Every year basketball teams come to the NCAA tournament like young Rodney Dangerfields, looking for respect. Not Coach Dick Bennett and his upstart Wisconsin-Green Bay basketball squad.
"I was uncomfortable with all the pregame talk of us not getting any respect," said Bennett, following Green Bay's surprising 61-57 win over Cal in the first round of the West Regional. "We get plenty of respect. Probably more than we deserve."That might be stretching the point. After all, the Phoenix produced a sterling 25-4 record two years ago and didn't get an NCAA bid, marking the first time in history that the tournament turned its nose up at a team with five or fewer losses.
The Phoenix, 27-6, gave the NCAA no choice this year, winning an automatic tournament berth with a victory in the Mid-Continent Conference tournament. The Phoenix's win over fifth-seeded, 16th-ranked Cal sent them to today's second round, where they will meet fourth-seeded, 15th-ranked Syracuse (tipoff: 2:35 p.m.).
Todd Bozeman, the Cal coach, delivered a warning to Syracuse. "Just beware," he said. "They (the Phoenix) can shoot, they can pass and they can handle the ball."
Not that Bozeman ever did take the Phoenix lightly. "The minute I found out we were seeded against Wisconsin-Green bay, every person I called said the same thing, `Oh, no,' " he said.
For its part, Syracuse, a 92-78 winner over Hawaii in the first round, does not suffer from respectability questions - the Orangemen sport the seventh best winning percentage in the country. But that success has rarely carried over into the NCAA tournament, where they've checked out after the first weekend (first or second round) 12 times in their last 15 appearances.
The 22-6 Orangemen, the runners-up in the Big East Conference, are led by their all-Big East (first team) backcourt of Lawrence Moten and Adrian Autry, who average 21 and 16 points, respectively, and forward John Wallace, who averages 15 points. Moten has scored 26, 30 and 29 points, respectively, in the last three games.
The Orangemen average 84 points per game, a sharp contrast to Green Bay's 67-point average. The Phoenix shoot well (49.5 percent), particularly center Jeff Nordgaard (59 percent shooting, 15 ppg), but what they do best is play defense. They limited opponents to 37 percent shooting this season. They held Cal to 37 percent shooting, and played a large part in the poor play of superstar Jason Kidd, who missed 13 of 17 shots and committed 6 turnovers.
For Green Bay, a school of 5,000 students, a similar victory today would be another big step toward respectability. If the Phoenix didn't already have it.