It’s possible I hallucinated this, but when I opened my sock drawer Friday morning Dick Vitale popped up waving his arms and saying, “Big Ten, toughest conference in America, bay-beee.”
For sure thousands of Vitales–all created by George Lucas to shape public opinion and hype college hoops–have been on every TV and radio station I turn to screaming the praises of the awesome BT! Thousands of Diggers and Billys have seized upon the theme. Now, I assume, America views the conference as the best thing since the BLT.
So there I was Friday at the Big Tent–sorry, United Center–watching the Big Ten’s best team barely survive the eighth-place finisher, 61-59. Without a late spate of glassy-eyed mistakes by Northwestern freshmen, the 15-13 Wildcats would have beaten 27-4 Michigan State, the country’s No. 2 team.
Later, last-place Illinois did pull off its second straight upset, a convincing whipping of No. 17 Indiana.
As I’m writing this, Dick Vitale just popped up on my computer screen saying, “See, anyone can beat anyone in that conference!”
There. I just hit the delete key and regained control of the keyboard. The truth is, Dickie V., that all the not-so-shocking upsets proved once and for all that this year’s Big Ten is really the Medium 11.
What we have here are a whole bunch of not-bad, not-great teams who kept rising into the Top 25 in a down year for college basketball talent. The players who should be dominating the NCAA now are dominating NBA sneaker ads. Not one Big Ten “star” is projected as a sure-fire NBA starter.
For that matter, not one player in all of college basketball will dramatically improve an NBA team. Not Lamar Odom or Elton Brand or Baron Davis or Steve Francis or Wally Szczerbiak, who possibly will comprise the first five picks.
It’s doubtful this year’s all-Big Ten first team could have beaten Michigan’s Fab Five. It’s also doubtful this year’s Michigan State team could have kept the ACC’s Duke, Maryland or North Carolina from winning the Big Ten or that the Big Ten’s second-place team, Ohio State, could have finished second in the ACC.
For that matter, coach Mike Krzyzewski admits his Duke, this year’s Goliath, isn’t as good as his Laettner-Hill-Hurley teams.
So this year’s Big Ten has led in RPI and ORI (overrated index). No Calbert Cheaney or Jim Jackson or Glenn Robinson–those three received national player-of-the-year awards. No dynamic personalities. Lots of low-scoring, low-interest games between teams you couldn’t pick out of a lineup.
Indiana is Iowa is Wisconsin is Penn State is Ohio State is . . .
In this class, everyone gets a B. Yet that made for a very competitive class. What we have here are lots of evenly matched teams heavy on moderately talented veterans taught and maneuvered by perhaps the best collection of coaches in the country.
I’ll give you this, Dickie V: The Big Ten is loaded with awesome coaches, from Knight to Keady to Jim O’Brien to Tom Izzo to Dick Bennett to O’Neill.
The job O’Neill has done this season should warm and chill NU faithful. O’Neill is proving he’s as fine a coach as he is a recruiter. Unfortunately for Northwestern, O’Neill is proving his coaching maturity to athletic directors at schools with much deeper basketball traditions and pockets than NU’s. This school is as lucky to have him as it will be to keep him.
Yet despite Friday’s rumors, don’t anticipate that O’Neill will be interested in the opening at Marquette, where he coached before taking the Tennessee job. Been there, left that. O’Neill loves Chicago and likes the class he already has recruited for next season–“five athletes better than the four we’re losing.”
Those four include sixth-year senior Evan Eschmeyer, who is a much better college player than he will be a pro. At least three NBA GMs say they would be reluctant to draft Eschmeyer until the second round. They question his rebounding, shot-blocking, hands, agility and ability to sense double-teams and quickly find open teammates.
If O’Neill stays at Northwestern, his Wildcats will be better in two years than they were this year with Eschmeyer. Yet as O’Neill said after Friday’s game, “We’d be 0-18 if he wasn’t playing.”
In this year’s Medium 11, the 6-foot-11-inch Eschmeyer was Gulliver. Michigan State, which plays no one taller than 6-8, struggled to contain him. With the ball, eyeing the basket and defender, the huffing, puffing “Esch” still looks like an overgrown kid preparing to lift more weight than he has ever attempted. Yet at 23, he’s physically mature and aggressive enough to cause problems for younger, smaller defenders.
He also has made himself an excellent free-throw shooter. He made all eight Friday on the way to 30 points. Eschmeyer played perhaps his best offensive game of a scrapbook senior season, offsetting a bully’s edge (17-4) by the Spartans on the offensive boards.
If only NU’s three freshman starters had been poised enough to get Eschmeyer the ball in the final minute.
But it was wildly exciting, just as this year’s March Madness promises to be. The Medium 11 will probably have six teams among the 35 or so with genuine shots at making it to the Final Three–the Fourth being Duke. If this conference is the nation’s best, this is one of the least awesome seasons for college talent, bay-bee.
