Lady Luck
March 05, 2009 10:47 PM | General
10:27 pm
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Bob Huggins has coached in 16 NCAA Tournaments with a 17th appearance likely coming later this month. His Cincinnati teams have reached the Final Four and the Elite Eight, while others were knocked out in earlier rounds. Huggins believes the difference between making the Final Four and being eliminated in the first round is a lot closer than you might think.
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| Good fortune played a part in West Virginia's Elite Eight run in 2005. Here Mike Gansey makes a layup against Wake Forest in a double-overtime win against Wake Forest.
All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo |
According to Huggins, there are two key ingredients a team needs to make a deep run in the NCAA Tournament – having good luck and not having bad luck.
“Denny Crum said it best,” Huggins said. “We did this thing at the Final Four one time and a guy asked Denny, ‘Coach you’ve won two national championships. What does it take to win a national championship?’ He said, ‘Well you have to be lucky, and you can’t be unlucky.’ The guy sitting next to me (Crum pointed to Huggins) is the most unlucky guy I’ve ever been around – Allen Jackson tearing his knee up in ’93, (Keith) LeGree breaking his foot in ’96, and Kenyon (Martin) breaking his leg' - Denny knew all that stuff.”
Huggins had the strongest team in the country in 2000 when national player of the year Kenyon Martin broke his leg in the semifinals of the Conference USA Tournament. Cincinnati was a lock as the overall No. 1 seed in the tournament before Martin's injury.
“We were the best team in the country when Kenyon broke his leg,” Huggins said. “There wasn’t any question we were the best team.”
Cincinnati played 20 games as the No. 1 ranked team in the country in 2000, including the entire month of January. But a memorable season ended with a fizzle in the second round of the South Regional against Tulsa.
Closer to home, West Virginia had great fortune in making its deep NCAA run in 2005. To say otherwise is to ignore the facts. If Nate Funk’s last-second shot goes in, or a missed Creighton shot doesn’t go right to Kevin Pittsnogle - who was able to relay the ball to Mike Gansey and then onto Tyrone Sally for the winning dunk - West Virginia’s Elite Eight run ends in the first round in Cleveland.
Great play? Yes. Great luck? Yes again.
Good fortune continued two days later for the Mountaineers when Wake Forest’s Chris Paul fouled out in the second overtime. That’s when Mike Gansey took over the game to knock the second-seeded Demon Deacons out of the tournament. Does Gansey go off in overtime with Paul in foul trouble? Maybe, or maybe not.
Many, many years ago in 1958 West Virginia had the No. 1-ranked team in the country. Then Don Vincent breaks his leg in the Southern Conference Tournament and West Virginia has one day after the league championship game to get to New York City to play Manhattan in the NCAA Tournament - on what is essentially Manhattan's home floor at Madison Square Garden.
During the game half the West Virginia team fouls out, including All-America Jerry West, and Manhattan beats the Mountaineers 89-84 in one of the most stunning upsets in NCAA Tournament history.
Say what you want about the Jaspers, but I say that's bad luck.
How many times has good fortune made a difference in the NCAA Tournament?
“Coach Crum said, ‘You take a look at Duke’s (1992) run - as fantastic as it was. If Christian Laettner doesn’t make the shot against Connecticut or he doesn’t make the shot against Kentucky, it may be Connecticut making that run.’ Christian was a really, really skilled guy but let’s be honest, there was some luck involved with that. Coach was right when he said that.”
When your team loses early in the tournament, bad luck is the last thing anyone wants to hear. Invented or contrived reasons are much easier to accept.
So just to be safe, when the NCAA pairings are announced in two weeks be sure to get out your horseshoes, rudrakshs, yantras, lockets and other good luck charms when West Virginia flashes across the big board.
You never know.
There is no secret that Bob Huggins understands the RPI as well as anybody in America. His teams at Cincinnati always had strong RPIs and West Virginia this year has an RPI of 22 despite its nine losses.
Huggins knows all too well that having a bad RPI means RIP in the eyes of the selection committee.
“I saw somewhere that they aren’t even taking RPIs into the room,” Huggins said. “For a long time, particularly when you didn’t get in, they brought up your RPI number right away. The guy who created the RPI they brought in-house. Why does the NCAA bring him in-house and they post it daily if it’s not important? It has to be important. I don’t know what other barometer you use?”
What makes the selection committee’s job so difficult is the pressure to come up with a 65-team field that is all-inclusive. Huggins believes the effort to include as many deserving mid-major teams as possible sometimes negates the difficulty of playing in one of the power conferences.
“I told a guy the other day, ‘I appreciate and respect what they do but they can’t appreciate what we go through here until you have actually gone through it. Going through whatever other non-BCS league you want to talk about – put them in our league. Put the winner of all those leagues in our league for a year and find out what happens to them. It’s brutal.”
Huggins used Conference USA power Memphis to make his point.
“John (Calipari) would be the first one to say this … they are not going to win 54 straight, or whatever it is, in our league,” Huggins said. “They’re not going to win five straight probably – a year ago maybe. It’s hard to sit in that room and figure out what the right thing is to do.”
Huggins also takes issue with the criteria often cited of a team’s performance over its last 10 games.
“It seems like that is a factor when you don’t get in,” Huggins remarked. “The reality is the last four or five teams it’s hard. There are probably a dozen teams vying for the last four or five spots. You have to come up with a reason why team A made it and team B didn’t make it.”
Huggins gives an example.
“Say UConn loses to Pitt and loses the first game of the (Big East) tournament, do you think (the committee) is going to say, ‘Well they are 8-2 in their last 10.’ Or Villanova loses a couple and then loses in the tournament to give them four losses in their last 10. Do you think people are going to say, ‘Well they are 6-4.’ No. It has to be the body of work but there has to be something that separates team A from team B. Maybe if everything else is equal then maybe it’s the team that is hotter at the end.”
By the way, West Virginia is 6-4 over its last 10 games. If it loses its next two against 24-5 Louisville and its first-round Big East Tournament game, the Mountaineers will still be 6-4.
Enjoy your weekend!
