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Midnight meeting in Mullins
By Arthur Stapleton Jr., The Massachusetts Daily Collegian Staff, February 18, 1994
It seems John Calipari's Massachusetts basketball team can do just about anything this week and that action will grab national attention. Two years ago, any spot on television would've had the Minutemen drooling.
But after this week of being one of the top stories in all media, from the controversy between Temple's John Chaney and Calipari to the upset loss at St. Joseph's, you would think the last thing any Minuteman wants is a camera in his face.
Sorry, guys, ESPN's lights will be on inside the William D. Mullins Center tonight yet again; well, tomorrow morning, 12 a.m. to be exact, as the Manhattan Jaspers come to town, looking to jump on No. 10 Massachusetts when they may be most vulnerable.
With all the distractions earlier this week, Calipari admitted his team wasn't focused on Atlantic 10 cellar-dweller St. Joseph's on Tuesday. It showed and the Minutemen received their first conference loss on the season to the lowly Hawks, who scored 81 points on a defense that only allows 61.2 points per game.
However, Calipari insists that his team will be ready after he put the Chaney incident behind him yesterday in a press conference at the Mullins Center.
One of the major things Calipari said before the season about the match-up with the Jaspers is they gave Virginia a better fight last year in the NCAA Tournament than the Minutemen did; Massachusetts was knocked out of the Big Dance by the Cavaliers in the second round, Manhattan in the first.
This isn't 1993, however.
Manhattan lost its star, Keith Bullock, to graduation, but they still have Fran Fraschilla, the Jaspers' coach and long-time friend of Calipari.
The two met back in Calipari's freshman year of college when they both worked in North Carolina at Dean Smith's Basketball Camp. They roomed together and according to Calipari, had a lot of fun together and have stayed in touch since then. Fraschilla is in his second season leading the Jaspers.
“I've always respected his basketball mind, his aggressiveness, his attention to detail, his work capacity. He is a very, very good basketball coach,” said Calipari.
Manhattan plays very similar to Massachusetts - tenacious, tight hard-nosed defense, something that Calipari knows all about.
“They're a lot like us. They play a lot like us,” said Calipari. “They're very aggressive, they play man-to-man. They don't give you an inch and they just play hard.
“Manhattan's challenge right now is to see if they can play as hard as us.”
In this court battle, recognition is a big part of the competition
By Mark Blaudschun, Boston Globe Staff, 2/18/1994
AMHERST – John Calipari was chanting the mantra of Atlantic 10 basketball: We'll play anyone, anyplace, anytime.
Kentucky in Lexington, a scant 30 hours after flying back from a tournament in Alaska? Book it.
Oklahoma in Norman, a place where visiting teams seldom leave with anything but another loss printed on their record? Let's go.
Manhattan at midnight, as the Minutemen will perform tonight on ESPN, years past the time they needed the exposure? Play the game.
“What other Top 10 team plays at midnight or ever has?,” asked Calipari, the University of Massachusetts coach whose name recognition keeps climbing on the charts each season.
Travel down the A-10 corridor to Philadelphia and you will find a Temple team, equally talented, with an equally famous coach in John Chaney, especially after last weekend's outburst against Calipari.
In one area, Chaney and Calipari are very much alike: Play anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Check out Temple's schedule in the next few weeks. Louisville in Orlando, Fla.; Duke in Durham, N.C.; each less than a month away from the tough grind of tournament time, and you see a strategy.
Go over to the league offices in the pastoral setting of the farm lands of central Jersey and associate commissioner Ray Cella will talk about television exposure, proudly pointing out that the Atlantic 10 has had teams on national television four consecutive weekends. He will mention computer rankings and marquee players and tell you how the conference has had to fight for each exposure and each player. Now it's on the verge of stepping up to the next level, despite the clear and present danger of the Big East, which seems ready to expand – at the expense of three prime Atlantic 10 teams.
“Regardless of what happens, there is going to be an Atlantic 10,” said Cella.
No matter. There is one now, and over at the Big East offices in Providence they are aware of their pesky neighbor.
Someone suggests to Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese that the Atlantic 10 might be where the Big East was a dozen years ago.
“I don't see that,” says the commissioner who has spent the past several months dealing with expansion talk, new television contracts and bowl coalition business, while attempting to also run the day-to-day affairs of a conference that has two separate entities in football and basketball. “When the Big East began, we really did not have any competition in the East. The Atlantic 10 has had to compete with us since Day 1.”
Until a few years ago it was unfair competition. The Big East was bigger and better. Bigger arenas, bigger markets, a television contract to die for from CBS.
Despite its recent television exposure, the Atlantic 10 still gratefully accepts what it can get, whether it's on ABC, ESPN or the Home Shopping Network. Earlier this week, the Big East extended its basketball ties with CBS through the end of the century.
“They have Kingston Rhode Island; we have Providence,” said Big East associate commissioner Tom McElroy. “They have Amherst; we have Boston. They have Olean N.Y., St. Bonaventure; we have Syracuse and New York City St. John's. We generally play in big arenas; they play mostly on campus, although there is something to be said for that.”
Ten years ago, the Big East was as great as it was Big. Final Four teams were almost a given, and it was regarded as an off year when six or more teams didn't make it to the Big Dance known as the NCAA tournament.
Last year, the Big East sent three teams to the NCAAs, the fewest NCAA bids since the 1980-81 season. None reached the Sweet 16. The Atlantic 10 sent four teams. Temple made it to the Final Eight, George Washington reached the Sweet 16 and Rhode Island and UMass each won its first-round game.
Still, when the Big East flexes its muscles, no one in the Atlantic 10 can really compete. “If they want someone, really want a player,” said Calipari, who has won more than his share of recruiting wars, “we can't get them. The Big East has too much prestige and history, and it has television. The mystique is still there, and it's hard to fight.”
The most painful recent example for UMass is Durfee's Chris Herren, who was pursued by just about everyone, including the Minutemen, but chose Boston College. “We wanted Chris Herren,” said Calipari. “He went to BC.”
Not that the Big East has not taken some hits. Marquee value coaches such as St. John's Lou Carnesecca and Villanova's Rollie Massimino are gone, and there was a long stretch during which the talent seemed to go elsewhere, to the Big Ten and Atlantic Coast Conference as well as the Atlantic 10.
“Big East bashing is fashionable,” says UConn's Jim Calhoun, who has the elite team in the conference this season. “And there's some justification. I think we got smug. We became very comfortable with ourselves.”
Smug. Arrogant. It still exists to some extent. The Big East was a made-for-television setup whose stars have become the coaches. A decade ago, people were talking about Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin and Derrick Coleman. Now the coaches have become the stars. Some have become almost as petulant as their players. While the Atlantic 10 craves publicity, the Big East seems to shun it.
League meetings are often regarded as secrets, and there is a reluctance to talk about anything that happens.
When asked where and when the Big East's next meeting will be held, one in which expansion will likely be voted upon, Tranghese, normally a master manipulator with the media, said, “I can't tell you.”
When asked why, he said that would bring too many reporters, asking too many questions of athletic directors and presidents who don't want to answer them.
The Atlantic 10 is still following the “all publicity is good publicity” theory, although the fallout from the Chaney outburst has tested that thinking.
The place doesn't have the coziness of The Cage, but UMass' state-of-the-art Mullins Center with nearly 10,000 seats still can create a sense of intimacy, especially when it is sold out as it was for last Sunday's game against Temple.
Facilities are part of a portrait of a conference, and you go from that down to tiny McGonigle Hall at Temple, with seating for just over 3,000, and the Atlantic 10's image comes into clearer focus.
While the Big East was carved out of the major cities of the Northeast, the Atlantic 10 still has, at times, a small-time feel to it.
“The campus environment is important,” says Calipari, who knows that places such as Mullins and McGonigle are as much television studios as they are arenas.
But then he smiles and points to a television sitting a few feet above his head in the Amherst restaurant in which he is having lunch. “Television is the biggest recruiting tool you can use,” he said, watching a replay of the UMass game from the previous night. “You have kids sitting in California who can turn on ESPN and see a game here at the Mullins Center and think it's a great place to play.”
It worked that way for the Big East in a different fashion. A Big East asset is its urban atmosphere. A conference tournament at Madison Square Garden in New York. Regular-season games in places like the Meadowlands Arena, the US Air Center in Landover, Md., as well as the Carrier Dome in Syracuse.
And when a game had to be played on campus, it was made attractive but limited in seating (with the exception of Syracuse), which helped create a demand for the product.
Take Gampel Pavilion on the UConn campus, which can squeeze in nearly 9,000 when the fire marshals look the other way.
“In a state like Connecticut, which doesn't have very much competition from pro sports, UConn basketball is the biggest thing going,” said Calhoun. “We don't have any more tickets available. And I'm not talking what is available for public consumption. Every seat is literally taken.”
The talk is of merger or expansion. The Big East gets bigger, grabbing Rutgers, Temple and West Virginia from the Atlantic 10 and just like that, your competition is weakened. So the thinking goes.
Some Big East coaches think the Alantic 10 is where the Big East was a decade ago in its search for prime-time players. Prop 48 kids, questionable high school transcripts, junior college transfers, all have come into the Atlantic 10 the past few years.
“We can't do that anymore,” says one Big East coach, giving a smile as if wishing for the good old days when any player, anywhere would be available to most schools. “I'm not saying that's bad. But if you look at the Atlantic 10, you see a lot of kids who couldn't get into our schools.”
Which is why any move that weakens the Atlantic 10 may help rejuvenate the Big East. Although Tranghese believes the competition does not come from the Atlantic 10, but from the Big Ten and ACC.
UMass officials have made it known they would be receptive to an offer from the Big East as well if further expansion is planned.
Calipari says he doesn't see it happening. “Coaches in the league do not want us,” he said. “They don't want us to rain on their parade.”
No one is saying the Big East and the Atlantic 10 are equal from top to bottom. The Big East still has more depth, more talent. But top to top is a different matter.
“We can play with anybody,” said Calipari, speaking for his team, but his league as well.
Anyone. Anywhere. Anytime.
Manhattan proves a headache, but UMass prevails
By Paul Harber, Boston Globe Staff, 2/19/1994
AMHERST – Midnight Manhattans have caused a few morning-after hangovers. Coach John Calipari and his University of Massachusetts Minutemen are lucky to wake up today without a major migraine after their 68-54 victory over Manhattan College which ended early this morning at the Mullins Center.
It was an ESPN special edition of Midnight Madness, but it certainly wasn't a pajama party for the Minutemen, who escaped serious threats by Manhattan in both halves to remain unbeaten in these Cinderella Showdowns (4-0 since their inception in 1991) and at the Mullins Center (15-0 since it opened).
UMass (20-5) needed a win badly. It has been a tough week in Amherst, beginning with another form of madness (L'Affaire Chaney) Sunday, the upset loss at St. Joseph's Tuesday and West Virginia coming to town tomorrow.
Manhattan (15-9) isn't a dog, but wasn't supposed to be as much trouble as it was last night.
Mike Williams (12 points) and Edgar Padilla (17 points) thwarted Manhattan rallies in each half. Williams used a 7-point run to break away from the Jaspers in the first half while Padilla knocked down 10 points during a 20-5 streak that broke a 38-38 tie.
Lou Roe (12 points) played a part in both rallies with key baskets.
UMass held a 34-25 lead at the half, but it took a late surge and some cold shooting by the Jaspers.
UMass looked as if it was going to run away with the contest at the opening jump when Donta Bright connected with a jumper from the corner, followed by another jumper by Williams and a dunk by Marcus Camby.
But Manhattan quickly regrouped, taking a 13-12 lead on a Don Ellis 3-pointer six minutes into the contest.
Williams rattled off 9 straight points to give the Minutemen a 21-15 advantage.