Friday, March 31, 2000
Final Four turned Jan. 22
Wisconsin, N. Carolina started runs
BY MIKE DeCOURCY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
INDIANAPOLIS — The afternoon of Jan. 22, 2000, appeared to be much like any other during the course of this college basketball season, but now you can see it was not. This was no ordinary Saturday. This was the day the most unlikely Final Four was born.
When North Carolina was done being humiliated at home by a Florida State team that ranked near the bottom of the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Tar Heels' record stood at 11-8.
Before its game that day against Big Ten rival Minnesota, Wisconsin had posted a mark of 9-8.
Eventually, both teams proved capable of winning the four NCAA Tournament games necessary to earn a trip to Indianapolis, along with more accomplished teams Michigan State and Florida. If the Badgers and Tar Heels had this sort of excellence inside them, how could they lose a combined 26 games in the first place?
“I guess if you were to take an opinion poll on that, they'd say poor coaching,” Wisconsin coach Dick Bennett said. “I think we were playing together and we were trying hard, but it just wasn't there.”
“I liked our team all year,” UNC coach Bill Guthridge said. “We were pretty close, and I'm proud of the way they hung in there. After each defeat, they still came back ready to go.”
In more than six decades of staging these championships,
the NCAA never had one team arrive at the Final Four with 13 defeats. Wisconsin and North Carolina made it two in the same season.
There wasn't anything special about that day in January that sent the Badgers (22-13) toward their NCAA Tournament semifinal game Saturday afternoon against Michigan State (30-7) and the Tar Heels (22-13) toward their evening game against Florida (28-7). But that was the day each team was at its nadir, and eventually the squads would discover there was no direction to travel but up.
From that afternoon forward, Wisconsin compiled a 13-5 record, including wins against Purdue, Indiana, Arizona and LSU. North Carolina went 11-5, beating Maryland, Wake Forest, Stanford and Tennessee along the way.
The Tar Heels struggled with intensity and focus for much of the regular season. Six ACC opponents shot better than 45 percent from the field, whereas none of their four NCAA victims has topped 41 percent. Center Brendan Haywood didn't reach double-figure shots in his last six games before the tournament; he shot at least 10 times in each of the four tournament wins.
Guthridge believes he “might have overscheduled.”
“Our schedule was too tough, and I think we lost some confidence,” he said. But five of the Tar Heels' losses were at home, and five were to teams that did not make the NCAAs.
The Tar Heels' problems did not completely abate until the NCAA Tournament began. After plunging to three games over .500, though, they escaped several circumstances that could have sent them to the NIT.
Maryland visited Chapel Hill five days after Florida State, and the Tar Heels earned their most impressive win of the year. They issued the first home defeat of the season to N.C. State in early February. They recovered from a last-minute deficit to avenge the Florida State defeat.
“We were disappointed in our regular season,” Guthridge said. “I take the blame for that, that I couldn't quite get things going. But I like our team, and I'm happy we hung in there and do have this opportunity.”
If Wisconsin found its offensive rhythm earlier in the season, it might have barged into the Final Four through the front door, rather than sneaking in as a No.8 seed.
The Badgers held such teams as Missouri (55), Texas (43) and Temple (44) to absurdly low scoring totals, but their own attack failed to generate a field goal percentage better than 40 eight times in the first 15 games.
“We were just struggling to score enough points,” Bennett said. “That's always been our problem. Perhaps we were feeling sorry for ourselves.
“I know one thing we were doing is we were trying to please everybody. After we lost to Michigan State, we figured everybody's on our backs now, we better circle these wagons and start pleasing one another. I think we just came together in a way that you have to. The old siege mentality.”
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