Booking it

Sporting News, The, Dec 26, 1994 by Bill Heller

You're nestled in for the holidays. You've already watched, "It's A Wonderful Life," and you're gearing up for one more New Year's Eve at Times Square attempting to understand how Dick Clark still looks like he's 20 while you're fighting off a second chin.

But do you know if your college basketball team is legit? Will victories in November and December lead to March madness or leave you just plain mad? Do games before January mean a thing?

For some, say Massachusetts, Ohio, George Washington and New Mexico State, December is a month-long coming out party. For others, it's an unwanted unveiling.

"We already knew that we're not very good," Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim said after the Orangemen's stunning seasonopening loss to George Washington at home. "I knew that before the game. Now everyone knows."

Everyone knows, too, that defending national champion Arkansas can't zip through its schedule unscathed. People may have thought Coach John Calipari was a UMassochist when he revealed his Minutemen's early-season schedule of Arkansas, Kansas, Pittsburgh, Maryland, Princeton and Western Kentucky. After UMass blew away the Hogs by 24 and the Terps by 11, who's laughing now?

"My job is to learn as much as I can about my team, so when we get into the January and February schedule, we're prepared," Calipari says. "The only way you can get ready is to play good teams. We've gone overboard. This is ridiculous. But when the Tip-Off Classic people call you and ask you to play the national championship team, you say 'Yes.' When the John Wooden Classic people call and ask you to play in a doubleheader with Kansas, Kentucky and UCLA, I said 'Yes. Yes, I want to be mentioned in the same breath with those teams.'"

UMass is definitely playing like it deserves the company it is keeping. Even before the game against Kansas, jayhawks Coach Roy Williams went on record as saying the inaugural Wooden Classic, as well as his dates with Florida, North Carolina State and Indiana, could do nothing but help his program: "If you don't have a young team, I don't think it can do anything but help you. Playing high-profile games on national TV, as long as you win any of them, gives you attention to help recruiting because young kids are watching."

Williams traditionally has used his early schedule for recruiting. In the course of four seasons, Williams tries to schedule an away game in each of his players' hometown: "When I recruit a youngster, I tell a kid we'll try to play a game near his home. We don't have a real strong high school level in Kansas, so we have to go to other areas to get our talent."

The other draw in the Wooden double-header paired UCLA and Kentucky.

"We play a very difficult schedule," UCLA Coach Jim Harrick says. "It's very attractive to our fans and TV."

And to him, too: "You get to play some guys in tough situations and find out if they can do the job. I've got three freshmen, and I'm going to see if they can play."

They can. No lie. With six-tenths of one second remaining, freshman J.R. Henderson made two foul shots to give the Bruins an 82-81 victory in the first meeting of the two teams since the 1975 national championship game. UCLA won that one, too, giving Coach Wooden the last of his 10 national titles. Wooden watched the rematch from the stands and had to like what he saw.

Maybe Kentucky Coach Rick Pitino did too, despite the agonizing finish. Pitino certainly learned more about his club losing this one than he did watching the Wildcats butcher Tennessee-Martin, 124-50, in their opener.

Tennessee-Martin? "That was not a good opener for us," Pitino says. "There was a great talent differential."

Scheduling Tennessee-Martin and UCLA cover the gamut. But whatever happened to schedules replete with Tennessee-Martins?

The birth of the Preseason NIT, the Wooden Classic and the ESPN Great Eight Festival -- which matched Boston College vs. Florida; Duke vs. Connecticut; Missouri vs. Purdue; and Michigan vs. Arizona -- have joined with The Great Alaska Shootout, the Maui Invitational and The Tournament of Champions in Charlotte, N.C., to restructure the thinking of coaches and athletic directors who believed the easiest way to a great season was padding the "W" column with patsies.

At the same time, expanding conferences have necessitated playing league games in December, giving coaches another reason to test their troops with tougher early-season matchups.

"If you take the sport of boxing, you do a lot of shadow boxing, road work and then sparring in the ring. Then it's the actual contest, itself," Georgetown Coach John Thompson says. "I don't care how much you see a kid in practice or how much you saw him while you were recruiting him. You never know him until you see him in the heat of the battle."

Georgetown's one-sided battles against overwhelmed opposition in past seasons -- St. Leo and Hawaii-Pacific spring to mind -- elicited criticism, which Thompson largely ignored. But this season, instead of Morgan State, Georgetown squared off against Arkansas. Maybe that double-digit loss against a powerhouse, as opposed to the easy W, will take the Hoyas further this spring. That's the bottom line. Because everybody's goal is exactly the same: to be playing well going into March; to be ready for showtime.