It's unthinkable that a school with the University of Alabama's resources has never won an NCAA basketball tournament regional final, never been to a regional final until now. Yes, Alabama is synonymous with football; it's the school not only of Bear Bryant but Bart Starr and Joe Namath. But Alabama has had it share of basketball stars, too, all-Americans like T.R. Dunn, Leon Douglas, Derrick McKey and Ennis Whatley. It's had big-time NBA players like Robert Horry, Jason Caffey, Antonio McDyess and Latrell Sprewell. In the all-time SEC tournament standings, Alabama trails only Kentucky in number of titles and winning percentage and leads everybody else including Arkansas.
But the later the season goes, when thoughts down in Tuscaloosa turn to spring football, the basketball team recedes from view. The Tide was 0 for 7 in regional games before finally breaking through Thursday night with a victory over favored Syracuse here in the regional semifinal. Seeded eighth, the Tide kicked the defending champions out of the tournament with a display of unselfish team basketball that has folks back at home actually paying attention to basketball.
"We weren't ready to be through playing," baby-faced guard Earnest Shelton said. "We wanted to do something this school had never done before."
Having done that, Alabama will be the underdog for the third straight game in this tournament. Last Saturday, the Crimson Tide beat No. 1 seed Stanford, then No. 5 seed Syracuse. On deck Saturday afternoon is No. 2 seed U-Conn., perhaps the most ferocious looking team in the tournament when center Emeka Okafor's back isn't bothering him. In this era of starless college basketball teams, U-Conn. is the exception, with Okafor and guard Ben Gordon. Alabama is the rule, but to the extreme.
"People have to be saying, 'Who's Alabama?' Shelton said. "Nobody really knows anything about us. It's like 'Who's Earnest Shelton? Who's Kennedy Winston? Who's Chuck Davis?'
"Alabama has had some pretty good well-known players not get this far. I didn't even know the school never got this far. You think about guys like Spree and McDyess and Robert Horry and Gerald Wallace. I was sure they'd made it this far. Then, I started looking at the records. Some of those guys won SEC titles and were all-Americans. I know their goal was to reach the Final Four, too. But they never got over that hurdle. Now, this team that nobody knows anything about is still hanging around."
They hung around by never allowing Syracuse forward Hakim Warrick and guard Gerry McNamara to get going at the same time. And they solved Syracuse's perplexing 2-3 zone by shooting 50 percent, largely because they dared to find creative ways to get the ball inside to Chuck Davis, the 6-foot-7 center whose 19 points played much bigger. Alabama also hit 9 of 22 three-pointers, led by Shelton and guard Antoine Pettway hitting 6 of 13.
Their coach, Mark Gottfried, never got this far during his Alabama playing career (1984 to '87). In fact, Gottfried's teams were responsible for nearly half the school's disappointments in Sweet 16 play. They lost in the regional semis three straight years, including 1987, when Alabama went 28-5, won the SEC regular season and tournament, and earned a No. 2 seed (in the Southeast Region) only to get blown out in the third round by Rick Pitino's Providence team that beat Georgetown to reach the Final Four.
Gottfried told his team before the game, "I'm 40 years old now. There's nothing I can do. I can't change what happened to me back then."
The coach also knows Alabama isn't going to change its athletic priorities.
"I think football," Gottfried said, "has earned that right. They've won national championships. At some point basketball needs to take the next step and reach the Final Four. I've believed that since I played at Alabama."
Shelton was somewhat stunned when he came to Alabama from Tennessee.
"I'm from Memphis," he said, "and I just couldn't believe how everything shuts down when there's a football game in Alabama. The whole town is dead. Nothing moves. It's the biggest thing in the state, period. I think basketball's coming along, though. My freshman year we won the SEC tournament. Last year we were number one in the country for a little bit. Now, we've done this thing no Alabama team has ever done. But we respect what football has done. We know they are the big guys on campus."
That has flip-flopped, as long as we confine the discussion to recent results. Alabama football is struggling. Alabama basketball used an ambitious schedule to get ready for March. The Crimson Tide played Pitt, Providence, Charlotte, Wisconsin and Xavier, all out-of-conference NCAA tournament teams, as it turned out. And in the SEC, it played Kentucky, Vanderbilt, Mississippi State (twice), Florida and South Carolina, all NCAA tournament teams.
Asked how he felt about the team's 17-12 record entering the tournament, Gottfried said, "We always felt the tough schedule would help us more than hurt us."
And as guard Antoine Pettway said, "My freshman year [2001, when the Tide went 25-11] the selection committee didn't let us in [the NCAA tournament] because of our schedule."
Whether the Tide has the wherewithal to beat U-Conn. is questionable. But Gottfried's team is playing with the confidence of knowing it has gone further than any team Alabama has produced. So it's not like the Tide is likely to take the court Saturday feeling tons of outside pressure.
"To do something some great players never did," he said, "makes you feel pretty special."
