Drake-Butler game good for NCAA
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By Eric Page | Thursday, February 28, 2008 |
INDIANAPOLIS — After a week in which Kelvin Sampson’s exit at Indiana exposed all that is ugly and corrupt in college basketball, the NCAA so needed a game like this.
No, not that game. Though Saturday’s 1 vs. 2 Tennessee-Memphis matchup did live up to the hype, it’s a bit of a reach to paint John Calipari and Bruce Pearl as the poster boys for NCAA compliance and virtue.
No. If you wanted purity of players, coaches and game Saturday, you needn’t have looked further than historic Hinkle Fieldhouse, where No. 16 Drake upset No. 8 Butler in the headliner of the weekend’s “BracketBuster” matchups.
It was college basketball the way it was meant to be played.
No scuffling in the tunnel before warm-ups, as there was in Memphis. No trumped-up behind-the-scenes footage from ESPN, as Pearl seems more than happy to oblige.
Rest assured, no recruiting violations were committed while assembling these squads.
The leading scorer in the game — Drake sophomore Josh Young, who scored 25 points and made three clinching free throws with 20 seconds to play — had 36 Division I scholarship offers coming out of high school, but he chose Drake for the academics.
Both Drake and Butler have stringent admission requirements, and both rosters are peppered with players who’ve been recognized as scholar athletes or academic All-Americans. They have put the “student” back in student-athlete.
“It’s a heck of a storyline to be able to have these two teams play,” said Drake coach Keno Davis, who is 24-3 in his first season after taking over for his father, Dr. Tom.
“It shows one thing, that you can have high academic standards and compete at a high Division I basketball level, that (having high academic standards) doesn’t mean you can’t do it.”
What was evident Saturday is that they can do it — both of them.
If Tennessee-Memphis was the heavyweight championship fight Saturday, Drake-Butler was the ideal welterweight undercard.
They went toe to toe and punch for punch and finished with a flurry.
Young would score at one end. Butler’s A.J. Graves would answer on the other.
When Drake’s Leonard Houston finished a nifty alley-oop midway through the second half, Butler immediately countered with a lob of its own.
It took a deep Klayton Korver 3-pointer to finally put Butler on the ropes with 5 minutes to play, and Young’s free throws provided the knockout.
It was a classic, for both quality of play and chaos of atmosphere, the kind of game that made even the most non-biased of observers want to stand up and cheer.
Yes, the game was played in a vacuum of idealism and in a house of nostalgia — Hinkle Fieldhouse, where 54 years ago, a kid named Bobby Plump hit a last-second shot to give tiny Milan High School the Indiana state championship, the shot that inspired the 1986 classic “Hoosiers.“
Plump — Jimmy Chitwood in the movie — went on to star at Butler, and he sat courtside Saturday night.
“It was a great game,” he said. “The kids played hard all the way through. Really, just a great, great game with two great teams.“
Is Drake for real, though?
The question had to be asked given the lack of national respect for the Bulldogs because of a perceivably soft nonconference schedule and a lack of a signature win.
“Oh, yeah,” Plump said, “they’re for real.“
“You hear a lot about signature wins,” Davis said. “This is definitely one you could put on the resume as something (the NCAA Tournament selection committee) will have to take a hard look at.“
So, on the night No. 1 was decided, another argument was laid to rest.
These ’Dogs are for real, both Drake and Butler.
And college basketball is so much better for it.
Eric Page can be contacted at (563) 383-2277 or epage@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.
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