Early entries help little guys compete
Once upon a time, a Dean Smith could load up with 16 scholarship players and the two guys on the end of the bench would be good enough to start at a couple hundred other schools.
Those days are gone, as passe as the notion that all the top players will stick around for four years while the coach molds them into an NCAA championship contender.
The game within the game in the upper echelon of college basketball is about staggering a team, not stacking it. It’s about getting the right blend of players who will stay for four years, some for a fifth after redshirting, along with those who can be expected to jump early to the NBA.
It’s a process that drives college coaches nuts. Not only are they trying to fill gaps in their rosters, looking for a guard or power forward, but they have to figure out which players are likely to bail out after a year or two.
Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski recruits a Luol Deng and loses him to the Chicago Bulls after his freshman year. Another recruit Krzyzewski thought he had, Shaun Livingston, leapt from high school to the Los Angeles Clippers.
The flip side of that problem for the basketball elites is that it opens the door to small schools who might recruit somewhat lesser players who will succeed by staying together longer.
There was no surprise that powerhouses in the major conferences dominated The Associated Press Top 25 preseason poll Monday, but no one should be shocked if one or two small schools emerge as Final Four contenders.
Or, if this year isn’t a repeat of last year, certainly that will happen more often in the future than in the past.
Gonzaga is the smallest school in the preseason Top 25.
Gonzaga, No. 25, has been a strong presence in college hoops for a long time. The Bulldogs have appeared in the postseason for 10 of the past 11 years, including six consecutive trips to the NCAA Tournament.
They finished No. 3 in the final AP poll last year and their best player, center-forward Ronny Turiaf, has returned for his senior year after flirting last spring with the idea of turning pro. Their big losses from last season were two-time conference player of the year Blake Stepp, the point guard drafted by Minnesota, inside bruiser Cory Violette and three other seniors.
Gonzaga won 21 consecutive games last year, and went 14-0 in the West Coast Conference, after losing early season games to Saint Joseph’s and Stanford. This year probably won’t go so grandly, although they could take down a few giants.
“We’re not just going to go steamroll through this thing like we did last year,” said Gonzaga coach Mark Few, 133-32 in five years as a head coach. “Every game will be a battle for this group.”
He’s probably right, though the team should get a boost by playing in a new 6,000-seat arena.
“It’s big-time,” Few said. “It was time for our facilities to catch up to the level our program is at.”
In the new world of college hoops, a school such as Gonzaga or Saint Joseph’s, which had its glorious run to the top last year, can aspire to a big-time basketball program and a shot at the Final Four a couple times a decade. The Kent States and Valparaisos are not condemned forever to second-class status.
If nothing else, the Olympics demonstrated that teamwork and maturity can trump raw talent. The U.S. team had some of the best pure athletes but lacked the cohesion and experience of the teams that beat them.
U.S. coach Larry Brown didn’t have the luxury of picking all the players he would have liked, nor did he have the chance to work with them for months to get them to play like an unselfish unit.
“A coach can no longer just go after McDonald’s high school All-Americans,” CBS college basketball analyst Billy Packer says. “For every kid that he takes that’s a potential two-year player, he has to find a kid that’s a little bit under his radar screen who can be a fifth-year player so that he can maintain stability in his program.”
None of the big-time coaches wants a one-year player, unless he’s that rare standout who can complete a roster and virtually ensure a national title (see Carmelo Anthony for Syracuse in 2003). Even then, a coach has to recruit players who will stay around for five years so he can have veterans when the star jumps to the NBA.
With 13 scholarships, it’s much more difficult these days to maintain a program at a high level than it was even a few years ago.
No one need feel sorry for schools like Kansas, Duke, North Carolina and Connecticut. They’ll survive just fine and keep winning most of the time. But their problem offers opportunity and hope for the little guys.