By midday Tuesday, Ron Hunter had set his severe-weather plan. The Georgia State coach wouldn’t do as he did when last snow fell on Atlanta — that was two weeks ago, in case the misery has run together — and he couldn’t make it to work for two days.
“I’m not leaving,” Hunter said Tuesday, speaking from his office. “I’m going to stay down here until somebody says we’re not playing Thursday.”
(That word came Wednesday. GSU’s game with Texas State was postponed because of the winter’s second round of ice.)
After the January snow, Hunter’s path to the office was barred for two days — he lives in Atlantic Station, 3 1/2 miles away. “I couldn’t get my car out of the ice,” he said. “I’ve lived in Milwaukee and the Midwest, but I don’t have snow tires. The guy who sold me the car said, ‘Don’t worry about snow — we never get that down here.’”
Since Hunter’s players were stranded on campus, they held two practices without him. Two of his three starting guards — senior Devonta White and sophomore R.J. Hunter, the coach’s son — took the lead. When next the Panthers played, they trailed Texas-Arlington 36-21 after 13 1/2 minutes.
This led Hunter to two conclusions: First, that his players hadn’t worked much on defense; second, that the coach’s son mightn’t have a future in what Dad calls “the family business.” Said the elder Hunter: “We gave up 91 points. My son said, ‘Yeah, but we scored 101.’”
That Feb. 1 game — GSU won in overtime after White made a tying 3-pointer at the end of regulation — was the closest the 17-6 Panthers have come to losing since Dec. 7. After a skittish start, they’ve won 14 in a row, establishing a school record and stamping themselves as the class of the Sun Belt, their new conference.
If you’re looking for a mid-major to make March noise, Georgia State fits the profile. It has three seasoned guards — Hunter, White and Kentucky transfer Ryan Harrow. It doesn’t turn the ball over. It induces a slew of turnovers. It can make the 3-pointer. It makes its free throws. (It doesn’t rebound much, though.) If the Panthers land in the NCAA tournament as a No. 14 seed, some high-falutin’ No. 3 could be bound for a fall.
“This team is built for tournament play,” Hunter said, but there’s a caveat. Only twice since 1996 has the Sun Belt managed multiple NCAA bids. Both times it came after the regular-season champ lost in the Sun Belt semifinals. But those two regular-season winners were blessed with an excellent RPI. South Alabama was No. 38 in 2008; Middle Tennessee was 28th in 2013.
According to ESPN’s Daily RPI, Georgia State ranks an uninspiring 89th. Its schedule is ranked the nation’s 250th-best. Even if the Panthers run the regular-season table, a loss in the Sun Belt tournament could relegate them to the NIT.
Said Hunter: “I don’t let myself think big-picture. I let everyone else worry about the big picture. If you do worry about the big picture, it gets too big … That’s what got us in trouble early. We were thinking too much big-picture; we didn’t do little things.”
This is Hunter’s third season at Georgia State. His first band of Panthers were 22-12 and won 11 consecutive games, but lost narrowly to George Mason in the Colonial Athletic Association semifinals. “I never thought we’d go into the conference tournament and win it,” Hunter said. “This group expects to win. We’re playing for a bigger prize.”
Then: “That first year, I knew we had a ceiling. I don’t know where this team’s ceiling is … I can’t see it, not yet … I don’t think we’ve played our best basketball, and we’ve got four guys (the guards plus forward Manny Atkins) who could play anywhere in the country.”
The level of Sun Belt play in 2014 isn’t to be confused with that of the CAA in 2012. (That proud basketball league has since been gutted by the defections of VCU, George Mason and Old Dominion.) But for Georgia State, the CAA served a purpose.
“The Colonial toughened us up,” Hunter said. “Travel was brutal for us. We were the lone team in the (Deep) South. We didn’t have any bus rides. We don’t charter; we flew commercial. We might have a game in Boston and then a game in Virginia.”
His team has shot to the top of the Sun Belt, and Selection Sunday is 32 days away, but Hunter keeps looking back. “I just told the team, ‘Remember, we were 3-6,’” he said. “If we weren’t thinking about March, we wouldn’t have been 3-6. But if we had won those games, we wouldn’t have won 14 in a row. We needed to lose those games. The players needed to feel that pain to get where we are right now.”
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