Lot of Caterwauling Over Kentucky’s Start

Once, success bought you something: time.

Before the Internet, talk radio and Seattle coffee made the world so knee-jerk jittery, a coach who won a championship could at least consider making a down payment on a house.

I used to think a title was worth five years at the security bank, an account a coach could draw on in lean years.

It doesn’t work that way anymore.

It took John Wooden 15 years to win his first NCAA title at UCLA.

You think he’d get that much rope today?

The San Francisco 49ers shoved George Seifert off the bridge after winning two Super Bowls. UCLA fired Jim Harrick not long after it raised its 11th banner. Mike Shanahan guided the Denver Broncos to consecutive championships but suddenly has become misguided during this year’s fiasco.

Maybe we’ve all gone nuts with sports obsession.

Or, maybe, we’ve finally caught up with Kentucky basketball fans.

Nobody has ever expected more than these hoops hayseeds.

It’s absurd to think the heat could be on Coach Tubby Smith, who, in two years in Lexington, has led Kentucky to a national title and a final eight appearance.

But this is Kentucky.

When the Wildcats started the season 4-4, dropping out of the polls for the first time in a decade, the uproar was so intense you’d have thought they repealed the 21st Amendment.

But this is Kentucky.

“They expect championships, year in and year out,” Brooks Downing, a Kentucky grad and the school’s basketball publicity director, explains. “In these parts it’s cause for alarm.”

Given Kentucky has won only seven national titles since 1939, that has made for a lot of apoplectic seasons.

Count this one among them.

Kentucky got a reprieve Saturday when it improved to 5-4 with a 30-point thumping of archrival Louisville, fulfilling half of its annual mission statement: Win national title, beat Louisville.

When the Rupp Arena announcer asked Saturday’s crowd to stay seated for a postgame announcement, a courtside writer quipped, “They’re extending Tubby’s contract through March.”

So much for the breather.

Kentucky is back in the kettle tonight when No. 5 Michigan State visits Rupp Arena. Michigan State denied Kentucky a fourth consecutive Final Four appearance last season with a victory over the Wildcats in the Midwest Regional final.

No matter what happens tonight, Kentucky fans would be well-advised to get a grip.

The rough start was not only predictable, it should have been expected.

Kentucky lost six players from last year’s Elite Eight team and is playing an ambitious nonconference schedule. Three of Kentucky’s four losses have come against ranked schools. Michigan State will be the sixth ranked opponent Kentucky will have faced. The rest of the Southeastern Conference, combined, has played seven ranked teams.

Smith made the schedule thinking he’d have the experience to match. But, in the off-season, starting center Michael Bradley, former coach Rick Pitino’s last recruit, and shooting guard Ryan Hogan transferred. Much more tragically, center John Stewart, the team’s top recruit, collapsed during a high school game last spring and died.

Had Smith known, he would have scheduled more mercenaries such as High Point, his alma mater.

If Wildcat fans can get beyond the state-of-the-minute hysteria, they’ll understand Kentucky could be finer than Carolina come March.

While not ranked in the national polls, Kentucky holds a respectable No. 20 ranking in the more important Ratings Percentage Index, better than No. 7 Auburn (60) and No. 8 Florida (66).

This is a proud bunch.

Despite owning four fewer titles than UCLA, Kentucky proclaims itself the “Team of the Century” for having won more games than any other school.

They are certainly the team of the late 1990s, claiming two titles and making consecutive finals appearances in 1996, ’97 and ’98.

Tubby isn’t about to take this team down the tubes.

He made a lineup adjustment against Louisville that could send the team on a bee-line, surrounding center Jamal Magloire with a quicker supporting cast. Smith moved Tayshaun Prince from small to power forward, Desmond Allison from off-guard to small forward and put freshman Keith Bogans at the No. 2 guard.

Ask Louisville if it worked.

As for the criticism, Smith says: “I think it has more effect on the players than me. I’m 48 years old and it doesn’t bother me at all.”

But it doesn’t end there. Smith’s son Saul, the starting point guard, has taken the brunt of the talk-radio trash, the low point coming after a six-turnover performance in a loss to Maryland.

“I can’t control what people say about me,” Saul says of the criticism. “I know I have never done anything hurtful to them. I think I’m a pretty nice guy.”

But this is Kentucky.

“I’m suffering too,” backup guard J.P. Blevins told the Lexington Herald-Leader. “This isn’t easy for us. We’re dying just like them.”

Once, Pitino, a Northerner, lashed back at the multitudes.

When a fan called his radio show in 1996 to complain about the team’s new uniforms, Pitino screamed: “I don’t want to hear any more of this nonsense! It shows you have nothing to do with your time.”

Geez, Rick, it’s Kentucky.

What else should they do?

MAKING A LIST

Hey, the other new ratings are out!

Scandal-plagued Minnesota tops the inaugural “Tarnished Twenty” basketball rankings released last week by a business Internet site that chronicles issues of sports and law, www.sports.findlaw.com.

Whom should the Gophers thank first? Start with former university tutor Jan Gangelhoff, who claims to have written more than 400 course papers for as many as 20 Minnesota players. Clem Haskins resigned as coach in the wake of the scandal.

The Tarnished Twenty top 10, in order: Minnesota, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Memphis, North Carolina, Iowa State, Weber State, Purdue, UC Santa Barbara and Duquesne.

Thanks to the unfolding escapades of JaRon Rush and Myron Piggie, his AAU coach, UCLA checks in at No. 14.

UCLA joins Michigan, Missouri and Wisconsin as the only four schools to make the dubious list in basketball and football, the gridiron Bruins riding the handicapped-parking scam to a No. 8 ranking.

Santa Barbara is the only other California school represented on either list.

Findlaw states its Tarnished Twenty rankings are intended to “raise the awareness” of big-time college sports’ troubled relationships with the law and “takes into account everything from murder to the smallest of recruiting and on-campus violations.”

LOOSE ENDS

The top program in the Southland? According to this week’s RPI, it’s Pepperdine. Sadly, no local team rates among the top 50 in the current RPI, which is used to help the selection committee pick at-large schools for the NCAA tournament. The local schools and their rankings: Pepperdine (52), UCLA (53), USC (128), UC Irvine (153), Cal State Northridge (174), Long Beach State (198) and Cal State Fullerton (288).

More RPI: Stanford may be No. 1 in the national polls, but Arizona is No. 1 in both the RPI and Jeff Sagarin’s power rankings. Think that might change after Tuesday’s home loss to New Mexico?

Stanford is ninth in both power polls. The Big Ten is the top conference in the RPI, followed by the Big 12, Atlantic Coast, Pacific 10 and Atlantic 10.

* OK, just so we have this straight: CBS recently paid $6 billion for the rights to televise the NCAA tournament, but UCLA’s Rush may lose eligibility for allegedly taking $200 from an agent?

* Illinois and DePaul have not played each other in basketball since 1958, and it may be another 41 years before the teams meet again after Illinois Coach Lon Kruger suggested Saturday that DePaul may not be running a clean program. “Business is done differently at the two programs, I’ll just leave it at that,” Kruger said. After his quotes made the papers, Kruger called DePaul Coach Pat Kennedy on Monday to apologize. Kennedy says he’d like the schools, located 150 miles apart, to meet again someday. Don’t count on it now.

* Don’t believe everything you read: This year’s “Lindy’s” basketball preview issue features a story on former Memphis coach Tic Price titled “The Price is Right: Christian Values Guide University of Memphis Men’s Basketball Coach.” Price recently resigned as coach after admitting to having an extramarital affair with a Memphis student.

* What’s wrong with Ohio State? OK, a No. 16 national ranking is hardly a crisis, but unless the Buckeyes’ dynamo guard tandem of Scoonie Penn and Michael Redd finds the bottom of the net more often, we can’t imagine Ohio State surviving the Big Ten gantlet and making a return trip to the Final Four. Penn, who made 45% of his shots last season, entered Wednesday night’s Toledo game having made only 34% this season. Redd, a 46.6% shooter last season, is making only 38.5% of his shots.

“It’s absurd to think that we would ask Scoonie or Michael to stop shooting because they aren’t shooting well,” Ohio State Coach Jim O’Brien says. Penn agrees: “I don’t think Michael and I are struggling. We are getting good looks and eventually they will fall.”

* Kids-are-all-right update: If only because of his name, our favorite shooter among the lights-out freshman class is George Washington guard SirValiant Brown, who entered the week with three of the Atlantic 10’s top five scoring performances this season. Brown scored 42 points against South Florida and has scored 33 points in two other games. We already anticipate Marv Albert’s NBA call: “Yeesssss, Sir!”