Final Two Both Start Season 0-1

It’s not college football any more.

How can you tell?

A team from the Pacific 10 won a nonconference game against a good team.

In the first game of the college basketball season, Stanford, poised and ranked No. 13, knocked off No. 10 Duke, the runner-up in the 1999 national championship game, 80-79 in overtime Thursday night at Madison Square Garden in the Coaches vs. Cancer Ikon Classic.

But, wait. Just when it seemed a rematch of the 1999 national championship game between Connecticut and Duke would not happen, Iowa upset the top-ranked and defending national champion Huskies, 70-68.

So welcome to the new season, Connecticut and Duke. How does it feel to play in the consolation game?

“Not so good,” Connecticut forward Albert Mouring said.

“Not so bad,” Duke forward Shane Battier said.

Either way, it was a heck of a start to the new season.

Before the game, many Connecticut fans were passing around copies of the Dansbury News-Times, which had a story about the 1998 Land Rover being driven by junior point guard and returning star Khalid El-Amin. According to the newspaper, the car is registered to a Hartford man named Diary Davis, for whom El-Amin has left tickets to at least two Connecticut games. This might make Davis a Connecticut booster in the eyes of the NCAA and the Land Rover an illegal benefit.

There was a sellout crowd of 19,458 that was mostly at the Garden to cheer for Connecticut. The crowd was deadly silent when Iowa, under new coach Steve Alford, went ahead 16-4.

El-Amin scored two points in a first half in which Connecticut trailed 36-21 and then 24 more as the Huskies nearly came back to win.

Connecticut Coach Jim Calhoun was tight-lipped about the El-Amin situation, saying this was a matter which would be handled internally.

As for the Duke-Stanford game, Michael McDonald--a 6-foot-1 junior from Long Beach Poly, who missed most of his senior high school and sophomore college seasons because of injuries--celebrated a return to good health by making two three-point shots in the Cardinal’s 10-0 run in overtime. McDonald’s father, Glenn, was an All-American at Long Beach State and he played at Madison Square Garden a few times during a three-year career with the Boston Celtics.

“I’ll bet he didn’t have more fun than me,” Michael said.

That Stanford run almost wasn’t enough, though. Duke, its talent thinned considerably by the premature departures of three underclassmen--Elton Brand, William Avery and Corey Maggette--from last year’s team, went on a 9-2 run after Stanford had grabbed a 78-70 lead.

And when Cardinal freshman Casey Jacobsen, from Glendora, nervously missed two free throws with 4.6 seconds left, Duke had one last shot. Nate James missed it, a 25-footer at the buzzer.

“This was huge because it was Duke,” Stanford Coach Mike Montgomery said. “Duke’s probably the most successful college basketball program over the last 10 years.”

Chris Carrawell, one of Duke’s two returning starters, had a career-high 28 points.