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Lucas: As Ryan well knows, NCAA tournament all about the matchups

Mike Lucas  —  3/18/2008 5:40 pm

During a commercial break Monday night on his state-wide radio show, University of Wisconsin men's basketball coach Bo Ryan recounted some of his earliest memories of the NCAA tournament, dating to the Bill Russell era at San Francisco in the mid-'50s and Chicago-Loyola's upset of Cincinnati in the 1963 championship game. The historical significance that season was the fact that Loyola coach George Ireland had no reservations about putting five black players on the floor at the same time, including four starters, when doing such a thing was considered taboo in a racially segregated America. Ryan also remembered watching Texas Western stun Kentucky in the 1966 title game, another watershed moment because the Miners fielded an all-black starting lineup.

Such were the imprints on his formative years.

Coming out of the radio break, Ryan revisited the 1976 Final Four at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, the first that he ever attended. Indiana capped an unbeaten season by crushing Michigan in a championship mismatch. There was another bookmark to that memory. "I had just taken the job here," Ryan said of being hired on Bill Cofield's staff at Wisconsin. "I signed my first contract on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 1976." When pressed on the dollar amount, he said "$16,000. I was making $11,800 at Sun Valley High School (Aston, Pa.). I got a raise and I thought I had it made until I saw the price of housing in Madison. I didn't have a penny to put down on a house but being in the Army for two years I bought the yellow house on Tokay and Segoe for $42,000 without a penny down."

Ryan and his dad, Butch, have been to every Final Four since 1976. Even though he won four national championships at UW-Platteville, does Bo Ryan ever think about or obsess over taking a team to the Final Four? "I don't lose sleep over it at night," he said, "because I know a lot of good coaches who have put in a lot more time than I have and not had a chance to do that. And that's not how I define my career as a teacher and coach."

. . .

In deference to the season -- the infatuating brackets and betting season -- Wisconsin has been listed as an 11-point favorite to beat Cal State Fullerton in Thursday night's first-round game of the NCAA tournament in Omaha, Neb. In all probability, though, the Badgers, despite being a higher seed, would be an underdog against Southern Cal in the second round assuming the No. 6-seeded Trojans get past No. 11 seed Kansas State. And that was the assumption that ESPN's college basketball analyst Doug Gottlieb was making by phone Monday.

"I think they got a bad draw," Gottlieb said of the Badgers. "The way Wisconsin beats you is they take you out of your style and make you play theirs. USC can win in a grinder and they have guys who can jump and make shots ... what Bo's teams feast on are teams like Texas. Wisconsin is a bad matchup for them (the Longhorns). You let them get up and down and play free and easy, they're going to crush you because they're so skilled. But you put them in a half court and grind with them you can beat them -- which is funny because that's the way Rick (Barnes, the Texas coach) used to play. So much of basketball is not necessarily about who's better, it's about matchups and also making shots."

Gottlieb was raised about 10 minutes from Cal State Fullerton. "It's a totally underfunded (basketball program)," cited Gottlieb, whose dad, Bob Gottlieb, the former UW-Milwaukee coach, has a working relationship with the Titans coaching staff, in particular assistant Jason Levy. "Bob Burton has never complained," Gottlieb said of Fullerton's head coach. "He's the real deal and he has done a great job there. But it's a commuter school and there's not a ton of campus life. Nor are there a ton of players coming out of North Orange County. That's why they have to take junior college kids and kids who are from Los Angeles or San Diego and want to transfer closer to home."

The last time Cal State Fullerton played in the NCAA tournament, there were 32 teams and no shot clock, 3-point basket or ESPN. The campus enrollment was 22,500 compared to over 37,000 today (only UCLA has a larger enrollment in the state). And the median price of a single-family home in Orange County was about $75,000 compared to more than $500,000 today.

The numbers and comparisons were supplied by the Cal State Fullerton athletic media relations office, which connected the dots between this season's team and the 1978 team, marking the first and only other time the Titans played in the NCAAs.

The parallels? Both teams had eight losses during the regular season. Both were a No. 3 seed in their conference tournaments. Both had co-players of the year. Both coaches were in their fifth year at the school. Both used six-man rotations. For the record, the '78 team (dubbed "Cal State Who?") won its first two games in the tournament before bowing out to Arkansas. Not only is the school celebrating that 30-year "Big Dance" anniversary but the first classes were held on campus 50 years ago. The Fullerton campus, incidentally, is 8 miles due north of Disneyland and 25 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles.

Although the athletic teams carry the nickname of Titans -- which beat out Aardvarks in a student vote -- the school mascot is an elephant resulting from the first intercollegiate elephant race that took place on campus in 1962. Wisconsin's infamous Binky the All-Bran elephant which spotted up the Camp Randall Stadium rug during an unscheduled halftime potty break during the late '80s (read: Morton Era) was not entered.

Nonetheless, the elephant connection to Cal State Fullerton should make the Titans feel more comfortable playing a "slow-footed" and "methodical" Big Ten rep, if you are to believe the pundits and the general perception of the league and the league champion Badgers. Not that Ryan will lose any sleep over the slights, perceived or otherwise. "It's still about that 40 minutes and what we're going to do with that team," he said, underlining Gottlieb's point. It's all about the matchups.

Mike Lucas  —  3/18/2008 5:40 pm