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Friday, March 21, 2008
Georgia can build on ‘history’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Washington D.C. — As tough as it has been to put what Georgia just did in perspective, the truly tricky part comes next. Was the Bulldogs’ rise from last in the SEC East to being, as Xavier’s Derrick Brown told the Washington Post, “the best 14th seed ever,” an eight-day blip or the sign of a page having at last being turned?
“We made history,” said the freshman Jeremy Price, and nobody rose to object. And then, even more to the point: “We came over a big hump.”
While the history part was, and forever will be, nicer than nice, eight days in March 2008 will cut no ice when it’s January 2009 and the Bulldogs are playing in Thompson-Boling or Rupp or the O-Dome. But what Georgia learned about itself in those eight days will. It learned it doesn’t have to be a second-rate program. It learned it has the resources to compete and win at the highest level.
And that’s huge. For five years Georgia had Harrick Hell to brandish as an excuse for failure. (Even Dennis Felton, who started out saying he wouldn’t make excuses, was pointing toward the mess he’d inherited midway through Season 5.) But the Tony Cole scandal has now been replaced by a fresher, cleaner memory, and Felton can stop making the case for his stewardship and can simply tend to stewarding.
He’s a good coach. He proved as much at Western Kentucky, where basketball is taken far more seriously than the masses realize and where he won with teams both big and small, and he proved it when he turned Harrick’s not-always-receptive remnants into a decent team. But he’d hit a barrier, or so it seemed, and he needed something extraordinary to happen to surmount it. At what might well have been the last possible moment, he got it.
Jim Donnan once called this writer and asked: How does a team know when it’s ready to break through? Now as then, this writer had no real answer, except to suggest that you can’t really know — a team either does or it doesn’t. (Donnan’s teams, alas, never quite could.) Felton’s team just did. With every successful coach, there comes a moment when he takes his men to a place even they weren’t sure they’d reach. (For Mark Richt, see “Auburn 2002.”) Felton took his men to a title.
Felton can now visit recruits without having to apologize for Georgia’s failure to reach the NCAA tournament. He can point to the soon-to-be-raised championship banner as proof this school indeed cares about men’s basketball. He can present himself as the coach who just cemented his job, not one in imminent danger of losing it. If this coach hadn’t gone out of his way to make friends and sow good will in his first five years in Athens, those four days in Atlanta did it for him.
The SEC East is in flux. Kentucky is no longer the gold standard, and Florida just missed the Big Dance. Vanderbilt loses its best player. South Carolina is looking for a coach. Tennessee is ascendant, but there’s room to move in this division. Georgia has the opportunity to be one of the prime movers. It has good recruits — Howard Thompkins III and Dustin Ware — on the way and should be able to use its heightened profile to get better ones.
“To have the experience of winning a championship is almost priceless,” Felton said, and the doings of those eight dizzying days — four wins in the league tournament plus a meritorious loss to a No. 3 seed — changed everything we’d come to think about Georgia basketball. The program that just couldn’t get over the hump soared above and beyond in one Bob Beamon-esque bound.
What Felton called, even in his post-Xavier briefing, “the most difficult period in Georgia basketball history,” belongs to the past, and good riddance. He and his team have an SEC championship to protect and defend. There’s no reason this program can’t take these eight days and run with them for … oh, the next eight years.
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