By DAVID JONES
Florida Today

GAINESVILLE, Fla. - During his senior season of college basketball in 1986-87, Billy Donovan averaged 20.6 points a game to help lead Providence College to the Final Four.

If Donovan, currently in his seventh season as the head coach at Florida, were coaching himself today, he wouldn't even dream of allowing himself to score that much.

In the era since Donovan put away the sneakers and picked up the clipboard, the college game has changed drastically. The Southeastern Conference has had just one player average more than 20 points in the last six years - Dan Langhi of Vanderbilt, who put up 22.1 a game in 1999-2000.

And it doesn't look like the days of the mad bombers are coming back any time soon. Six-foot-7 forward Ronald Dupree of LSU averaged 17.3 to lead the league two years ago. Georgia swingman Jarvis Hayes averaged an SEC-best 18.6 last season.

"I think it's very, very difficult to have a team that great that has just one go-to guy and no one else is very good," Donovan said. "You've got to have it spread around. I think if you look at the good teams across the country that are all rated very high, there are a couple of guys in there that can score on any given night and go for 25. But are they going to average 20-25? No.

"My thing has always been to have four to six players on your team in double figure scoring. Then you've got balance."

At major college powers, the changes in the game have simply demanded the Donovans of the world change their styles. Today, defense is stressed more than ever. The days of the star gunner are long gone.

With it, the caliber of athlete has also changed. In the SEC, most teams have at least a handful of players with potential NBA-caliber skills. The margin of talent is very minimal in many games. That means points don't come easy and the little things - like a steal on defense or a big rebound at the buzzer - can mean the difference between victory or defeat.

Then there's the coaching. In the early '90s, pressure defense and shutting down an opponent's top gun were stressed more than ever in the SEC. Today, teams focus every game on stopping star players with special strategies.

"I remember one of my last years at Kentucky, we were playing against Tennessee with Allan Houston," said Donovan, a former Wildcats assistant. "Allan Houston was averaging like 26-27 points a game in the SEC. His senior year in the SEC Tournament, with like 30 seconds to go in the game, he hadn't scored a basket because every time he got it, we just trapped him and we forced other people to score."

In an era when so many teams have so many good athletes, one-dimensional teams simply can't win. With various defenses being coached all over the country, big scorers nowadays can't come down the floor and bomb away.

It won't work anymore.

"It's too tough," Donovan said. "I think defenses have become so advanced that if you are a one-dimensional team and you've got one guy that's doing all your scoring, you can shut them out."

No more Pistols

Remember Pistol Pete Maravich? From 1968-70, the LSU guard averaged 43.8, 44.2 and 44.5 points a game - the latter an NCAA record.

And he wasn't alone.

In 1971, Johnny Neumann of Mississippi averaged 40.1. Even as recently as 1989, LSU's Chris Jackson led the SEC in scoring with a 30.2 average. In between Maravich and Jackson, the conference scoring leader almost annually at least flirted with a 30-point average for much of the season.

But there's another reason the Maravichs and the Neumanns aren't coming back anytime soon.

"There's too much talent. Teams have got too much talent to get an individual who's going to go off like that, where you have everybody else standing around," ESPN analyst Dick Vitale said. "I think we'll have a guy average 20 again, but we're not going to have a guy average 40. That's just not going to happen, not at that conference level."

Of the top 19 individual scoring games in SEC history, the most recent was 1971. Nine of the top 10 players in career scoring averages finished their careers by 1988. The top 10 individual scoring averages in a single season were all accomplished before 1990.

Today, coaches look less at points and more at overall production from a player. In fact, if Maravich didn't play defense in the 21st century, he likely would have found himself on the bench. And he would have been forced to get a few rebounds, as well.

Hayes, a junior at Georgia, was possibly the best offensive weapon in the SEC last year. But even he knows a simple error on either end of the ball can mean the difference in a tight game. In a league where almost half the games were determined by six points or less last season, even the star players have to be able to do other things.

"I think coaches would rather have 15-point guys on their team (who get) eight or nine or 10 rebounds," Hayes said. "I think coaches would rather have 10-12 rebounds than they would 20 or 21 points."

But it's not that offensive basketball is dead. The top six offensive teams in SEC history are all from seasons since 1994.

It's just that the overall attitudes have changed, putting more emphasis on playing defense. Eleven of the top 13 teams in SEC history in field goal percentage defense came from years since 1995.

Sharing the wealth

As more teams started focusing on shutting down star players and making lesser players beat them, the shift became obvious at top programs: recruit more scorers and spread the wealth.

Donovan's 2000 NCAA runner-up is a prime example. Seven Gators on that team averaged 8.1 points or more. The top scorer was Mike Miller (14.1) with three others also averaging in double digits. Seven different players led the team in scoring in a game that season.

With so many talented scorers, opponents couldn't shut down one guy and eliminate the Gators from the NCAA Tournament.

Vanderbilt forward Matt Freije averaged 15.1 points a game last season. But on a team with offensive limitations, he was often stymied by big, physical opponents.

"There are just too many athletes in our conference," Freije said of the challenge of averaging 20 points. "It's hard to score when every game you've got somebody matched up against you that's a gifted athlete. There's no team that's not athletic in the league. It just makes it harder to score. Everybody's big, everybody's strong, everybody's quick."

And even if you can put up those big numbers for a while, sooner or later, SEC opponents start focusing in on that player.

"Obviously, everybody is going to be trying to stop him from getting his 20 points a game," said Georgia guard Ezra Williams, who averaged 16.5 points last season. "That's going to wear him down eventually."

Nobody needs to tell LSU's Dupree what happens when you're a marked man. With the Tigers' suffering through scholarship limitations because of NCAA probation, Dupree was put in a situation last year where he had to score more.

After leading the SEC in scoring two years ago, he took 110 more shots while trying to also take up some of the slack inside. He ended up averaging less - dropping more than a point a game to 16.2.

But as a competitor, he loved the challenge.

"We're in the SEC," Dupree said. "A lot of these players are potential pros. You're going to have one or two potential NBA prospects on each team you play. I look at that as a challenge. It's a challenge to know you're playing that kind of competition game in and game out."

Will anyone ever average anywhere near 25 points a game in this league again?

"I'm not going to say it's not going to happen, but it would be tough," Dupree said. "He'd have to be an extremely good shooter or the coach would have to love him that much, that he would allow the offense to flow through him. And I don't know how well his team would do if he averaged 25 points a game."

And what if Pistol Pete was in the SEC now?

"You have a guy that good nowadays, he'll have probably good numbers like that across the board (rebounds, assists, steals) instead of mainly in the scoring column," Dupree said. "You don't have to average 20 points to be successful and win in this league. I think a lot of it has to do with your team and everybody doing their part, the majority of the guys on the team doing well collectively.

"You see, I led the league in scoring my sophomore year - and we lost."

The Tigers went 13-16 that season and were last in the SEC West with a 2-14 record.

After deciding to come back for his senior season instead of giving the NBA a try, Dupree would just as soon take a few less shots this season.

"If I do score less and we're winning, that's great with me," Dupree said with a hopeful smile.

Pistol Pete, this just ain't your league any more.