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| The Pointers now have matching Walnut and Bronzes. Photo by Ryan Coleman, D3sports.com |
By Pat Coleman
D3hoops.com
Quite simply, the 2003-04/2004-05 UW-Stevens Point men are the best Division III basketball team I’ve ever seen.
Elsewhere on the site we’ve devoted quite a bit of space to the greatest men’s team in Division III basketball history, the 1978-79-80 North Park threepeat champions. And Potsdam State ran off a string of 60 consecutive wins in the mid-1980s. But having seen the greatest teams of the past decade, I feel confident that these Pointers belong on top.
One of the great things about Salem is that there are a bunch of Division III men’s basketball coaches who come down for the weekend every season — coaches from Massachusetts to Texas who have seen the best Division III has to offer on a regular basis. (This is something the women’s basketball coaches need to pick up on.) In talking to these coaches and picking their brain on a regular basis, the team that came up most frequently was UW-Platteville’s back-to-back title team.
The 1996 Rowan team also was brought up for discussion, but there was some sentiment that this shouldn’t be counted as a Division III team. (For those who don’t know, that team had Division I transfers who had lost a year of eligibility because of Prop 48 but because of a loophole were allowed to use it at the Division III level. They won the national title. That loophole was closed soon after.) Even so, however, the Rowan team I saw that year would have given this year’s UW-Stevens Point team a run for its money (I’m picturing the Demetrius Poles/Eric Maus matchup, or Antwan Dasher trying to stop Nick Bennett) but wouldn’t have won, nor did it maintain its excellence over two seasons.
The back-to-back Bo Ryan championship teams were truly team efforts, winning games and championships with discipline but not necessarily with flashiness or a superstar quality.
There are a lot of similarities between the two minidynasties — each spent one of the two years as a near wire-to-wire No. 1. Each had a last-second win in Salem and another year in which they were in control throughout. Each has a coach destined to coach at the next level — Bo Ryan left that offseason for Division I UW-Milwaukee and Jack Bennett still might do the same.
But only UW-Stevens Point won the title game by the largest margin in Division III men’s basketball history. The Pointers’ 21-point average margin of victory throughout the tournament was better than Platteville’s gaudy 1999 numbers (16 points per game). Stevens Point had two standout superstar individual performers that Platteville didn’t. Losing just one Division III game and one WIAC game, like Platteville ’99 did, is impressive, no doubt. But that team was more closely challenged in the playoffs. The 1997-98 team ran the table, but again, didn’t wipe the walls with its playoff competition.
That’s the difference in my mind and in the minds of the coaches I talked to — Kalsow and Nick Bennett are head and shoulders above their Platteville equivalents and the remaining starters and key contributors are comparable. It’s a slight edge, but I give it to Stevens Point, and I wasn’t alone.
MOST OUTSTANDING? I’ve always subscribed to the theory that the Most Outstanding Player of any tournament should be the person who comes up the biggest when the game or tournament is on the line.
Problem is, this year’s Final Four was on the line for approximately 25 minutes of the entire weekend — the first half and opening minutes of the second half of the UW-Stevens Point/Rochester game. And nothing against Jason Kalsow, who made a great impression on the voters in Friday night’s blowout win against York (Pa.), but the Most Outstanding Player was Nick Bennett. He scored 12 of the first 17 points of the second half for the Pointers and assisted on two more, opening up a 12-point lead early in the second half.
So to Nick Bennett, hey, you got my vote. Too bad not enough others followed suit.
WHERE IS BENNETT GOING? Jack Bennett dropped a bit of a bombshell on us at the postgame press conference after the title game.
“What do wrestlers do, they put their shoes out on the mat when they’re ready to retire? I’ve got one shoe on the mat right now.”
Bennett, 56, couldn’t back away from that statement when we talked to him later in the week on Hoopsville, but he did elaborate.
“I was asked an honest question about future thoughts and I guess I’m too dumb to try to mask some of my answers. I’ve been thinking seriously really for a while now. I started thinking about this years ago when Nick came to school here and this class with Jason (Kalsow), back when they were freshmen. I thought if I can get through this group, I was really going to take stock of how much longer.
“I’ve made no definitive decision. I may coach here. I like our young kids, I like the university, but there is the possibility of doing something else within the university, perhaps retiring midyear, or, maybe we’re ready for a new challenge, if something would evolve.”
A LITTLE RESPECT: Speaking of Bo Ryan, it was refreshing to read quotes from him in stories throughout UW-Madison’s run to the Division I Elite Eight and see how often Division III was mentioned. It started in earnest when the Badgers met Bucknell in the second round in a game coached by two former Division III national champion head coaches, Ryan and Bucknell’s Pat Flannery (Lebanon Valley).
While this might never drive the national media to care about Division III basketball, it might make some high school coaches realize that this level is not simply an extension of theirs. Sadly enough, there are still high school coaches who think this way.
Elsewhere, keep an eye on ESPNU, which is going to be featuring Calvin/Hope in its series over the offseason on the Top 10 college basketball rivalries. They had a production crew at the game at the Holland Civic Center in February and hopefully will be inspired to come back and broadcast a game live next season.
CONTINUED KUDOS: Our hats go off to the folks in Salem, who put together yet another fine event. The fact that the Division III final has outdrawn the Division II final three of the last four years is representative of the community of Salem and the promotional job that the Salem folks do for Division III. (Maybe D3hoops.com can share a small part of that as well.)
But that didn’t prevent an interesting idea from surfacing. Eddie Fogler, the former Vanderbilt and South Carolina head coach who was doing analysis of the game for CSTV, appears to have become a champion for moving this game to a bigger venue and a bigger stage.
Fogler would have the NCAA play the Division III Final Four in the same city as the Division I Final Four. Play it in a smaller arena, on Friday and Sunday (the Division I games are Saturday and Monday). It’s Fogler’s contention that the crowd in town on Sunday will be interested in attending another basketball game and will flock to the Division III game.
This very well may be true, but the plan is hardly bulletproof. First of all, this would require extending the Division III season by two weeks. While one could make the argument for starting the season one week later, it would be hard to get the membership to extend the winter sports season for just one sport (or, even if you included women’s basketball, two sports).
Second would be finding a suitable arena at the site of the Final Four. St. Louis, for example, which hosts this year’s men’s Final Four, doesn’t appear on the surface to have a lot to offer in that regard. There is a 10,000 seat building a 23-mile drive from downtown, but that’s hardly convenient. Indianapolis hosts the 2006 Final Four and Butler University’s Hinkle Fieldhouse, which seats 11,000 for basketball, might work. San Antonio hosts the event in 2008, Detroit in 2009, Indianapolis in 2010 and Houston in 2011.
Salem has the Division III championships through 2007.
Third would be travel and lodging. Houston and San Antonio aren’t close to a whole lot of local Division III fans or the traditional powerhouse schools that would bring lots of fans to the game, although obviously any city D-I chooses will be convenient by air. But lodging sticks out in my mind as an issue — why should Division III fans have to pay through the nose for a hotel room? (I think it’s safe to say a room in Indianapolis during the Division I Final Four costs more than a room in Salem.) That would price a lot of people out of the event.
I’m thrilled that a former Division I coach has taken a liking to our event (this was Fogler’s third year covering the game on television), and sure, the event deserves a higher profile. But I don’t think hitching our wagon to the Division I event and eliminating some Division III fans from the event is the way to go.
THEN AGAIN … Perhaps a higher-profile Final Four would give the NCAA a little more incentive to make sure we actually get the four best teams there — or at least have the possibility. What good will it be to have a 58-team tournament is all the good teams are still in two brackets?
The least-competitive championship game in Division III men’s basketball history should be a wake-up call for the beancounters.
“The Division III championships philosophy is to field the most competitive teams possible while minimizing missed class time; to emphasize regional competition in regular-season scheduling; and to provide representation in NCAA championship competition by allocating berths to eligible conferences, independent institutions and a limited number of at-large teams, realizing that this may be done at the expense of leaving out some championship-caliber teams.”
This handy little disclaimer that was thrown into the championships handbook a few years ago doesn’t cover unbalanced bracketing. Student-athletes are going to miss class the day before the second-round games and sectionals if you send them 200 or 499 miles. Let’s emphasize the championship, especially since Division III’s entire operation came in $3.4 million under budget in 2003-04 and championships came in $2,000,000 under budget “as a result of reduced transportation costs,” according to the Division III budget committee.
Don't shortchange the championship.