A Vermont state of mind

Brennan, Catamounts have everyone talking

CORNWALL, Vt. -- For much longer than there's been an NCAA tournament, people who live in these parts, as I do, have come to know March Mudness. Real spring is still weeks away. If we're lucky, a thaw will start the sap running, and the roads commissioner won't have busted the budget by Town Meeting, and a range of other small consolations will carry the "from heres" to May, when the "come heres" invade. But this year we have a little Madness to go with our Mudness, thanks to the University of Vermont's men's basketball team and a transplanted Jersey guy named Tom Brennan.

Even if he weren't employed as the Catamounts coach, Brennan would always have a gig as one half of Corm and the Coach, the morning drive-time show he co-hosts with Steve Cormier on Burlington classic-rock station WCPV. Brennan isn't just sports funny; he's real-world funny. Locally, he and Cormier outdraw Don Imus and Howard Stern with their platter-and-chatter routine, which might include a wakeup-call ambush of one of Brennan's coaching buddies; or the coach's pledge to dye his hair if the Cats make the tournament (Brennan promises he'll make good on it after the season); or tales from T.B.'s basketball past, such as how, as a player at Georgia, he let a floppy-haired, floppy-socksed kid at LSU abuse him.

But then a 6-foot-5 Canadian named David Hehn bottomed out a little left-handed jumper in the quailing moments of the America East title game last Saturday, and Vermont suddenly found itself staring at a date with No. 1 seed Arizona in Salt Lake City. "I just can't put it into words right now," Brennan said after the Cats beat Boston University in the Terriers' gym to land that bid. "I really don't know what to say."

That, regular listeners to Corm and the Coach can attest, was a truly unprecedented state of affairs.

Monday, when Corm and the Coach surely logged its best rating ever, Brennan had his voice back. "The committee must have done its homework," he told the audience. "They sent me to a dry town."

Now those phone victims are calling him. Hofstra coach Tom Pecora checked in Monday, to marvel over the air at the felicity of Hehn's game-winner -- "that a 6-5 lefty made a shot to send a 6-5 lefty to the tournament."

So maybe it is rank parochialism that has me going off the deep end in my brackets, picking Vermont over Arizona. Sure, 16th seeds are 0-72 since the tournament went to a 64-team field in 1985. The average No. 16 goes down in the first round by more than 25 points. But Ball State math instructor John Rajca has developed a statistical model that establishes not only that the unthinkable will happen, but that it ought to happen roughly once every 11 years. While no men's teams have done it, a few have come close: East Tennessee State, which fell to Oklahoma by a single point in 1989; Princeton, a 50-49 loser to Georgetown the very next day; and Murray State, which extended Michigan State to overtime a year later. In 1996 another band of Catamounts, from Western Carolina, took Purdue to the wire before falling 73-71. The women had their seismic stunner in 1998, when No. 16 Harvard defeated top-seeded Stanford. The men are well past due.

Eyeball the particulars of UVM vs. Arizona, which takes place Thursday, and you can make a case that it's at least within the realm of plausibility. Lute Olson's teams have been notoriously mercurial in NCAA play. The Wildcats' puzzling loss to a horrible UCLA team in the Pac-10 tournament -- on the heels of Olson's even more bizarre declaration that he didn't care how his team fared in the conference tourney -- hardly strikes the right note. And by the standards of the college game today, Brennan's Catamounts are an unusually rugged team, starting no one under 6-5 and ranking third in the nation in rebounding margin. They won't be pushed around.

At practice yesterday, Brennan recounted for his players what he had told an ESPN interviewer who wondered how the coach would be able to keep a straight face when he told his team it has a chance. "Are you kidding me?" Brennan replied. "We didn't sneak into the tournament with seven wins. We won 21 games and earned the right to be there."

Or as Brennan put it after the America East final: "I'm the ultimate dreamer. And they're the ultimate workers."

It's the local way to arch an eyebrow at fast-talking flatlanders. But old timers also respect those who prove they can cope with a Vermont winter -- and what to call Brennan's first five seasons, in which UVM averaged more than 19 losses a year, but Vermont winters? All their other hardships the Cats have taken in stride. Lose the 2002 conference Player of the Year, T.J. Sorrentine, to a preseason injury? Simply develop another, Taylor Coppenrath, the pride of West Barnet, Vt. Hockey and women's basketball traditions tend to leave men's hoops feeling neglected? Get in their slipstream, then sprint to the front. Don't have fully funded scholarships? Recruit guys who'll regard that as even more reason to prove themselves.

Oddsmaker Danny Sheridan has UVM an 87 gazillion-to-1 shot to win it all. That the Cats will beat Arizona seems only slightly less unlikely. But those seem to be the odds against spring right now, and spring always comes.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Alexander Wolff is author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure, available online and in bookstores everywhere. He can be reached at http://www.biggamesmallworld.com.

 

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