College Basketball / Mike Downey : The Good, the Bad and the Ugly at Half-Court Point of the Season

Most of those adorable little matchups like Georgetown vs. St. Leo’s of Florida, North Carolina vs. Stetson, Indiana vs. Morehead State and Nevada Las Vegas vs. Nevada School of Blackjack Dealers are behind us now, so the college basketball season is picking up steam faster than one of Dick Vitale’s sentences.

Before you know it, the conference races will be over, the Final Four at New Orleans will have come and gone, and athletic directors will be meeting with NCAA officials to decide whether to cut back scholarships from 13 a season to 2, and whether to move the three-point field-goal stripe to within 9 feet 9 inches of the hoop.

There is barely time to count to 10 before we reach the half-court point of the season. So far, Kansas, Louisville, Pittsburgh, Navy and UCLA do not look quite as solid as we thought they would look; DePaul, Georgetown, Iowa, Temple and Clemson look considerably better than we figured they would look; and Coach Jerry Sharkanian’s UNLV Runnin’ Rebels are beating opponents the way Meadowlark Lemon and the Harlem Globetrotters used to beat Red Klotz and the Washington Generals.

How about some individuals?

Well, All-American center David (It’s Not Just a Job, It’s an Adventure) Robinson is weighing the Navy’s generous offer of serving half a year in a professional basketball league and the other half 20,000 leagues under the sea.

Missouri’s mischievous Derrick Chievous is getting lots of ink for his various eccentricities, including the wide variety of Band-Aids he wears all over his body while he plays. Opponents who have been listening to the 6-7 junior’s fast-breaking bragging wish he would wrap an Ace bandage around his mouth.

Indiana’s strait-laced Steve Alford, alias Little Stevie Wonderful, continues to be the boy who stepped right out of a Gil Thorp comic strip as he pours through points for the Hoosiers, while Coach Bob Knight, a man whose idea of a good book is one written by Clair Bee, has been busy referring to the author of “A Season on the Brink: A Year With Bob Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers,” as a no-goodnik and a “whore” and a man who ought to get hit with a flying chair.

Meanwhile, speaking of Big Ten coaches, Jud Heathcote of Michigan State is the leader in the clubhouse for goofiest move of the season. During a game at Illinois Jan. 5, Heathcote, who already was hot and bothered by the work of the officials, picked up a loose basketball that had rolled in his direction, gripped it with both hands and bounced it angrily to the floor.

It popped back up and hit him in the face.

Top-ranked team in the land continues to be unbeaten Nevada Las Vegas, which sends (Ready) Freddie Banks and friends up and down that floor gravitating toward that 19-9 three-point stripe like heat-seeking missiles. The Rebels have been filling up the 18,500-seat Thomas and Mack Center, as usual.

So far, though, UNLV’s schedule has not tested the team much, save for a tournament game against Navy in which the Rebels absolutely mopped the decks with the Midshipmen.

Today, when Tark’s marksmen take to the road to play 16th-ranked Oklahoma, we should get an even better idea whether UNLV is capable of such wonderful things as a national championship or an undefeated season. A Feb. 1 date at ninth-ranked Auburn should reveal even more.

No. 2 ranked North Carolina kept winning while waiting for 6-9 slick-as-oil J.R. Reid to get his feet wet. To date, the Tar Heels easily appear to be the class of the Atlantic Coast Conference again, with 6-10 Joe Wolf all but making people forget Brad Daugherty was ever on campus.

“We’ve got a long way to go, and we’re still making a lot of mistakes,” Coach Dean Smith said.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So do the Lakers.

Although Big Ten teams were ranked 3-4-5 in the most recent UPI national poll, and although Iowa’s 16-0 start under new coach Tom Davis has caught practically everybody by surprise--when George Raveling leaves a program, don’t say he leaves it empty-handed--the class of the Big Ten may yet turn out to be 10th-ranked Illinois.

Led by 6-8 Ken (the Snake) Norman and some hot-shooting guards, the Illini have great talent. And people should be hearing more about them as time goes on, because of Lou Henson’s continued hot recruiting.

Henson landed the state’s top prep player of a year ago, only to temporarily lose him to Proposal 48, and already has gotten a commitment from this year’s No. 1 player, Chicago high school player Marcus Liberty, who is rated by some scouting services as the country’s best.

Illinois has three losses this season--one on national television at North Carolina, where the Illini held a lead until halfway through the second half; one at Chicago Loyola, where Henson screamed bloody murder afterward about the officiating, and one at home, where Iowa made up a 61-39 deficit and eventually won in overtime.

The team’s problem, as it has been in seasons past, is its inconsistency. It took a last-second shot by Norman last week just to squeak by Wisconsin.

Big surprise in the Midwest, or anywhere for that matter, is DePaul, which, as Missouri’s Chievous recently called it, continues to be “the ultimate television school.”

Despite its serious shortage of national championship trophies, DePaul continues to appear on television more often than Johnny Carson. This year was supposed to be different, because the talent pool had appeared shallow, but 6-8 Dallas (Situation) Comegys finally is living up to his potential, and 6-3 Kevin Edwards has been so good that Coach Joey Meyer, like Bob Knight and others, has at last been converted to a believer in junior colleges.

Georgetown--remember the Hoyas?--does not have the mighty Patrick Ewing in the middle anymore, and hasn’t for a couple of seasons now, but as Coach John Thompson said, “I think people are finally beginning to realize how good some of Patrick’s teammates were.”

Reggie Williams, for instance. The 6-7 forward can dribble, shoot, score, rebound and do just about everything there is to do on a basketball court, except answer Brent Musburger’s questions after the game.

The Hoyas could very well win the Big East title again this season, but, despite sort of a slow start, the choice here is still Pittsburgh.

The Panthers have a lot of wild and woolly talent that Coach Paul Evans, formerly of Navy, has been attempting to harness, and if and when he does so, America is going to be hearing about this team. Besides, any team with a player named Demetrius Gore is certainly worth hearing about.