Wooden's championship run at UCLA began and ended with a classic pair of "Philly guards."

The point guard for UCLA coach John Wooden's first national championship team was from Philadelphia, from Overbrook High. And the point guard from Wooden's last NCAA winner was from Philadelphia, from Overbrook again.

I was going to put up a Facebook note about that, or some sort of half-assed Tweet that would make the point in 140 characters, but that lead paragraph from Mike Jensen's story in this morning's Philadelphia Inquirer renders that moot. It's well worth a read if you want to know more about the Greatest. Coach. Ever.

Thoughts following one of the great NCAA Championship Games ever.

1. This guy is correct to the Nth degree:

I think people have gone overboard in saying how big an upset this would have been.

As a 5 seed beating a 1 seed, that would have been huge. But if you had watched these teams play, they were practically mirror images of each other. Both very noticeably white (please -- that's not a bad thing, that's not a good thing but you can't pretend it doesn't stand out), both extremely good defensive teams. Gordon Hayward is pretty much a sophomore version of Duke's Jay Singler.

CBS playing up the Hoosiers angle for all it's worth made this more of an upset than it truly would have been. Butler already had beaten a No. 1 seed, Syracuse, which was viewed as a much stronger team than Duke when the tournament began.

Had Hayward's shot gone in, this would not have been Villanova beating Georgetown in '85. A colleague and somewhat of a basketball expert tried to convince me otherwise. It's simply not true.

You have to remember what Georgetown represented back in '85. As a freshman, Patrick Ewing had carried Georgetown to the national title game in 1982. If not for the Freddie Brown pass at the end, the Hoyas might have upset a North Carolina team that had Michael Jordan, James Worthy and Sam Perkins. Think about that collection of talent as it compares to the game today.

Georgetown went on to win the national title in '84, beating Kentucky with Sam Bowie and Mel Turpin in the semifinals and Houston in the championship. The Cougars were playing in their third straight Final Four with Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler.

There was just a mind-blowing amount of Hall of Fame talent making it to Final Fours in that era. No one saw Ed Pinckney and Villanova as being in the Hoyas' league. Georgetown's only nemesis was a St. John's team with Chris Mullin and former Mav Bill Wendlandt (remember the towel-waver?) and the Hoyas had blown that team away on the Saturday afternoon in Lexington to set up the championship game against Villanova.

With today's rules and a shot clock, Villanova would not have stood a chance. But slowing down the game and shooting an improbable 78 percent, Villanova won.
 
That Georgetown team was a true Goliath. This Duke team was not.

2. Long forgotten about that magic year 1985 is that St. John's had Villanova's number all season and beat them handily twice. They were also the only team aside from the Hoyas to be ranked #1 during the entire season. It would probably have  taken a perfect game to beat them as well.

3. Just imagine how good Butler would be if they didn't have that five or six minute scoring drought every damned game.

4. It needs must be said: Duke is a heckuva team and plays basketball as the team game it's meant to be; if they were wearing any other uniforms, coached by a human being and not part of the awful ACC, I'd probably love them.

Twilight of the coach.

There's a very interesting article in this morning's Philly Inquirer about the effect of the three-point shot on the game of basketball.

It uses Villanova's historic upset of Georgetown in the NCAA Championship Game 25 years ago next Thursday (April Fool!) as starting point and looks at how that game would have been different and how all games are different since. Phil Martelli's comment in the final paragraph sums it up: Rollie Massimino made that victory happen.

It used to be said about Rollie that, if he had two days to prepare, he could come up with a game plan to beat anybody. That truism was often manifested in the early rounds of the NCAAs and that's why, in addition to his being the only one who ever won it all, this is the larger picture:

Massimino had the most successful 10-year postseason run in Big Five history, reaching the Elite Eight five times from 1978 to 1988.

That's a quote from this story, which ran over the weekend. It's well worth reading about how, at age 75, Rollie just keeps on keepin' on.

As I've recounted before, Rollie and I had our problems (almost entirely on his end), but I always loved him as a coach, for his skills, for his passion, for the way his players all graduated and stayed part of the larger Villanova community.

For a lot of reasons, some his own fault, some a convenient way for the Big Five to move into modern times and have a scapegoat to blame, Rollie remains a somewhat controversial figure in the city. That's slowly changing and someday it will have to be acknowledged that he was the best we ever saw in the era when coaches could--and did--win games.

Even if it sometimes took a Perfect Game to do it.

This is not good news for the McCain Campaign (although Politico will spin it somehow).

Ali Farokhmanesh leads Northern Iowa over #1 Kansas. Why can't everybody who's on TV have an American name so that the Teabaggers can sleep at night?

A fine weekend ruined.

Beautiful day today and the dog-thing and I tried our best to make it worthwhile.

The Villanova loss to St. (who?) Mary's made it less than perfect.

But, you know....

In the end, you win or lose on whether you're the better team, but,  as I Tweeted and Facebooked in the game's last moments:

"So the guy falls down, never loses his dribble, gets up and hits  a three. Seriously?"

and shortly after that...

"Okay, I give up. A three banked in from, what, 40 feet, with the game tied and under a minute to play. Again, seriously?"

Seriously, these things are impossible.

Or, I guess not.

And so it begins....

Two good teams and a fraud.

Villanova is a very popular choice to get to the Final Four all of a sudden, despite the late-season collapse, mostly based on its bracket. Kansas is the consensus pick to win it all. This is reflected in this cartoon, along with the other meme of this post-season, the mindless love being expressed for Trust Fund U:

Click to enlarge.

Okay, not so proud today, Villanova.

There is little good to be taken from yesterday's massacre at the Carrier Dome aside from the (I hope) emergence of Mouphtaou Yarou as a factor going forward and certainly in the NCAA Tourney and the continuing steadiness of Scottie Reynolds. Syracuse was by far the superior team this day and looks like it will deserved to be ranked #1 come Monday. I do have enough of the "mindless fan" in my heart to want to see them again, on neutral ground, at Madison Square Garden in the Big East Championship Tourney finals.

This guy tries to put a nice face on it all and it makes for soothing reading, but all I could think about was back in the day when St. Joe's had a basketball team and how I would have felt to read an apologist such as he defend the Hawks. You take your lumps and move on.

The header, by the way, refers to this earlier post. When will I learn not to celebrate my life's minor triumphs? It's just another invitation for the gods to smack me down and remind me of my place.

Today's grumpiest bastards (I love 'em).

Pierce, again, with the best idea for the play-in game for the NCAA basketball tournament (soon to involve everybody so who cares?) I've ever seen and Cole, again, with a perfect in every way detailed outline of the fate any decent, forward-looking legislation would fare in the current congress and how the media would treat. Brilliant.

The wildest Villanova/West Virginia basketball game ever.

Villanova plays an important game starting in a few minutes against West Virginia in Morgantown where, I believe, they've not been victorious is over a decade. As any VU/West VA game always does, this one inspires memories of a great and controversial battle between the two back in the day.

West Virginia came into town undefeated, 11-0, and ranked #1 in the country to play an, at best, mediocre Villanova team at the Palestra. Somehow, Villanova was up by ten at the half and by 14 with eighteen minutes to go, at which point a heralded but not yet established West VA sophomore named Jerry West (whatever became of him?) started to take over the game. He scored 15 in those final minutes, ended with a total of 37 for the game.

With seconds to go, West made his final basket to make the score Wildcats 75, Mountaineers 74. The ball dropped through the basket and rolled back to the stands where the Villanova player who was to pass it in could not find ot while official Dan Smeddy started counting the five seconds allowed for a pass in. Villanova captain Tom Brennan was screaming for a timeout which Smeddy ignored but fellow official John Stevens did call it. Smeddy had his back to Stevens and continued counting, then took the ball and gave it to West Virginia without objection from Stevens. 

With two seconds to go, West VA forward Lloyd Scharrar made a jumpshot from the corner to win the game, 76-75. Pandemonium ensued.

Sports writer Bob Vetrone, who was the guy who covered Philadelphia's Big Five college teams, jumped over the scorer's table and chased Smeddy and Stevens across the floor and into the dressing room. The officials later had to be escorted out of the building by a police squad because irate fans were still waiting outside.

A friend, with whom I was discussing this last night, says he remembers reading in the papers that Villanova coach Al Severance told the press "the game was closer than the score indicated." I never saw that but Severance was noted for more than the occasional malaprop and it's a great line either way. My lead in the game story for the weekly Villanovan was

"Yes, West Virginia, there is a Santa Claus..." 

There was a personal postscript, three or four years later.

I was playing in a YMCA basketball league in center city and we were given a budget to hire an official for each game, usually, in those simpler times, one of the guys who did the Palestra games. We were in the playoff and the official that night was...Dan Smeddy.

Late in the game, one of the players on other team grabbed a reboud and through a long pass the length of the court to teammate who was cherry-picking. I had stayed back with him and what I did is illegal now but wasn't then, I don't believe. He was much taller than I so I waved my hands wildly in front of his face to try and obscure his vision and Smeddy blew the foul. He was still at the other end of the court and thought I had hit the guy on the arm.

We lined up along the foul line and Smeddy took the ball and, before handing it to the foul-shooter, asked "Is everybody ready?" And I responded, "Hey, Dan, that call was worse that the West Virginia one."

He laughed his ass off and threw me out of the game.