He done it: with the success of his Princeton offense, "Columbo" Pete Carril holds sway in Sacramento and New Jersey, the elites of both conferences

Basketball Digest, Summer, 2002 by Irwin Soonachan

"When you have better players you don't have to have that much structure," Carril says. "As my career went on, the tuition there went from $2,800 to $35,000. We weren't getting prominent players, so we had to do more planning. As the cost of going to school there went up, the talent level started to subside."

Hence was born Carril's most famous brainchild: the Princeton Offense. Incorporating the emphasis on passing and cutting from his original offense, Carril developed a complex scheme in which all five offensive players had to be able to pass, dribble, and shoot--the Carril mantra. Princeton's players were in constant motion and made several of Carril's famous backdoor cuts, but wouldn't shoot until they had an absolutely open look at the basket The process took extreme patience, and would throw more athletic teams completely off kilter.

"It's an offense that requires precision and a lot of practice," says former Carril assistant Brian Winters, now head coach of the NBA's Golden State Warriors.

Kings guard Brent Price played on a top 20-ranked South Carolina team that had the misfortune of a date against Carril's Tigers. "They controlled the tempo," Price remembers. "You would work, work, work defensively, and then somebody would cut backdoor for a layup and it would just kill you. Then you would go downcourt, put up a quick shot, then you're back playing defense for another 40 seconds. They would wear you out, wear you out some more and cut backdoor. It was a thing of beauty to watch his teams play. They didn't have a lot of athletic ability, but they would win because of basketball knowledge and discipline."

The most celebrated exhibition of the Princeton Offense came in the greatest near-miss in the history of college basketball, if not all of sports. In 1989 Princeton entered the NCAA Tournament as the lowest seed, a No. 16, pitted against the top-ranked Georgetown Hoyas, who were led by the intimidating Alonzo Mourning at center. It was the ultimate David vs. Goliath matchup. Before the game, television commentator Dick Vitale announced that if Princeton won, he would be the Tigers' ball boy at their second-round match. Princeton was undaunted.

"Pete got kids who maybe weren't as tough as he wanted them to be," Winters says. "Part of his job was to make them think they were tougher than they were."

Princeton drew the Hoyas into a low-scoring duel and led most of the way. When Mourning gave undersized Tigers center Kit Meuller a fat lip, Meuller kept his cool and scored a layup on Princeton's next possession. The game ended 5049 when Mourning blocked a pair of shots, the second believed by most of the fans in attendance to have been a foul.

"To this day, I believe they got robbed," says Price, who was in the crowd that night. "Mourning committed a foul on the last play. It was unbelievable to watch that game unfold. They played the game the way it was meant to be played."

Despite the success, fissures were starting to show in Carril's relationship with the university. He was rejected when he applied for the athletic director's job. ("Columbo is the best detective," quipped one local scribe, "but Columbo will never be chief.") Carril would try to get need-based scholarships for prospective players, but with a centuries-old reputation to protect, the school was loathe to shoehorn students in partially because of their basketball skills. In one case, Carril says university officials learned that a recruit's mother had a paper route and subtracted the amount she made from their scholarship offer.