Associated Press
The college basketball notebook …
DAVIDSON ó Stephen Curry walked onto the practice court Thursday and showed no rustiness from three days off, consistently drilling long jumpers in a familiar scene for anyone who saw him star in last season’s NCAA tournament.
But moments earlier the Davidson star had been forced into a different, unfamiliar role: salesman. After losing in the Southern Conference semifinals Sunday, Curry was making Davidson’s case to be included in this year’s NCAA field.
“We are 26-7. The seven losses are all against 20-win teams. We have some good wins against N.C. State and West Virginia,” Curry began. “I think we showed we can play and actually win games. Things didn’t go well late in the season, but based on last year, if we get a shot we can do something with it.”
The NCAA tournament without the sweet-shooting Curry? It’s a possibility. Davidson has a dangerously high RPI of 69. A Southern Conference team has never gotten an at-large bid. The Wildcats, clearly not as deep last season’s club, finished 4-3, including a 59-52 loss to College of Charleston that ended their three-year reign atop the lower-tier league.
“We’ve had three days off and it’s kind of felt like the offseason not knowing our future, really,” Curry said. “It’s been a weird week, confusing.”
Consider that last year the Wildcats entered the tournament as an automatic qualifier at 26-6 with no wins against the RPI top 50. They then upset Gonzaga, Georgetown and Wisconsin before losing to eventual champion Kansas.
This year, Davidson has a win against West Virginia, 26th in the RPI. It’s lost to four ranked teams: No. 6 Oklahoma, No. 9 Duke, No. 16 Butler and No. 24 Purdue. It went 1-2 against College of Charleston (26-8) and, the other loss came to The Citadel (20-12).
Plus, there must be some Curry formula for the NCAA selection committee to consider while holed up in that Indianapolis conference room, right?
“If anything we did last year should say is don’t make judgments based on what conference a team is in,” Davidson coach Bob McKillop said.
CALHOUN
HARTFORD, Conn. ó Few Connecticut residents are calling foul on UConn men’s basketball coach Jim Calhoun’s recent outburst to a blogger who pressed him on his $1.6 million annual salary.
More than three of every five Connecticut residents surveyed in a new Quinnipiac University poll say Calhoun, the highest-paid public employee in the state, should keep his entire salary rather than donate a portion to help ease Connecticut’s fiscal problems.
Eighty percent also said he should not be disciplined for his angry response to freelance journalist and political activist Ken Krayeske, who questioned Calhoun about his salary at a Feb. 21 post-game press conference.
Calhoun had a 68 percent favorability rating in the Quinnipiac poll results. Only 12 percent described their opinion of him as unfavorable.
Douglas Schwartz, the poll’s director, said politicians would love to have Calhoun’s level of support.
COACHES VS. CANCER
NEW YORK ó Syracuse, North Carolina, California and Ohio State will be in the championship round of the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic, to be played Nov. 19-20 at Madison Square Garden.
The rest of the 12-team field will be announced later.
The four regionals hosts announced Thursday will play two games at home and then automatically advance to New York for the semifinals, regardless of the regional results.
The other participants will automatically advance to play a round-robin series at one of two other sub-regional sites, so every team will be guaranteed four games.
The four host schools have combined for seven NCAA championships and 109 appearances in the NCAA tournament.
Duke beat Michigan 71-56 in the tournament’s 2008 championship game.
WOODEN AWARD
LOS ANGELES ó Tyler Hansbrough of North Carolina, Davidson’s Stephen Curry and Luke Harangody of Notre Dame are among the finalists for the John R. Wooden Award as college basketball’s player of the year.
The final ballot was announced Thursday.
Hansbrough, who leads the Atlantic Coast Conference with 21.1 points a game, won the award last year. Curry leads the nation in scoring at 28.6 points, while Harangody is seventh with 23.7 points and fifth in rebounding at 12.1 per game.
Also on the ballot is Hansbrough’s teammate, Ty Lawson, along with Pittsburgh teammates DeJuan Blair and Sam Young, and Duke teammates Gerald Henderson and Kyle Singler.
Along with eight seniors, Memphis guard Tyreke Evans was the only freshman selected as a finalist.
The others include Kyle Singler of Duke and Jeff Teague of Wake Forest.