Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2004 | 10:03 a.m.
Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4088.
Just a few months after leaving Air Force via the back door, Joe Scott has Princeton back on college basketball's front porch.
Which means there probably are a bunch of potential No. 2 or 3 NCAA tournament seeds that are already getting nervous.
Scott coached the Falcons from last to first place in the Mountain West in just four short years by utilizing Princeton's beguiling ball-control offense predicated on back door cuts. Now he has returned to his alma mater, where he was a hard-nosed point guard.
On Friday, Scott and Princeton gave Jim Boeheim and No. 5 Syracuse a taste of the Ivy-flavored medicine that so many blue chip programs have choked on.
Syracuse swallowed hard in winning the Coaches for Cancer second-round game 56-45, but only after Princeton had raced to a 14-5 lead and Boeheim somewhat reluctantly pulled the Orangemen out of their man-to-man defense that the Tigers' cutters and passers ripped to ribbons.
"Syracuse couldn't guard us man to man," Scott said. "But they have something to go to that really is their staple. I don't know if there's another team in America that could have done that to us."
Except perhaps Air Force.
The Falcons will continue to run Scott's system under his replacement Chris Mooney, who served as his top assistant last year and is also a Princeton man. That may explain why the Falcons, who last year advanced to the NCAA tournament for the first time in 42 years and routed Ole Miss 60-36 Monday to improve to 2-0, were tabbed third behind UNLV and Utah in a Mountain West preseason poll.
Not to beat a dead horse, but leave it to Las Vegas Motor Speedway to give Mister Ed's carcass another whack.
As outlined in this space two weeks ago, Las Vegan Kurt Busch's drive to the verge of the Nextel Cup championship has by and large been ignored by his hometown. Now he's being slighted by his hometown track as well.
While LVMS has been a big supporter of Busch -- and to a lesser extent, fellow local Cup drivers Brendan Gaughan and Kyle Busch -- the speedway deserves a black flag for not including Kurt among the five drivers it featured in a Nextel Cup ad that repeatedly ran during Sunday's Southern 500.
The spot features Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Tony Stewart, Matt Kenseth and Rusty Wallace, four of whom are still pretty good drivers but none of whom went to high school here.
Being an old school guy at heart -- in this case, literally -- count me among those who think Valley High's run in the high school football playoffs is the neatest thing since kids wore letterman sweaters to class.
The Vikings are a charter member of the Original 8 1/2, as I like to call the schools that along with Bishop Gorman and old Las Vegas High (not to be confused with new Las Vegas High that opened on the eastern edge of town but kept the name used downtown). They were the only ones playing high school sports when I started working at the Sun in 1987.
Valley's return to prominence is noteworthy but you wouldn't know the Vikings have been down and out judging from their facilities. While the other playoff teams are playing on dusty, dried out fields that resemble the Texas panhandle during tumbleweed season, Valley will practice for its rematch with Las Vegas High II on the new emerald green Field Turf system at Piggott Stadium on its campus.
The Clark County School District installed the artificial surface that looks and plays like real grass at a cost of $738,000. The field is used by the Valley football and soccer teams as well as the Bishop Gorman football team, which is still without a stadium, at least until its new campus opens in a few years.
Whoever said the Mountain West gets no respect in football needs to check the printout from Herman Matthews' PC.
Matthews is chairman of the math and computer sciences department at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn., which is where UNLV should have stopped instead of Knoxville. His rankings were part of the Bowl Championship Series formula from 1999-2001 but unfortunately for the MWC, are no longer used -- perhaps because Matthews' computer with the Intel Pentium processor gives its members way too much respect.
Utah's bid to crash the BCS party has disguised the fact that this is not a banner year in the MWC. Yet five of its eight members are ranked among the top 50 in Scripps' power ratings, which take into account the usual criteria such as won-lost record, opponents' won-lost record, opponents' opponents' won-lost record and other vague variables, such as which way the wind is blowing at the Rubber Bowl in Akron.
Utah is No. 3, New Mexico No. 31, Brigham Young No. 36, Wyoming No. 48 and Colorado State No. 50.
UNLV is ranked No. 89, behind such little blocks of granite as North Texas, New Hampshire, William & Mary, Northern Illinois, James Madison, Harvard and yes, even Penn State.
This much -- but not a whole lot more -- is known about the teams that might be headed to the Las Vegas Bowl on Dec. 23.
The Las Vegas Bowl does not want New Mexico. And New Mexico does not want the Las Vegas Bowl. And yet, like Anna Nicole Smith and the Trim Spa diet, they might be stuck with each other.
Unless BYU shocks the world and upsets No. 5 Utah Saturday, the Las Vegas Bowl, which has the second choice from among the MWC bowl-eligible teams, will choose between the Lobos and the Cowboys, both of whom are guaranteed of finishing no worse than 6-5.
It just so happens that Wyoming and New Mexico will close the season against each other in Albuquerque this weekend. Should the Lobos win, if you're LV Bowl executive director Tina Kunzer-Murphy, how do you bypass a 7-4 New Mexico team that has won five consecutive games for a suspect 6-5 Wyoming bunch that will have closed with two losses?
Well, you probably don't.
As for the MWC opponent, with Southern Cal locked into and Cal still on track for BCS bids, the Pac-10 may not have a fifth bowl eligible team to send to Las Vegas. In that case, there would be a scramble to secure any bowl eligible teams from other conferences or independents (such as Navy) that aren't spoken for.
"About all you can say is that everybody is talking to everybody," a somewhat exasperated Kunzer-Murphy said Monday.
Oklahoma State and Gonzaga most likely will be the best teams that visit the Thomas & Mack Center during the college basketball season, although Rebels fans will only get to watch the Zags lace up their glass slippers. Gonzaga will meet Georgia Tech in the Las Vegas Showdown on Dec. 18 after the Rebels and Okie State go end to end in the first game.
But the Rebels' next-toughest home game could come in next Tuesday's season opener against Saint Mary's, Gonzaga's most formidable West Coast Conference rival.
Don't be fooled by the CYO connotation. The Gaels, despite playing without three projected starters, canceled Cal's ticket to the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic at Madison Square Garden this week by whipping the Golden Bears 61-52 on their home court in Berkeley Friday night.
You could say the Lady Rebels almost didn't have a leg to stand on its anticipated season opener against Minnesota, an NCAA Final Four team last year. And that the Golden Gophers played short-handed. Not to mention broken-handed.
Playing without rebounding whiz and spiritual leader Sherry McCracklin (Achilles) and fellow starter Nikki Hitchens (knee), UNLV missed out on a chance to earn some equity with the NCAA selection committee by losing to Janel McCarville-less No. 14 Minnesota 77-69 Sunday in the WBCA/BTI Classic in Seattle.
McCarville, a preseason first-team All-American, missed the game with a broken hand. But had the Lady Rebels won, by the time they dole out the tournament bids in March few probably would have recalled that she was sitting at the end of the bench with her foot in a cast.
At least that's what Pac-10 dark horse Washington is hoping, after knocking off Minnesota on Monday night after UNLV beat South Carolina.
UNLV had to be encouraged with the Sheena Moore-to-point guard experiment. If Moore, last year's shooting guard, continues to distribute the ball to the bottom of the basket as she did Sunday -- she scored 34 points on 12-of-21 shooting -- the Lady Rebels should be able hang on until everybody is healthy in December.
archive
