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Sporting News, The, March 22, 1999 by Mike DeCourcy

Where Bill Guthridge, Steve Lavin, Bob Bender, Clem Haskins, Denny Crum and Dick Bennett perished, John Chaney survived. He escaped the mid-major peril that swirled through the first weekend of the NCAA tourney.

It was not safe to be the coach of a mid- to high-major program. The best programs from the mid-major conferences recognized an opportunity to gain national recognition at their expense and took full advantage as the tournament began.

"The talking heads on TV constantly spin that talk about the historically great conferences all the time, how great they are," Chaney says. "The other guys in other conferences say, `Hey, I can play with those guys and I can beat those guys.' So they come with a lot more emotion. They come with a lot more purpose. They have an extra set of motivations.

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"The guys from the Mid-American Conferences and those little conferences, they walk around with a banana peel under your (butt)."

The brave new world in which the Missouri Valley Conference earned as many NCAA Tournament bids as the Atlantic Coast Conference was every bit as strange, unfamiliar and exciting as a basketball fan might have expected.

The mid-majors did not rule the tournament's first weekend, but their stunning collective success gave those anticipating a Duke landslide on the way to the national title a healthy dose of the shock value that makes this event unique.

Six teams from leagues outside the college game's elite won first-round games, and Gonzaga, Miami (Ohio) and Southwest Missouri State crashed the Sweet 16. This became the second consecutive season in which a half-dozen mid-majors won in the opening round, which is the most in any year this decade.

"You can't very well say it's parity, because it's not," Chaney says. "Not in terms of skilled players. There's a big difference in Duke players and the other teams. I hear guys like Dick Vitale talk about North Carolina and what they lost. What the hell'd they lose? Every guy on the team is an All-American."

That the Heels can't stash as many All-Americans as they used to, though, is one of several reasons the mid-majors have dosed on their big-time competition:

Scholarship limitations. The cut from 15 to 13 has at last spread the talent more evenly.

The limits made it more possible for someone like Mike Pegues to slip to Delaware or Matt Santangelo to end up at Gonzaga. Santangelo was beaten to Stanford's final backcourt scholarship by Arthur Lee. If the 15-man rosters were still in effect, Mike Montgomery might have been able to take them both.

Player exodus. It's hard for Creighton or Weber State to miss players such as Ricky Davis, Nazr Mohammed, Al Harrington and Rashard Lewis. They never had those guys and never would have.

It's the major conferences who are hit hardest by the early departure of gifted players to the NBA. And we're not just talking about the big names, such as Chris Webber and Glenn Robinson. That's a different matter, which college basketball has long since learned to absorb.

But it's the early departures of good-if-not-great players like Mohammed and Davis, both NBA reserves, that affects the quality of the game in the power conferences.

Summer recruiting. Kent coach Gary Waters says he found nearly his entire team as a result of diligent scouting in the summer months. By watching dub tournaments and camp games, he picked out players who were good enough to help the Golden Flashes but not so good that he would have to beat all the Big Ten schools to land them.

He's concerned that the National Association of Basketball Coaches' effort to change and shorten the summer recruiting calendar will cripple programs in mid-major conferences because they do not have the budget to scout the number of players they can see at a few summer stops.

Waters believes the summer is the last venue in which a school like his can outwork a big-time program. "Most of these coaches remember when you could be out nearly all year," Waters says. "Now it's down to 25 days, and you're complaining? You've got to work sometime."

Coaching stability. It's hard to figure how the mid-majors could be steadier in this regard than their higher-paying neighbors, but the coaches of the six first-round winners averaged 4.7 years at their present school. Nine of the 26 high-major coaches who survived their opening games have not been in their current jobs that long.

The big-time schools have come to regard even excellent coaches as dispensable. Witness the absurd firing of Mike Deane after winning 100 games in five years at Marquette.

Conference USA has been in existence only four years. Just three of the 12 coaches who were in place when C-USA opened for business in 1995 still have their jobs: Cincinnati's Bob Huggins, Louisville's Crum and Tulane's Perry Clark. The league appears to be constantly in a rebuilding stage.

"We have a tendency to think just because these conferences haven't had the success of the Atlantic 10 or the ACC, we think their players can't keep up," Temple guard Quincy Wadley says. "Then individuals think they can win by themselves, and that's why you see upsets.

1999 Ad

Sporting News, The, March 22, 1999 by Mike DeCourcy

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