Thursday, March 18, 2004 | 9:26 a.m.
Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4088.
If there's one thing on which Dick Vitale and I agree, it's that for frozen pizza, DiGiorno isn't half-bad. If there's a second, it's that the difference between college basketball and pro basketball is that in the college game, it's the coaches -- and not the guys sporting the God-awful tattoos -- who are the stars.
Having said that, there are very few coaches who can win with guys who couldn't hold the court at Sunset Park. Let's see, there's Bob Knight, Joe Scott, that guy at Vermont and Norman Dale of "Hoosiers" fame. And even he was flirting with a .500 season until he talked Jimmy Chitwood into going out for the team.
A shortage of talent also explains why those Bracket Busters from the mid-major conferences seldom hang around beyond the first weekend of the NCAA tournament. There was Utah in 1998, but let's not forget the Fat Man had two NBA players on that team (Andre Miller and Michael Doleac). Maybe 1996 UMass also fell into the overachieving category before it was put on probation. Before that, you've got to go back to 1979, when Penn and Indiana State made it, to detect a mid-major presence in the Final Four.
Again, the Sycamores had Larry Bird at a time when the tournament was open to just 40 teams. That meant there were 24 fewer at-large teams available to knock off an Ivy League party crasher such as Penn, which did not have a Larry Bird, or for that matter, even a Corky Calhoun.
So if you're a Gonzaga wanna-be from the Mountain West -- and in that it has been 14 years since the Rebels cut down the nets in Denver, UNLV should be classified as such -- how do teams with Poor Farm budgets compete with those running and gunning at Millionaire Acres?
The answer, of course, is to recruit better players. That's what Lon Kruger, the Rebels' new coach, told the audience at Monday's news conference called to introduce him. His input aside, he said the Rebels, in the long run, will only go as far as their talent. The chat room Termites probably considered that a cop out, when, in fact, it was just a matter of fact.
So after Duke and Kentucky and North Carolina scarf up all those McDonald's All-Americans, what's a mid-major to do? Well, you could take the Gonzaga approach and set sail on a 3-hour cruise to some barely-chartered island in the Caribbean. Although I've got to believe that there aren't too many more guys like Ronny Turiaf tossing coconuts through guava baskets hanging from palm trees in Martinique.
Plan B, of course, is to do what Jerry Tarkanian did here, and take a chance on some "playaz" that other coaches wouldn't touch with the Grinch's 39 1/2-foot pole. For the most part, Tark's players turned out to be winners both on an off the court, but it was the exceptions like Lloyd Daniels that people -- especially those with the NCAA logo stitched on their breast pocket -- tend to remember.
It was pretty much the same situation when Billy Bayno came on board several years later, with two notable exceptions: The first is that the booster-types that gravitated toward the program under Tark's watch had pinkie rings and fat wallets, while the guys Bayno couldn't keep out of the gym were dentists. The second is that Tark's teams won.
While I fully expect that Kruger will win, too (although Tark's record might be out of reach), he'll still need some guys in baggy shorts to help the process along. That's why the chief assistant he is about to hire could be the most important decision he'll ever make.
Marvin Menzies, said to have the inside track on the job, is regarded as one of the best salesmen on the West Coast since Cal Worthington and his dog Spot. That might explain why Menzies has bounced from one program to the next out there.
He spent last year at Southern Cal after leaving Steve Fisher's staff at San Diego State, where he signed, sealed and delivered Evan Burns, last year's Mountain West newcomer of the year, to the Aztecs.
For what it's worth, Burns, a gifted 6-foot-8 forward who committed to UCLA out of Fairfax High School, is no longer with the Aztecs, due to injury, academic and marijuana problems, not necessarily in that order. For what it's worth again, he may be looking for a place to rehab his college career.
Given Burns' talent, he's a kid who could make a difference, but given his past, he's also one you might avoid. All things being equal, of course.
But in college basketball, as you'll find out when turn on your TV today, it's been a long time since that was the case.
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