No script needed for magical ending
Drew defied enormous odds in rebuilding Baylor, but champs were hardly underdogs
Scott Drew said Baylor deserves a movie project, but it might be hard to find a studio to take it.
The beginning is way too dark for Disney, the ending is way too happy for HBO, and even if Richard Linklater wanted to set up his cameras to chronicle 18 years of change, he’s way too late now.
The story of the Bears winning the NCAA men’s basketball championship Monday is one of perseverance, and of defying enormous odds, and of vindication. When Drew announced at his introductory news conference in 2003 that he intended to bring a national title to Waco, no statement ever had made a new coach sound more insane.
Bill Snyder bringing a consistent winner to Kansas State? Sean Payton bringing a Super Bowl to New Orleans? Joe Maddon bringing a World Series to the north side of Chicago? Norman Dale bringing a state title to Hickory?
All those guys had to overcome was history. Drew not only had to get past one of the ugliest scandals college sports ever had seen, he had to beat common sense.
Eventually he did both, and did it in a way that removed all doubt about whether or not it was earned. In a tournament known on occasion to reward flawed teams on a hot streak, Baylor proved to be as deserving a champion as any the Final Four has produced over the past few decades.
The Bears didn’t just beat everyone, they trounced them, and that list of victims included a previously undefeated final opponent pegged by statistical models as perhaps the most dominant team of the modern era.
But only a few minutes into Monday night, it was clear: Not only could the Gonzaga Bulldogs not hang with the Bears in size, they couldn’t hang with them in speed, or in skill, or in scheme.
And this is one of the potential problems with the movie Drew proposes. The climactic
scene isn’t the culmination of an underdog story — it’s the tale of a better team from a bigger conference exerting its power.
As for a comparison to Glory Road — the film chronicling the only other Division I men’s team from Texas to win an NCAA basketball title?
The antagonist in Texas Western’s inspiring tale was racism.
The bad guy in Baylor’s movie is its former self.
The reason Drew’s success is so astounding is that no program in college basketball ever had suffered from more internally inflicted damage than the Bears had in the months and years leading up to Drew’s arrival.
It wasn’t just that they were bad, although they were that, for sure. It had been 15 seasons since they’d managed a winning conference record, and they’d squeezed in an 0-16 mark a few years earlier, and the entire athletic department was a mess, and nobody at
the school had shown much inclination or aptitude to fix it.
If Drew’s job was just to rescue one of the most dismal programs in the country in terms of performance, he would have had his work cut out for him.
But that wasn’t the half of it. Drew’s predecessor, Dave Bliss, resigned after a horrifying chain of events in which one Baylor player was murdered by another, prompting Bliss to frame the deceased victim as a drug dealer to conceal illegal payments the coach made.
As a result, Drew had to deal with the emotional fallout of a traumatic, surreal scandal, but also with scholarship reductions, limited recruiting visits, and a season in which the Bears weren’t allowed to play a single nonconference game. That he even lasted four years was an upset in itself.
He did much more than that, of course. By 2008 he’d turned Baylor into not only a winner but an NCAA Tournament team. In 2010 he had the Bears in the Elite Eight, and two years later he did
it again.
Somewhere along the way he set the program’s standards so high that a handful of postseason disappointments gave him the reputation of an underachiever — a truly absurd concept when you think about where he started. But in a progression not unlike that of another oft-lampooned coach who brought a high-profile national championship to this state, Drew accomplished what Texas’ Mack Brown once did.
He created a team so great and so well prepared that it couldn’t possibly implode.
The thing is, Drew and Baylor might have had a championship taken away from them. They were good enough to win it last year before the pandemic scuttled the NCAA Tournament, and they were the best team in the Indianapolis bubble from start to finish.
Davion Mitchell and Jared Butler look like they’ll be NBA regulars, at least, for much of the next decade. And Drew had six other guys playing at their peak in the Final Four.
As a screenplay, that’s not exactly cinematic. The tragedy of 18 years ago seems out of place in a feel-good story. The character arcs seem too long. The ending seems too obvious.
But even if they never get an
Oscar?
Nobody doubts the Bears have the trophy they deserve.