As we enter the dreary weeks before NCAA tournament pool sheets come out–otherwise known as the college basketball season–let us give thanks for the Arizona Wildcats.
The Wildcats have given us a reason to pay attention to the regular season, which is typically as pointless as non-Olympic figure skating. Not content to be ranked No. 1 in the coaches’ and media preseason polls, the Wildcats sally into the 2000-01 season with their eyes on immortality, or what passes for it in the transient world of sweat socks and pep bands.
Let the other 300-odd Division I teams dream of snipping down the nets in the Metrodome next spring. The Wildcats are talking about becoming the first team since Indiana ’76 to go undefeated.
“We can be one of the best teams ever,” center Loren Woods told reporters recently at Pac-10 media day in Los Angeles. “If, if, if … It’s just fun to us. We laugh about it. We always compare ourselves to past teams that were great, like Duke of ’92, the Fab Five, UNLV.
“Our second five can beat a lot of teams in the nation,” Woods said. “So that’s where a lot of our competition comes from.”
Arizona can stick out its chest, not to mention its neck, largely because Woods, a 7-foot-1-inch fifth-year senior who runs the floor like a guard, has recovered from back problems that sidelined him last March.
But the Wildcats are entering dangerous territory. The last team to draw serious comparisons to the greatest teams of all time was Duke ’99–and those comparisons were thrust upon the Blue Devils by outsiders. And instead of earning its place in history, Duke became history, losing to Connecticut in a riveting national final in St. Petersburg, Fla.
The loss seemed to loom larger when the Blue Devils set a record with four NBA first-round draft picks a few months later, three of whom were underclassmen. By its nature, modern-day college basketball almost precludes the possibility of true greatness. It takes time to develop teams, and that’s the missing element in an era when the best players often jump to the NBA after one or two years. (Woods is a notable exception, having snubbed the NBA to return for his fifth year.)
The lottery by which the national champion is determined also works against greatness. On some March days, the best team in the country isn’t even the best team in the building. Madness? No one knows this better than Arizona, which has a history of falling flat on its NCAA tournament seed.
The Wildcats may look unbeatable, but unlike Al Gore, no Division I basketball coach is going to concede before the last vote is counted, or recounted.
Did someone say coach? The coaching merry-go-round whirled at a dizzying pace last off-season, with almost a sixth of the Division I jobs turning over. But in July national attention was focused on a job that didn’t turn over: Kansas.
In an upset, Roy Williams rejected North Carolina to stay in Lawrence. Williams had long been pegged to return to Carolina, his alma mater, but he decided he’d rather not live in the shadow of Tar Heels legend Dean Smith, who still has an office in the arena that bears his name in Chapel Hill.
“I knew I couldn’t make everyone happy,” Williams said. “This wasn’t going to be a win-win situation for both parties. I knew I was going to disappoint some people either way and that wasn’t a comfortable situation for me, to say the least.”
Williams’ non-move stunned the Carolina bluebloods. They were forced to undertake an unseemly search that ended with Matt Doherty, who decided nothing could be finer than to run out on the last four years of his contract at Notre Dame.
The Carolina search provided great midsummer drama, but it turned out to be only the second biggest story of the off-season. The bigger one broke in September, when Indiana President Myles Brand fired inimitable Hoosiers coach Bob Knight for violating the “zero tolerance” conduct policy imposed on him in May. The Hoosiers quickly promoted assistant coach Mike Davis, a gentle, softspoken Alabaman who is as different from Knight as Kleenex is from sandpaper.
Knightheads won’t believe this, but IU basketball may carry on fine without Knight, who had won two NCAA tournament games since 1994. In fact, it’s possible that Hoosiers will be better, thanks to the talent Knight recruited, including Jared Jeffries, Indiana’s Mr. Basketball.
Knight’s demise came when he allegedly grabbed an IU freshman–Knight denies it to this day–who had called the coach by his last name. That violated the “zero-tolerance” policy, and it also would violate new NCAA guidelines discouraging physical play.
In what is more a change in emphasis than a change in rules, the NCAA rules committee has ordered officials to clean up play in the post. “I think it’s the most significant action taken by the (rules) committee since the three-point basket,” Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese said. “Fans have to understand that the game is going to be called very differently than it’s been called the last 10 years.”
Fair or not, the crackdown on physical play has been widely perceived as an institutional response to the Wisconsin Badgers, who clutched and clawed their way to the Final Four last spring. At halftime of the national semifinal, Wisconsin trailed Michigan State by only a safety, 19-17. “Players are spending more time in the weight room and the emphasis is shifting to bigger and stronger instead of quicker and more skilled,” said Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany, who is on U.S. Basketball’s board of directors. “We’ve been encouraging less contact. I believe the game is a game of skill.”
And that’s why Arizona is No. 1, though No. 2 Duke isn’t exactly a bunch of YMCA hackers.
The Wildcats have Woods and junior forwards Michael Wright and Richard Jefferson in the frontcourt and sophomore guards Gilbert Arenas and Jason Gardner in the backcourt.
With that kind of talent, it’s hard to fault the Wildcats for aiming for perfection. But they won’t waltz. Arizona opens in a Maui tournament whose field includes Maryland, Illinois and Connecticut. Two days after returning to the mainland they face Purdue in Indianapolis on Nov. 25. They also take on Illinois in the United Center on Dec. 16. The Pac-10 schedule brings home-and-home dates with Stanford, the West’s other power.
“All these teams are in our way to get to the national championship,” Woods said.
