Manic Saturdays often lead to madness in March

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Manic Saturdays often lead to madness in March
Sep. 1, 2006
By Gary Parrish
CBS SportsLine.com Senior Writer

For 13 years, Saturdays in the fall meant little to Bruce Pearl. He was the coach at Southern Indiana, then at Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He won a whole bunch of basketball games at both those places, but weekends like this weekend offered little reason to get excited.

"We didn't have football at either school," Pearl said. "I missed it. I mean, I really missed it."

Now, Pearl finds himself at the other end of the spectrum. The second-year coach at Tennessee has a handful of prospects visiting Knoxville this weekend. And on Saturday, they'll be roaming Neyland Stadium, presumably impressed and overwhelmed by one of the more remarkable sights college football offers while the 23rd-ranked Vols open against ninth-ranked California.

"To be able to experience Tennessee football and all of its greatness and pageantry and 108,000 fans and the Pride of the Southland Marching Band and the football team coming out through the 'T' and the unbelievable tailgates ..." Pearl said, and he could've gone on forever. "The whole thing is just electric, and I think it's a huge advantage for us in recruiting."

Many coaches will tell you that when prospects visit, it's important to show them the academic side of their university. And it is. But lest we forget these prospects are usually 17-year-old kids, and do you know what most 17-year-old kids truly enjoy?

Parties!

And crowds!

And big events!

What is the best football and basketball power?
LSU
UCLA
Texas
Florida
Tennessee
Ohio State
Anybody but these guys

They like to see 100,000 fans cheering something, then imagine themselves on the receiving end of those cheers next year. In other words, add basketball recruiting visits during football weekends to the list of advantages all-sports BCS schools have over non-BCS schools.

(Boy, this is becoming a long list.)

"It could be a disadvantage for us," acknowledged Saint Joseph's coach Phil Martelli, otherwise known as a man at a school with no football team. "I don't think you can combat the tangible. If they can feel it and they can touch it then it's real."

Credit Martelli for keeping it real. He doesn't pretend football doesn't exist just because it doesn't exist at his school. He understands the impact a great football experience can have on a basketball recruit, which is why Martelli reacted like any sports fan would when told elite prospect Anthony Randolph purposely scheduled his visit to Texas for next weekend so he and his family can attend the reigning national champions' game against top-ranked Ohio State.

"Oh sure," Martelli said. "I'd like to go to that game, too."

Alas, he won't. Martelli will instead be entertaining recruits of his own, but doing it in a non-football way designed to enhance Saint Joseph's positives and discount any potential negatives.

Case in point: The Hawks rarely host prospects for Friday-Saturday-Sunday visits, which is the normal routine among NCAA members. More often, Saint Joseph's brings a prospect into town on Thursday night, lets him experience a normal class day and workouts on Friday and then sends him back home at some point Saturday with a more-realistic -- though probably less-stunning -- view of what college is genuinely like.

"We are more zeroed in on the important things and the reality of what it's going to be like for four years," Martelli said. "I think we do a good job in that area. We try to let them get a flavor for where they would be going to school and accent our positives, like Philadelphia."

So while there's no football, there is the Liberty Bell. And though there won't be any touchdown celebrations, if a prospect has always dreamed of running the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and jumping around with his arms raised like Rocky Balboa, that opportunity can be presented, too.

Bottom line: Martelli -- like most basketball coaches at non-football schools -- sells what he has to sell and tries to ignore everything else, including football (or the lack thereof). That's what has worked in the past, though it's worth noting he admitted trying the pigskin angle at least once.

Philadelphia does have football, after all. It's played on Sundays. The team is called the Eagles.

"We have taken a kid to an Eagles game," Martelli said. "But it was way back."

And?

"We didn't get that kid," he answered. "So we never used it again."

www.sportsline.com/collegebasketball/story/9632023

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Good to see Coach K has his own self interest at heart
Sep. 8, 2006
By Gary Parrish
CBS SportsLine.com Senior Writer

Eight high school players skipped college to be selected in the 2004 NBA Draft. Mike Krzyzewski's reaction at the time?

"We're losing our brand."

No high school players skipped college to be selected in the 2006 NBA Draft, thanks to the new age limit. Mike Krzyzewski's reaction this week?

"They should be (allowed to turn pro out of high school), and we should be able to adjust. It's not going to hurt the college game."

So it's official.

Coach K is a flip-flopper.

Cue the Swift Boat ads!

Both quotes come courtesy of the Charlotte Observer, and they couldn't be more opposite. If I were judging, I would award Krzyzewski, at best, a bronze medal in consistency. It could hang in his trophy case, right next to the one from the FIBA World Championship.

Still, I understand the reason for the switch. This isn't hard to figure out. After all, if the NBA's age limit was incidentally supplying rival programs with superior talent and threatening your dynasty, you'd probably flip-flop, too.

Duke has everything.

Great tradition.

Great academics.

Great exposure.

Great fans.

The list of positives is long and convincing, and it's the reason Krzyzewski has pretty much been able to handpick recruits while staying out of the rat race run year after year by the majority of his colleagues. That's what other coaches will tell you, by the way. That the Blue Devils don't really have to recruit like everybody else. Instead, it's often a simple, four-part process.

They observe.
They identify a target.
They offer a scholarship.
They gain a commitment.

More times than not, things are that easy. It's the ultimate sign of greatness, a testament to what Krzyzewski has created. And the three-year period preceding the age-limit provided a perfect example of how his philosophy was executed.

In 2003, 2004 and 2005, what Duke did was target the best player in each class most likely to attend college. In other words, they focused on Luol Deng and not LeBron James, Shaun Livingston and not Dwight Howard, Josh McRoberts and not Gerald Green. And though Livingston turned pro and never attended Duke, understand that when the Blue Devils actually committed the talented point guard, hardly anybody expected he would eventually bypass college.

But he did.

By no coincidence, that's also when Krzyzewski described prospects shunning the NCAA as a huge problem, right after Livingston left him with eight scholarship players. Krzyzewski's first quote from above -- "We're losing our brand" -- came during that same offseason. Then a year later, the NBA put into place a rule prohibiting Americans from entering the draft until one year after their high school class graduates, and Coach K was a happy man with his wish granted, right?

You'd think so. But that's actually where the problems began for Duke, because it made staying above the fray no longer a viable option.

Before, the Blue Devils didn't really have to deal with wild recruiting sagas featuring the likes of Sebastian Telfair and Kendrick Perkins. They would instead focus on more stable situations -- fewer posses, fewer AAU ties, fewer problems -- and let others battle for the elite talents who might or might not ever enroll. Consequently, Duke usually got its clean-cut McDonald's All-Americans into school without worries while just about everybody else -- Arkansas, Louisville, Mississippi State, Arizona, etc. -- had to sweat the process.

Sometimes it worked out (Rudy Gay enrolled at Connecticut).

Sometimes it did not (Andrew Bynum bypassed Connecticut).

Either way, it was a necessary gamble. Because without it, there are no Final Four dreams.

But fast-forward to today, and things have changed -- even if Duke has not. The Blue Devils still stay above the fray, mostly recruiting well-rounded prospects with little baggage, meaning they'd never touch O.J. Mayo or Derrick Rose. And though in the past that would be fine considering those types of guys probably weren't going to college anyway, now it's a hindrance because both Mayo and Rose -- and another half-dozen elite players just like them -- should indeed be wearing some school's colors for at least a year, therefore making Duke's quest to pile ACC and NCAA titles much more difficult.

But don't take my word for it.

Just look at the facts.

Question: Counting the Classes of 2006 and 2007, how many commitments has Duke gained from prospects who would go directly to the NBA if not for the age-limit?

Answer: Zero.

Meanwhile, Ohio State got Greg Oden, Texas got Kevin Durant, Georgia Tech got Thaddeus Young and North Carolina got Brandan Wright. Next year, Kansas State will have Michael Beasley, and somebody not named Duke will have Mayo, Rose, Bill Walker and Eric Gordon.

Bottom line, lots of schools are benefiting from the age limit. Yet Duke is not one of them.

So yeah, Coach K flip-flopped this week.

But seriously, can you blame him?

www.sportsline.com/collegebasketball/story/9646622