Monson digs his Gophers out of hole
The fun stories are already in heavy rotation, to be notarized today.
The 12-18 team from Oakland, so far in the East Bay that it’s actually in Michigan. The Golden Grizzlies are in the NCAA bracket, begging reason. Vermont and its retiring coach/radio DJ, back for a third straight year. First-timers like Delaware State and Bucknell. Ohio University – did you see the freshman do a backflip at center court Saturday?
Heck, Gonzaga used to be one of the really fun stories, before it moved uptown for good. But the Zags are still on the fun fringes.
By definition, however, the fun stories of March Madness don’t come from the ACC or the Big Ten or the other mega-conferences. What’s fun about them?
Well, sometimes more than you’d expect. We’re thinking back to a game in the middle of February at the University of Minnesota when Dan Monson donned a gold blazer with the Century 21 logo over the pocket to coach his team on national television.
“After last season,” Monson cracked, “a lot of people stopped by the house and introduced themselves, and one guy forgot his coat.”
Wait, that was just the funny part.
The fun part comes today when Monson and the Golden Gophers get their official invitation to the NCAAs, in some respects the most unexpected development in college basketball this side of that 12-18 outfit from Oakland.
You’ll recall that the last time the Gophers were in the tournament in 1999, it was another Monson team – Gonzaga – which eliminated them, a watershed event for both programs. For the Zags, it was the first wave in a tide that has yet to ebb. For the Gophers, it was the first drop in a flood of academic scandal and shame that they immediately acted to halt by hiring Monson away from Gonzaga some weeks later.
The scandal is long over. Some of the shame lived on.
A dedicated band of radio and Internet yahoos, and perhaps even a newspaper columnist or two, had determined before this season had ever started that Monson’s usefulness was spent – not because the program’s seamier side hadn’t been cleaned up, but because the Gophers weren’t back to cleaning up on the court. They were coming off a 10th-place finish and, with something like eight points a game in returning talent, were picked for 11th in the Big Ten.
Things turned out a little better. Try 21-10 after Saturday’s narrow loss to Illinois in the Big Ten semifinals, which ended a five-game winning streak.
“This has been as much fun as I’ve had coaching a basketball team since I left Gonzaga,” Monson said. “Kind of like that team, we start two walk-ons, an unrecruited guy and a bunch of guys with a common goal. We have serious limitations – we’re not afraid to say that. We have trouble scoring, so we just try to defend people like crazy.
“We have a saying: We’ve got to make every game ugly and win every ugly game.”
OK, but just how ugly?
“We were at Nebraska in the preseason and it was 0-0 at the first TV timeout,” Monson said. “I’d never had zero before – but I’d never held a team to zero before, either.”
The Gophers are an interesting lot – even Monson admitted that “maybe we do have the 10th- or 11th- best talent in the league – that’s why we were picked that.” They managed to unearth a star in recruiting junior college swingman Vincent Grier, whose game is equal parts NBA and parks-and-rec and who probably should have been Big Ten Player of the Year just for his sheer impact on the program. There’s a 7-foot galumph named Jeff Hagen and a waterbug guard named Aaron Robinson who were nothing but program fillers until this year. Another guy transferred in from St. Francis, Pa., not to be confused with St. Francis, N.Y.
You can tell Monson loves his team as much or more for its modest pedigree than for the won-lost record.
“They come every day to get better,” he said. “They haven’t believed everybody when they were supposed to be bad and they understand that it would be pretty hypocritical now to get caught up in everybody telling them they’re good.”
But what was Monson believing when the jackals were in full howl?
“At first that stuff – hot seat, hot seat, hot seat – is really hurtful,” he said. “Then after a while you tell yourself, ‘OK, it’s out there – who cares? Let’s go coach.’ The worst that can happen is that you might have to go find someplace else to work.”
Monson conceded that he got himself into some of the trouble – managing, he said, rather than coaching. Some of that stemmed from dealing with two high-maintenance in-state recruits – Rick Rickert and Kris Humphries – who got the star treatment and then skedaddled early to the NBA draft, though Rickert didn’t even get a chance to be an NBA bust.
“But, really, I’m indebted to those guys – they didn’t have to come here,” Monson said. “They could have gone anywhere in the country, but they came here and tried to help us fix it. What I feel good about now is that if we don’t get the in-state kid, we can go out of state – and we didn’t have that option before.”
That’s because the NCAA recruiting sanctions Monson has lived with virtually since taking the job have expired.
“We’re the only team in America with three seniors who didn’t take official visits,” he said. “We were so limited before. If you brought a guy in for a visit early you almost had to sign him whether he fit in or not.”
As he peeled back layer upon layer of impediments to success at Minnesota, Monson couldn’t help at look at the Gonzaga situation he left behind with some wistfulness, especially as his successor took it to an unimagined level. What he always fell back on was that unofficial coach’s credo: We’ll figure out a way.
“I made a vow to these guys the first day of practice that I’m going to work harder than I ever have,” he said. “I don’t know how you do that, because you always feel like you’re working hard, but somehow I’m going to – and I’m going to have more fun than I ever had.”
The Realtor’s blazer? Monson had implored fans to wear gold to the Wisconsin game to counter the red of Badger infiltrators, then realized he didn’t have that in his wardrobe, either. He’d also realized he’d been gripping the wheel too tight in previous games and that everybody needed to loosen up.
Good taste suggests he not wear it again. But imagine an entire Gopher rooting section outfitted that way.
Might be fun.