Editor's Note: Dick Weiss, a member of the U.S. Basketball Writers Association Hall of Fame, has covered college sports in Philadelphia and New York for more than 40 years. He will be providing regular commentary for the American Athletic Conference during the 2014-15 season.
NEW YORK-- The dynamics of the American Athletic Conference may have changed with the arrival of Tulsa, East Carolina and Tulane from Conference USA and the departure of Louisville to the ACC and Rutgers to the Big Ten.
But the goal is still the same.
The American wants to compete for national championships in men's and women's basketball every year and would like nothing better than to write a sequel to last season, when the University of Connecticut men's and women's basketball programs pulled off a rare double.
On the men's side, conference athletics directors are investing more money and resources to hire high profile candidates with head coaching experience and assistants with national resumes who can improve their chances of challenging for the league title and earning one of multiple bids to the NCAA tournament that the league seems destined to receive on an annual basis.
Houston, which desperately needed to make a big splash in the post- Phi Slama Jama era, reached into the NBA for Kelvin Sampson, a Houston Rockets assistant who coached Oklahoma to 11 NCAA bids and a 2002 Final Four appearances during his 12 years in Norman from 1995 through 2005, hoping to bring back the mystique of a program that produced four Naismith Hall of Famers-- Elvin Hayes, coach Guy V. Lewis, Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler from the late 60s to the mid 80s.
Tulsa, which has traditionally been an incubator for talented coaches on the rise like Nolan Richardson, Tubby Smith, Bill Self and Danny Manning, has imported veteran coach Frank Haith from Missouri to build on last year's NCAA appearance. Haith recruited six McDonald's All Americans as an assistant at Wake Forest and Texas and coached both Miami (Fla.) and Missouri to NCAA appearances.
And USF has hired former Kentucky assistant Orlando Antigua, who helped John Calipari recruit many of the stars for that blueblood program. Antigua most recently coached the Dominican Republic national team in last summer's World Cup of Basketball in Spain.
It may not happen overnight for all of them, but all three new faces have the vision to make The American a more competitive top-to-bottom league in the long run.
The undervalued American is coming off the best basketball season of any men's conference in the country, producing three first-team All America guards -- seniors Sean Kilpatrick of Cincinnati, Shabazz Napier of UConn and Russ Smith of Louisville.
UConn’s 41-year-old coach Kevin Ollie showed he was a fitting successor to Jim Calhoun last spring when he gave this new league instant credibility. Ollie coached the Huskies to a 60-54 victory over Kentucky in the national championship game just four weeks after losing to Louisville by 33 points in the final game of The American's regular season. That spoke volumes for just how strong the league was at the top last season.
Ollie was romanced by the NBA last spring, but spurned the league to stay in Storrs where his heart resides. His team was selected by the coaches as the favorite to win the league again this season, ranking slightly ahead of SMU, which has made impressive strides under Hall of Fame coach Larry Brown in just two years, winning 27 games last year and defeating UConn twice during the regular season before advancing to the NIT finals. Memphis and Cincinnati are NCAA regulars too, and have good young coaches in Josh Pastner, who has established himself as one of the best recruiters in the country, and Mick Cronin, who is rapidly becoming one of the best technical minds in the sport.
Haith's Tulsa team has the best chance of joining those four in the NCAA brackets. He became so intrigued by the opportunity at Tulsa last spring, he left an SEC program to take that job after Danny Manning departed for Wake Forest.
“I had a great experience at Missouri,” Haith said at Tulsa’s media day. “We won 76 games in three years and I had three years remaining on my contract. I was not feeling pressure to the level people were saying, as in, 'He's about to get fired.'
“For me, it was the people – the new conference and the new challenge – and the TU history,” Haith said. “When I went to Miami in 2004, the school had five previous NCAA tournament appearances. Tulsa has 15. We're going to be playing in a multi-bid league that is on a par with the SEC in terms of coaches and talent.”
Haith spoke with former Tulsa coaches such as Tubby Smith and Bill Self and became even more excited about the possibilities. It also didn't hurt that he would be inheriting a team that, under Danny Manning a year ago, turned a 1-6 start into a 21-13 finish, including Conference USA regular-season and tournament championships and the school's first NCAA appearance since 2003.
Four starters, including guard James Woodard, the C-USA tournament MVP, and four other key players are back, along with junior guard Marquel Curtis, who missed most of the year with an ankle injury. If lack of height and muscle was a concern among the mostly smallish veteran starting unit, 6-foot-11 redshirt Emmanuel Ezechinonso, 6-8 sophomore Tarekeyi Edogi, 6-8 freshman Keondre Dew, and 6-9 junior Brandon Swannegan should combine to ease those concerns.
Haith is salivating about instituting his up-tempo style with returning juniors Woodard, Rashad Ray, Shaquille Harrison, D'Andre Wright and Rashad Smith, all of whom excel in transition.
Sampson is making his first reappearance in college basketball after spending in five and a half years in the NBA. He won 496 career games before being pushed out of Indiana in 2008 for making improper phone calls and was given a five-year show cause order. That rule, incidentally, has since been changed. It is now legal for coaches to have unlimited phone contact and texts with high school prospects following 10th grade. Sampson found refuge as a consultant to Gregg Popovich with the Spurs for the rest of the year, then spent three years with the Milwaukee Bucks and three more with Houston.
“I learned a lot in the NBA,” Sampson said. “The one thing that young coaches should do is if there an NBA team in your area, get to training camp and see the coaching that goes on. There are incredible decisions being made in a 48-minute game with a 24-second clock. I'm a significantly better coach today than I was before I went to the NBA.”
Sampson, an excellent coach who won three straight Big 12 titles at OU, seemed destined to become a head coach in the NBA but lost out on one opportunity because a team went with an ex-player. When James Dickey announced he was stepping down as head coach for personal reasons after the 2014 season, AD Mack Rhodes placed a call to Sampson, asking him to restore the glory of a program that has not won an NCAA tournament game since 1991.
It will not be an easy task but it should be worth the gamble once Sampson sings his own players. Sampson lost five players after he arrived, including TaShawn Thomas, a 6-8 forward who was the team's leading scorer and is now ironically at Oklahoma; and 6-7 guard Danuel House, who transferred to Texas A&M. Although the school has wisely committed to building a new practice facility, the team will still play its home games in ancient Hofheinz Pavilion.
Sampson will rebuild with two starting forwards Danrad “Chicken” Knowles and Mikhail McLean and guard L.J. Rose, who led The American in assists last year. He is just happy for a second chance.
Antigua, a onetime McDonald's All America from the Bronx, is finally ready for his first trip to center stage. He is the latest branch to grow from Calipari's coaching tree, joining Josh Pastner of Memphis, Derek Kellogg of UMass and Bruiser Flint of Drexel.
Antigua is a pioneer of sorts, only the second Hispanic head coach, along with Frank Martin of South Carolina, ever in Division I. He has strong recruiting ties in Florida and the Hispanic community in both New York City and Miami, and will need them after the transfer of seven players. Antigua wants to play up-tempo like his mentor, and he has a renovated arena and a beautiful practice facility to show off his product. But he needs more players to compliment 6-8, 266-pound Chris Perry, who made The American’s All-Rookie team in 2014; and senior guard Anthony Collins, who was the catalyst on the Bulls' 2012 NCAA tournament team, but missed 24 games last year with knee swelling.
It will be a challenge. USF only has two winning seasons in the last 11 years. But Antigua does not want to think about the past. Instead, he focuses on a league that has marquee teams but also offers the chance to Antigua to build a competitive program in a warm-weather state that is becoming a growing hotbed for high school talent.
“My guess is they will do things that have never been done before at South Florida,” Calipari predicted.