2003 YABA Tournament in the books

By By Stan Torgerson / sports columnist
March 31, 2003
Three number ones getting knocked off in the NCAA Tournament's round of eight should come as no real surprise. In college basketball, as we know it today, there are no fail-safe locks. Sooner or later someone comes along who holds a key. Marquette, Kansas and Syracuse were those someones this past weekend.
The game has changed and it takes a gathering of the best such as this national championship tournament to understand how much. Once it belonged to the thinking man. Today it is a game of quick and almost automatic response. Today's players are so much more athletic, so quick, so strong, so big. You no longer can just outsmart the other guy. You have to out athleticize him.
We talk so much about the changes in football, about how the 300-pound linemen who can run have changed the game. We glory in 240-pound running backs who are not only swift but powerful enough to muscle over others of their own size or bigger. We expect our quarterbacks to be so highly skilled they can see an entire field with a glance and in a split second make their decision of what to do and how to do it.
Those same skills of size, speed and instant response have come to basketball as well. Kids are growing bigger, and bigger means both taller and heavier. Players who formerly during the off season just messed around shooting hoops on playgrounds are now in the weight room, side by side with their fellow athletes from the football, baseball, track, golf and tennis teams.
If the kids from Ole Miss are doing it then the kids from Mississippi State had better be doing the same. If Alabama's players are improving by pumping iron, the Rebels and the Dogs who are going to push and bump with them under the basket are going to get whipped if they are unable to give as much as they get and they know it.
They are also not putting in as much time practicing layups and short jumpers. Today the fun side of practice is getting behind the three point line and playing bombs away.
No where is there a better illustration of the changes in the game of basketball than the statistics on assists. Look at the record book. You do remember the good old days, do you not, "BSC", before the shot clock? The point guard would walk the ball down the court, there would be three or four of what now seems like slow motion passes, then he would feed it to someone who had managed to get open inside and the result would be a basket.
That was then. Now is now. The SEC Media Guide lists the top 21 assist performances in a game. Every single one of them came before 1998. In other words, no player has had as many as 15 assists in a game over the last five years. As a matter of fact, the best one game performances in history were by Bill Hann of Tennessee and Kenny Higgs of LSU, each with 19. Hann did it in 1968. Higgs in 1977.
The season record is held by Sean Tuohy of Ole Miss who had 260 of them in 1980, over 20 years ago. The Rebels played 30 games that year so Tuohy averaged a bit more than eight assists per game. When State's Derrick Zimmerman led the league in 2002 with 210, he was 50 assists behind Tuohy and 210 was only 14th best on the all time list.
Tuohy, the slow, short, white kid from New Orleans who couldn't shoot was a star in his day because of his skill feeding the ball to someone else. I'm not certain he could even be a starter today.
The NCAA Tournament record for assists in a championship game was set by Rumeal Robinson of Michigan with 11 back in 1989. The record in a semi-final game is held by Mark Wade of UNLV. He did it in 1987.
Care to bet on whether or not someone will break that mark this year in this era of bring it down, shoot from the boondocks and run back the other way. Not likely.
This weekend the conclusion of the NCAA event will come again. The fortunes of the SEC, like the game itself, have changed. For the third consecutive year, and the fourth in the last five, our league will not have an entry in the Final Four for the national championship.
From 1993 through 1998 we had at least one for whom to root every year. Since then only Florida in 2000 made the Final Four from the SEC.
If Kentucky had come through, we would have been in New Orleans next weekend. Since they didn't, we will be at our TV set instead. This way is cheaper, but not nearly as much fun.
Oh well. Wait til next year.