Baylor’s championship silences Drew’s critics
INDIANAPOLIS — How many times have you heard the four words that defined Baylor men's basketball over the last 18 years?
The arc of the story, the actual details of it, never really mattered when it came to Scott Drew. Maybe it was rooted in the whispers of recruiting impropriety early in his career that never amounted to anything, even when the NCAA looked into them. Maybe it was his relentless positivity that bordered at times on smarm. Maybe it was a few embarrassing NCAA Tournament losses that built the narrative, even though the real
miracle was that Baylor basketball had been good enough to be favored in those kinds of games to begin with.
Whatever it was, you heard it for nearly two decades: Scott Drew Can't Coach.
Let it be known that on Monday night, in a football stadium in the state where he grew up, with his father and brother — both college basketball coaches — standing and gyrating in the stands, there's a new set of words that will forever define Baylor Basketball.
Scott Drew is a National Champion. And by the time the journey was complete, in the final moments of an 86-70 evisceration of No. 1-ranked Gonzaga, any narrative that had previously knocked Drew for the work he'd done at Baylor looked awfully silly.
Because what had been a seasonlong collision course to the national championship game between the two best teams in college basketball turned into one-way traffic. What started as Gonzaga's quest for perfection became a full-scale submission. What looked like a potential classic instead became a showcase for the relentlessness, the abounding energy and the marvelous skill on which Drew had built this team over the last two years for exactly this moment.
'We didn't even have to be lucky'“You don't get these opportunities often, and we were on a mission to make the most of it,” Drew said. "In the coaching fraternity, getting to a Final Four is very similar to winning a national championship — there's usually some luck that goes into it. We didn't even have to be lucky because our guys were so dominant this entire tournament.”
Indeed, in Drew's masterpiece of a championship game, it was never close, never truly competitive, never really in doubt.
For all the talk about Gonzaga's historically good efficiency numbers and its attempt to become the first undefeated national champion since 1976, the best team in college basketball was hidden in plain sight — right up until a barrage of three-pointers, defensive deflections and thumping drives to the rim in the opening minutes Monday made it obvious for everyone.
“They punched us in the mouth right at the get-go,” Gonzaga's Corey Kispert said. “It took a long, long time for us to recover and start playing them even again. But then it was too late.”
Aside from a very brief moment in the second half when Gonzaga pulled within nine points, the game was basically drama-free.
Gonzaga was so utterly turned around on both ends of the floor — “We were kind of playing sideways,” coach Mark Few said — that it resorted to playing a zone defense, something it had done for only a handful of possessions the entire season.
It worked for about two minutes, until Drew called a timeout, got guard MaCio Teague flashing into the middle for mid-range jumpers and busted it up with haste. So much for the can't coach thing, eh?
There was a time in Drew's career when so many people in college basketball gleefully said he would never figure out how to win at this level.
Though he had pulled Baylor out of one of the worst scandals in college sports history when he arrived in 2003 and shocked the sport just by getting to the NCAA Tournament five years later, there were detractors every step of the way.
Even when Baylor went to Elite Eights in 2010 and 2012, making another step up the ladder, the conventional wisdom never gave Drew credit for much more than rolling the balls out. It was ridiculous of course, all of it. Monday night began with talk of potential perfection.
But as Baylor showed, it wasn't about a win-loss record. It was about the parts working together when everything is on the line.
By that standard, nobody was more perfect than the team Drew put on the floor Monday night.
Can he coach? Nobody will ever have to ask that question again.