The Forgotten Cinderella

In the days leading up to NCAA Tournament last week, Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun inferred that the George Mason team that stunned his Huskies in the Regional Final a few seasons ago was in over its head the following week at the Final Four.

“George Mason had no chance, in my opinion. They played a great four games and went to the Final Four and weren’t going to win the national championship.”

He may have just been talking about one team, but the statement applies every March to the teams that go on magical runs and this year is certainly no different. But if a double-digit seed is ever going to win the tournament, it’s going to happen this year. But not with Davidson and Western Kentucky, who certainly have at least a “puncher’s chance” to advance through the weekend, but almost no shot at winning the whole thing.

I’m talking about Villanova, the forgotten Cinderella.

The 12th seeded Wildcats, who have the third smallest undergraduate enrollment of the 16 schools still dancing, are a fantastic story. This is a team doesn’t have an NBA prospect, much less a Lottery Pick, on its roster, yet they still managed to tread water in the Big East, a conference loaded with future pros. Head Coach Jay Wright has figured out that recruiting players who are just going to leave the first chance they get isn’t the way to build a consistent winner. Instead, he seems to target undersized guards who handle the ball well and shoot the lights out.

For any team to win the title, a little bit of luck has to be on its side, which could be just the case with Villanova. Last week, after upsetting Clemson in the first round, their draw became considerably easier thanks to Siena’s victory over Vanderbilt. If the team was able to shock Kansas on Friday night, they would have the chance to face an upstart Davidson team or Wisconsin, two teams that would no better than average in the Big East.

With their grueling Big East schedule, excellent guard play and a little bit of luck, there is no question the Wildcats have shot to advance to San Antonio. And if they do, you can rest assure they won’t be in over their heads like that George Mason team.

And they’ll certainly have more than a “puncher’s chance” to win it all.

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If Thabeet goes, so might Cahoun

Ever since Donyell Marshall left Connecticut after his junior year and became the first Lottery Pick in school history, fans have watched so many great Husky greats follow suit, making the jump to the NBA a year, sometimes two, early. From Ray Allen to Rudy Gay and all the others stars that have made UConn the best college-to-NBA school in America, it has seemingly become a yearly ritual to pick apart said player’s games in hopes that he will realize how beneficial an extra season in Storrs would be.

Hasheem Thabeet is next in line. But if the big man enters the NBA Draft, I wouldn’t be surprised if he isn’t the only person the University says goodbye to this year. The other would be Jim Calhoun, the architect of one of the most successful college programs in the country over the last 20 years.

At times early this season, it sounded as though Calhoun might retire following the season. He was upset with the school for various reasons and his young Huskies weren’t responding to him the way teams in the past had. The 65 year old Hall of Famer looked angry and tired, which wasn’t all that out of character. But he also looked defeated.

And then everything clicked. The team ran off ten consecutive wins, including a season-changing road victory over Indiana. All of a sudden Thabeet was showing flashes of dominance offensively and A.J. Price had become exactly what Calhoun claimed he would be three years ago: one of the best point guards in college basketball. The Huskies were back in the national spotlight again.

But by getting eliminated from the Big East Tournament in the first round by West Virginia and then dropping their first round NCAA Tournament game to San Diego, the Huskies were exposed as a team with serious flaws defending the perimeter.

To lose Thabeet would mean that Huskies would head into 2009 in rebuilding mode as opposed to having their eyes on the Final Four. Is Calhoun prepared to spend another year or two (at least) constructing a contender?

He sounds optimistic about next year, but let’s wait and see if the big man returns.

Then we’ll know how Coach Calhoun truly feels.

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College Basketball is struggling in the Northeast

Nearly half of the 65 teams playing in the NCAA tournament this week have players from north Jersey or New York City on their roster, solidifying the argument that the best high school basketball is played in the northeast. And it’s not just the city kids that can play either. New England’s prestigious prep schools are home to just as many Division I recruits as they are to future senators these days.

Schoolboy basketball is thriving.

Yet somehow, college basketball in the region is dying.

Only Connecticut and Siena managed to qualify for the Big Dance this week, and only the Huskies have a reasonable chance to make it past the first weekend. It’s gotten so bad that even the Northeast Conference had to find a team from Maryland (Mount St. Mary’s) to represent the league in the tournament.

It wasn’t that long ago that St. John’s and Seton Hall were among the country’s elite teams and Providence was thriving. Even more recently, Boston College became a tournament lock every year, Massachusetts was in the Final Four and Rhode Island was able to recruit and land a future lottery pick named Lamar Odom. And of course there was UConn and Syracuse, who eventually went on to win three National Titles in six seasons.

But all of that seems forgotten now, especially since the Huskies are weaker than normal and the Orange have now missed the NCAA Tournament two years in a row.

The biggest problem, clearly, is that the schools have done a horrible job at keeping the region’s top players home. Next season, Connecticut will bring in New York’s top rated player, point guard Kemba Walker, but five of the next six prospects are all expected to leave the area. The same goes for Jersey, which is sending its best player to Louisville and three of its top five to Kansas to play for Bill Self. The top players in New England’s high schools are heading to Arizona, Ohio State and Louisville as well.

City kids are trading city life for cow tipping and pickup trucks.

And the future doesn’t look much brighter. Sure, Connecticut and Syracuse will always be fairly prominent, but the rest of the region (especially the New York Metro schools) seems hopeless. Until they figure it out, the kids will continue to thrive elsewhere.

And the schools will continue to fade.

*Correction* Cornell is the third team from the northeast in the tourney.

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Random Rumblings (NCAA Tournament Edition)

• If there was ever a time where the NCAA should be thankful for what gambling does to promote its sports, it is now. Because if it weren’t for the satisfaction that comes from winning an office pool, there would be just one game worth watching over the next three weeks.
  
  And it wouldn’t be the one that falls on the first Monday in April either.
  
  It would be the one that comes just two hours before Lost this Thursday night, the 6-11 matchup between two schools led by freshmen - O.J. Mayo’s USC team and Kansas State, with Michael Beasley, the best player in college basketball.
  
  The two future lottery picks are among the few names that the average (and even slightly above average) sports fan will actually recognize in a tournament that has never been filled with so many anonymous faces. Sure, all the top schools are in along with their big name coaches, but wouldn’t it be nice to know more than two freshmen and someone nicknamed Psycho-T?
  
  The best 35 minutes of the tournament will come on the first night. But with five minutes left, no matter the score, America will collectively turn to ABC so we can Meet Kevin Johnson.
  
  At least we’ve seen him before.
  
  
• Forget not knowing most of the players, who are some of these teams? Mid-Majors are fun when they are pulling off stunning upsets over the top ranked teams, but it’s different when they are paired against each other in first round games.
  
  There’s a time and place for that. It’s called the Bracket Buster and ESPN plugs it more than NASCAR.
  
  
• Not even the NCAA believes the Opening Round game is part of the tournament anymore. If it did, Coppin State would be playing Mississippi Valley State on Tuesday night. But because the committee didn’t want to deal with the blowback it would have gotten for placing two HBCU’s in a game that doesn’t matter (even know they are the lowest ranked teams in the field), it stuck Mount St. Mary’s in MVSU’s spot.
  
  
• North Carolina doesn’t have to leave the state in order to get to the Final Four, but they still might have the toughest draw of all the No, 1 seeds.
  
  
• UCLA had to go through UConn the last time it won a National Title too.
  
  
• Kansas and Georgetown might have the two easiest roads to the regional final in the history of the tournament.
  
  
• My picks: I’ll go into more depth with my guests on the podcast later this week, but my initial picks are Louisville, Kansas, UCLA and Memphis.

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Tragedy should open all of our eyes

I was 12 years old the first and only time I saw a handgun that wasn’t in the possession of a police officer. My friend’s cousin pulled it from the front pocket of what was probably a Starter coat and pretended to be a character from Menace to Society, a fictional movie that brought kids from Connecticut suburbs closer to the hood than we had ever been.

The moment had after-school special written all over it. A white kid who did well in school shot and killed by a teenager who stole his father’s gun. But that never happened.

I simply got scared and went home.

My memories from that experience are pretty blurry and were almost forgotten completely until I read about Jamiel Andre Shaw Jr., the Los Angeles High running back who was shot and killed by a gang banger on March 2.

Shaw was on his way home when he was approached by two men in a car who wanted to know what gang he was with. When he didn’t reply, he was shot twice, dying on the spot. Unlike me, he was given no chance to just walk away.

The two situations are hardly comparable, but there is one constant. The same one that is obvious in all cases like these, from the high profile Sean Taylor-type murders to the accidental shootings that occur every single day.

Of course I’m talking about the gun.

It’s unfortunate that it takes the murder of an athlete with a bright future for sports fans and the sports media to start thinking about real-life issues like gun control, but maybe it can be a blessing in disguise. Maybe the aftermath of someone like Shaw’s murder will help everyone realize that it’s easy to obtain a gun legally and even easier to do it illegally and something needs to be done.

Hopefully Shaw’s murder will inspire leaders from Los Angeles and around the country to step up efforts to curb the amount of weapons flowing into all of our neighborhoods, from Compton to Greenwich. Maybe, just maybe, Shaw can have a greater impact on all of us in death than he would have had as a college running back or as a sports agent, which was his dream.

This is not the time for any of us to get scared and just walk away.

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Random Rumblings (On Favre, college basketball and Calhoun)

• Like all the legends in sports that have retired before him, Brett Favre used family as one of the main reasons why he retired from football this week. And we accept it–maybe more than we did from Michael Jordan- because of who he is and all he’s been through.
  
  But what if the Packers were able to sign Randy Moss? Would Favre have walked away then?
  
  The answer is no. Despite the success the team had this season, Favre didn’t believe he had the right pieces to win a Super Bowl, and he said as much when he talked about how getting there in losing wouldn’t be good enough.
  
  Family might have been the reason he retired. But he wasn’t talking about his wife and children. He was talking about Greg Jennings and company – his second family.
  
  The one he didn’t believe in.
  
  
• The NCAA Basketball Tournament might be the greatest event in sports, but it is going to be hard for most of the country to get excited about players they just don’t know, and that’s why the NBA forcing players to attend school for a year is going to hurt the college game in the long run.
  
  Last year, Kevin Durant and Greg Oden became household names because of the success their teams were having. This year’s best player, Michael Beasley, plays on an average Kansas State team that is barely ever on national television.
  
  The same goes for a lot of the big-name freshmen. O.j. Mayo’s USC team still needs to do work in order to qualify for the Big Dance. Eric Gordon at Indiana has been overshadowed but the Kelvin Sampson situation. And most people probably don’t even know what team Jerryd Bayless plays for.
  
  And the trend isn’t going anywhere. As long as the freshman classes are more talented than the juniors and seniors, the average fan will not get a chance to learn about the stars they are watching come tournament time.
  
  And interest will fade.
  
  
• Speaking of college basketball, The Big Lead asked who the coach of the year was going to be and didn’t include Jim Calhoun.
  
  The guy has won a National Title has a huge underdog (1999) and as an overwhelming favorite (2004), but if he can get Connecticut to the Final Four this season, it has to be his best coaching job.
  
  And he should be rewarded.

Get betting odds at the world’s best online sportsbook

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