The cultural difference hit Ron Hunter over the head late last December.
“I had a night off, so I told my wife, ‘Hey, let’s go out to dinner,’ and we drove downtown,” Georgia State’s basketball coach said. “There was traffic everywhere and people said, ‘Don’t you know it’s the week of the Chick-fil-A Bowl?’ I had no idea it was that big of a deal. That’s how it is back in Indiana for a high school basketball game.”
The NCAA tournament begins this week. It culminates with the Final Four at the Georgia Dome. It’s a nice moment for our state, except for the fact that for the second consecutive season no Georgia school was good enough to make the tournament field.
Georgia might as well be Alaska or Hawaii or North Dakota. Or the Maritimes. We’ve become a college basketball wasteland, the contradiction being that the state continues to produce some of the best high players in the nation, only to see them proceed to other parts of the nation after graduation.
Brian Gregory, who came from Dayton, has made incremental progress at Georgia Tech. Mark Fox, who came from Nevada, has done the same at Georgia, but he couldn’t make the tournament with the SEC’s best player, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. Hunter just finished his second season after 17 years in Indianapolis at IUPUI.
There are 31 states, plus the District of Columbia, represented among the 68 tournament teams. None are from Georgia. None of the seven state teams can claim they were robbed.
Consider the season-ending RPIs for the seven state schools, via RealTimeRPI.com. Mercer is our shining light at No. 137. All hail, Mercer. (The Bears are in the NIT!)
The rest of the field, by RPI: Georgia at 140, Georgia Tech at 149, Savannah State at 166, Georgia State at 209, Georgia Southern at 264 and Kennesaw State at 341 … out of 347.
This is culture shock for guys like Hunter. He played at Miami of Ohio and is from a state with a solid college basketball tradition. (Ohio State, Cincinnati and Akron reached the NCAA field this year.) He lived and coached in Indiana, where the sport is as significant a part of the landscape as corn and grain.
“In Indiana, almost everything you do growing up is connected with basketball,” he said. “If you can’t play basketball, then you play football. In Georgia, it’s just the opposite: If you can’t play football, you play basketball. In Indiana, I had women all the time who were telling me how to coach — and they knew things and said things that most women don’t know. Every town in Indiana shut down for high school basketball games. That’s how it is here in Georgia for football.”
Hunter understands that is not going to change. That’s OK. When Peyton Manning played for Indianapolis, he made football more than relevant in a basketball state.
Georgia basketball teams can do the same. The state doesn’t need to get five schools in the tournament like North Carolina, Pennsylvania and California did. It doesn’t need to equal the four of Indiana and New York.
But one or two? Is it too much to ask for one or two?
“When one gets it going, it becomes more of a competition for the others,” Hunter said. “I’m seeing progress. I think it’ll happen. In the state of Georgia, we have a lot of new coaches, and we’re all from areas where basketball is a bigger deal. We’re all trying to adapt a little bit. Winning solves all. It will just take some time.”
Re-stating the obvious: Too many of the state’s best high school players go elsewhere. Too little is done to market college basketball as a whole in the area.
Here’s a thought: Why not take four or six Georgia schools and have an early season, pre-conference tournament? Hold it at Philips Arena or Gwinnett Arena. It could only help recruiting in metro Atlanta.
Sixty-eight teams. Not one from Georgia. Again.
“In Indiana when only two schools make it, people are depressed,” Hunter said. “I’ve been to four Final Fours, and I haven’t quite gotten the same feeling yet in Atlanta this year that I had in those years.”
No reason to wonder why.
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