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Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Time kind to Kansas, not Tech
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Over the course of nine months and three days, Georgia Tech and Kansas had built the beginnings of a beautiful rivalry. They’d played twice in that span, each game requiring overtime, each game a shining example of college basketball at an exalted level.
Tech won the first, outlasting the Jayhawks in the St. Louis Regional final along the giddy road to the 2004 NCAA title game. Kansas won the second, prevailing when Keith Langford hit a splay-legged jumper on New Year’s Day in a frothing Allen Fieldhouse, and the entire 2004-05 regular season didn’t see a better game.
They met again Tuesday, peers no longer. Kansas is still really good. Tech has become just another team, unranked and unassuming. Afterward, Paul Hewitt said of his losing Jackets: “We’re a talented team - we’re not a good team.” A harsher judge would say Tech is neither.
On this night 28 of the 30 NBA teams dispatched representatives to Alexander Memorial Coliseum. It’s safe to say that none of those men came to watch any Jacket. If you were to take the two rosters and choose a starting five, you might consider Tech’s Anthony Morrow for the fifth spot. Then again, you might not.
Kansas has depth and talent of the first rank. Tech has a middling collection of Division I players. “Put two first-rounders on this team,” said Kansas coach Bill Self, speaking of the departed Thaddeus Young and Javaris Crittenton, “and how good would they be?”
But there’s the difference. Kansas lost a first-rounder of its own in Julian Wright, and the Jayhawks are ranked No. 3 in the land. Tech lost its two one-and-dones and is sub-.500, having lost to UNC Greensboro and Winthrop. Kansas is a premier program. Tech is an OK program that had a really big season a few years back.
“We’ve just got to realize we’re a good team,” Hewitt said, but the more likely outcome is that Tech will go through another winter with a couple of rousing victories but far more losses. The Jackets aren’t a factor on the national landscape anymore. They’re just another team.
About here, you’re saying: Didn’t Tech have a chance to catch the nation’s No. 3 team at the wire Tuesday? Isn’t that a sign of definite progress?
The answers: Yes and no. The Jackets had a chance to hoist a game-tying 3-pointer inside the final nine seconds but, being the Jackets, didn’t even find a shot. Zack Peacock threw a halting pass in the general vicinity of Matt Causey at midcourt, and Sherron Collins turned the gift into the clinching layup.
“I thought we were going to win the game,” said Hewitt, when asked if he felt he had a manpower advantage over Kansas at any position. And why did he think that? “Because we’re a good team.”
This would seem to be a case of hope (or maybe, to be generous, faith) trumping reality. Kansas can get away with missed free throws and silly turnovers because it’s gifted enough to override foolishness with athletic feats. Tech’s talent level is such that it has to play really well just to have a chance. It had a chance and didn’t know what to do with it.
“We did the things we’re capable of doing,” Hewitt said, and that was true - to a degree. Tech induced 18 turnovers and outrebounded a bigger opponent, but when Kansas didn’t throw the ball away it usually scored. The Jayhawks made 52.2 percent of their shots, and Tech was already last in the 12-team ACC in field-goal percentage defense. A team of modest ability must play barbed-wire defense if it’s to have a prayer along Tobacco Road, and the Jackets haven’t yet shown that capacity.
What Tech has shown, and showed again Tuesday, was its limitations. It doesn’t have a top-shelf player. It lacks a point guard to pull the tangents together. It lacks an inside scorer to keep the defense honest. In sum, it lacks what Kansas has in abundance. It lacks, for want of a better word, quality.
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Salesman holds statesman’s job
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
No doubt, major league baseball is robust and healthy to its financial core. It bores into the future looking neither right nor left, changing its rules as it goes. Estimate is that the two leagues took in six billion dollars last season, and that makes headlines in Fortune Magazine.
But, in reality, it is a headless monster, and has been since the day A. Bartlett Giamatti died. Tragedy is that Giamatti was able to serve only 154 days.
Here was a man who was as much a curator of the game as he was commissioner. Here was a man who preferred to be commissioner of baseball rather than president of Yale University.
He was your kind of commissioner. He preferred real grass to artificial, he disliked the designated hitter, preferred day games to night and wooden bats to the steelies colleges use.
If you were looking for a man to care for your game, here he was, Bart Giamatti.
He had exercised his authority by putting the ban on Pete Rose, but nine days later he died. He was only 51.
He had been moving ahead with grace. The deputy commissioner by Giamatti’s own choice, Fay Vincent, succeeded him, but the owners were lying in wait. He took his authority seriously. He was commissioner, behaved like a commissioner.
Baseball politics began to bore in. He put a ban on George Steinbrenner. He got cross-legged with the owners over divisional alignment - the Cubs and Cardinals were set up to be in the Eastern Division, Atlanta and the Reds in the West. Made no geographical sense to him. The air thickened, Vincent’s back stiffened, and in time he finally threw in the towel. The owners finally had their game back and they’ve been jacking it around ever since.
They had their own insurance policy right in their midst. They picked one of their own, the one least likely to make waves, and made him pseudo-commissioner. The original title was “interim,” but it was one of the longest interims on record. Allan (Bud) Selig was a car salesman who also owned the Milwaukee Brewers, but it is on record in Wisconsin that the Brewers eventually became the property of his daughter.
So baseball sailed merrily along. A World Series was canceled, the All-Star Game was remodeled, all roads led to the commissioner’s office. Bud Selig became every owner’s pal. No fuss-budget protector of the game to deal with.
Now, I don’t know that that includes the road paved with steroids, and other such body pollutants. I don’t know that any commissioner could have foreseen that, or that he could have intervened. Somehow, though, I have a feeling that Giamatti, and later Vincent, might have sensed it coming and moved into a preventive mode. Giamatti himself had such a grip on his place in the baseball corporation, and enjoyed such popularity with the owners, that it might have been a different kind of game. He moved with diplomacy. Vincent tried to rule with an iron hand, and the contrast created rebellion.
Bud Selig now finds himself in a whirl of contamination. He appointed a senator to check out the drug scourge in the major leagues, and George Mitchell came up with a boatload. Two major league power hitters have come clean, Jose Canseco and Jason Giambi.
Ah, but Mitchell Report has broken the ice. Not just some middle reliever or closer, but the big cheese himself, Roger Clemens. Andy Pettitte, friend and neighbor, has made a confession, and now Clemens is on an island of his own.
He’ll take each case at a time, the commissioner says, and that’s one that arouses deepening curiosity. It leaves him a hanging target, which way to go and how? Too late to call off the senator now, even if his major sources appear to be no more than shady clubhouse figures, most important of whom has been Clemens’ personal trainer.
Oops, Clemens just issued a denial.
Roger and out.
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Singletary’s the wise choice
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
THE TUESDAY COUNTDOWN..
(Or 10 things not worth a whole column.)
10: Bobby Petrino just took the West Virginia job.
9: If we can assume the Bill Cowher dream is dead, I’ve narrowed my Falcons coaching search to these top three candidates, eliminating almost anybody who qualifies as a re-tread or works for the NFL Network. I don’t know what you need a search committee for. This only took about 30 seconds.
8: Ideally, the Falcons should seek somebody for the offensive side of the ball, who can make the most out of the least - because personnel-wise, they are at the least. The top two up-and-coming offensive coordinators right now are Jason Garrett in Dallas and Josh McDaniels in New England. The other best option is San Francisco assistant head coach Mike Singletary. Singletary’s specialty is defense, but he was highly respected as a player and ranks as one of the best ambassadors for the NFL that the league ever has had. He could get players to follow him and unite both the team and the city.
7: Dallas Cowboys fans are blaming Jessica Simpson for Tony Romo’s bad performance against Philadelphia. OK, so I’m Tony Romo: I just had a bad day at work. I drive home. Look who’s waiting for me. I, like, so don’t care, about Barry Beergut in section 212.
6: There are unconfirmed rumors connecting Bobby Petrino with the Notre Dame job, should it open up.
5: Don’t look now but the Thrashers have fallen below the Atlanta Spirit’s Mendoza Line. Thirty-one games into the season, they have a worst record (14-17-1) than the Hawks (12-12).
4: Everybody on their feet. High school baseball coaches in Texas are re-thinking their plans to bring in Roger Clemens as a speaker next month.
3: Such protests carry a lot more weight than asterisks on records or even changing Hall of Fame votes. History will judge star players from baseball’s steroid era. Every canceled speech hits an athlete’s legacy like a sledgehammer.
2: The Falcons (3-11) are locked in a three-way tie for the NFL’s second worst record, and suddenly only two games “back” of Miami (1-14) in the draft order. So which teams are you backing the next two weeks?
1: Bobby Petrino admits being president of Venezuela has always been his “dream job.”
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