Running 2022-23 NCAA Basketball Thread

Drew has a LOT of enemies. So did his Dad. It's not even that they cheated, many coaches do, it's the aw-shucks public image they cultivate, deemed by many to be bullshit of the highest order.

 

Which means 19 guys in the NBA scored more points per game. And I bet most of those 19 guys played on college teams with better records than LSU, which went to the NIT once in Maravich's career. This was also in the 60's when basktball only mattered in the SEC at Kentucky and Tennessee.

Maravich had a lot of talent but if he had played for any other half way decent program I think he would have shot less and played more defense.

 

I believe that about Homer. His AD at Valpo was one of the biggest idiots I've ever had the mispleasure to be around.

One time, our athletic department tried to tell us get off the football field by turning the sprinklers on us the moment we got down to field level after the game hit zeros. Scared the crap out of one kid in our rank who didn't scare easily, scared and upset plenty of other people around me in the block, wet some woodwind key pads and soaked a bunch of uniforms. Athletics offered to pay for a round of dry cleaning for everyone in the band, and paid for keys to be rep added that got wet because they knew they had screwed up. Then this clown who later ended up as the AD at Valpo went to Reynolds Coliseum a few days later where we went to record some stuff for an album in what was supposed to be an apology. He was thisclose to sincerity ... and I responded in kind by doing chin-ups on the rim while he spewed his verbal sewage.

He glared at me, and I looked back at him and made clear he wasn't deterring me because I knew he was FOS (did no damage to the rim – not the biggest guy on Earth – but his verbal crap was insufferable and apology was astoundingly hollow). And I can completely see him cuddling up to a guy like Homer Drew.

Thing is, the media sings Scott Drew's praises. Is he disingenuous? A complete phony?

 

You know how they say never be the coach that follows the program legend? Turns out being the coach who follows the guy who hushed up a murder buys you a lot of slack.

More seriously, I hear Scott Drew praised as a great on-court coach, but I haven’t really heard any of the syrupy “leader of men” pablum that used to be handed out liberally to the previous generation of national championship coaches.

 

IDK, as a kid of the Maravich generation the stuff he did was unbelievable. Yeah, he shot a lot. But he was also a great, great passer and loved to share the ball. And by the time he was a senior a hapless LSU program was winning and made the NIT, which was a big deal in the era of the 24-team NCAA tournament.

This was also in the 60's when basketball only mattered in the SEC at Kentucky and Tennessee.

Probably true. But Maravich is one of the big reasons that began to change. Real integration certainly helped as well, and Maravich's popularizing basketball in the deep South certainly pushed that along at least a little I'd think.

I can't underestimate how he blew the socks off of people at the time. No one had seen anything like him before. He was Elvis in sneakers.

Detroit can't win even with Davis. Who, by all accounts, is a super human being.

 

It mattered at Vanderbilt, which expanded the Memorial Gymnasium four times that decade. It mattered at Mississippi State, which rattled off a string of SEC titles at the beginning of the decade and finally got so popular they could tell Ross Barnett and the WCC to pound sand.

 

Auburn only had one losing season from 1959-60 through 1969-70.

 

A friend of mine - a guy I 100 percent trust - worked closely with Drew for several years, and said the aw-shucks image he projects is exactly who he is, and told me several stories to back up that claim.

 

As for 19 other NBA guys scoring more than Maravich, how many of them played in the 3 point shot era? Pete hit lots of those that were only worth two points in his stat line.

Pick out a "How good was Maravich?" video and look at his passes. The guy had an amazing handle as well as shooting. Remember too that his knees got torn up in the "fix it with a scalpel" era before scoping knees to fix them became common. Sure he got fed the ball at LSU. So did Wilt. When you have a talent like that on your team he gets the ball.

 

If you took over a situation at BAYLOR, a wasteland regardless that had four NCAA Tournament appearances, with three of them coming between 1946-50, in its history before his arrival, and in his last 14 seasons (removing COVID 2020) has 10 NCAA Tournament appearances, a national title, two other Elite Eights, two other Sweet 16s, and NIT title, your praises should be sung

 

I'm pretty sure plenty of guys could put up the numbers he did, if you told them they could shoot close to 40 times a game. I think the fact that most teams have coaches that wouldn't ever allow that shit kind of limits how many other test cases we can have compared to him, though. Like the immortal Kevin Bradshaw was given the green light to fire up 29.9 FGA a game in 1990-91, and probably played in excess of 33.9 MPG (his mark as a junior), and he averaged 37.6 PPG. Pete *averaged* eight more shots than that a game per year. It's cool that Pete could pass the rock every so often, but his style of play clearly wasn't conducive to winning basketball - they won a bit his senior year despite his dad devoting the offense to him, not because of it.

 

Probably not.

OTOH, I'd watch an entire season of Maravich's LSU teams over the coach-controlled, offense-choking, boring dreck that's on ESPN seven days of the week these days. They never averaged less than 88 points a game when he played. The game flowed, great passing, shooting on the run, players out on the break all game. He was appointment TV but unfortunately was never on TV much nationally.

He was perfect for that era and the Hank Iba's hated him because he dictated the flow of the game, not the coach.

Maravich never played on a losing team at LSU. His freshman year (ineligible for varsity), they were 3-23, 1-17. His sophomore year they improved to 14-12, 8-10. His senior year they were 22-10, 13-5, and certainly would have made the NCAA tournament in its current format.

LSU has won more than 13 SEC games (Pete's high-water mark) only five times in the 53 seasons since he left.