Illinois, Louisville on collision course

Friday, Feb. 4, 2005 | 9:55 a.m.

The Great

Air Force

The Falcons won for the 24th consecutive time on their Clune Arena court Monday, against UNLV.

Oklahoma State owns the longest home-court winning streak, at 25, in the nation. Uh oh, though. Air Force's next game at Clune is against Utah on Feb. 19.

The Good

Derrick Low and Robbie Cowgill, Washington State

Low, a guard, had a career-best 13 points in a 70-63 victory over Arizona in Tucson last Saturday. Cowgill, a center, scored a career-high 12 for the Cougars.

Neither was alive on Jan. 30, 1986 -- the last time WSU won in Tucson. It had lost 38 consecutive games to the Wildcats.

The Bad

Oregon

The Ducks went a woeful 4-for-34 from beyond the 3-point arc in a 13-point defeat to Arizona State at home. OK, Oregon fans, that was two Saturdays ago. But didja think we'd forget?

The Ugly

Georgetown

We had been so high on the resurgence of the Hoyas under Junior, John Thompson III. Then they went 15 minutes, 3 seconds without scoring in the first half of a loss to Boston College last Saturday.

During that dry run, G-town went 0-for-14 from the field and committed 12 turnovers. Even more ugly, it only trailed by a 24-12 score at the half.

Everyone in both starting lineups scores at least 10 points a game, both teams are lethal beyond the 3-point arc, one plays tight defense and the other takes care of the ball better than anyone in the nation.

Our national championship game, come April 5 in San Antonio?

Illinois vs. Louisville.

Old-timers will be reminded of the high-wire showdown between top-ranked Houston and No. 2 Louisville in a 1983 national semifinal game in Albuquerque.

Clyde Drexler, the center formerly known as Akeem Olajuwon and Michael Young provided the electricity for the Cougars' "Phi Slama Jama" squad that defeated the Cardinals, 94-81, in one of the NCAA tournament's most exciting games.

PSJ recorded 13 dunks, and a 21-1 second-half run that was filled with sprints and gravity-defying jams secured it for Houston.

Reid Gettys hopped off the Cougars bench to give out four assists. A few years later, he tried sneaking onto the Sigma Chi team at San Diego State.

Bad move, Reid. We let you play until the playoffs, then the frat counsel had to DQ you and your team when we showed it a tape of that '83 semifinal.

Did you really think you could get one by Sigma Phi Epsilon (never to be confused with Phi Slama Jama)?

For Louisville, Milt Wagner and the McCray brothers, Rodney and Scooter, didn't have enough against Houston in '83. Fans of that scintillating game will finally see a similar matchup.

And in the title game, no less.

Illinois (22-0) proved itself to us over the last two weeks, winning at Wisconsin and Michigan State with style.

Illini coach Bruce Weber has even started taking on Vegas to fire up his team for extra motivation.

Playing the Spartans on their own court is tough enough, but Weber told his players that the line Tuesday was an embarrassment to the program. The spread fluctuated around a pick 'em around town.

"A slap in the face," Deron Williams of the Illini told the Chicago Sun-Times. "I don't know what else we have to do to prove we're No. 1. We should be getting more respect ... but that's cool."

Led by senior guard Luther Head's 17-point average, Illinois is 10th in the country at 3-point shooting (40.7 percent) and leads everyone with a nifty assist-to-turnover ratio of 1.8-to-1.

Michigan State coach Tom Izzo also likes the Illini. In '00, former Indiana coach Bobby Knight, after losing to the Spartans, told Izzo that MSU had what it takes to win it all.

Then the Spartans did just that, winning a championship in Indianapolis by beating Florida. Izzo passed the torch to the Illini this week.

"I think they have the ingredients to win a national championship," Izzo told the Chicago Tribune. "(But) I don't want to put that on their backs because there are so many other things on their backs."

If so, none of it has held Illinois down yet.

On Wednesday night Louisville (19-3) got by Cincinnati, which always sports one of the nation's stickiest defenses, and we do not foresee a second-half league slip that has tripped up the Cardinals in recent seasons.

Francisco Garcia, a 6-foot-7 junior guard, leads Louisville with 16.5 points a game.

Like Garcia, Larry O'Bannon and Taquan Dean, the other top scorers on the team, all make more than 38 percent of their 3-point attempts and shoot at least 83.9 percent at the line. Juan Diego Palacios and Ellis Myles combine to grab 16 boards a game.

The Cardinals are fourth in the country in scoring (85.6 points) and ninth in 3-point shooting (41.1 percent), and fourth-year coach Rick Pitino's pressing defense ignites Louisville's fury.

Look for it to expose Wake Forest, Duke and/or North Carolina en route to the last game in St. Louis, too.

It will produce one of the most exciting NCAA finales, and the three-headed monster at guard for Illinois (Williams, Head and Dee Brown) will be too much for another Louisville team involved in a late-season thriller.

Illinois 88, Louisville 85.

Eustachy had hit rock bottom at Iowa State, where he was dismissed after photos of him partying with college kids on the road in the Big 12 hit the Internet. Eustachy gave up the beer and worked on his sobriety last season.

The Eagles, he admitted, hit rock bottom Wednesday in an 11-point home loss to South Florida, which had lost its previous six games. Southern Miss (10-10) fell to 1-7 in the demanding Conference USA.

And since junior center Dwayne Brown left the South Florida game with a knee injury in the first half, Eustachy will have nobody taller than 6-6 at Marquette on Saturday.

Four others have left the program under their own volition, though, because of demanding ways and tactics that Eustachy hasn't tempered.

Jasper "Smooth" Johnson executed the latest departure, last week, and at least one Eagles fan took exception with Eustachy for publicly questioning the "mental toughness" of the team's most versatile player.

"I look forward to winning games and enjoying a high level of basketball, but not at the expense of the few kids who have given their best while attending this university," Hattiesburg, Miss., resident Steve Willis wrote in a letter to the Hattiesburg American.

"It will be interesting next season to see all these new scholarship players with so much mental toughness. I hope it's not the coaches who are lacking mental toughness."

Then he said he's never seen a team with as many "good athletes" as the Huskies. "It's rare," Bennett said, "really rare."

The one that comes closest, according to Bennett, was "the Illinois team of the late 1980s" that had Ken "Snake" Norman, Marcus Liberty and Kendall Gill.

Those three, however, never played on the same Illini squad.

In 1986-87, Norman's last season and Gill's first, third-seeded Illinois was upset by 14th-seeded Austin Peay in the first round of the NCAAs.

From '87-88 through '89-90, Gill and Liberty were teammates. With Nick Anderson, they guided the Illini to the Final Four in Seattle in 1989, when Michigan beat them, 83-81, before winning a national title against Seton Hall.

On the other side of the bracket that year, UNLV lost a spot in the Final Four by losing to the Hall, 84-61, in the West Regional final in Denver.

In this week's Ratings Percentage Index, two Missouri Valley programs (No. 15 Southern Illinois and No. 19 Wichita State) and one from the American East (Vermont, 20th) were ranked higher than the top Mountain West team.

Utah checked in at No. 22. That UNLV is the next-best Mountain West program, at No. 103, illustrates how far the league has plummeted.

By the time the Rebels enter the RPI picture, the Colonial Athletic Association, and the Ivy, Patriot and Horizon leagues -- all mid-majors -- each has multiple teams on the big board.