Grantland: The Most Hated College Basketball Players of the Last 30 Years

I wasn’t actually aware that there was anything better than filling out tournament brackets in March, but it turns out that filling out bonus brackets in March before the real brackets come out is pretty good, too. At least, the idea of it is pretty good. I came across this story while perusing CollegeBasketballTalk at the old juke joint the other night. I’ve written on more than one occasion about not buying into that rivalry crap about hating your rival’s school just because they’re your rival, and about not disliking a player for no other reason than that he plays for a school that competes in a rivalry with your own school (or with whichever you school you happen to root for).

It’s funny what the NCAAs can do to you, though. It’s difficult to explain, but the bad feeling I get when Indiana loses in the NCAA tournament is always much stronger than the good feeling I get when they win. This is due in part to a couple of tough breaks in the 1990s, when Indiana lost to Duke in the Final Four in 1992 and to Kansas in the Elite Eight in 1993. If not for that infamous Christian Laettner shot, Indiana would have played Kentucky in the Final Four, and not Duke. I think Indiana would have beaten that Kentucky team, but that’s just me. In 1993, Alan Henderson’s knee exploded toward the end of the Big Ten season, and that might well have been the difference between losing to Kansas in the regional final and hanging a sixth national championship banner in the Assembly Hall. (For what it’s worth, that 1993 team only lost four games all season—to Kentucky and and Kansas in the pre-league, and then at Ohio State, deep in the Big Ten season. And yes, that does mean that 50% of Indiana’s losses that year came at the hands of Kansas.)

I never really got over disliking either Duke or Kansas, and for no other reason than that they beat Indiana in a couple of key games twenty years ago. It should have been enough to get me over when Indiana beat #1-seeded Duke in the Sweet Sixteen in 2002, but apparently not. I still smile a little on the inside whenever Duke loses a game. It doesn’t help matters that Duke is as consistently good as they are. (Which is not remotely mitigated by the fact that current Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski made his bones as an assistant to one Bob Knight, at Army, way back in the day.) I never cared about Kansas as much as I cared about Duke back then, and I no longer care if Kansas wins or loses. I was even rooting for them last year, because I picked them to win the national championship, and I was the only one in the ESPN Tournament Challenge group I participated in who had Kansas as the champion. I was way down in the standings by the time the Final Four rolled around, because three out of my four Final Four were gone—but the way the points worked out, I would have finished with the highest score in our group if Kansas had beaten Kentucky. Sometimes that’s all it comes down to—which horse you have in the race, so to speak.

And so while I don’t really hate any college basketball program or player, there are certain programs and players that I...like less than others, I guess. It’s the middle of March, so it’s almost time for the NCAA tournament, which means college basketball is on my mind a lot—and because Indiana has been very good at times this year, I have been worried about the minor swoon they took during their last four games in the Big Ten regular season. That’s what made finding the Grantland bracket of most hated college basketball players of the last 30 years so amusing—it’s a good way to ease some of that pressure, and to remind myself that it’s just a game. It would have been amusing regardless of how the brackets had been structured, but what makes it extra fun is that one region—fully one fourth of the bracket—is devoted entirely to players from Duke. The author of the post goes on to explain why the Dukies had to be relegated to their own region, and he also gives a pretty concise explanation for why people seem to dislike Duke so much—and what that boils down to is the fact that they win as much as they do.

At the end of the day, sports should be about sportsmanship and teamwork and having fun; and it’s important to remember that these are just games. I’m definitely going to keep that in mind as I fill out my Most Hated College Basketball Player of the Last 30 Years bracket at the same time that I’m filling out my real bracket for this year’s tournament. (And watch—Duke is going to win the tournament this year, because of the reverse karma that comes down on the head of the guy who came up with this idea. Of course, because I blogged about it, Duke is going to beat Indiana on their way to that national championship.)

The Victors

"You Back That Queen Again, You Son of a Bitch, and I'll Blow You Right Up That Wildcat's Ass!"

So I was at Jockamo this past Sunday for lunch, with Amy and Jackson and some of the youth group peeps from her church, and somebody mentioned college basketball. Then Amy joked that maybe she should separate me from the dude who was sitting across from me, since he was a Kentucky fan and I’m an Indiana fan. Apparently those two don’t get along, or some shit. I gave the empty chuckle I reserve for a somewhat polite response to an attempt at humor that doesn’t even come close, which is the only way I have found that I am any longer able to react to people who think they are going to get my blood up with some kind of college basketball rivalry nonsense. I used to get hot and bothered about that shit when I was a kid; but when I was a kid, I was an idiot. I’m not sure exactly when I gave up on rivalry as something that could get under my skin, but the catalyst for it had to be the Indiana-Purdue game in Bloomington during the Spring 1994 semester. I didn’t have a ticket for that game in the six-pack I got when I turned in my claim card. One of my friends—that’s how long ago it was...I actually had some friends!—gave me her ticket. Glenn Robinson dropped 39 points on Indiana, but the Hoosiers won anyway. Then all of us who went to the game stayed behind in our seats, just hanging out and talking, while the Assembly Hall emptied out—and then the pep band drummer ripped into what I remember being a kickass drum solo. That was a pretty sweet end to a pretty sweet game—and it was a pleasure to watch Glenn Robinson play that night. You don’t often see a big guy who can shoot as well as the Large Pooch. He may be one of the best pure shooters ever to play the 4 in college.

Nowadays, I don’t care about the rivalries like that anymore. I love Indiana, and I hope that they win. When I root against other schools, it’s only because a loss for that school would help Indiana. It doesn’t matter which school we’re talking about; and most of the time, I don’t care anyway. I just want Indiana to win. The only niggling bit of rivalry that still bothers me has to do with Duke, because of The Shot. That’s the turnaround fadeaway that Christian Laettner hit from near the top of the key to beat Kentucky in the regional finals of the 1992 NCAA tournament. The winner of that game would go on to play Indiana in the Final Four, and I was hoping that Indiana would get Kentucky in that game, because I seem to recall thinking that Indiana would have a better chance of beating Kentucky than of beating Duke; but Duke won that game, because of the Christian Laettner shot (which has gone on to achieve something on the order of cult status, as one of the most replayed college basketball highlights of all time), and then beat Indiana in the Final Four, en route to their second consecutive national championship. If Indiana had played Kentucky in the Final Four, and beaten them, I think Indiana also would have beaten Michigan in the title game. So while there is no way to know for sure, of course, I still sometimes wonder if that one shot was the only thing standing between Indiana and their sixth national title; and I still smile a little anytime I see a college basketball scoreboard that shows a Duke loss. On the other hand, that does not mean that I do not respect their program, or their players, or their head coach, Mike Krzyzewski.

I didn’t explain all this to the dude Amy thought she should separate me from, but I did say that I don’t dislike Kentucky. He said that that was “refreshing,” which probably means that he gets shit from pretty much every other Indiana fan whenever the topic comes up. I went on to say, however, that I do dislike John Calipari. His daughter piped up with something to the effect of, “Everybody says that!” Then I proceeded with my reasoning, but failed to make a good argument, because I had forgotten most of the details of the two NCAA rules incidents at Calipari’s former schools, apart from the result of each investigation, which was that the first two Final Four runs by John Calipari-coached teams were vacated by the NCAA. The dude I was sitting across from said, reluctantly, that that was a “true statement,” but that those vacated Final Four runs were not due to anything that John Calipari had done.

I didn’t have an answer for that, and pretty much wilted under the confidence of his response. Later that day, I went back and re-read some of the material on the two NCAA incidents at Calipari’s former schools (Massachusetts in 1996, and Memphis in 2008). It’s true that Calipari did not overtly have anything to do with Marcus Camby accepting improper benefits from an agent, or with Derrick Rose’s SAT being invalidated by ETS (for which Memphis ultimately had its entire 2007-08 season vacated, not just the Final Four run, which ended with Memphis losing to Kansas in the title game). Calipari left each school for greener pastures, before the NCAA had a chance to come calling. But he failed somewhere along the line at Massachusetts, by not ensuring that Marcus Camby knew to stay well away from agents, even if he was thinking about going pro. Calipari did not commit the violation himself, but if he had had good control over the program, the violation probably would not have happened.

Same thing goes for Derrick Rose at Memphis, except that this one is way more shady than what went down at Massachusetts. Rose was never eligible to play at Memphis, and the NCAA report (PDF) implies that the school knew he wasn’t eligible, but let him play anyway. Rose would also have been ruled ineligible, even if his SAT had passed muster, because someone at Memphis allowed Rose's brother to travel with the team and to stay at the team hotel—benefits that are not against the rules by themselves, but which become violations when they are paid for by the school, which was the case on several occasions that Rose’s brother traveled and lodged with the team. Calipari was subsequently summoned by the NCAA to provide discovery on this matter, although the letter summoning him (PDF) made it clear that he was not “at risk,” with respect to the Rose issue. That letter reached him at the University of Kentucky, and was dated April 27, 2009—approximately one month after multiple sources reported that he was leaving Memphis for Kentucky.

It stretches the limits of credulity to claim that Calipari was unaware of Rose’s eligibility issues. Calipari’s experience at Massachusetts establishes a pattern that these kinds of things take place on his watch. He may very well not have done anything overt in either situation; but it’s patently clear, especially with respect to Rose and Memphis, that he could have done much more to make sure that no rules were broken. They’re sins of omission rather than commission; and if it happens once, you can almost call it a fluke. It’s happened to Calipari twice, though—and he didn’t hang around to defend himself either time. He hit the free agent market, with his gaudy “record” of recruiting superstars and turning formerly lifeless programs (a bit of an exaggeration with Memphis, though if you cancel out all of the NCAA tournament success brought about by rules violations, you basically have a lifeless program) into national title contenders, and landed on his feet at Kentucky, where he has already won a national championship—which has yet to be vacated by the NCAA!

And on top of all that, he runs NBA factories, recruiting kids he knows are only going to stay one or two years before making the jump to the NBA. I don’t know how much that hurts your recruiting, since you’re winning instantly and reloading the very next year; but it sends a terrible message to the kids who are watching all of this on television, and following it on the Facebooks and the Twitters: College is no longer seen as important, or even valid, when you are perceived to have the talent necessary to go right to the NBA after high school. But what happens to the kids who absorb that message, and then bet everything on their jump shot, only to be overlooked by the college scouts or the NBA? What do they have to fall back on if they shoot the moon on the Coach Cal Game Plan and it turns out they don’t have the skeelz? What does John Calipari teach the rest of us when he skips town at the first sign of trouble? Maybe that’s just the way they roll in Graceland, I don’t know. Nobody cared about UMass before John Calipari, and nobody cares about them now. But Kentucky is one of the great programs in college basketball.

As any Indiana fan will tell you, it’s horrible when someone sails into town with the NCAA at his back, and then starts breaking all the same rules in a new place. Part of the problem at Indiana was the legacy of Myles Brand, who abused his position of power as president of Indiana University to unfairly fire head basketball coach Bob Knight, which allowed Brand to shoehorn himself into the presidency of the NCAA; and part of the problem was another former university president, Brand’s successor, Adam Herbert, who, as a minority, probably felt like he had to replace a fired minority coach (Mike Davis) with another minority coach (Kelvin Sampson); but Sampson was running from the NCAA when he departed Oklahoma, and he finished the job Brand had started when he brought down the basketball program at Indiana. It would be terrible for college basketball, to say nothing of the fans and supporters of the University of Kentukcy, if Calipari were given free rein to manage to do in Lexington what Sampson managed to do in Bloomington. Sampson was brought in at Indiana because he had a proven track record of winning—which we later learned was due at least in part to flagrantly breaking NCAA rules. Calipari, with a history of very cleverly avoiding personal direct sanction by the NCAA, was brought to Lexington because he had a proven track record of winning. Indiana came to regret the hiring of Sampson. Hopefully, the same thing will not happen to Kentucky, despite the fact that everything about Calipari’s history suggests otherwise.

The Evolution of Bob Kravitz

I didn’t like Bob Kravitz when he first started writing a sports column for the Indianapolis Star. (I also don’t remember how long ago it was, but it was awhile. I’m pretty sure it was before they were assimilated by Gannett, back when the Star was as respectable as it was possible to be for a paper run by ultraconservative hillbillies.) I seem to recall his writing as being sort of mean-spirited and sarcastic (not unlike my own sometimes, but remember this was many years ago, and my awareness of self has been a long time incubating), and I got the feeling—I think—that he didn’t much like us. (Back then, I would have been filled with faux pride for Indiana. No longer, of course. Conservatives and other limited people probably feel right at home in a silly place like Indiana; but for anyone even slightly more evolved than that, the place is stifling.)

But Mr. Kravitz’s writing has evolved, as it was wont to do over time; my self-awareness and my thinking have both evolved, too; and I have come to find that I actually agree with some of the things that he writes. He once took the time to write a whole column about the way he writes, and why he says some of the abrasive things that he says. The bottom line was that, even though he was mainly a sports writer, part of his job was also to sell newspapers; and that meant that he would often write things that were designed almost or entirely to get a reaction—to get someone to buy the paper. I like that he copped to that, and I’m stunned that the paper let him get away with it.

And so I wonder how a Bob Kravitz column about the game Indiana lost to Michigan State last night would have read all those years ago. You have to factor out certain things, of course, like the fact that, all those years ago, Bob Knight was still the coach at Indiana. He was disliked as much as he was liked, especially by those possessing no affinity toward Indiana University, and its basketball program in particular. These days, however, Tom Crean is the coach at Indiana, and it would appear that he is genuinely liked and respected across the board. It would have been easy for Mr. Kravitz to be snide toward Indiana under Mr. Knight, and not so much for him to be snide toward Indiana under Mr. Crean—especially given the remarkable amount of progress that Indiana made in just its first twelve games this year.

The column in today’s paper, however, was not at all snide—no trying to sell papers here, just an honest look at what happened last night at the Breslin Center in East Lansing; and what happened was that Indiana got beat. It was the first loss for a much-improved Indiana team, on the road against a Michigan State team that had won 11 straight after dropping their first two games of the season to North Carolina and Duke—not exactly cupcakes. Mr. Kravitz pointed out things that Indiana has been doing well all season, but which they did not do well last night, including free throws, three point shooting, and getting production out of freshman phenom Cody Zeller.

And this was another one of those tests for an Indiana team that has not had much to brag about the last few years. So far this year, they have managed to obliterate cupcakes in Bloomington, stay competitive in games where they don’t dominate, win road games against respectable teams, and play hard and stay in the game with a ranked opponent at home. The icing on the cake was that remarkable win against Kentucky, on Christian Watford’s last-second three point shot. The Hoosiers faced those challenges—and won them all. What they had not faced so far this season, before last night (and with apologies to N.C. State fans), was a road game against a genuinely good team; and it’s the one hurdle they could not clear. Mr. Kravitz is correct, however, when he says that “this group is for real.”

Mr. Kravitz had a column about Purdue’s Robbie Hummel, earlier this year, that I also enjoyed. (I think I may have written about that in one of my NaNoWriMo warm-up posts.) I don’t know if the guy has mellowed with age or what; maybe it’s just that he genuinely loves sports and is inspired by what’s going on with Indiana and Purdue basketball. He’s also written some good columns about what has gone wrong with the Colts this season, and he tends to be critical of Bill Polian, which I totally support. (Bill Polian tried to use some expired passes once, and got pissy with me when I said that he couldn’t use them. Here’s one of the biggest big-shots in the NFL, and he gets pissy over twenty bucks worth of expired passes. Really? I wish I could say that he just accepted what I said and went on about his business, but like most customers these days, he just kept griping and complaining, like a child, until I let him use the passes. I don’t know who coined the phrase “the customer is always right,” but that person clearly never had to deal with actual customers. They have signs on the wall at a Jimmy John’s sub shop that I go to sometimes that say, “The customer is usually right.” [Emphasis mine.] I think even that is giving them too much credit. Based on my experience, customers are—maybe—a percentage point or two slightly more evolved than cattle. And usually wrong.)

But I digress. If you haven’t read Bob Kravitz in awhile, go check out the column. If you had formed a negative opinion of him from his early work at the paper formerly known as the Star, you might be surprised by this one.

The Monster Season

I was all set to start writing another warm-up exercise today before I went to work, and it was going to be about Steve Jobs and Apple, a piece that I had started writing shortly after Jobs passed away, but which I stopped working on because there was already so much out there. I basically had what I have already written here, and then I checked my e-mail and got an IU basketball newsletter from the Star.

And then Bob Kravitz goes and drops a question in today’s column that is impossible for me to resist, so now there will be two things for me to write today, and an even bigger challenge. Can you do two 1700-word posts, thereby potentially getting two day’s worth of work done in the span of one? I have to return to the idea that it’s much easier to write when you are channeling things onto (virtual) paper that you already have in your head, which is what I have been doing with these long posts over the course of the last week or so; and I sort of wish that I could start in on my NaNoWriMo project, just to see if I really can get 1700 words on that as easily and quickly as I have been getting 1700 words on all of these other things. That would be cheating, though, and there’s no point in doing National Novel Writing Month if you don’t want to do it the right way, because the whole point of it is to be the kind of exercise that helps you to find out if you can do that kind of work in that amount of time.

So then, to Mr. Kravitz’s question. First we link to his column for today, and then we speak briefly about it. He makes twelve observations about the Big Ten (in honor of the twelve teams in the conference*), one of which is that, “If Purdue’s Rob Hummel can stay healthy and have the kind of season most expect him to have, it will be one of the best college basketball stories of the year. Even IU fans have to feel like rooting for this guy. (Right?)”

It’s sometimes hard for me to tell where the friendly nature of a rivalry ends for some people, and where it turns into outright dislike. I have talked about this once before, and it still puzzles me. Unless there’s a silly little trophy involved—which, in and of itself, has no more meaning than the game over which it is being played—how is it any sweeter for Indiana to beat Purdue than it is for them to beat anyone else? (Hell, anymore, it’s nice when Indiana can manage to beat anybody, regardless of whether or not it’s Purdue—and regardless of whether it’s in football or basketball) I can understand the concept of rivalry a little bit more with respect to the Colts and the Patriots, because there is often—though most assuredly not this year—something big at stake when those two teams play each other. Plus, for a long time it was the Patriots that the Colts could not beat—neither in the regular season, nor in the playoffs, when it really counted; and the Colts-Patriots rivalry is a relatively recent thing—maybe going back ten years, but probably less than that. Indiana and Purdue have been playing each in everything for like a million years or something.

Some years Indiana is better, and some years Purdue is better. I just don’t get the point of hating another school just because they are your rival. I know I’m not a very good sports fan anymore, but I just don’t get it—haven’t really understood it for a long time. I hope Robbie Hummel comes back fully healed and has a great season, even if it seems like the odds are against him. For those who don’t know, Hummel was a standout at Purdue through most of three seasons, before he tore his ACL and missed the end of his junior season. He was expected to return for his senior season, but then re-tore the ACL during a practice and missed that season as well. After surgery and rehab, he is on track to return (again) for his senior season this year.

And Indiana fans have sort of been in the same boat. Though not of the same caliber as Hummel, Maurice Creek has missed parts of the last two seasons at Indiana because of injury; and he, too, is on track to return to the floor this year—for what should be a much-improved Indiana team, with the addition of high school phenom Cody Zeller. So Indiana fans, especially, should understand what their Purdue counterparts are going through, and they should be rooting almost as loud for Hummel to come back and have a monster senior season as the Purdue fans are. I don’t imagine many of them are, but they should be. Purdue’s head coach, Matt Painter—who is going into his seventh year as the head coach at Purdue, and I can barely believe that that many years have gone by since he took over for Gene Keady—is doing a great job with that program, developing talent in much the same way that his predecessor did.

Tom Crean is slowly but surely getting the Indiana program back on its feet, after it was demolished by Kelvin Sampson. Crean has the aforementioned Zeller in this year, and he currently has the #1 recruiting class in the country coming in for 2012. Painter and his crew will have to be on their toes if they want to be able to compete with Indiana in the next couple of years—and that seems like the logical end to the concept of rivalry to me, a friendly kind of excitement when you think about the idea of playing a particular team. You want to beat your in-state rival for bragging rights, or whatever, but it should never get beyond fun and games, and there should be handshakes all around when the game is over. There’s always next year!

I just don’t get how it develops into the kind of thing where you hate the other team or wish any kind of ill upon their players or coaches. I felt those kinds of things when I was a kid—especially for the Duke teams after 1992, the year that Duke beat Indiana in the Final Four; but college basketball was more important to me back then than it is now, and the fact remains that I was, in fact, a kid then. I grew up, and then grew out of it, because there was no reason for me to continue to bear any ill will toward Duke. I’m not going to say that it wasn’t pretty sweet, ten years later, when Indiana improbably knocked off a much better Duke team in the Sweet Sixteen. Was it a little bit sweeter because it was Duke that Indiana beat? Sure it was—but that’s all it was, just a little bit sweeter. There’s nothing wrong with Duke because they beat Indiana in 1992.

In fact, it should be something of a point of pride to Indiana fans that Duke is as good a program as it is. Mike Krzyzewski, the Duke head coach, broke into coaching as an assistant at Indiana, under the tutelage of Bob Knight. He only spent one year at Indiana, but he went on to coach at Army, where Knight started, and then took the head coaching job at Duke in 1980. This past season, Coach K won his 900^th game as a head coach, becoming only the second coach in Division I history to win 900 games. The first coach to 900 was Bob Knight.

Okay. That’s all I’ve got. My writing time is just about up for tonight, and this has not been as good a post as some of the others that I have been writing as warm-ups for National Novel Writing Month. In fact, I’m using this especially lame last paragraph pretty much just as filler to get to 1700 words; but that’s also part of National Novel Writing Month—forcing yourself to keep going even when the writing isn’t very good or isn’t pouring out of you quite as well as you would like. What you have at the end of the month is going to be crap. The time for revision starts on December 1^st. Before that, all you’re doing is writing, and trying to get as much down as you can. If this were actual NaNoWriMo work, it would be a prime target for revision after November 30^th; but since this is only a warm-up, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is keeping it going, and getting through to the end.

Oh, and the answer to whether or not you can get two 1700-word posts done in one day? No. Not at this point, anyway. That would have been a lot of writing, and would have required way more time in front of the computer than I had at my disposal today.

* Yes, there are 12 teams in the Big Ten. For years, it actually made sense, and there were only 10 teams in the Big Ten. But don’t ever listen to anyone who tells you that college sports is about anything other than money, because college sports is all about money. The Big Ten added Penn State to the mix in 1990, largely because Penn State was a football powerhouse in a conference that—up to that time, and apart from Michigan and Ohio State—was mostly thought of as a basketball conference. I believe the theory was that adding Penn State would make the Big Ten slightly more competitive in the Rose Bowl, a New Year’s Day game that traditionally matches the champions of the Pac-10 and the Big Ten against one another, and which has mostly been dominated by the Pac-10. Penn State has appeared in all of two Rose Bowls since they entered the league, but I guess maybe it might have been more if not for that whole Bowl Championship Series thing, which is the worst idea ever in the history of sports, other than Myles Brand.

The Next Jeff George?

Stephen Curry announced that he would stay for his junior year at Davidson after leading the 10th-seeded Wildcats into this year’s Great Eight and nearly into the Final Four. Some would say that he has nothing left to play for and that he’s only risking an injury that might end his hopes of playing in the NBA - after all, he was the Most Outstanding Player in the Midwest regional despite not playing for the region’s champion, and he was selected to the All-American second team with the likes of Indiana’s D.J. White and Georgetown’s Roy Hibbert (a pre-season first team selection).

But Curry himself says that he’s not ready - and that’s a pretty mature thing to say for a kid who averaged almost 26 points per game in the regular season and more than 34 points per game in this year’s NCAAs. Not only is it mature, it’s refreshing. They’ll call him undersized at 6’3” and 185 - but he shot 48% from the field and 43% from the 3-point line in the regular season and 46% from the field and 44% from behind the arc in the tournament. Granted, he’s not a dunker (is he?) and hasn’t cut a rap record (has he?), so the NBA might not want him - but he can play pro ball. Right now. And he chooses to come back for another year of school.

Are you listening, Eric Gordon? I know...you came to Indiana to play for Kelvin Sampson, and they took him away from you - but life goes on. You play for whoever is the head coach - not just the head coach you wanted to play for. If your pro stock drops any lower, David Stern is going to walk up to the podium this summer and announce that whichever team picked you has just selected Bear Sterns, from Indiana University.

The Indiana basketball program is reeling at the moment, and you have a unique opportunity to stanch some of that bleeding by staying in school for another year and bringing some small amount of stability to a program that is being turned down by coaches who haven’t even been offered the job yet (Washington State’s Tony Bennett). I don’t know if your staying one more year makes Indiana a national title contender, but it will keep the Hoosiers near the top of a Big Ten that Purdue is going to own next year - and there’s always a chance that the guy they name as the new head coach might just be the kind of superstar coach you signed up to play for when you came to Indiana.

If that’s not enough to consider, however, chew on this - the Indiana Pacers, the most embarrassing organization in all of American sports not involving stock cars, are going to have a high first round pick; and if you’re still on the board when their number comes up, they’’ll take you. Why? Because it’s a bad decision, and the only thing the Pacers are even remotely respectable at is making bad decisions. If one more Pacers player gets arrested, the Simons are going to rename the team the Cincinnati Bengals. You’ll want to play anywhere but here, of course - because the Sampson situation has left a bad taste in your mouth - and you’ll become the next Jeff George.

That pesky NBA draft lottery makes it hard to peg, with any real degree of accuracy, where the Pacers will draft this summer - but if the draft went by team record alone, they would draft no higher than 6th and no lower than 17th. Ever seen the Range Game on The Price Is Right? Twenty years ago, Donnie Walsh was smart enough not to pick the Indiana kid and instead take a chance on a wiry guy from UCLA; but the temptation to make the Indiana mistake will be greater this time around, because you will actually have an NBA career; and the possibility of the Indiana mistake being made this year is greater than it was twenty years ago because Larry Bird is calling the shots now. If there were a contest between Larry Bird and George W. Bush to see who has had the least success in their current job, I’m not sure who would win.

Stepehn Curry has the right idea, and I really hope that it works out for him - and for Davidson. College basketball may be doomed to the role of being a minor league for the National Bone Thugs Association, and the power conferences and their power schools may always dominate the recruiting classes and the national polls and the postseason tournaments - but every now and then you get to see a class program and a class kid shine in the national spotlight at the end of March. There is nothing in sports that compares with the greatness of the NCAA tournament - and guys like Stephen Curry (and schools like Davidson) are the reason that that statement is true.

(For a really good story about college basketball in its purest and least commercial form, go find a copy of The Last Amateurs, by John Feinstein - and spend a season with the gutty competitors in the Patriot League.)

The Uh-Uh-Uh-Uh Dance #2

I heard on the radio on the way to work this afternoon that the last time Davidson won a game in the NCAAs was 1969, when they beat St. John’s in Raleigh, North Carolina. Davidson College is located near Charlotte, North Carolina, and they won another tournament game today, knocking off 7th-seeded Gonzaga in - wait for it - Raleigh, North Carolina. It was one of two games in which I used the fake home court advantage theory to pick the winner. (The other was the Butler-South Alabama game, which I missed.)

Usually by Friday night my bracket is a wreck, with lots of blue going into the Sweet Sixteen and the Great Eight. I use a red pen to circle correct picks and a blue pen to circle incorrect picks on the penciled-in bracket - and when I have an incorrect pick that automatically makes a future pick incorrect, such as my pick of Connecticut going to the Sweet Sixteen this year, I go ahead and circle the automatically incorrect pick in blue - thus blue circles advancing farther into the bracket than games that have actually been played. Unusually, however, I have only one of those this year - the aforementioned Uconn Sweet Sixteen pick.

I mentioned in my first tourney post that I did not think that a 3 had gone out in the first round very often in the last 14 years, and I was right (sort of). It has happened six times, including twice in the 1995 tournament. The most recent occurrence was two short years ago, when Northwestern State knocked off Iowa. All of the three seeds survived the first round of this year’s tournament. The highest seeds to go out in the first round this year were two 4 seeds - Connecticut and Vanderbilt.

The Indiana game, of course, was aggravating - the only team from Indiana to lose in the first round, and the only team from the Big Ten to lose in the first round. Will anyone with any influence on his life bother to tell Eric Gordon that he desperately needs one more year of college in order to prove that he can play in the Bone Thugs Association? Not that I would blame him for wanting to leave Indiana, though - the Hoosiers are a long way from getting right, even if they are young. The two best players are gone, along with the lion’s share of the scoring - and there’s a search already on for the new head coach.

That was nice of Indiana - announce a head coach search party just as your team is getting ready for the Big Ten and NCAA tournaments. That had to make interim head coach Dan Dakich feel good - what amounts to a vote of no confidence going into the home stretch of what had started out like a monster season and wound up being an unequivocal disaster.

Speaking of the Big Ten...anybody else besides me thinking there might just be a bracket buster - or at least a minor one - looming on Saturday? If I’m an Xavier player, I don’t know that I’m all that excited to be meeting Purdue in the second round. I also would not be surprised to see Butler put the fear of Darwin into Tennessee on Sunday. American played Tennessee close for awhile there, and Butler was solidly in control of South Alabama in a hostile environment.

Any converts to my theory that Villanova might be the best 12 ever? I know, I know...not yet, right? Clemson wasn’t exactly the best 5 that ever went dancing, rising to that 5 with a great run in the ACC tournament and a surprising win over Duke and an almost-upset against North Carolina in the title game. If they knock off a spirited Siena team on Sunday, the Sweet Sixteen game - likely against Kansas - will be the real test.

The Uh-Uh-Uh-Uh Dance #1

Xavier-Georgia in the first round was one of those games that I left blank on my first pass through the bracket. Some picks are obvious and you just fill them in on auto-pilot - you pick the #1 seeds and almost always the #2 seeds, and picking teams like Indiana, Purdue and Stanford to go out in round one are usually safe choices, as well.

Then there are the ones you chew on for awhile, although they aren't usually 3-14 matchups. The fun ones are the 5-12 and 7-10 games. One of the guys I work with had Temple (12) over Michigan State (5), and I'll bet he wasn't the only one. I took two 12's myself - George Mason and Villanova. Villanova might be the best 12 ever and probably would have been higher if the Big East had sent fewer teams.

I looked hard at Georgia - even though they were sub-.500 going into the conference tournament (which they won), were the lowest-scoring team in the SEC, and tied for the worst regular season record in conference. Other than running the table in the SEC tourney, there's not much to remark them. But they gave the Musketeers a run for their money, leading by 9 at the break and holding the lead for part of the second half.

I don't have my past brackets in front of me and so can't tell you off the top of my head how many times in the last 14 years a 3 has gone out in the first round - but it's probably not many. I even wrote down Georgia on my second pass through the bracket. But then I was looking at a Georgia vs. Purdue-Baylor winner in the second round - the guys in Durham must have been giddy at the Georgia-Xavier halftime score - and changed my mind. I've got Xavier in the Great Eight in both brackets.

Oddly, though, I didn't stop to think about Michigan State-Temple at all, even though it was a 5-12 and Michigan State has not played great ball down the stretch. People say the Big Ten is soft, but Tom Izzo might be the best coach in the country when it comes to preparing his team for the tournament (and if he's not the best, then he's second behind Jim Calhoun). Also, the A-10, other than Xavier, is even softer than the Big Ten. There's a sharp drop-off after Xavier - so much so that Temple's bubble probably would have burst had it not won the conference tournament.

Michigan State didn't seem to have much trouble with Temple - which I hope portends good things for the Big Ten this weekend. I only have one Big Ten team (Wisconsin) winning past Sunday in my serious bracket (The Usual Suspects) - but I have Indiana in the title game in my goofy bracket (No Country For Old Men).

Ode(n) To The Buckeyes

A quiet little news item out of Columbus, Ohio, today. No, nothing about the undefeated Ohio State football team and which of the two remaining one-loss teams will face the Buckeyes in the Fiesta Bowl for the college football National Championship. Not even anything at all about the fascist Bowl Championship Series, that embattled method of using as many obscure computer statistics and quality matrixes as possible to determine which two teams most deserve to play for the National Championship - although that might come up later.

No, this news item has to do with the college basketball debut of one Greg Oden, the freshman starting center for the men’s college basketball team at Ohio State. If you follow basketball at all, you’ve heard of him. He’s the guy from Lawrence North High School who led his team to three consecutive state titles and won the Indiana Mr. Basketball award last year. Year before that, as a junior, he won the Gatorade National Player of the Year award. Only one other junior has ever done that. You might have heard of him, too. He plays in the NBA, for the Cleveland Cavaliers, and they call him LeBron James.

Oden played in his first game for Ohio State tonight, having not participated with the Buckeyes as yet because of surgery over the summer to repair a torn wrist ligament. He scored 14 ponts and pulled down 10 boards - in only 23 minutes of play. Mike Conley, another highly-touted Ohio State freshman, who played with Oden at Lawrence North, had seven points and seven assists.

Oden might have gone straight to the Association if not for the new rule that forbids players from jumping directly from high school to the professional draft. He might also just as soon have gone to school, though, since Conley was going to Ohio State regardless of what happened to Oden, and it was widely accepted that Oden, at least a little bit, wanted to play at least one season of college ball with his high school teammate.

I’m all for the new NBA rule, since it should help college basketball, which I enjoy far more than pro basketball, which I am starting to think of more and more as the Dunking Thugs League. I would have preferred that Oden go to Indiana, of course, but for that to have happened former Indiana head coach Mike Davis (motto: What, me recruit? I can barely coach!) would have had to recruit him, and Davis spent way too much of last season trying to figure out a way to get himself out of the job at Indiana without getting fired. He would have been fired if he had not gotten the Hoosiers back to the NCAA tournament, a goal they had failed to achieve in each of the previous two years.

But Oden went to Ohio State, and that’s fine. Indiana is in transition right now - and has been since Myles Brand (former President of Indiana University, now President of the NCAA, and whose exploitation of Bob Knight to advance his career is analagous to President Bush’s exploitation of 9/11 to advance - or rather, keep alive - his own) fired Knight in 2000.

We get at least one year to watch Greg Oden and the Ohio State Buckeyes run riot through the rest of the teams in the NCAA. If - no, when - Ohio State wins the National Championship next April, Oden will likely announce that he is going pro, where he will be drafted first and likely go on to have the kind of career few in the NBA have ever had.

Have you seen this guy play? He’s listed at 7’0”, which I suspect is being conservative - he may go a bit taller than that. And he might be a touch on the lean side to be able to play rough in the low post with some of the bigger centers in the Association. But that might not matter, because Oden can move like a shooting guard - he has a fluid way of moving with the ball that more than belies his size. He may not have the innate skill of a David Robinson or Tim Duncan, but he is far more mobile. He sort of reminds me of Hakeem Olajuwon in the days before he added the H to his name, except a lot faster. It would have been interesting to see Oden play against Shaquille O’Neal in the latter’s prime - if you can call it a prime; O’Neal, who has always gotten by on size rather than skill(z), would likely have found it impossible, even on his best day, to defend Oden. Oden might not have been able to keep O’Neal out of the low post, but he would have been able to swat most of his junk back toward the stands.

Barring injury, he is likely to become one of the most electrifying players to grace the Assocation since Michael Jordan - but he is not yet a complete player. He has a unique opportunity to - maybe - change the way kids approach basketball; he has to get used to playing against players his own size, or at least closer to it than the kids he played against in high school. He also needs to put on some weight in order to bang against the kind of players he will post up against in the Association. By staying in school, he could learn those things and set an example by showing younger kids that even the most talented of players can make their game better by going to school. Oden is a smart kid, unlike the Glenn Robinsons and Kevin Garnetts of the world, who could not have graduated college if they had roomed with Stephen Hawking; he might be able to resist the temptation of the pro draft - in part because there is no question that he goes as the first pick, regardless of when he goes - in order to play a year or two more with Conley and maybe set some NCAA records, as well as win a few Big Ten titles and National Championships.

Regardless of what happens in the future, Greg Oden is in college for at least a year. And today, December 2, 2006, is the day he arrived on the scene.