UPSETTING PATTERN : Arrogance Can Mean a Quick Trip Home at Tournament Time

It would stand to reason that George Mason’s Patriots were quaking in their high-tops as they await their NCAA West regional first-round matchup with the second-seeded and nationally eighth-ranked Indiana team that’s irate over being snubbed for the No. 1 berth in the Midwest.

Then again, maybe we should be asking Hoosiers Coach Bob Knight if he’s feeling a little pinch under his shirt collar. After all, it was just a year ago that Richmond, like George Mason a member of the lightly regarded Colonial Athletic Association, upset the defending national champion Hoosiers, 72-69, in the opening round.

In the first round of the 1986 tournament, Knight and the Hoosiers lost, 83-79, to Cleveland State, a member of the Association of Mid-Continent Universities. The AMCU doesn’t carry the weight of the Big Ten, but even before the game, Vikings Coach Kevin Mackey said he knew his team was ready.

“I just thought we were better than them. I knew that we would be doing things they’d never seen before,” Mackey said. “We didn’t have their name, but there’s a lot more parity out there than people realize. I think they struggle with that at times.”

There always have been upsets in the NCAA tournament. The UCLA dynasty of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was preceded by a Texas Western (now Texas-El Paso) victory over Kentucky in 1966, and ended when the Bill Walton-led Bruins were upset by North Carolina State eight years later.

Sometimes, the shock waves spread just as far when a bigger school comes away with an unexpected victory. In the 1985 title game, Villanova shot an incredible 90 percent from the field in the second half en route to a 66-64 win over overwhelming favorite Georgetown.

Two years earlier, Lorenzo Charles put in a Dereck Whittenburg air ball at the buzzer to give North Carolina State another two-point win, 54-52, over the Phi Slamma Jamma gang from Houston. That same year, unheralded Georgia went to the Final Four in Albuquerque with an 82-79 victory over North Carolina.

Sometimes, teams string together a series of upsets, making for improbable trips to the Final Four -- North Carolina-Charlotte in 1977 and Penn two seasons later come to mind. In today’s age of megabuck television contracts, there seems to be something particularly alluring about a virtual unknown defeating the supposedly superior team.

Perhaps it’s because such wins are regarded as next to impossible by the media, general public and often, by the players and coaches on the higher-rated teams.

“Last year, we played a dance club, Arthur Murray, and lost,” said N.C. State Coach Jim Valvano, trying to make light of the Wolfpack’s 78-75 loss to Murray State, a member of the Ohio Valley Conference. “This year, we’re playing a whole state -- South Carolina.”

But the Gamecocks play in the powerful Metro Conference and were even nationally ranked at one point during the regular season. Neither can be said for Duke’s first-round foe, South Carolina State, which is one reason why Blue Devils Coach Mike Krzyzewski finds himself worrying about his team becoming overconfident.

“The ones seeded 15th and 16th; those are the teams that you hope your kids don’t look at and say, ‘I wonder who’ll win the West Virginia-Tennessee game (the winner of which will face Duke)’ ” Krzyzewski said. “You do that and you’ll find yourself getting beat.”

Often, meetings between David and Goliath are prefaced by players and coaches trying mightily not to give the other team any locker-room fodder. Listening to Lou Henson on Sunday after this season’s pairings were announced, one might have thought he was the coach of McNeese State, ranked as the nation’s 160th-best team in one set of power ratings, and not third-ranked Illinois.

“They’re huge,” he gushed, pointing out that the Cowboys have a pair of starters 6 feet 9 or taller, while the Fighting Illini have just a single 6-8 player on their roster.

Henson was merely following the unwritten coach’s rule that says you don’t anger an opponent, no matter how inferior they may appear to be. But the tenet doesn’t extend to the media, which can help raise a team’s emotions.

“I remember we got kind of fired up over all the things people were saying,” recalled Austin Peay Coach Luke Kelly of the buildup that led to the biggest upset of the 1987 tournament, a 68-67 victory over Illinois. “(Television analyst) Dick Vitale said we had no chance at all and a sportswriter from Birmingham said we had no defense, when that was our pride and joy.

“We were really being treated as total unknowns by people who hadn’t done their homework. Someone else said that Illinois wouldn’t have any trouble with us because no one else had all year. But we had gone to overtime with Kentucky and played Missouri a great game at Colombia -- they just didn’t know.”

In 1986, everyone knew about Steve Alford, Indiana’s all-American and Olympic gold medalist. Next to no one was aware of Cleveland State, a fact that angered the Vikings.

Indiana had met with great success all season by having Alford work on the wing offensively, having teammates brig the ball up court and give him the ball in prime scoring position. But Cleveland State’s full-court pressure changed the game plan.

“We knew that if the game was played 17 feet in, we didn’t have a chance,” Mackey said. “But the game was 94 feet -- they weren’t ready for that kind of frenzy.”