SI disses Mountain West, maybe with good reason

Friday, Dec. 3, 2004 | 8:51 a.m.

In its college hoops preview issue, Sports Illustrated picked only one Mountain West Conference program, Utah, to advance to the 65-team NCAA tournament in March.

Is that a slap at the sixth-season league or an accurate gauge on a conference that hasn't done anything to deserve national recognition since its birth in 1999?

We'll go with the latter.

Since that inception, the Mountain West has failed to send multiple teams to the NCAAs only once, when only Brigham Young went in 2001. In fact, it has sent three to the showcase event each of the past three seasons.

However, the league is in over its head on the national stage. None of its teams has advanced past the second round as a Mountain West program, and only Utah (in 2000 and 2003) and Wyoming (in 2002) have won first-rounders in the NCAAs.

No Mountain West squads were on the recent Associated Press Top 25 poll, and a reader had to get past 13 "others who received votes" to finally reach a Mountain West team -- Utah.

That placed the Utes behind such powers as Southern Illinois, Creighton, Vermont, Charlotte and Pepperdine.

New Mexico is the lone Mountain West team that has not gone to the NCAAs in the league's brief history, but it is currently atop the overall conference standings at 6-1.

Maybe SI got it wrong, and the Lobos -- instead of the Utes -- will be the conference's lone entry in the big tournament come March. No matter what happens, it appears the Mountain West has been relegated to mid-Major status.

Kirk Snyder, who went for 29 points against the Jayhawks, then guided the Pack to the Sweet 16 in the NCAAs before leaving, a year early, for the NBA draft. And then coach Trent Johnson bolted for Stanford.

Without the two main figures of last season's stunning upset, Nevada found itself in Allen Fieldhouse on Monday and was soundly thumped, 85-52, by the nation's second-ranked team before a national ESPN2 television audience.

A year ago, the Jayhawks trailed 40-20 at halftime.

Kansas coach Bill Self said before Monday's game that "revenge" wouldn't be the proper word for the rematch, "but," he told the Lawrence Journal-World, "I know the first half last year at their place they dominated us, and I think our guys certainly remember that and it's fresh on their minds.

" ... we should be motivated to get after it."

Sophomore J.R. Giddens also declined to talk about revenge, but he did say he hoped Kansas would let the Wolf Pack "know how the Jayhawks play."

After the game, various Jayhawks fessed up. Self said Nevada ran into a "buzz saw," and KU senior forward Wayne Simien said last year's game was in the back of his mind.

"They were pretty talkative last year. We wanted to give them a reminder," Simien told the Journal-World.

"I wish we could have won by 40," Giddens said. "I figure they beat us by 14 last year and we beat them by 33, so we're still up a little bit. It'll give them something to remember ... payback is a 'Mmmmm.' "

The more-telling figure might be UNR's most recent odds, at 300-1, of winning it all, courtesy of the Station Casinos. UNLV was pegged at 400-1.

The award is named after James Naismith, the game's founder, and is given to individuals who exhibit sportsmanship on and off the court, and who have made a lifelong commitment to the game.

The announcement arrived at a good time, since the Boilermakers are 1-3 and next play Memphis (today) and Oklahoma. Keady, 68, has coached the program for 25 seasons.

Former DePaul coach and Chicago-area legend Ray Meyer, who went up against Keady three times between 1981 and '84, said Keady was always his type of coach, a football coach.

"Every time I see Gene, I tell him he looks just like a football coach," Meyer told Purdue-sports.com. "He is a strong guy and built like a house. I think his players are afraid of him, but they love the guy.

"Sometimes you think he is going to have a stroke because he gets so red in the face ... during the game he is out to kill you, but after the game he's your friend ... the referees look at him and think to themselves, 'I don't want to get him mad!' "

When he broadcast Los Angeles Clippers games, Fratello was approached by the coach of a Southern California high school girls' team after a game who politely told Fratello how much trouble his players were having with inbound passes.

Without hesitation, Fratello grabbed a pen and diagrammed a variety of schemes on half a dozen napkins, explaining the nuances of each to the coach. With napkins or a Tele-Strator, the czar is an ace.