Around College Basketball: Not exactly glory days

NCAA Basketball Betting Lines

02/20/2009 - Philadelphia, PA (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - This is a column for all of us beleaguered college basketball fans, who have watched our favorite teams suffer through miserable seasons.

For those of us who have absolutely no hope of anything more than first-round exits in conference tournaments. For those of us who think March Madness is defined as the act of wondering why you are wasting time watching such dreadful basketball.

My alma mater, Fresno State, has had its share of exciting moments through the years. I fondly remember the Boyd Grant era of the late 1970s and on into the 1980s, when this dynamic though down-to-earth coach turned a down-on-its luck program into a winner.

We went from a 7-20 record in 1976-77 to 21-6 in 1977-78 by leading the nation in defense, and were off and running toward a decade of success that included being ranked in the top 10 nationally and reaching the Sweet 16 before losing to Patrick Ewing at Georgetown in 1982. It included a magical run to an NIT title in 1983, beating Wake Forest and DePaul at Madison Square Garden, at a time where the NIT still meant something.

We witnessed three NCAA appearances and a pair of NIT trips in five years, and sent players such as Rod Higgins, Ron Anderson, Bernard Thompson and Pete Verhoeven to the NBA. There were wins over teams like Houston, with Akeem Olajuwon, and UNLV.

Selland Arena, the local municipal facility in downtown Fresno, was jam-packed nearly every night, and was one of the loudest basketball arenas in America.

Your hair would stand on end from the electricity in the air, and you didn't even bother to try having a conversation with the person sitting next to you for most of the game. The decibel levels exceeded some of the rock concerts I watched in the same venue.

There was a renaissance under one of our favorite alums, Jerry Tarkanian, in the late 1990s and a couple of more trips to the NCAAs with players like Chris Herren, Rafer Alston, Courtney Alexander, Tito Maddux and Melvin Ely.

Tarkanian and some of his players may have been lightning rods for controversy off the court, but on it, they generated enough excitement to spark the building of an on-campus arena, the sparkling 15,596-seat Save Mart Center.

This isn't one of those glory years.

The Bulldogs were playing on national television on Thursday night, a fact that I only discovered while watching one of my new hometown teams, Villanova, beat Rutgers, 82-72. That tells you what kind of a year it's been for your team, when you find out they have a game on national TV on accident.

That's what happens when your club is in last place in the Western Athletic Conference and has a 10-17 record. With at least six games remaining, Fresno State is poised to record the most losses in school history. And that is for a program that started playing basketball in 1921.

While I was watching from my couch in Hatboro, PA, I conversed by cellular phone with my best friend and fellow basketball agonizer, Jim, who was tuned in from a snow-bound cabin in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

For over two hours, we watched our alma mater play just well enough to give us hope of a victory, though the obvious weaknesses of blocking out on defensive rebounds, poor free-throw shooting, brutal defensive lapses and turnovers left us with the bleak realization that a loss was inevitable.

Even against an almost equally bad Hawaii club, we knew this collection of underclassmen and transfers wasn't up to the task. They left us hanging until the final minute before losing, 73-69.

The Kool-Aid being fed the alumni is that this young team is gaining valuable experience that will reap dividends in the next couple of years. But you don't have to be a seasoned basketball fan to know that this squad is a long way from the Grant and Tarkanian days.

I know there are fans at other schools with proud traditions like San Francisco (9-17), Massachusetts (9-15), Georgia (10-16), Georgia Tech (10-15), Virginia (9-13), DePaul (8-18), Valparaiso (7-20), Loyola Marymount (2-25), Oregon (6-20) and Indiana (7-20) who are in as much pain as I am this season.

For all of them, and my alma mater as well, we can only hope that in the future, March Madness will see such teams return to their glory days.