington. Coaches now reported to the head of the “Office of Student Athletics, Recreation and Wellness.”
Gee looked around and saw college athletics had run amok. There were academic scandals at Georgia, Fresno State and Missouri. There were coaches gone wild at Baylor (Dave Bliss) and Iowa State (Larry Eustachy). There was Maurice Clarett, period.
Gee said at a news conference: “There is a wrong culture in athletics, and I’m declaring war on it.” He felt student-athletes needed to be a greater part of campus life. He believed the focus had strayed too far from academics, which is amusing considering Vanderbilt already was throwing off the class curve.
At the time, Gee also told a Nashville newspaper, the Tennessean: “It’s a return to the first principles of why we started playing games at universities in the first place — for a confluence of mind and body and spirit.”
And we all thought: Cute. What next? World peace and inseparable socks?
It’s difficult to gauge whether Gee’s revolutionary idea is a huge structural success. We only know that he’s saving an AD’s salary, and it certainly hasn’t been a disaster.
We also know that nobody has followed Vanderbilt’s blueprint.
“This isn’t going to happen anywhere else, certainly not in the SEC,” said senior guard Dan Cage. “We’re a private school and people at high levels here have enjoyed doing things different.
“I don’t think Alabama is going to take the leap. With their football team, they’re not going to take advice from us.”
Cage mused that after he graduates, “Maybe they’ll hire me as AD. I can walk around and have no responsibility whatsoever.”
This is Stallings’ eighth season, and he barely notices the difference since the restructuring. “Our buildings are still in place,” he said. “Our ticket office still works, as does our media relations office and fundraising office and all of the other things that go on in an athletic department.”
But he says he’s “not surprised” others haven’t followed.
“We’re a unique school in the SEC,” Stallings said. “They’re all similar. We’re different. But I can understand why Florida wouldn’t change what they’re doing. Last I checked, they were doing OK.”
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Tubby’s leaving is Kentucky’s loss
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
St. Louis — Tubby Smith didn’t forget how to coach. Tubby Smith just got tired of people insisting, despite voluminous evidence to the contrary, that he didn’t know how to coach. He leaves Kentucky for roughly the same money at a lesser program because he decided, rightly for him but sadly for Kentucky, that coaching there was no longer worth the aggravation.
Here’s what Mike Slive, the commissioner of the SEC, said about Smith as the shocking news blazed across the Midwest Regional here Thursday. “He’s a wonderful guy, a great coach.” And a credit, it was suggested, to Slive’s conference?
Said Slive: “A credit to the game.”
But that’s the thing about Kentucky. (I’m both a native Kentuckian and a UK alum.) The Big Blue has come to believe it’s bigger than the game, that a season ending without a national championship is an abject failure of coaching, that all those other schools — North Carolina, Duke, Kansas, Florida, UCLA — are having their moments only because the Wildcats have been misdirected. There’s a certain strain of Kentucky fan that believes the pecking order should be as it was in the ’40s and ’50s, when Adolph Rupp rarely lost a conference game and often won the national championship.
That’s the thing about Kentucky: It keeps trying to live in the long-ago past. Rick Pitino rekindled the Wildcats’ sense of entitlement in the ’90s, but it should be noted that Smith won exactly as many NCAA titles as Pitino. And the argument conveniently levied against Smith — that his 1998 championship was achieved only with Pitino’s players — ignores the reality that Smith was (and is) a better bench coach than Pitino has ever been.
And now he’s Minnesota’s coach. What Tubby said to me last week in Chicago — “I can always get a job” — sounds in hindsight like the exit line of a man who’d wearied of the job he had. The wonder is that it took him so long. There was a certain segment of Kentucky fans and media that never forgave Smith for not being Pitino, who went out of his way to construct a cult of personality. Tubby wanted no part of cult status. He simply wanted to coach his team and raise his family.
I’ve said this before, but here it is again: As a human being, I admire Tubby Smith as much as any coach I’ve ever known. He was the absolute right man to help Kentucky put aside its history of racism regarding its basketball program, and he won so often — he never missed the NCAA tournament, never failed to win 20 games and took five SEC tournament titles in 10 years — that you had to believe even the bigots had been swayed.
It would be easy now to say that Smith was made to feel uncomfortable in Lexington because he’s black, but I will never believe as much. I believe he was made uncomfortable because Kentucky fans (the weasel AD Mitch Barnhart chief among them) haven’t grasped the reality of 21st Century basketball. Nobody wins all the time — not Duke, not Kansas, not Carolina, not UConn, not UK. There’s no coach who’s going to make the Big Blue as dominant as it was under Rupp, or even Pitino. The world has changed. The SEC has changed.
Tubby Smith will do fine at Minnesota. (He has taken every program he has coached, Tulsa and Georgia included, to the Sweet 16.) Tubby Smith will make roughly the same money with one-tenth the aggravation. He isn’t leaving because he forgot how to coach. He’s leaving because he has forgotten what it’s like to coach in peace.
He’s leaving and it’s not his loss; it’s Kentucky’s. The same school that once ran off Bear Bryant has made itself untenable for a man who has the unanimous respect of his peers. That’s a terrible reputation to have. Kentucky fully deserves it.
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