COLLEGE BASKETBALL : Notre Dame-LSU Game to Produce Baskets of Food, Too

College basketball breaks some new ground today when Notre Dame plays Louisiana State in the Superdome with proceeds from the game to benefit the homeless.

Entertainers have raised money for the homeless through Comic Relief, but college basketball has never before been involved in the project.

“We want to not only raise funds, but also to raise consciousness,” said Bob Zmuda, president and founder of Comic Relief, which hopes to realize as much as $75,000 from the event.

The idea to stage a college game to benefit the homeless came from Sonny Vaccaro, promoter of the Dapper Dan high school all-star game in Pittsburgh. Vaccaro guaranteed $200,000 to each Notre Dame and LSU and got CBS-TV interested in the matchup.

“The whole thing came to me, hit me last year at the Final Four, when I realized that people in basketball have never bound together to do something for a charity,” Vaccaro said. “We know poverty exists. We see it every day. I wanted to awaken the basketball community.”

Zmuda said LSU and Notre Dame might receive as much as $50,000 for homeless charities of their choice in Baton Rouge, La., and South Bend, Ind.

Headmaster: ESPN commentator Dick Vitale paid off a debt to Illinois students. Vitale stood on his head at midcourt before a game because last season he said that if Illinois made it to the Final Four, he would stand on his head.

Illinois did reach the Final Four, losing to eventual champion Michigan.

So there was Vitale last week, putting his bald head on a pillow and then hoisting his legs in the air, steadied by Illinois cheerleaders.

“I should have asked Nadia Comaneci for advice,” he said.

More Vitale: He is introducing the “balance” theory, meaning that only the teams that can score from the perimeter as well as inside have a chance to win the NCAA title. To Vitale, is is clear that Georgia Tech (not enough inside), Syracuse (not enough outside) and Illinois (not enough outside), have no shot.

Vitale says the teams with the best chance because of balance are Georgetown, UNLV, Kansas, Missouri, Michigan and Duke.

As for the Pacific 10, Vitale said UCLA is stronger because it’s getting a lot of help from freshman Tracy Murray, but “they’ll lose some games they shouldn’t.” Vitale sees the Pac-10 going to UCLA, then Oregon State, then Arizona.

The bus stops here: The Washington Huskies, who are taking the long road back toward prominence in the Pac-10, are only 2-5 in conference play, apparently still trying to find themselves after getting stranded in the Arizona desert.

The Huskies were traveling from Tucson to Tempe when their bus was pulled over by a highway patrolman. It was the same patrolman who had stopped the same bus with the same driver north of Tucson a few days earlier and had declared the bus unsafe to drive because of a bald front tire.

D’Lee M. Steiner, the bus driver, had continued to use the bus without replacing the tire. So when the patrolman stopped the bus a second time, Steiner was arrested, handcuffed and taken away.

The players were left in the desert, about 25 miles north of Tucson.

While Coach Lynn Nance, his two assistant coaches and a trainer were taken by a patrol car to Tucson for rental cars, Sally Nance was left to chaperon her husband’s 12 dusty basketball players.

“They just had a jolly good time,” Sally Nance reported.

Put your Dukes up: At Duke, there was a big showdown last week. No, not between Duke and North Carolina, between Duke’s coach and the school newspaper.

Coach Mike Krzyzewski invited 10 sportswriters from the Chronicle, the school newspaper, to a meeting with Blue Devil players and then launched into an eight-minute, expletive-laced critique of what he thought about the writers.

Krzyzewski was upset by a column by sports editor Brent Belvin, who assigned each Duke player a grade for his play this season. The Duke coach complained that the column degraded his team.

The Chronicle retaliated by giving a taped transcript of Krzyzewski’s speech to the Durham Morning Herald, which ran it without expletives. The Chronicle, meanwhile, printed excerpts of the speech, including expletives.

What’s next? Will Krzyzewski take out an ad? Will the feud escalate?

Duke center Christian Laettner offered his own critique of the Chronicle: “The only thing I read are the cartoons.”

Build a better student?: George Raveling is opposed to the proposal by the NCAA’s Presidents Commission that would shorten the basketball season by three games as well as delay the start of basketball practice from Oct. 15 to Nov. 1 and the regular season from the fourth Friday in November to Dec. 1.

Raveling said, however, that shortening the season from 28 games to 25 doesn’t bother him nearly as much as shortening the time allowed for practice.

“It’s hard for me to believe that educators can be that naive, to believe that 15 days in October and three games are all of a sudden going to produce a better student,” Raveling said. “Personally, I wish it was that simplistic.”