College Basketball

Kentucky Blues
From Lexington to Louisville, players and fans are in a state of dismay

Choppy Waters are normally a part of life for the skipper of the good ship Kentucky, but Tubby Smith saw this latest crisis as one that could truly rock the boat. It began on Dec. 19, when Smith met for about four hours in his office with 6'10" sophomore forward-center Marvin Stone to talk about Stone's unhappiness with his role in the Wildcats' offense. During practice the next day, Smith's son G.G., a team manager, came bounding down the bleachers of Memorial Coliseum holding a printout of a story that had run in that day's Huntsville ( Ala.) Times. The headline in Stone's hometown newspaper read STONE MAY LEAVE KENTUCKY. On Dec. 22, a few hours before his team took the floor against Indiana, Smith was on the phone with a friend of Stone's former AAU coach, still trying to quell the storm. "I can't be having this," Smith told the friend. "I'm having enough trouble up here as it is."

Given the way Kentucky has been plagued by transfers ( Michael Bradley, Ryan Hogan, Nate Knight) and suspensions (Desmond Allison, Jules Camara) for the last few years—and given its 3-5 start this season—losing Stone, a former high school All-America, would have been a devastating blow. Fortunately for Smith, Stone announced that he was staying put, and on Tuesday he chipped in 11 points and six rebounds in the Wildcats' 64-62 win at Louisville. That pushed Kentucky's record above .500 for the first time this season, but the Wildcats remained unranked for the sixth straight week, failing even to make it into the "Others Receiving Votes" section in either of the two major national polls. Despite all this, Smith insists his program is shipshape. "What happened with Marvin happens at a lot of places," he said after the Louisville win. "But because it's Kentucky, it's something good to write about, something good to talk about. That's just the way things are out here."

As dysfunctional as the Wildcats family has been of late, it looks like the Brady Bunch next to its intrastate rival. Tuesday's loss dropped Louisville to 4-9, its worst start in Denny Crum's 30 years as coach of the Cardinals. After Louisville ended December with consecutive 23-point home defeats to Dayton and Oregon, senior guard Marques Maybin criticized what he called Crum's "zero tolerance" policy of yanking a player out of a game the minute he makes a mistake. "If we all don't get on the same page, it's going to be pandemonium around here," Maybin said. Crum's riposte to his leading scorer? "Marques's main problem is that his shot selection sucks," he said.

The team met for seven hours last Sunday, but it appears that the only one who was clearing any air was Crum. "Some of the guys got a couple of words in edgewise, but not much," Maybin says. "He really laid down the law. You could have cut the tension with a knife."

Crum, 63, doesn't sound like a man who is about to ride quietly into the sunset—"I'm not going to retire until I'm ready to retire," he says—but the walls of support around him are beginning to crack. Longtime Lexington Herald-Leader columnist Billy Reed called for his resignation this week, and when fourth-year athletic director Tom Jurich was asked before the Kentucky game whether he was committed to Crum, he replied, "I'm committed to him, but I also want to do the right thing for the university. We have much higher expectations than this." He added that Crum's status would be evaluated at the end of the season.

When Kentucky and Louisville resumed their annual series in 1983, SI featured the game on its cover. On Tuesday, for the first time since then, neither participant brought a winning record into the so-called Dream Game, and Jurich's lament about unmet expectations was undoubtedly echoed all across the commonwealth. It has been a long time since basketball season in the Blue-grass State was so blue.

Easy Schedules
Court of the Cupcake Kings

In coaching parlance, there's no such thing as a good loss. So while a smattering of elite teams (most notably Arizona, Illinois and Michigan State) spent the first two months of the season priming themselves against tough competition, an equal number fattened themselves on schedules larded with cream puffs. "It's simple math," says UConn coach Jim Calhoun, whose Huskies beat a pacifist's row of Fairfield, Rhode Island and Stony Brook before losing their league opener to Boston College on Wednesday. "The days of going to the [ NCAA] tournament with 12 or 13 losses are over."

That indeed is the mind-set of coaches like Georgetown's Craig Esherick, whose Hoyas were 12-0 through Wednesday thanks to a lineup of opponents that ranks 249th out of 319 in the latest RPI strength-of-schedule ratings. Esherick believes that early in the season it's better to ace easy tests than try to get better through hard ones. "I think it's an exaggeration that you get credit for losing to good teams," Esherick says. "If I had scheduled three more wins last year, we would have had 21. That looks a whole lot different from 18."