As feared, Baylor just too strong
The day after basketball season ends brings fresh hell to anyone bound up in a team’s fortunes over the past several months. The trouble with living and dying with a team, it’s been said, is that one dies a lot.
Though it came up short Monday night, Arkansas fiddled with an upset of Baylor long enough to make Razorback Nation dream wistfully of an extended NCAA-tournament run.
Having beaten Texas Tech in an earlier round, Arkansas could position itself with a second win over a former Southwest Conference rival to play a third in the Final Four Saturday.
Think a game with Houston wouldn’t send Bob Holt and other Razorback basketball historians into the archives? Reliving years when Eddie Sutton and Guy V. Lewis coached teams that routinely played on a national stage and with marquee talent.
Houston came to town in 1982 when I covered my first Razorback game at Barnhill Arena. Arkansas won that one on a wing jumper by Scott Hastings. Interviewing the Nigerian-born Hakeem Olajuwon, with his lilting English, was a post-game delight.
I would see a lot of Olajuwon, Clyde Drexler and friends over the next three years, once taking in a rout of Arkansas at UH’s Hofheinz Pavilion and watching the Cougars play another time in the SWC tournament (Arkansas losing earlier to TCU) at Reunion Arena in Dallas.
Tommy Bonk, a Houston sportswriter, became a minor celebrity for coining the nickname “Phi Slama Jama” to the Cougars, who tended to play above the rim. A Fayetteville trip in 1983 brought out trail-breaking Houston female journalist Anita Martini and Dallas Morning News stylist Skip Bayless, long before he became a TV personality.
That game is remembered for a top-10 battle, Houston winning, in which the Razorbacks had an answer, it seemed, for every Cougar except forward Michael Young, death on corner jumpers. Those Cougars appeared locks to win the national championship, only to meet North Carolina State, an underdog gone wild coached by Jim Valvano, who famously looked for someone to hug after the Wolfpack’s storybook upset in the finals.
Guy V. Lewis, who years before coached Elvin Hayes and Houston to an upset of Lew Alcindor and UCLA, never got over that one. Valvano’s ploy of sending UH to the line, where it could not clinch with free throws a rare close game, worked sensationally and the coach became a national celebrity. Though his team reached
the finals the next year, losing to Patrick Ewing and Georgetown, Lewis never got what’s now called a “natty.”
And though it had good teams under several coaches, Arkansas native and former Razorback assistant Pat Foster included, the Cougars yielded the spotlight. Getting people out to Hofheinz Pavilion, no matter the home team’s starpower, always proved difficult for Houston, a college team (basketball at that) in a pro market (mainly football).
But here are the Cougars back in the Final Four, first time since 1984, and with a coach who once was thought headed for Arkansas.
Kelvin Sampson, first at Oklahoma and later at Indiana, ran afoul of the NCAA for phone calls and text messages to recruits. Resigning at IU and taking a $750,000 buyout in 2008, Sampson later incurred a five-year show cause order, one of the stiffest penalties ever levied on a former head coach. Though denying that he knowingly misinformed investigators, Sampson appeared damaged goods, like Sutton for a spell after forced out of Kentucky, no one willing to take a risk.
But when Arkansas replaced Mike Anderson, a nice man whose teams were putting people to sleep, Sampson was thought an insider for the opening because of his ties to new UA athletic boss Hunter Yurachek, formerly at UH. Sampson jumped from the NBA Houston Rockets to UH, one source said, so he “could recruit in Houston and be home for dinner. It wasn’t a blue blood, and so there wasn’t huge pressure.”
Sampson’s son joined his college staff, and it was said at the time that if not for a question about Kellen Sampson’s contract, his dad might have come to Arkansas.
Instead, trying to revive a dormant program, Yurachek went with Eric Musselman, then doing great things with transfers and the like at Nevada. In two years, Arkansas fans have come to regard Musselman as a savior. Sampson to Arkansas is a might have been on the order of Bill Guthridge leaving Dean Smith’s staff at North Carolina had Frank Broyles not lured Sutton from Creighton in 1974.
His first Razorback team stopped cold by the COVID-19 pandemic, Musselman guided these Hogs to a 25-7 mark, one that lived on the edge but emerged as a clear No. 2 (to Alabama) in the SEC. Three freshmen from Arkansas high schools stood tall plus a sprinkling of other players, some transfers included. Arkansas made its first Sweet 16 showing since 1996, the year after Corliss and Scotty left and just before the Razorbacks began to show “slipperage,” the coach’s words, under Nolan Richardson.
Comebacks from double-digit holes in 10 games convinced Razorback fans, at least the true believers, that all things were possible. That Arkansas, with its long bench and quick ball movement, would find a way.
That worked against Colgate, Texas Tech and Oral Roberts in the NCAAs. There was no coming back, at least not all the way back, against Baylor, which by
81-72 earned its first Final Four berth since 1950.
Meanwhile, Sampson, in his
1,000th game as a college head coach, watched Houston scrape by Oregon State 67-61 in the Midwest Region final before Baylor took the South.
Musselman is loath to call time-outs but when Arkansas trailed 26-11, he called his second just before the after-12 media break. The Hogs did not get their bearings until down 18, yet felt reasonably confident when pulling to six before the half ended 46-38.
Arkansas might have a chance, it was thought, if it could get Moses Moody going, make some threes and protect the ball better. None of those things happened — Moody, 4 for
20 against Oral Roberts, went 2 for 10, missing all four threes he attempted on a night the team went 3 for 11 from long range. Baylor made eight threes, including two daggers after Arkansas trimmed it to 66-60 near the five-minute mark. In a game it never led, Arkansas could not overcome a 15-9 turnover deficit.
Baylor senior Macio Teague, scoring 22, drilled an open three for 72-61, 3:59 left, and all over. The Bears held on to cover the
7 1/2-point betting spread in Las Vegas, a pretty fair assessment of the teams’ abilities.
Yet some Arkansas people will look back on the fifth foul to JD Notae as the killer. Five of six off the bench, tying Davonte Davis with a team-high 14 points, Notae stood out early when no other Razorback seemed in the flow. Arkansas had to play without the 6-1 junior for the last
13:58 when a block-or-charge call went Baylor’s way.
Those kinds of calls are a part of basketball, no way around it. Whatever problems the college game has with oneand-dones to the NBA, it remains a beautiful sport. And now with some fresh faces — possibly some old ones if Michigan, UCLA or Gonzaga came through in region finals Tuesday night — taking the place of old stand-bys.
One thing that kept going through my mind was that for every step Arkansas took forward, a North Carolina or Duke or Kentucky or Kansas would be waiting around the corner. Baylor, though not a basketball blueblood, proved just as forbidding — and immovable.
Good luck to the Bears (the Cougars, too), and how about those Hogs!