College Basketball Notes : Road Life Won’t Get Any Better for Iowa

Iowa’s shocking trip to Hawaii for the Chaminade tournament, where the Hawkeyes lost to Division II UC Riverside was just the start of a month on the road.

Southwest Texas State did get served up on Friday night at Carver-Hawkeye Arena, but then the Hawkeyes open the Big Ten season at Michigan State on Jan. 5.

That is followed by consecutive road games at North Carolina, Minnesota, Ohio State and Purdue. Nine of 11 on the road and two of those games are against ranked teams.

“It wouldn’t look so bad if it hadn’t been for the North Carolina game being thrust in there because that was to be a home game with Northwestern,” said Iowa Coach Tom Davis explaining the tough schedule. “So we would have had one home game. If you just place that in your mind, then it doesn’t look quite so bad. But you take out a home game and you put in a very tough nationally televised road game and all of a sudden it really looks difficult.”

It could still be a problem for Davis.

“There were so many changes (in the schedule) made this year because of television that I can’t even remember all of them myself,” he said.

Sam Houston State is trying to pack Iowa’s month of travel into a special three-week tour.

The Bearkats started the road trip in Little Rock, Ark. on Dec. 23 against the Razorbacks. Mississippi was the next stop four days later. Baylor was on the 29th and January starts with Oklahoma on Jan. 3, Nebraska on the fifth and Southwestern Louisiana on the 10th.

“This is about as brutal a schedule as any team can take on in this span of time,” Sam Houston State coach Gary Moss admitted.

Plausible reasons for this scheduling can still be offered.

Hawaii earned its fourth victory last season in its 28th game. That was it in a 4-25 season.

The Rainbows won their fourth game this season in game No. 6. Easily the quickest turnaround in college basketball.

Hawaii opened the season with victories over Montana State and Texas. Road losses to Iona and St. John’s evened the record but victories over Texas Tech and Oregon tied last year’s mark and an 80-61 win over Indiana State on Dec. 19 bettered 1987-88 victory total for the Rainbows.

Hawaii, one of 58 Division I teams which won nine or less games last sseason, won six of its first nine this year.

If Syracuse swept the week’s opponents of Western Michigan, Rutgers and St. Francis, Pa., Orange coach Jim Boeheim would have become the fastest coach to 300 victories.

According to research by Bob Snyder of the Syracuse Herald Journal, Boeheim notched victory 300 in game 13 of his 13th season. Louisville’s Denny Crum had been quickest, reaching the mark in the ninth game of his 14th season.

Boeheim’s 300th victory will make him the 45th active Division I coach over that number.

There are so many holiday tournaments it’s tough for any one field to stand out. Every once in a while one will grab your eye for another reason: Why?

The Gold Rush tournament at New Orleans this weekend is one of those. Host Xavier of New Orleans, University of the Ozarks and Montevallo are three quality NAIA programs and make a nice start to a strong field on that level.

The fourth team is NCAA Division I Western Carolina. Huh?

“When I took this job I felt I needed something to use as a recruiting tool and since the school was not committed to a tournament, I thought New Year’s Eve in New Orleans would be good for recruiting,” first-year coach Dave Possinger said. “There were no Division I tournaments available.”

Possinger, who took over a team that went 8-19 last season, used his NAIA connections from his nine successful years at St. Thomas Aquinas in Sparkill, N.Y. to get the Catamounts a chance to greet the new year on Bourbon Street.

“If I could do it all over again I wouldn’t go for the tournament,” Possinger said. “These are ranked teams in the NAIA. I know how good these teams are. I should have booked two easy games for home and taken the W’s. It was a situation created for recruiting because of the late start I got here.”

Ohio State Coach Gary Williams is in his third season with the Buckeyes, the same number he was at Boston College.

He was asked recently to compare the Big Ten and Big East conferences.

“The Big Ten has a little more power game inside,” he said. “The Big East is a little more up tempo but with Tom Davis (at Iowa), Illinois and Michigan, we have changed. The leagues are getting closer together and TV has a lot to do with that.”

Billy King, regarded as one of college basketball’s best one-on-one defenders in recent years, starts his broadcast career in the sport this month.

The Duke graduate will join veteran play-by-play man Ralph Hacker for the Ohio Valley Conference late night games this season on ESPN.

The 22-year-old King, who played on two Final Four teams with the Blue Devils, is employed by Capitol Broadcasting of Raleigh, N.C.

Indiana State coach Ron Greene brought new meaning to the word suffer.

Greene has been bothered by kidney problems and he left a hospital without passing the stone to coach the Sycamores against Evansville last week.

“There was no reason for me to just sit there and be in pain, I might as well go to the arena and be in pain on the bench,” he said.

Evansville beat Indiana State 94-75. Ouch.

When Kent State lost to No. 15 Ohio State 92-57 last week it gave the Golden Flashes a 1-16 record against Big Ten teams. The lone victory was a 64-62 decision over Purdue at Mackey Arena in the 1970-71 season.

Georgia Tech’s Brian Oliver credits his father with his successful attitude as a starting guard for the 16th-ranked Yellow Jackets.

“When I played against him, he would always dunk on me and beat me bad,” the younger Oliver said of his playground confrontations with his father James, who played at DePaul. “That’s how I came up with the attitude of not liking to lose. I’m not a sore loser but I hate losing.

“There was no mercy. There were times when he beat me 32-0. He wanted to make sure I didn’t get cocky, and that no matter how good I became, there was somebody better. You have to keep working. That’s the attitude I have now.”

Georgetown students have renamed the area underneath one basket at the Capital Centre “Rejection Row.”

Every time a Hoya blocks a shot, the silhouette of a hand is attached to the bottom of a banner with the name of the area on it.

The Hoyas have forced the production of plenty of extra hands with two games with 15 blocks.

The front line of freshmen Alonzo Mourning and Dikembe Mutombo and junior college transfer John Turner will probably give chase a few times this season to North Carolina’s single-game mark of 18 set three seasons ago.

By the way, the patch on the shoulder of Georgetown uniforms is the school’s crest. Georgetown, the nation’s oldest Catholic university, is celebrating its 200th anniversary and the patch bears the motto: Learning, Faith, Freedom.