Analysis : Still No Parity in College Basketball

Parity? Not this year in college basketball. After thousands of regular-season games, after a dozen or so conference tournaments that serve as NCAA qualifiers for potential Cinderellas in sneakers, after two rounds of the NCAA eliminations themselves, tradition twinkles.

Nearly all the 16 coaches who have survived to do battle in four regions starting Thursday are familiar even to casual fans: Dean, Bobby and John. V and Coach K. Tark and Lute. Bill Frieder didn’t last, as usual, but the team he coached until last week (Michigan) did. A Terry has made it again; so have some Pirates.

Bobby Knight fussed about too many non-basketball types being involved in the tournament-selection process. Maybe so. But the top four seeds are still dribbling and setting screens. Same with all the number twos, three of the threes and two of the fours.

With few exceptions, the tournament seeds conformed with most of the regular-season polls. A couple of coaches quibbled, among them Iowa’s Tom Davis, who couldn’t understand how the regular-season champion from the Atlantic Coast Conference (North Carolina State) got lowered to a No. 5. Turned out Davis was right, N.C. State managing to rout Rutgers and slip past fourth-seeded Iowa in double overtime, when Rodney Monroe resembled Earl Monroe.

This week will be hectic and highly pressured for the surviving 16, but not in ways it once was. Tapes and bolder athletic directors have lessened the scouting strain and the differences in style among the major conferences. When an ACC team looks at somebody from the Big Ten, for instance, it can relate to someone from its league.

Davis said this is because many schools look for the best available coaches instead of ones from within the conference. He brought his style of pressure defense to the Big East (Boston College), to the Pacific-10 (Stanford) and the Big Ten.

N.C. State’s Jim Valvano was asked about the problems of preparing for an opponent in such a short time. That was the day after the Wolfpack had beaten Rutgers and the day before it met Iowa. He lifted his hand high above a table, indicating the number of tapes his assistants had assembled. The only film he watched, Valvano said, was “Coming to America.”

This weekend is a time for some coaches to enhance their well-earned reputations for grace under pressure and for others to overcome the often unfair knock of catching brain scramble at such rarefied playoff altitude. Lou Henson of Illinois especially needs to make the Final Four; Billy Tubbs of Oklahoma and Jim Boeheim of Syracuse have been there recently, but still are lightly regarded as bench coaches.