Reversal of Fortune
By Steve Onions Shep
March 13, 2008
Hanging from the rafters, above the west end of the basketball court in this dingy, outmoded building on the corner of 22nd and G Streets in Northwest Washington known as the Smith Center, are four banners arranged in a row: NIT 2004. NCAA 2005. NCAA 2006. NCAA 2007.
Karl Hobbs has brought success and national recognition back to George Washington in his seven-year tenure as head coach. Just two seasons ago, GW lost only one regular-season game and was ranked sixth in the nation at season’s end. That year, however, the Atlantic 10 conference was weak outside of the Colonials, who ran the table in-conference, winning all 16 games against their A-10 opponents.
The landscape changed this season. After four consecutive postseason appearances, the Colonials won’t only be left out of the N.C.A.A. Tournament; they didn’t even qualify for the Atlantic 10 Tournament this week in Atlantic City, showing just how fleeting success can be outside of the perennial B.C.S.-conference contenders.
Meanwhile, the conference, as a whole, is experiencing a renaissance. The conference could send as many as three teams—Saint Joseph’s and Massachusetts are on the bubble and regular-season conference-champion Xavier is a lock—to the N.C.A.A. Tournament, the most since 2004, when the A-10 sent four. Rhode Island and Dayton had also been contenders for tournament berths, but the Rams and Flyers have faded since conference play began.
Folks around Foggy Bottom are frustrated that the conference’s awakening coincides with the Colonials’ recent struggles. GW lost seven consecutive conference games in January and February and also dropped its first 11 road games of the season, en route to a 9-17 season, the only time under Hobbs that the Colonials failed to win 10 games. The Colonials’ pre-season starting point guard, sophomore Travis King, who was supposed to replace four-year starter Carl Elliott, played just one minute before succumbing to a kneecap injury suffered initially over the summer. Their lone scholarship senior, Maureece Rice, moved over from the off-guard to play the point in King’s absence, but he faltered and was replaced by five-foot, eight-inch—measured very generously—walk-on sophomore, Johnny Lee, who played only 38 minutes all last season. GW, last season, had the best turnover margin in the conference; this year, they were worst in that category, in no small part due to the lack of a competent point guard.
It has all equaled a lost season for GW, and a feeling to which Hobbs and his squad are not accustomed. Attendance, excitement, and morale have all been markedly affected.
“It’s tough,” Rice admitted to the Philadelphia Daily News in January. “I came in, even as a freshman, to a real good team. Even last year [which began 15-8] we were successful at the end [8-0 entering the N.C.A.A. Tournament, including a run to win the Atlantic 10 Tournament]. Now, this year, we haven’t beaten any good teams.”
Rice’s frustration must have hit a crescendo last Thursday when, with two games remaining in the Colonials’ season, he was dismissed from the team by Hobbs. The reason was not disclosed by the university, but Rice had served one-game suspensions on two separate occasions earlier this season, so it was hardly the first dispute between the coach and his erstwhile star player.
Saturday night was Senior Night at Smith Center—a 67-63 loss to U-Mass.—but Rice, GW’s only scholarship senior, was not there. The school in no way acknowledged his three-plus years with the team. It was a very notable failure in what had been a positive record for Hobbs and his recruits.
Hobbs’ first full recruiting class, which graduated in 2006, featured little-recruited forwards Mike Hall and Pops Mensah-Bonsu, both of whom played in the N.B.A. last season. Danilo Pinnock, Jr., who started at GW the year after, in 2003, left school after his junior year in 2006 and was drafted in the second-round of the N.B.A. Draft. It was in their final year, 2005-2006, that GW went 27-3. Even last year, without Hall, Mensah-Bonsu, and Pinnock, and with Carl Elliott and Rice leading the way, GW still qualified for the N.C.A.A. Tournament for the third straight season.
During those three seasons, only once did the Atlantic 10 send an at-large team to the Big Dance—and only because GW lost in the A-10 Tournament, allowing Xavier to capture the automatic bid. The season prior to GW’s run, the conference sent four teams to the N.C.A.A. Tournament, including two—Xavier and Saint Joe’s—that were each one possession from a Final Four appearance. Such is life in a conference like the A-10, which resides in some sort of netherworld between high-major and mid-major. Clearly, the A-10 is not an equal of the Big East in terms of basketball, but, at the peaks of their cyclical ebbs and flows, they can challenge the B.C.S. conferences. In those valleys, however, it is not uncommon for leagues like the A-10, Western Athletic Conference, and the Missouri Valley Conference to be one-bid leagues.
Likewise for their individual members. Maintaining the level of success achieved by Hobbs and GW, as represented by those banners, festooned in buff-and-blue, is nearly impossible at this level of college basketball. This isn’t Indiana, or Syracuse, or UCLA, or even nearby Georgetown, where consistent excellence is demanded. Programs like George Washington will experience down years like this. With a capable point guard, perhaps GW would have been more competitive and not so woeful and inept at times.
Still, it was a stressful season, from the start of official practices in October to Saturday night’s home loss on Senior Night. Case in point: after a blowout loss, 68-36, at Virginia Tech in December, Hobbs turned testy with a student reporter who asked him, ill-advisedly, if he thought he had been “out-coached.”
“When I get some top-50 recruits, you can ask me about being out-coached,” he told the young scribe, in a conversation described at the time by the Washington Post as “heated.”
Hobbs isn’t a poor recruiter; to the contrary, that is arguably his great strength as a coach—though he commented after the season’s final game against U-Mass. that he wanted to reemphasize character, a not-too-cleverly veiled reference to the Maureece Rice situation. But his overall statement is indicative of the institutional reality in which Hobbs finds himself. Bad luck has made things seem worse than they are, just as the program wasn’t as healthy as it seemed after three straight tournament appearances. Success is fleeting at this level of collegiate basketball, and George Washington is learning how quickly fortunes indeed can turn—and how fast attitudes can change with them.