Search

ARCHIVES
CONTACT US
WORLD NEWS

Hide the basketball team

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Chris Jackson

A memo to men's basketball head coach Lute Olson: Hide your players. Keep them locked up somewhere in McKale Center, letting them out only to go to class from now until the season starts on Nov. 16 against Kansas State.

Why?

To avoid what happened to the UA football team.

They've gone from No. 4 in the country to getting one whole vote this week.

Over the course of many years, the UA men's basketball team has been ranked up there in the preseason. This year should be no different.

The question is, can the players keep the preseason hype from going to their heads?

"The Basketball News" ranks UA No. 7 in the country while "Lindy's Magazine" and "Athlon Sports" named the Wildcats the Pac-10 favorite.

It seems like telling Arizona, in any sport save softball, that it's the preseason favorite in the Pac-10 is akin to a death sentence.

The 1997-98 basketball team was possibly the greatest in school history, going 15-1 in the Pac-10 and winning 30 games overall. But it fell in the Elite Eight to Utah.

Compare that to the team from the year before, which finished fifth in the Pac-10, didn't win 20 games in the regular season, but then made its improbable run to the NCAA title.

Arizona teams are better off being underdogs. They're better off playing with a chip on their shoulder from being slighted by the media and fans than they are with a King Kong-sized monkey on their backs from high expectations.

And don't start talking about how the basketball team returns so much talent and has such great newcomers like Loren Woods, Jason Gardner, Lamont Frazier and Gilbert Arenas.

The football team returned 16 starters and brought in its best recruiting class ever. And now it's 3-2; both of its losses were blowouts.

It's crucial for the UA men's basketball team to ignore any and all preseason hype. Because that's all it is, hype.

It's all based on how a team did last year and how people imagine, best or worst case, that a team can do this year.

Coach Olson has done a great job in the past in terms of getting his players' minds off what's being written about them.

Here's hoping he can do it again. He's already put his annual moratorium on contact between the media and players until Oct. 15, when practice officially starts.

That's a start, but the rest is up to the players to close their eyes and ears to all that is being said about them, and just to focus on the court because no one on that team wants to be locked up somewhere in the depths of McKale.