Feinstein Getting the Mid-Major Vote Out

Keeping his usual eye out for the underdog, John Feinstein blazed a trail of sorts in late January when he listed George Mason as the No. 25 team in the country in his weekly ballot for the Associated Press basketball poll.

Feinstein’s vote meant the Patriots were listed with a lonely “1” in the Also Receiving Votes section at the very bottom of the poll, but the small piece of recognition was a groundbreaking source of pride for a mid-major program in the Colonial Athletic Association. Other voters soon took note, and in the following weeks George Mason climbed steadily and nearly cracked the Top 25 for the first time in school history.

“I like to give it to someone for whom it will have meaning,” Feinstein said. “If I vote Alabama 25th, what difference does it make to Alabama? They’re in the Southeastern Conference. They’re a power school. They were No. 1 a few years ago. But if I put Bucknell, Air Force, or early this year when Harvard was undefeated, I gave Harvard the vote. It was a big deal at Harvard. It was a big thing for the kids, the coaches. People were going around, ‘Who voted for us?’ ”

Eventually word got out, and Harvard Coach Frank Sullivan gave Feinstein a call.

“We were quite surprised by it,” Sullivan said. “It’s nice to see that there is a caretaker for the low- to mid-majors looking out for us.”

As a best-selling author, newspaper columnist and television and radio commentator, Feinstein has become an unofficial voice for the have-nots in college sports. He made his name 20 years ago writing about coach Bob Knight at Indiana in “A Season on the Brink,” but he’s since won acclaim for best sellers about the Patriot League (“The Last Amateurs”) and the Army-Navy football rivalry (“A Civil War”), off-the-beaten-path topics that got him smaller than usual advances from his publisher.

His latest book is “Last Dance,” an insider’s look at the Final Four.

“Having gone to it for so many years, I wanted to write stories not just about [John] Wooden, [Mike] Krzyzewski, Dean [Smith], Roy Williams -- although I wrote about all of them -- but I also wanted to write about [Vermont coach] Tom Brennan’s farewell party,” Feinstein said. “I wanted to write about what it’s like to ref in a Final Four. All of my books are just excuses to tell stories about people.”

As usual, Feinstein will be watching keenly when the NCAA tournament brackets are announced today. George Mason deserves to make it, he says, even though the Patriots didn’t win the CAA tournament. He said the process is weighted too heavily in favor of the power conferences, with the mid-major teams suffering in the computer rankings because of scheduling.

“What makes the NCAA tournament unique is that it’s the only major sporting event we have where David has a legitimate shot, not only to compete with Goliath, but occasionally to beat Goliath,” Feinstein said. “And when I hear coaches from the major conferences argue that all of our teams in the ACC are better than the first or second team in the Patriot League or the CAA or the America East or whatever, they miss the point. If the NCAA was just the ACC, the Big East, the Big 12, the Southeast, the Pac-10, the Big 10, there’d be no magic to it. You can’t have Bucknell beating Kansas. You can’t have Vermont beating Syracuse.”

Feinstein’s everyman personality suits his mid-major passion. He owns just two pairs of shoes -- “I don’t see why you would need more” -- and his voice was tinged with emotion when he talked about his father, who died last month. Martin Feinstein grew up in Brooklyn during the Depression and became the first executive director of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

“Maybe it goes back to my father, growing up the way he did,” Feinstein said.

Still, in many eyes, Feinstein always will be linked with Knight, who denounced “A Season on the Brink” because Feinstein was explicit with Knight’s use of profanity.

Feinstein said he now has an affable relationship with Knight. The estrangement ended eight years after the book, when Feinstein and Maryland coach Gary Williams happened to cross paths with Knight outside a hotel during a tournament in Hawaii. Knight extended his hand and acted like nothing had ever happened.