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More questions than answers
Sports Illustrated senior writer Grant Wahl answers your college basketball questions every Wednesday. Click here to send him a question. CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- How big was Tuesday's Illinois-Michigan State game here? Big enough that there wasn't a rental car left in town -- until, miraculously, one appeared an hour before game time. And so I've been rollin' in a burgundy PT Cruiser, the kind of big-grilled, vaguely sinister pimpmobile that would have fit perfectly in a ZZ Top video or The Untouchables. All of which is a lame way of segueing to what I thought were college basketball's "untouchables" -- in other words, the nation's top teams when they play on their home courts. Suddenly, in less than a week, a rash of home-court upsets has turned an orderly season chaotic. Duke loses in Cameron to Carolina? Stanford gets whacked in Maples by UCLA? Kansas bites the dust in Allen to Iowa State? What does it all mean? Because top teams lose so rarely at home, the rankings -- to say nothing of our expectations -- go to rubble when it actually does happen. In a matter of days, Carolina became the frontrunner for the No. 1 seed in the East and vaulted from No. 4 to a clear No. 1 in the polls. Overnight, Iowa State replaced Kansas as the Big 12's candidate for a top seed in the Midwest. With one win, UCLA ... well, UCLA simply confirmed its rep as the nation's most mystifying team. What are we to think, in turn, of Duke, Kansas and Stanford? When good teams lose on their own floors, in what are supposed to be snakepits, you can't help but wonder. March is what matters, of course, but this week there are more questions about more teams than there have been all season. And that's fun. It's good to have our little world shaken up a bit now and then. Before we get to the meat of the 'Bag, a couple of holdovers from last week: First, congratulations to Aaron Katz of Tucson, Ariz., who gets an honorary C.S.A. tag for casting Dabney Coleman as Georgetown coach Craig Esherick for my proposed Ally McBeal episode on schedule fraud. ("You could just give him a little toupée and it would be perfect," Aaron notes.) Props are all you're getting, though, pal. Fox script royalties are going directly to one of the 'Bag's many Swiss bank accounts. And many thanks to Eugene (Night Owl) Khabure of Nairobi, Kenya, who actually responded to my question about his viewing habits by writing, "I do not watch ESPN2. I watch ESPN via satellite. I have been a basketball junkie all my life." To which we say, more power to you, Eugene. Anyone who watches Big Monday at 4 a.m. on Tuesdays is a certifiable fan -- or simply certifiable. Two additional points (I'd call them Hoop Thoughts®, but Seth Davis' lawyers threatened legal action the last time I did that): I told you my All-America team wasn't final, and last week North Carolina's Joseph Forte clearly played his way onto it. (That audible sigh you hear is my reaction to putting three ACC guys on my first team.) My current A-A's: Jason Williams, Duke. Best news of the week: Two more years of Williams, guaranteed. Guaranteed? Joseph Forte, North Carolina. Double-double in the first half against Duke. Now get off my back, UNC loyalists. Casey Jacobsen, Stanford. One bad shooting game doesn't earn a demotion. Shane Battier, Duke. Nor does one dumb foul. Troy Murphy, Notre Dame. Numbers (and ND wins) are going through the roof of late. Also, I now know the answer to the question, Which coach would you most enjoy going fly-fishing with? After spending Monday at Gonzaga, I'll tell you that one's easy. Mark Few is a friendly, low-key, no-b.s. guy who wears jeans to work and keeps fishing pictures on the walls. He also happens to have the Zags up to their old tricks at 16-5 and 8-0 in the West Coast Conference. Rick Pitino apparently is looking for a school that has a job open, in a big city, with tradition and a big recruiting base, and where basketball is top dog. How about somewhere like DePaul (for fear of kicking out Pat Kennedy prematurely)? Given that reports go back and forth about UNLV, are there any other dark horse candidates for Pitino's services?
Good point. Aside from a sometimes shaky conference, DePaul would be ideal for Pitino, who has the skills (and the ego) to become the basketball czar of Chicago. (Sorry, Tim Floyd. ) The city wants so badly to go nuts for hoops, and Kennedy has clearly wet the bed after being given a sweet opportunity to make the Blue Demons matter again. Where else might Pitino end up? I'm just speculating, but here's my skinny on the Coach P Sweepstakes, as measured on the Armani Suit Scale (from 1 to 10): UCLA (8 Armanis)
DePaul (6 Armanis)
Michigan (3 Armanis)
UNLV (3 Armanis)
North Carolina State (2 Armanis)
St. John's (1 Armani)
Louisville (1 Armani)
If coaching a city school is as important to Pitino and his family as much as I understand it to be, these programs would have to be dark dark horses: Kentucky, Indiana and Massachusetts. What do you think about Jason Williams' statement that he will play four years at Duke? Do you think that his classmate, Carlos Boozer, will be smart enough to do the same? Anyone who watched Thursday's game against UNC knows, as I do, that Boozer doesn't yet have the skills or size to be an effective NBA post player.
Though we'll have to wait and see if he lives up to it, I couldn't be happier (or more surprised) that Williams pledged to stick around. Maybe he saw William Avery at the end of the T'wolves bench. Maybe he noticed that none of this year's NBA rookies are having outstanding seasons. Maybe he got sick of hearing the same question from the media after every game. Whatever the reason, it's good for the game. You can only hope Boozer learns from his teammate, since Williams is infinitely more ready for prime time than Boozer is. How many JaRon Rush stories do you have to hear to convince you to stay in school? I was able to attend Penn State's upset over Illinois on Jan. 31 and I wondered what you thought about Brian Cook. In the first half, he had 22 points and looked like a collegiate version of Kevin Garnett. In the second half, he took three shots and looked clueless on the floor. Is there any way Bill Self can harness what seems to be Cook's unlimited potential?
Opposing coaches say Cook is talented but soft, the kind of player who's difficult to prepare for because you never know which side is going to come out. The Sybil in Cook came out again against Michigan State on Tuesday, when he was mercilessly pushed around early in the game but came back to show off his impressive shooting range. NBA scouts drool over the kid because of his skills and height, but he has a ways to go before he becomes a consistent threat, and "soft" can be a hard reputation to shake. Whom do you like in the Ivy League? Could this be the year in which a school that doesn't start with P gets an invitation to play on CBS?
You know you have a bizarro league when your best team (Penn) loses its first eight games of the season. Yet for all the strangeness in the Ivies (only two teams, Princeton and Harvard, are above .500 for the season), there's the old reliable duo, Princeton and Penn, all alone at the top of the conference at 4-0. I'd look for Penn to break away over the next couple weeks. Princeton now has to play five straight road games, including one against the Quakers at the Palestra. DALE BROWN FOUND! Former LSU coach Dale Brown, one of my favorite interviews around, rang in Monday from Baton Rouge, La., and, as I expected, he's failing miserably at retiring. There's the less surprising stuff, of course: the coaching clinics, the two books he has written and the radio call-in show with Billy Packer and Tim Brando. There's the charity work, too. Brown is also trying to build a shelter for abused children in New Orleans and a foundation to fund college educations for the poor. And there's time with the grandkids. There's more, too. Oh, there's more. Like the two trips Brown has taken to British Columbia in search of Sasquatch. "I have no doubt that it's there," says Brown, though he hasn't spotted Bigfoot just yet. "They caught a fish off of Peru not long ago that everybody thought had been extinct for a million years. I met John Green, who has made plaster of Paris footprints of [Sasquatch]. British Columbia is bigger than California, Oregon, Washington and half of Idaho put together, so it certainly makes sense that they're there." Regrettably, Brown hasn't yet fulfilled his plans of traveling to Mount Ararat in Turkey to search for Noah's Ark. "Two different times I was going to do it," he says, "but they wanted me to spend six weeks on the mountain, and I didn't have that much time." Where has Dale Brown been? Where hasn't he been? Brown says he has visited 85 countries. He proudly rattled off the highlights of his travels, from climbing the Matterhorn to covering the length of the Mississippi by speedboat, from spending a week in the Amazon jungle to ascending the ruins of the Tower of Babel, from tours of Transylvania to the Killing Fields of Cambodia. He has traced the steps of the Bataan Death March and entered the gates of Dachau and Damascus. He is, in short, the perfect candidate for an Errol Morris movie. "I may not be as adventurous as I used to be," Brown says, "but I've had a wonderful life." This week's WATN: Where in the world is Dwayne Schintzius? (Bonus WATN: Last year I heard that Billy Donovan uses the same Gainesville, Fla., barber that Schintzius so gloriously did. Where in the world is Billy and Dwayne's barber? Does he wear a mullet? And did Dwayne scar him for life?)
Click here to send your college basketball question to Grant Wahl.
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