Welcome to the state capital of basketball.
Indiana? Kentucky? North Carolina?
Nah, Alabama. Move over Nick Saban, Bear Bryant, Cam Newton, Joe Namath … all those past legends of the football holy land that is the Yellowhammer State. Hey, this is basketball country now. True, no team has ever held up a national championship trophy, nor even been in the title game. But have you noticed the standings and rankings this season? As Alabama-ish as a cotton field.
Look at the polls. Auburn is No. 1, and Alabama is No. 2 in the Associated Press. Or if you prefer the coaches’ poll, Auburn is No. 2, and Alabama is No. 1. Whichever. You can’t swing a bath towel without hitting an SEC team in the top 25, and it’ll probably be that way in the NCAA tournament, but it all starts at the top with the Iron Bowl couple. They’ll meet in Tuscaloosa Saturday, the first 1-2 match in SEC history and only the sixth time since the creation of the AP poll that a 1-2 game features teams from the same state.
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The last was Tennessee at Memphis in 2008. Coaching the Vols to a 66-62 victory that day . . . Bruce Pearl. He’ll be on Auburn’s bench on Saturday. “All I can remember was a sense of satisfaction that all eyes in college basketball were on Memphis, Tennessee watching Tennessee and Memphis and the state of Tennessee,” he said over the phone Wednesday. “The eyes weren’t on Kansas or UCLA or North Carolina or Duke, it was Memphis, Tennessee. The same thing can now be said to be true about this matchup. I am very proud and pleased to be a part of that matchup in Alabama.” Look at the conference standings. Four leagues have leaders or co-leaders from the state of Alabama. Four more have contenders within two games of the top. If enough things break right in the conference tournaments, the state could send a wave of teams into March Madness, like high tide at Gulf Shores.
Auburn has stayed No. 1 in the AP poll for more than a month now and has 13 quad 1 wins, five more than anyone else in the country. Alabama is the nation’s highest scoring team and reached the 100-point mark 17 times in the past two years. The Tide has broken 85 in eight consecutive road games, something never done before in SEC history. They made 17 3-pointers Tuesday night at Texas.
“Do we think we’re the best team in the country?” coach Nate Oats said. “I think we’ve got a chance to be, but Auburn is the best team in the country right now.”
Saturday should be a blast. But this Alabama hoopfest doesn’t stop with the marquee names.
Jacksonville State leads the rest of Conference USA by two games.
No, Jacksonville State is not in Florida. How to get to Jacksonville, Alabama? Go to the county seat of Anniston and turn north. Anyway, the Gamecocks are 17-7 and have won eight in a row and send out the sixth leading scorer in the nation with Jaron Pierre Jr., who’s putting up 21.3 points a game.
They have a coach who took off in his profession as if it was a drag race. Ray Harper first presided over a Division II juggernaut at Kentucky Wesleyan, getting to 200 career wins in only 224 games, the fastest jump to that mark in NCAA history. This is his ninth year at Jacksonville State, and if the Gamecocks win the league tournament, it would be the third such title under Harper — in three different conferences.
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Samford is 19-6 and in a three-way tie for the lead in the Southern.
Bucky Ball is alive and well. That’s Bucky McMillan, the free-wheeling coach who sends out a team that is fearless in its pressure defense and attacking offense. Hence, the Bulldogs are fourth in the nation in 3-pointers per game, ninth in turnovers forced and 16th in scoring.
Bucky Ball can be a pain in the neck for the big guys. Samford was up 13 points on Michigan State in November before losing 83-75. Kansas barely escaped the Bulldogs in the first round of the NCAA tournament last March, 83-79. “I do think we’ll be back here,” McMillan said after that. “I do think we’ll win here.”
McMillan came directly to his first Division I job from coaching high school and has said those modest roots helped in the creation of Bucky Ball. “I started off coaching when I was 15 years old, coaching Over the Mountain (youth league) basketball in Birmingham. When I was 16 and 17 years old, I was coaching AAU basketball. Then I was coaching 17-and-under basketball. Then I coached JV basketball, varsity basketball, then I got a crack at this job. Everything that I wanted to experiment with, I got to do it in some back gym with three or four people watching. A lot of times, people in this spot get their first DI job after being an assistant for years and everybody is watching.”
North Alabama is 17-8, one of the four co-leaders in the ASUN.
The Lions will balance you to death, with six guys averaging between 15.9 and 9.8 points a game, three of them in-staters. They’ve had four players go for double figures for eight games in a row. The cast includes guard Will Soucie, who has missed one game in five years, and guard Daniel Ortiz, whose career path looks like a boomerang, starting his career at North Alabama and making all-conference, transferring to UAB and helping the Blazers get to the NCAA tournament, then coming back to the Lions.
They’ve only been around Division I for seven seasons, and Tony Pujol, an all-conference baseballer in college, has been the coach for all seven of them.
UAB is tucked two games behind Memphis at the top of the American Athletic Conference.
A unique bunch, these 15-9 Blazers. The coach is Andy Kennedy, who spent 12 years as the head man at Ole Miss. He’s also a UAB alum and second on the school’s all-time scoring list and still holds the record for 3-point and free throw percentage. The leading scorer — and rebounder, and assist man, and shot blocker, and in steals — is Yaxel Lendeborg. The second leading scorer is Christian Coleman. Attention Walmart shoppers: He was 6’1″ coming out of high school and didn’t get one offer from anywhere, so he worked at Walmart for two years and grew seven inches. It seemed a good idea to try basketball again, so he first went to an NAIA school, then junior college, and now UAB.
South Alabama and Troy are both in a five-way tie for second in the Sun Belt, one game behind Arkansas State. South Alabama is 16-9 and has won four conference games by 25-plus points, something the Jaguars hadn’t done in 25 years. Coach Richie Riley likes his zone defense, with the intent of making life difficult for anyone trying to get to the basket. Hence, a lot of opponents try to fire over it — 61 percent of the shots taken against South Alabama so far are from the 3-point range. Troy is 15-9 but that includes nights spent with some high-end meanies — Houston, Oregon and Arkansas. The Trojans are the anti-portal team. They have 12 returnees from last season and did not have a single player transfer to another Division I school.
The good times have even spread to Division II, where Alabama Huntsville is 22-1 and ranked No. 4.
Maybe this Alabama show of power is happenstance. Or maybe there’s a reason. “There’s got to be something to it. There has to be,” Pearl said. “I would say it has to start with the interest in college basketball. With Auburn and Alabama getting to the Final Four in the last four or five years, there’s been a trickle-down effect in just the interest. There was a time where the best athletes played football and baseball, and you could not get those great quarterbacks from the football teams to play basketball because people just didn’t have as much interest in it.
“And then the quality of the coaches. UAB having Andy Kennedy that’s like having another top-notch SEC coach right there. Literally I think almost every coach in their respective leagues you could make an argument is the best coach in that league.”
All eight coaches of the Alabama Division I teams fighting for conference leads have been at their posts for at least five seasons. This is the sixth for Oats at Alabama, the 11th for Pearl at Auburn. He recalled taking the job when Tigers basketball meant constant losing seasons. “I remember the days when our league was getting three or four teams in the NCAA tournament, and part of the reason that was the case was we had several programs that were so down that their math was just bringing the rest of the league down. Auburn is one of them. I said we’re no longer going to be a bottom feeder; that’s going to change. Now, I never dreamed that we would have this kind of success with this kind of consistency. But I was going to bring us up off the bottom.”
So the Tigers began a steady rise, and so did the Crimson Tide and so apparently, the whole state. Most of the stars come from outside Alabama but there are some native sons. Mark Sears at Alabama, for instance. He’s the only SEC player in the top five in scoring and assists.
Look where it’s led, to a possible cavalry charge of Alabama teams into March, and maybe the regular season game of the year Saturday.
Alabama vs. Auburn. No. 1 vs. No. 2. Know how many times that’s happened in football?
Never.
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