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Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Today’s Final Four countown
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
10: Never have sold my media credential. Never figured it was worth losing my job for. But for $12,000 …
9: Seriously, what would possess even the most diehard, lunatic, whackjob, Cheez Whiz-drooling fan to spend $12,000 for a ticket to the Final Four? Checked on StubHub. There’s a pair of floor seats on sale for $24,000, which actually is up from $22,000 the day before, maybe because gas also went up six cents.
8.: “Actually, there’s also a 10 percent service charge,” my new pal Dave said by phone. “So it’ll be $26,400 for the pair.” Do the tickets come with anything? Like a hot dog? Or a car? “I don’t think so,” Dave said. “But I can check with the sellers to see if that includes anything. But we can waive the $15 handling fee. So then you can buy the hot dog.”
7: Dave would not tell me who originally held the tickets. So I really can’t say for a fact that it’s Phil Fulmer.
6: A company called “ZipWay” announced its new break-away warm-up pants have a “technologically advanced zipper” that allow athletes to remove the pants in “a matter of .3 seconds.” The pants have been endorsed by the NBA Players Association, and Shawn Kemp.
March Madness in Atlanta:
Check out the AJC’s Final Four page5: Look, I don’t think Billy Donovan will leave Florida for the Kentucky job, either. And I’m not saying he should. But if you don’t get why a coach would even consider it, then you don’t get coaches.
4: Is the Florida job better than the Kentucky job? No. But football always will be No. 1 at Florida. Basketball always will be No. 1 at Kentucky. For some coaches, it’s about ego. And if Donovan perceives (operative word) that he can be even bigger at Kentucky than Florida — and if that’s important to him — then of course he’ll think of making the jump.
3: Yes, Donovan would have a limited honeymoon period in Lexington, just like Tubby Smith. But that same win-or-you’re-bupkus attitude that makes the Kentucky fan base insufferable also makes the job bigger.
2: Went to the Gainesville Sun home page online. Hey, look what I see:
TOP STORY
Video: Monday’s Florida football practice
“The Gator football team takes to the practice field, and a UF student comments on the upcoming season during Monday’s training.”
1: Former UCLA coach John Wooden, 96, will be in Kentucky this weekend for a function. Go ahead. Start the coaching rumor.
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Smith erred by leaving Georgia
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
By going from lordly Kentucky to lowly Minnesota, Tubby Smith just admitted to making the biggest mistake of his college basketball life. And, no, this isn’t referring to the past 10 seasons, when he attempted the impossible. He tried to make those Wildcats Wackos realize Adolph Rupp is still dead and Rick Pitino isn’t coming back.
That was only Smith’s second-biggest mistake.
The biggest? Leaving Georgia for Kentucky or anywhere else.
If Smith stays in town after coaching the Bulldogs to overwhelming success for two seasons through 1996-97, he becomes the Vince Dooley of Georgia hoops. “Yeah. No question,” said Dick Bestwick over the telephone from Athens, where he lives in retirement after 14 years as Dooley’s associate athletics director.
In fact, Bestwick was at Georgia when Dooley joined others in telling Smith that he’d never be good enough for those Wildcats Wackos who are in search of a national championship every spring or so. That his mellow style would get melted under the intense UK heat. That, in time, Georgia would pay Smith in the vicinity of what he was getting at Kentucky, especially if his Bulldogs continued to progress at the rate they were going.
That the Bulldog Nation just didn’t want him to go.
March Madness in Atlanta:
Check out the AJC’s Final Four page“I’d sure like to have him here, rather than to see him at Minnesota, because I like Tubby so much that I would give anything to have him here with what this job offers, compared to that one,” said Bestwick, who befriended Smith at South Carolina during the late 1980s. Bestwick was the Gamecocks’ athletics director and Smith was their assistant basketball coach. They’ve remained close ever since. Bestwick even dropped Smith a note last week, but it wasn’t to tell Smith that he blew his chance for greatness at Georgia.
Which Smith did, by the way.
Added Bestwick: “The Minnesota job - no matter how good it might be - is not one that can compare to this one as far as available talent is concerned. There is enough basketball talent in Georgia, consistent with the kind of football talent we have in this state, to have successful teams here and at Georgia Tech. Over the years, virtually all of the major powers have had a Georgia kid on their basketball team.”
We’re talking about major powers, medium ones and little ones. Walt Frazier. Josh Smith. Norm Nixon. Dwight Howard. Randolph Morris. Kenny Walker. Dale Ellis. Matt Harpring. Mike Glenn. Kwame Brown. Joby Wright. A.J. Moye. Cameron Dollar. Earl Callaway. Pervis Ellison. Al Wood. Those were just some of the gifted basketball players with Georgia roots.
As for the state of Minnesota, you’ve had Kevin McHale.
If you really wish to stretch the point, Minnesota also has produced the decent likes of Randy Breuer, Sam Jacobson and Jim Petersen. Plus, Wisconsin starting point guard Kammron Taylor is a Minnesota guy. So was Khalid El-Amin, among the leaders of UConn’s national championship team in 1999. It’s just that, while Minnesota produces Division I standouts in ripples, Georgia does so in waves.
Here’s how this relates to Smith: Among other things, those Wildcats Wackos ripped him for his recruiting issues (no Kentucky natives on the Wildcats’ active roster at the end of last season, and Chris Lofton, a former Mr. Kentucky, dribbling at Tennessee). Well, if Smith stays at Georgia, he gets many of those home-grown stars by accident. If Smith stays at Georgia, he benefits from the school showing its commitment beyond O Holy Football by adding the last bricks to a $30 million practice facility for hoops.
If Smith stays at Georgia, he saves the Bulldogs from the sorry years of his successor, Ron Jirsa, and the corrupt years of Jim Harrick. If Smith stays at Georgia, he makes the Bulldogs at least the equal of Florida, Kentucky and Tennessee.
If Smith stays at Georgia, everybody is happy, including Smith.
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History of hoops strong in Atlanta
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
College basketball tournaments have been finding their way to Atlanta since the 1920s, when the original Southern Conference teams poured into town by train or bus and put on their show at the then-stylish, now old and creaky, Municipal Auditorium. (Yep, it’s still there, serving some kind of purpose to Georgia State University.) About 5,000 saw the championship game in 1927. Vanderbilt beat Georgia.
Basketball was more or less a second cousin to football in those times. Often, the coach was a football assistant who wanted to pick up some extra cash during the winter. A basketball coach was seldom ever fired. Teams often were dominated by football players, staying in condition during the winter.
Winning wasn’t important enough to make life so miserable for the coach, as in the case of Tubby Smith at Kentucky, that he chose to get out of town. (And in passing, let me say that if I had to hire a basketball coach today, Tubby Smith would be at the top of my list.)
We leap forward now to 1977. Tom Cousins has built a palace (somewhat) and called it The Omni. Atlanta had reached Final Four status. The combatants were UNLV, Marquette, North Carolina and UNC-Charlotte, and of these four, UNLV appeared most fearsome. Jerry Tarkanian and his coaches paced the sideline in garments that made you wonder who was driving the getaway car. As was, the Rebels got away early, cut down by the Tar Heels. Marquette won the final and Al McGuire wept — for joy.
March Madness in Atlanta:
Check out the AJC’s Final Four pageWe move now into another century, yea, leap forward in style. The Georgia Dome is in place. Atlanta can now seat 40,000 guests at a basketball game, and there’s nothing the NCAA likes better than the sound of ca-ching. It will allow beer to be advertised on television — “drink responsibly” — but won’t sell the stuff at the games. The Final Four came in 2002, and Maryland won, and five years later it’s back again.
The first official championship — not yet known as Final Four — was played at Northwestern in 1939, with an audience of 5,500. They saw Oregon beat Ohio State. You see, the NCAA was getting a late start. A New York sportswriter named Ned Irish had started the National Invitation Tournament, played in Madison Square Garden, and the winner was generally recognized as the national champion. The NCAA, in its belated wisdom, decided this was too good a thing to leave in the hands of a mere sportswriter. Hence, here came their own championship version, and when it became the Final Four, I can’t say, but there are those in our world who consider it the major sports event in the country. Just shows you what a little effective copy-catting can do, and a lot of geographical skewing.
For instance, how do you like the idea of Western Kentucky playing in the Northwest, or Holy Cross all way out to Idaho? Say this, though, what they’ve done is lessen the margin between the haves and have-nots. Note Winthrop College, once a school for young women, taking out Notre Dame.
What else they have done is make this game impossible to officiate. But for a couple of tweaks, one involving a seriously debated call, the other a missed free throw, you might have a Final Four without Ohio State and Georgetown. Xavier had the Buckeyes on the ropes, ahead by two with four seconds to play and its leading scorer at the foul line for two. Justin Cage made the first. Make the second, let Ohio State have its 3-pointer. Game’s over. But Cage clanks the second, Ohio State ties and wins in overtime. Crushing.
Now, the other was a traveling call that wasn’t made against Jeff Green of Georgetown. Vanderbilt has a one-point lead in the dying seconds, Green pivots, banks in the winning field goal, but did he travel? Clark Kellogg and Billy Packer, two TV analysts, went at it with opposing views in a CBS interview. Kellogg said, “It was a walk. I thought he traveled.”
Packer said he didn’t think he did. “And I stand by my opinion. Three officials on the floor, three sets of eyes, and they didn’t call it.”
Otherwise, you’d probably have two Tennessee teams in one final, Vanderbilt against Memphis, not nearly as stirring as Ohio State against Georgetown. But that’s the short distance between being a winner and a loser in this game, how many calls were missed, how many critical free throws were missed, and how many coaches went home in tears. But not Tubby Smith. He went all the way to Minnesota. He beat the Wildcats browbeaters to the punch, and good for him.
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Today’s Final Four countdown
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Look for “The Countdown” in Stanley Cup, World Series and Alberto Gonzales editions in the coming months. Also try new “Diet Countdown.”
10: Let me just start by saying, having analyzed all four schools at the East Regional this past weekend, seeing the bottom-seeded Georgetown cheerleaders advance to the Final Four is quite a depressing development.
9: Yes, worse than Vanderbilt’s.
8: Thank goodness for the Final Four, conference championships and the Sugar Bowl two years ago. Otherwise, who knows when we might see another postseason game in the Georgia Dome.
7: From the “Wardrobe Malfunction” category of statements: When asked to explain the technical foul he assessed Georgetown coach John Thompson III, referee Curtis Shaw said: “It’s a bench decorum issue.” Personally, I liked this explanation better, from John Thompson The Elder: “I think John flashed back to his father for a minute. But I probably would’ve had three or four.”
6: For those who don’t think much of a team’s RPI, the Final Four’s respective rankings before the start of the tournament were first (Ohio State), third (UCLA), sixth (Florida) and ninth (Georgetown). Most important, my alma mater, Long Beach State, was 79th — and then got tattooed for 121 points by Tennessee.
5: Roy Williams. He just can’t win the big game. (Oh stop! I’m kidding. Kinda.)
4: Yes, it’s a wonderful warm-and-fuzzy story with the fathers and sons at Georgetown. But, seriously, I can’t remember when I saw a college basketball team have such an extended mind melt in an important game as North Carolina did Sunday.
3: The Hoyas weren’t happy with the officiating early, but the Tar Heels in fact were drawing fouls by driving to the basket and crashing the offensive boards. That disappeared late in the game, and it wasn’t merely because of the Hoyas’ defense. The Heels inexplicably started firing up jumpers from Neptune — and just missed Pluto, going 2-for-25 down the stretch and in overtime.
2: Gators fans will be happy to learn that Billy Donovan is only 11-1 odds to be the next Kentucky coach. Hey, wasn’t it not long ago when everybody wondered if Paul Hewitt was going to leave? There’s the primary indicator of your popularity level: No he’s-gonna-leave-us job speculation.
1: Still like Louisville over Carolina, and Florida over Kansas in the semis.
Permalink | Comments (15) | Categories: Final Four, Jeff Schultz
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