Category Archives: College

Basketball, Chicago Tribune, College

OUR LOCAL PRODUCTS GROW IN STATURE

Leave a comment

The Battle of Chicago, such as it was, went to the locals from Loyola, those basketball players who do not need a road map or a flashlight to find Lower Wacker Drive.

Local knowledge being what it is, Loyola also did not have to ask directions to find the basket, though De Paul, the visitor on its home floor at the Horizon, could have used a Seeing Eye dog or a tour guide and not found it.

The final accounting of Tuesday night’s tussle was 78-71, which is either a victory for home cooking or a loss for imported talent, maybe both.

Whatever deeper significance there is in that must be left to sociologists and recruiters, not necessarily the same people, though the emphasis of the two programs was clearly decided in favor of Loyola’s home- grown strategy for one night at least.

“We are the Chicago team,” said Loyola’s Alfredrick Hughes. “We wanted to prove it tonight.”

“They (De Paul) are a Chicago team, too,” said Loyola coach Gene Sullivan, which can only be interpreted as a compliment from a man who recruits only as far as his eye can see.

It was not quite civil war, not that it was a happy block party, either. It was more like your average neighborhood clock cleaning. Both sides walked away more or less friends and no blows were struck in anger.

“This game was personal,” said De Paul’s Marty Embry. “I guess you could say it was for bragging rights this summer. We’re just going to have to wait one long year.”

“The local products really wanted to beat us,” said De Paul’s Dallas Comegys.

Most notable of those were Loyola’s Hughes and Andre Battle, who threw balls into the basket at times and from places on the floor no one could have expected, least of all De Paul.

Hughes and Battle finished first and second in scoring for the night with 28 and 23 points, Hughes, in fact, becoming the eighth-highest scorer in college basketball history.

“It’s nice being known as the best player (in Chicago),” Hughes said. “But you want to be on the best team. I think I’m on the best team.”

In his four years of playing against De Paul, Hughes has scored 27, 26, 42 and 28 points, for which he may expect the entire Meyer family to be at his graduation, wishing him well. And good riddance.

It took Hughes a little longer to get his act together this last time. He had only nine points at the half, as did Battle, with Hughes playing mostly at center. In the second half, Hughes moved farther from the basket and found it more easily.

“You can’t keep Mr. Hughes down all game,” said Sullivan. “You can’t keep Mr. Battle down all game.”

Still, how Loyola accomplished all of this is not quite clear, since the Ramblers were shorter than De Paul and outrebounded the Demons 54-47, and they shot from much farther away and hit 42 percent of the time to De Paul’s 33.

“If you don’t put the ball in the hole,” said De Paul coach Joey Meyer, “you can’t win basketball games.”

Not one De Paul player made as many as half of his shots, with Tyrone Corbin getting only 4 of 13, Embry getting 5 of 15 and Comegys 5 of 13.

“I thought we had good shots,” said Meyer. “They just didn’t go in.”

And when they didn’t, it was usually a Loyola player who got the ball, rather than someone from De Paul.

“I thought the key for us was Ivan Young in the first half,” said Sullivan.

Young replaced starting center Andre Moore barely four minutes into the game when Moore picked up three fouls. Young scored eight points and got eight rebounds.

“Once Moore went out,” said Comegys, “that was when we should have destroyed them inside.”

De Paul should have done lots of things this season, but hasn’t, having now lost seven games, and two of those at the Horizon. At 15-7, De Paul looks like a less desirable NCAA invitee than does Loyola at 17-5.

“This game had lots of local interest,” said Sullivan, “but it had a national significance, too. We are both after at-large bids to the NCAA and whoever got the loss would be set back.

“I think we’ll get a bid and I think De Paul will get one, too. They’re a good team. We’re a good team.”

“We just can’t seem to turn the corner,” said Meyer. “When the offense plays well, the defense falls apart. When the defense is on, the offense is off.

“The road just doesn’t get any easier.”

Basketball, Chicago Tribune, College

JOEY? HOW ABOUT EARLY RETIREMENT?

Leave a comment

The thing for Joey Meyer to do, obviously, is to announce he is retiring as De Paul basketball coach at the end of the season, not an original strategy but nonetheless worth a try. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

It worked for his father Ray, who only lost half as many games as Joey has lost already with the same team.

Besides, all the common motivators are used up. Revenge didn’t work. Dayton whipped De Paul worse the second time than the first, and paid its own way here to do it.

The Horizon winning streak is gone, dead at 36. No longer can De Paul depend on the home-hangar advantage, which has always been greatly magnified by the astonishment of visitors realizing they did not have to dribble around parked aircraft or dress like Mr. Goodwrench.

Defending a high national ranking is a memory. That incentive was half gone before the latest loss and is sure to disappear completely the next time AP voters express an opinion on the Blue Demons. There may not be enough fingers on the starting five to count De Paul’s position among America’s college basketball elite.

Even the threat of losing a bid to the NCAA tournament is inconclusive. So many teams are invited to join the march through March that even twin- hyphened colleges that get their mail RFD have booked rooms with running water in Lexington, Ky., where the four finalists will gather in eventual resolution.

By winning just half of its remaining eight games, De Paul can expect at worst to be exiled to some remote tournament outpost, playing the late game against the top seed, a fate usually reserved for the Ivy League sacrifice or any school that has Baptist as a last name.

And who can say that, just as this season has gone exactly the opposite of what was expected, the usual tournament results will not be reversed, too? De Paul losing early is not quite as unusual as De Paul losing late, though it has been done that way, too. In fact, the last time De Paul made the Final Four, that is precisely the way it was done. With eight games remaining in the 1978-79 season, De Paul had already lost four, including one each to Dayton and Western Michigan, a pair of familiar curses.

Edgy about missing the then considerably smaller NCAA tournament field, De Paul worried its way into an invitation, not losing (to Loyola) until it had been anointed. Indiana State and Larry Bird subsequently disposed of De Paul in the semis.

Mark Aguirre’s considerable presence at the time may be enough to make present comparisons seem foolish, though Dallas Comegys and Tyrone Corbin have big enough feet to wear one each of Aguirre’s shoes, and Comegys alone has enough room to share the question mark that Aguirre has never quite been able to erase.

Having Kenny Patterson running the De Paul offense has not proved to be lethal, but one suspects that as a senior, Patterson has somehow regressed to the point where he might not even be recruited by De Paul today.

The important thing for De Paul to realize is that it doesn’t have to look any further than the school yearbook to find the recipe for redemption.

Joey Meyer has gallantly taken the blame for all of this, which is the least he can do, even if he was in the most unenviable of all positions for a first-year coach. Meyer had to start his coaching career without benefit of a single excuse.

Other coaches inherit the mistakes of strangers. They get three years to be repairmen before judgments are made. Meyer took over a winner from a relative. He did not have to introduce himself to his players or his players to his methods, which immediately removed the most handy alibi for failure.

The biggest move he had to make was one seat up on the bench. He assumed a 26-3 team with exactly the same players save Jerry McMillan, who no one imagined would be missed.

Meyer’s mission was to not botch things up, and there is not enough evidence yet to determine whether he has or not.

All that is known is that these players are not performing for the son as intensely or effectively as they did for the father. The present danger is that the De Paul basketball season will come down to an argument against heredity.

PHOTO: Joey Meyer.

Basketball, College

KNIGHT BENCHES HIS INTEGRITY

Leave a comment

The basketball coach of Indiana University is a fool, as well as a phony, and thankfully has nothing more sinister to do than to bully other people’s children and occasionally give away conference games to the University of Illinois.

If the Indiana coach were doing something truly vital, such as your laundry or mine, he might be a perpetual irritant, but he is seasonal and avoidable, like poison sumac.

In fact, there are many citizens who think of the basketball coach of Indiana about as often as they do insurance, and with equal fondness.

What amusement there is in paying the least attention to the man comes from wondering what new and original way he can make a jerk of himself, though such curiosity is as pointless as wondering whatever happened to your first bicycle.

None of this is a startling discovery to have made on a cold Sunday afternoon while watching the coach of Indiana insult Illinois and the rest of college basketball, a sport he pretends to protect, for his own private amusement.

The greater surprise would have been if he had not done something to confirm his loutishness, though the last thing anyone expected was that he would play to lose.

The coach of Indiana has won national titles and was only recently the headmaster of our Olympic effort, which resulted in gold medals all around from stomping foreigners without remorse, hardly a challenge.

Maybe the only thing he had never done in the game was lose on purpose. And now he has.

Unless, of course, the coach of Indiana has simply allowed his ego to disengage him completely from reality.

Ordinary coaches can win with their best players, their starters. That’s the way it’s done every day. But only the most exceptional coach can win with the very bottom of his roster, and only the most arrogant would try.

The coach of Indiana tried. He played six freshmen against Illinois, the point being not their ability, of which there was precious little, but their age.

He was apparently teaching his regular players a lesson in humility, or defense. Maybe he was merely making some insane point for the guardians of Illinois athletics, in whose house he was playing and whom he considers unrepentant pirates.

Maybe he thought it beneath him to play games with crooks. Which it was is not important to anyone but him.

It could be that he was showing everybody who is in charge at Indiana, who is the boss, a question that needs to be posed but has never been raised except possibly in his own curious mind.

All that is known right now is that he did it in public, as only a fool or someone overly enchanted with his own legend would do.

He did throw in one regular senior starter, who stands sometimes without falling at 7 feet 2 inches. One imagines he did that so that when the pictures come out, it will look like a real basketball team was on the floor.

Otherwise, the team that represented Indiana was as unkempt as a teenager’s room and had no more chance of beating Big 10-leading Illinois than it did of finding a clean shirt under the bed.

His explanation was not as amazing as the fact that he bothered to explain at all, even in his fashion, which was to pretend like nothing unusual had happened at all.

“I enjoyed watching our kids today,” he said. “They played defense.”

And even the coach of Illinois lied right along with the coach of Indiana.

“Different coaches have different ways of handling their players,” Lou Henson said. “I am not complaining.”

What Henson ought to be doing is calling for an investigation, or at least an apology. This wasn’t college basketball, this was an inexcusable fraud.

It was a man tripping over his own mania, which is that only he knows what is good for himself and for everyone else.

The coach of Indiana has lately and loudly expounded on the evils of his sport, accusing without proof almost every other basketball program in the nation of the most terrible things.

The danger in calling into question the integrity of others is that you must be above reproach yourself, and that was the edge he enjoyed.

His honesty and his concern for the game had never been an issue until now. But the evidence of Sunday is that the coach of Indiana cares as little about the integrity of college basketball as he would have us believe everyone else does.

Which is worse, to buy players in order to win or to use players who have no chance of winning?

Choosing up sides on this issue is as appealing as trying to decide whether to sleep with a weasel or a warthog.

One of which is Bobby Knight.

PHOTO: UPI Photo. Brian Sloan, one of 4 freshmen who started for Indiana in its loss at Illinois, flips the ball between Bruce Douglas (25) and Efrem Winters.

Chicago Tribune, College, Football

Thumbs Down on Latest Polling Mess

Leave a comment

Dateline: MIAMI

The discussion concerning which college football team deserves the right to be No. 1 had come down to this.

“Remember when Notre Dame jumped from No. 9 to No. 1?” asked Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer. “Only Notre Dame could do that. Has anyone ever checked on how many Catholics vote in the polls? Somebody ought to count the Protestants.”

Actually, Notre Dame went from fifth to first by beating Texas in the 1978 Cotton Bowl, but these things tend to get exaggerated as the years pass, and Switzer had tried everything but begging to boost his Sooners for the national championship.

Switzer was not above questioning the religious conscience of those who annually decide the issue of which scholars played the best football.

“The problem,” reminded Washington coach Don James, “is Mormons.”

And so it is. And nothing that happened in the Orange Bowl Tuesday night will change that. Brigham Young had both the luxury and the agony of watching Oklahoma and Washington try to change the minds of voters who had placed BYU first before and after its season ended without a loss nearly two weeks ago.

“The only thing I am sure of,” said James, “is that it is between them and the Orange Bowl winner.”

IN WHICH CASE, it is between Brigham Young and Washington, which upended Oklahoma 28-17.

“They are the best team we have played,” said Switzer. “Washington deserves to be No. 1. They are 11-1, have the next-best record and I guarantee you they are a better team than Brigham Young.”

“We get my vote,” said James.

That such important matters should be left to a vote is, of course, a grand tradition of all enlightened civilizations, dating to the Romans who used to decide life and death by the hang of their thumbs.

College football being much more important than that, modern voters are presumed to use their entire hands, palm up, yes; palm down, no. The fingers are then counted and divided by five, which gives us the final total and our national champion.

Switzer is alert to the process and after Oklahoma’s last practice made sure his team knew exactly who this game was being played for.

“It will be watched by millions,” Switzer said, “but the people you have to impress are 60 sportswriters.”

Having often shared the same space with large numbers of sportswriters, I have seen them confused over which knife to eat the peas with, but that does not make the (AP) sportswriter’s poll any less valid than the coaches’ (UPI). Coaches have their own selfish interests to consider, not the least of which is recruiting. Until the rules change, Switzer and the rest of us are stuck with one another.

“ANYBODY WHO CAN beat Oklahoma, which beat Oklahoma State and Nebraska, ought to be No. 1,” James said. “The only team that beat us (Southern Cal) won the Rose Bowl today.”

“It’s easier to be a mythical national champion than a real one,” Switzer said. “All you have to do is win your conference and one bowl game. There will not be a true national champion until you start playing east to west and make one team beat the world.”

A system, by the way, that Switzer does not favor, but one in which Brigham Young would have had a tough time surviving.

In the past few years, we have had unlikely champions, Miami and Clemson to name two, but at least they had to beat Nebraska to earn their title. Beating an intramural schedule without anybody watching and then barely surviving the worst Michigan team in years is not enough to prove Brigham Young better than a dozen better bullies whose records were worse because they beat up each other.

And yet, the mere possibility that Brigham Young may be No. 1 is exactly what college football deserves as long as it resists a natural tournament.

James favored diplomacy when addressing the merits of Brigham Young, his caution based in practical coaching. Washington must play Brigham Young next season. Switzer, however, was burdened by no such restraint since the chance of Oklahoma and Brigham Young ever showing up on the same field is as unlikely as oysters and grits showing up on the same plate.

“Of the eight major conferences in college football,” said Switzer, “Brigham Young’s (the Western Athletic Conference) is ranked last. It is just not the toughest conference in college football. Before Arizona and Arizona State moved to the Pac-10, Brigham Young couldn’t win a championship.”

EVEN JAMES SIDED with Switzer’s argument that Brigham Young played a benign schedule.

“When Robbie Bosco (BYU’s QB) was hurt against Michigan (in the Holiday Bowl), you get an idea of what it would be like for them to play that kind of competition every week. In the Big 10 or the Big Eight, they would have a tough time winning the next week.”

I have no vote in any of this, but any game that includes nine fumbles, four interceptions, a muffed punt snap, a forward pass to the center, a penalty on a wagon pulled by toy horses (nearly two yards for every unauthorized hoof on the field) and a kickoff dropped out of bounds at the 2- yard line cannot produce champions, only fools.

Brigham Young will be No. 1 because somebody has to be. But like town drunks and village idiots, they shouldn’t brag about it.

Brigham Young is not, but neither is Washington.