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One-finger salute

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31-27
Utah State gave us a fright, but we came out all right. You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, he brought us a great escape. The Aggies thought they’d get a treat, but it was all a trick and a defeat. OK, we’ll stop now, promise.

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Fresno State remix of “I Gotta Feeling” by Y101
Among the lyrics: “Tonight’s gonna be the ‘Dogs’ night. Tonight’s gonna be a Bulldogs night. Fresno State, mazel tov. Jump out that sofa, meet me off Shaw.”
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

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Time change
Yesterday was the one day a year you got to sleep an extra hour and it was all okay because of the “time change.”

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Time change
However, if you arrive to class late today you will look like the most pathetic waste of human skin that ever lived. And it will be true.

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Basketball season
The first scrimmage is this Wednesday. Now is your last chance to dream of a magical season that won’t involve any embarrassing losses, players getting arrested or losing in the first round of the WAC tournament to Something State. Dream now, you’ve only got 48 hours left!

Hoops schedules set for ’09-10

Both basketball teams set for 2009-10 runs

The Fresno State men’s and women’s basketball teams schedules have been released and each team will face tough competition as they try to win Western Athletic Conference (WAC) Titles.

On the men’s side, the team’s schedule has the Bulldogs playing games against old WAC foes, a Pac-10 up-and-comer, and a return to Sellend Arena for a game against a longtime rival.

The women’s team has a schedule that starts the season on a three-game road trip. They play against teams that are perennial powerhouses and 12 teams that finished inside the Top 100 in the RPI last season.

The Fresno State women’s basketball team hopes that a tough non-conference schedule will help propel them to the NCAA Tournament for the third-straight year.

Eight different conferences make appearances on the ’Dogs’ schedule. They open with three-straight road games against UC Santa Barbara, USC, and TCU.

UC Santa Barbara made the NCAA Tournament last year. They also will travel to West Virginia to play a Mountaineer team that made the Women’s National Invitational Tournament (WNIT) in 2009.

The biggest game of the season will take place on Dec. 30 when the Stanford Cardinal come to the Save Mart Center. Stanford has made the Final Four of the NCAA Tournament the past two seasons.

Head Coach Adrian Wiggins has not shied away from playing big competition throughout his career.

“We have a great schedule that will test us early,” Wiggins said in a press release. “This is a schedule that will challenge us as we prepare to defend our WAC Championship. We want to grow and play the kind of competition that will give us a chance to get better. This year’s schedule does just that.”

In all, the Bulldogs will play 12 teams that made the postseason last year.

The men’s team has a rigorous schedule as well. They will open their season at home against San Francisco State before going on the road for two games as part of the West Coast Classic, hosted by Santa Clara University. In the Classic they have away games at Northern Arizona and Seattle University. They then return home for a game against San Diego State and go on the road to Santa Clara.

The last game of the West Coast Classic has the ’Dogs returning to Sellend Arena as they host the Pacific Tigers.

It will be the 152nd meeting between the two teams. The game, which is being played at Sellend Area due to a scheduling conflict, will be a chance for the Bulldog faithful to reminisce on good times.

Head coach Steve Cleveland says the game will bring back a lot of memories for him as well.

“I played there as a freshman at Fresno State, coached there when I was at Clovis west and have watched games as a fan at Sellend Arena. It will be a very nostalgic night,” Cleveland said.

Also on the Bulldogs schedule are games with BYU, Oregon State, Montana, San Diego, Colorado St, UC Davis, Cal State Bakersfield, and Pepperdine. The BYU game will be the first time that coach Cleveland will play against his former team.

“BYU is the favorite to win the Mountain West and I will have different emotions, but I am committed to Fresno State and confident with our young players,” said Cleveland
Possibly taking a play from head coach Pat Hill’s football scheduling playbook, Cleveland is bulding a schedule that will be noticed outside of the Valley,
The Bulldogs hope that this will prepare them for the rigors of the WAC season, which begins Jan. 1 against Boise State.

“We have a balanced schedule. Wins versus those type of teams can create a postseason run,” Cleveland said

Sports photos of the year

Men’s basketball finally drops 611 APR score

After five years of scholarship restrictions and sanctions that left the once successful program crippled, the men’s basketball team is finally off the snide.

For the past five seasons, basketball team has been under sanctions from the NCAA because of poor Academic Progress Rate (APR) scores. The APR scores measure the athletic department’s academic success and percent of student’s graduating.

The scores are broken down into a tangible five-year average and if a particular program has a low graduation rate and scores poorly, the sport will be penalized by the NCAA in scholarship numbers.

The men’s basketball program has been under NCAA sanctions for a string of poor APR scores dating back to former head coach Ray Lopes. The APR scores are measured on a scale to 1000 and in Lopes’ first season with university, his team scored a 611. That score is drastically lower than the 925 mark the NCAA can begin to penalize programs for.

The 611 score, which was Lopes’ first season in 2005, is finally off the five-year APR average for the men’s basketball team. With the 611 off the five-year average for Cleveland’s team, the program scored a 891 in the most recent release of scores.

Even though the 891 score does not meet the NCAA’s standard 925 mark, the progress shown for the past five seasons has kept the Bulldogs from another season of penalty. The men’s basketball team will have the maximum possible number of scholarships in 2009,10 – 13.

Check back next week with The Collegian for more in-depth coverage of the 2009 APR scores.

New APR scores

Men’s sports

• Baseball, 924
• Men’s basketball, 891
• Men’s cross country, 950
• Football, 948
• Men’s golf, 925
• Men’s tennis, 912
• Men’s outdoor track, 926

Women’s sports

• Women’s basketball, 944
• Women’s cross country, 951
• Women’s golf, 986
• Soccer, 977
• Softball, 928
• Women’s tennis, 976
• Women’s indoor track, 937
• Women’s outdoor track, 935
• Volleyball, 962

Remembering the ‘Magic’ of Johnson vs. Bird

1979 NCAA Title game still the highest rated of all time

Even now, 30 years later, he still hears it every time he walks into a room.

“This is Terry Donnelly, everyone: The guy who played with Earvin (Magic) Johnson.”

Won an NCAA championship. Beat Larry Bird. Played in the highest-rated title game in history.

It is how Terry Donnelly has come to be known. It followed him after he left Michigan State , first to Houston, then to Dallas , as a stockbroker and a co-owner of his father’s paper processing company.

“It’s opened a lot of doors for me,” said Donnelly, who lives in a suburb north of Dallas. “In business relationships. In social relationships. All because of him.”

He, of course, turned out to be one of the best basketball players ever, a 6-foot-9-inch point guard with a smile the size of Saturn and eyes in the back of his head. Johnson won an NBA championship as a rookie, teamed with Bird to save pro basketball, made unselfishness cool.

But before all that, Magic Johnson was one of the guys in East Lansing, cutting up on the back of the bus, playing chess, using his unique talents to blend in with Donnelly and Greg Kelser and Mike Brkovich and Jay Vincent and all the rest of the team that won the school’s first, and most celebrated, basketball championship three decades ago.

The title game, pitting the 25-6 Spartans against Larry Bird’s No. 1-ranked Indiana State Sycamores, has grown in stature since the two legends went at each other in Salt Lake City. The more fame each achieved after college, the more titanic their clash came to be remembered.

Of course, Donnelly had no idea he was taking part in such an outsized cultural event. No one did. Not even Johnson. Not even his coach.

“Did we realize the importance of the game” at the time? asks Jud Heathcote, who coached the Spartans then. “Of course we didn’t.”

No NCAA championship game had ever drawn a larger audience , nor has one since. Some 400 media members covered it, nearly double the amount from the previous year. Yet in those days the Final Four wasn’t the spectacle it is now , it wasn’t even part of the sporting lexicon. In fact, many fans had never seen either guy play, even on television , after all, this was before cable and ESPN.

When basketball historians say this title bout changed college basketball, they are largely talking about the evolution of the tournament. After Magic and Bird, it became a happening, it became . . .. March Madness. After Magic and Bird, dominant players were judged not just by their obvious skills but also by how much better they made those around them.

Johnson, said Donnelly, “made guys like me much better than they would have otherwise been.”

This is why, all these years later, he still doesn’t mind being introduced as a small part of someone else’s titanic clash, a role player backing up a Hall of Famer. Besides, Johnson never made anyone on the team feel that way.

“He got the team up,” remembered shooting guard Brkovich, who lives in Windsor now and works in the real estate business. “And nobody ever practiced harder than Earvin.”

It was a team defined by Johnson’s exuberance, his constant encouragement and by Heathcote’s griping , “That was a TERRIBLE shot, Earvin!”

“Jud wasn’t always easy to play for,” Donnelly said. “In practice, he would find one or two guys to focus on , and that is a nice word, focus , and you’d walk out of that gym not wanting to come back.”

You had to stick around long enough, Donnelly said, “to understand Jud.”

“We used to say a prayer before each game,” Kelser recalled at a reunion at the Breslin Center in February. “Never prayed for a victory, just to play to our potential. We felt like that would be good enough.”

By Shawn Windsor / McClatchy Tribune

Now the NCAA Tourney begins

In my small opinion …

The NCAA Tournament is over, and the National Championship Tournament is about to begin.

They are two different things.

The misunderstanding about the NCAA Tournament is that it is for the 65 best teams in college basketball. It is not.

The NCAA Tournament is designed to make all member institutions, no matter how big or small, feel as if they are all part of the system.

That’s what last weekend was about. It was the weekend for dreamers, when schools are made to feel as if they are welcome at the Big Dance.

As for the competition, it is a time when a surprise team from a mid-major conference can get some name recognition and enjoy a moment in the spotlight by knocking off a recognized name from one of the power conferences.

Last week, it was Siena knocking off Ohio State, Cleveland State taking out Wake Forest and Western Kentucky beating Illinois.

But the real purpose of the NCAA Tournament is to cull the field for the National Championship Tournament.

It’s the time when the clock strikes midnight and Cinderella leaves the ball; when the frauds from power conferences with nothing more than brand recognition are dismissed.

By the time we get to the Sweet 16, the suckers all have been eliminated and the National Championship Tournament is composed solely of legitimate contenders.

The only double-digit seed to make it to the Sweet 16 is 12th-seed Arizona, a perennial Pac-10 power with as much talent as almost anyone.

After that, the lowest seed is Big Ten Tournament champion Purdue, a No. 5.

The only schools from so-called non-power conferences are No. 4 seeds Xavier of the Atlantic 10, Gonzaga, of the West Coast Conference and No. 2 Memphis, of Conference USA, possibly the best team in the country.

But those have been Top 25 programs for most of the season.

As much as people like to question the NCAA Selection Committee, 14 of the top 16 seeds advanced to the second weekend.

And that is usually the way it always works out.

There are exceptions, but a mid-major that earns its way to the Sweet 16 generally started as a high seed that had already proved its mettle throughout the season.

The NCAA Tournament is for everyone. The National Championship Tournament is reserved for the 16 best teams.

One is done. The other is about to begin.

In my small opinion …

It’s diminishing returns for women’s basketball when Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma or Tennessee’s Pat Summitt assembles a squad as superior as this year’s UConn.

Certainly, if you’re an alum or fan of UConn, it’s nice to have an undefeated team that is light-years better than everyone else, but for the rest of us it’s a waste of time.

There is no reason to watch this year’s women’s NCAAs when the other 63 teams are just playing for the right to be cannon fodder for Connecticut (34-0) on April 7 in St. Louis.

There is more talent than ever in women’s basketball, but it’s still a two-program fight at the top, with Connecticut and Tennessee alternating turns as Queen of the Mountain.

Since UConn won its first NCAA title in 1995, the Huskies and Lady Vols have combined for 10 of the past 14 titles, with each winning five.

When Connecticut or Tennessee puts together one of its uber-teams, the only thing capable of derailing them is if the other is just as good. It’s a down year for the Lady Vols, a No. 5 seed who lost to No. 12 Ball State in the first round Sunday night.

That’s bad for women’s basketball.

By John Smallwood / McClatchy Tribune

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