Pac-10’s Arizona Goes It Alone

How best to describe the Pacific 10 Conference’s troubled relationship with the NCAA basketball tournament?

An inferiority complex in denial?

A recovery program lacking any kind of national affirmation?

It was very nearly “No Longer Alive in 2005,” down to its final 2.8 seconds, before Salim Stoudamire sank his resuscitating 17-footer against Oklahoma State on Thursday night, moving Arizona and the conference into the Chicago Regional final, barely, 79-78.

Before Stoudamire’s sudden intervention, the Pac-10 was looking down and completely out by the middle of the third round. Earlier in the evening, Washington, derided by many east of the Rockies as undeserving of its No. 1 seeding, did nothing to dispel that notion by losing in Albuquerque by 14 points to No. 4 Louisville, 93-79.

Before that, the other half of the Pac-10’s NCAA contingent, UCLA and Stanford, had lost in the first round, their very presence in the tournament already a long forgotten vapor trail, gone without a trace.

UCLA lost to Texas Tech, no longer in the tournament itself after its 65-60 defeat to No. 7 West Virginia on Thursday night in the Albuquerque Regional.

Stanford lost to Mississippi State, which lost to Duke. Not only did the Pac-10’s California division go winless in this year’s tournament, the teams that beat them went 1-2 after those elimination games.

Once again, Arizona will go it alone into the Elite 8, carrying the Pac-10’s flickering torch into the tournament’s second weekend. If not for Arizona, the conference’s Final Four portfolio for the last decade would be depressingly bleak.

Since UCLA’s championship of 1995, the Pac-10 has made but three trips to the Final Four -- the Wildcats accounting for two of them. Arizona won the title in 1997 and lost to Duke in the 2001 final. The conference’s only other Final Four representative over that span was Stanford, a semifinal loser in 1998.

But say this much for the Wildcats: They know their way around the Sweet 16.

Thursday’s victory improved Arizona’s Sweet 16 record to 7-4, which resides in the same neighborhood as the 9-4 mark owned by Kentucky and North Carolina.

For the Wildcats to reach another Final Four, they will have to beat the tournament’s top-seeded team, 35-1 Illinois, playing close to home in Chicago.

The Illini advanced with ease to the Chicago Regional final, defeating 12th-seeded Wisconsin Milwaukee, 77-63, Thursday night.

Some hope for Pac-10 fans: En route to the 2001 Final Four, Arizona met and defeated Illinois in the regional final.

Aside from Lute Olson racking up his 45th NCAA tournament victory, Thursday was not a good night for old coaches.

The Bob Knight survive-advance-and-grouse-until-the-next-game campaign was thankfully halted by a West Virginia team that last reached a regional final in 1959, led by a sharp-shooting guard named Jerry West. Forty-six years later, the name that sparked the Mountaineers was Kevin Pittsnogle, who scored 22 points to stop Knight’s Texas Tech squad, but has yet to be nicknamed anything like “Pittsnogle From Cabin Creek,” although it does kind of flow off the tongue.

Likewise, Oklahoma State’s Eddie Sutton went out of another NCAA tournament a loser, fittingly enough for a man who is the winningest NCAA tournament coach to never win it all. Sutton has 39 tournament victories, two more than Roy Williams, still searching the wilderness but still in the tournament with North Carolina. Sutton was on the verge of victory No. 40, and another trip to the Elite 8 with fingers crossed, before Stoudamire fired the shot cheered ‘round the Pac-10 office.

Washington, fighting doubters ever since it was dealt the top seeding in the Albuquerque Regional, carried its case only as far as the third round.

Was Washington a “soft” No. 1-seeded team, as so many maintained?

Well, the Huskies took care of the opponents they should have -- No. 16 Montana in the first round, No. 8 Pacific in the second.

Louisville represented Washington’s first real test in the tournament, and the Huskies were virtually out of it after 20 minutes, trailing by 12 points at the half.

Louisville had its own seeding issues with which to contend. Seeded only fourth in the Albuquerque Region, the Cardinals believed they were under-seeded by at least two notches -- and probably three, judging from its dominating all-around performance against the Huskies.

“We went further than most of the nation thought we could go,” Washington Coach Lorenzo Romar said during a postgame interview on CBS.

Does that sound like the coach of the No. 1-seeded team after a third-round defeat?

Such is life when you represent the Pac-10 in the NCAA tournament in March of 2005.