On the march to champions on hardwood
In any direction a Razorback sports fan looked last weekend, locusts were not leaving anything green.
Basketball season behind them, the populace then had to deal with conference defeats in baseball and softball. What else can be said but “alack and alas?”
A distinction is made here between University of Arkansas fans and the general population in our state. To the former, it is of minimal concern that a Jonesboro team was the Natural State’s last NCAA Division I basketball team still in action Monday. Razorback Nation is muttering about what, in a 16-17 season, went wrong with Eric Musselman’s Razorback program and what’s being done about it.
Arkansas State slipped past Bethune-Cookman 8685 in something called the CBI tournament and played in Daytona Beach, Fla. Little Rock got invited to the same clambake but lost 82-75 to Fairfield. Both teams played in conference-tournament finals, James Madison rolling over Arkansas State in the Sun Belt and UALR falling to Morehead State in the Ohio Valley. Arkansas, you might remember, beat Vanderbilt, which promptly fired coach Jerry Stackhouse for services not rendered, and lost to South Carolina in the Southeastern crawfish boil in Nashville, Tenn.
Duke, which lost to Arkansas in November before a record Bud Walton Arena crowd, reached the NCAA Sweet 16, next taking on Houston. Duke’s football stadium is named after a former Alabama coach, Wallace Wade. So is Alabama’s; a former New York district attorney on NBC’s “Law & Order” said Sept. 11 served nicely as Bear Bryant’s birthday until Osama bin Laden got involved. Alabama next plays North Carolina, where the basketball arena is named after basketball icon Dean Edwards Smith, reflecting that school’s athletic priority.
Two former Southwest Conference club brothers clashed in the late show in Sunday’s second round of NCAA March Madness. Houston beat Texas A&M, another school whose football program carried a Paul William Bryant imprint, 10095 in overtime. If it was not exactly a storybook classic, it carried the top-seeded Cougars one step closer to the first national championship in program history after Guy V. Lewis took Akeem Olajuwon, Clyde Drexler and associates (Phi Slama Jama) to the NCAA title game three straight years in the 1980s.
The 1983 Cougars, beaten by underdog-gone-wild N.C. State in the Albuquerque final, with coach Jim Valva
no looking for someone to hug, might be the best second-place team in tournament history. They would be in a virtual dead-heat with defending champion UNLV in 1991, which Duke upset in the semifinals before stopping Michigan’s Fab Five two nights later.
Michigan has fallen on hard times, firing coach Juwan Howard, one of the Fab Five, and on Sunday rounding up Dusty May from Florida Atlantic, a Final Four team last year, to repair the damage. Lake Hamilton High School senior Ty Robinson (mistakenly identified in Sunday’s edition; my apology) is affected by that move after signing with FA before completing a 2,000-point career on Adam Brown Road.
Thursday night, it’s Connecticut vs. San Diego State — a rematch of the 2023 championship game, UConn winning — and Iowa State vs. Illinois at TD Garden in Boston. Out west, it’s Arizona vs. Clemson and UNC vs. Alabama in Los Angeles at the former Staples Center.
Friday, eve of the 88th Arkansas Derby, brings together Marquette and N.C. State (seeded 11th, the only Cinderella left in the field) and Duke vs. Houston in Dallas. I am particularly interested in the Midwest pairings at Detroit — Purdue (the pick here to win the championship) vs. Gonzaga and Tennessee vs. Creighton.
Two teams will play for the shekels, as they say in racing, in the title game April 8 in Glendale, Ariz. That could be a virtual home game for the Arizona Wildcats. It is likely to be eclipsed, pardon the pun, by another event that day. Arkansas will not be playing that night but will be host for thousands as Mother Nature does her act.