Marquette coach plays underdog card

  • By Scott M. Johnson Herald Writer
  • Monday, March 15, 2010 11:35pm
  • SportsSports

Buzz Williams was a young boy growing up in Texas when Lou Holtz was head football coach at the University of Arkansas, and he’s always held the gridiron legend in high regard.

This week, Williams was starting to sound like Holtz.

Williams, the 37-year-old head basketball coach at Marquette, was giving his best Holtz-esque woe-is-us approach to the Golden Eagles’ opening-round game of the NCAA tournament this Thursday.

The University of Washington’s first-round NCAA tournament opponent, Marquette (22-11) is a sixth seed that Williams is trying to portray as a 66th seed.

“We’ll be the smallest team you’ve seen from a BCS conference,” Williams said of the Golden Eagles, who finished fifth in the almighty Big East Conference this season. “We’ve got a 5-(foot)-7 point guard (Maurice Acker), a center (Lazar Hayward) who’s 6-6½ with shoes on, and we don’t have a lot of depth.

“We’re small in stature, and we’re small in depth.”

And Williams didn’t stop there.

“We’ve been on the bubble longer than anyone in the country,” he said during a Sunday night conference call with Seattle-area reporters. “We were 2-5 (in the Big East) when we got whipped by Syracuse (76-71 on Jan. 23), and everyone left us for dead — not for the NCAA tournament, for the CBI.”

To say that Williams is playing the underdog card this week would be a bit of an understatement.

So are the sixth-seeded Golden Eagles an underdog against 11th-seed UW?

“Anytime you play on the West Coast against a Pac-10 team,” Williams said as his team prepared for Thursday’s game in San Jose, “you’re definitely the underdog.”

Given a similar opportunity to play the role of upstart, the Huskies (24-9) weren’t biting on Sunday. Coach Lorenzo Romar and several players said that they didn’t know what seed they felt they had earned, adding that the results over the next few weeks are more important than pre-tournament seedings.

Historically, being a No. 11 seed does not always equate to a one-and-done tournament. The past five NCAA tournaments have included at least one first-round upset by a No. 11, and in 1989 all four 11 seeds won in the opening round.

Since 2001, there have been 36 meetings between No. 6 and No. 11 seeds in the NCAA tournament, and the lower seed has won 12 of them. While No. 10 seeds (13) and No. 12 seeds (16) have pulled off more upsets during that span, history has shown that the difference of five seeding spots does not always guarantee a victory for the No. 6.

Most of the recent 11-over-6 upsets have come when a power team from a so-called mid-major conference took on a middling team from a so-called power conference. Notre Dame, Duke, LSU and Oklahoma have fallen to teams like Dayton, Winthrop, UAB and Wisconsin-Milwaukee in recent years. But there have also been a few power-on-power upsets, like when a Big 12 also-ran Kansas State team beat O.J. Mayo’s USC squad in 2008.

Since 2002, George Mason is the only 11th seed to win more than one game in the tournament. In 2006, they became just the second No. 11 to advance to the Final Four, joining the 1986 LSU Tigers.

The 2001 Temple Owls won three games after being saddled with the 11th seed, making it all the way to the Elite Eight.

And, of course, there were the 1998 UW Huskies, who made it all the way to the Sweet 16 as an 11 seed.

Among this year’s 6-11 matchups, the one pitting Marquette and UW seems the most ripe for a so-called upset. As Williams pointed out during his Holtz-like surrender this week, the Huskies have won 12 of their past 14 games and are the hottest team the Pac-10 has to offer.

Marquette, meanwhile, got blown out in its last outing — a 80-57 pasting by Georgetown in the Big East semifinals that Williams called “the worst loss of my tenure here” — and has struggled against some of the conference’s lower-regarded teams. The Golden Eagles needed seven wins by margins of three points or less, including three consecutive road overtime victories, just to get into the NCAA picture.

In Hayward, the team’s leading scorer at 18.1 points per game, the Golden Eagles have one of the toughest players in a conference known for toughness. The undersized center has thrived on outplaying taller players night in and night out, while his supporting cast is mostly made up of guards.

After losing three of the school’s top eight all-time scorers from last year’s team — Wesley Matthews, Dominic James and Jerel McNeal — Marquette didn’t have very high expectations heading into this season. But the Golden Eagles have surpassed them all to date.

“Our mindset has somewhat been the same up to now,” Williams said. “We’ve always been the underdog. We were picked to finish 12th in the Big East.”

And to hear Williams tell it, the Golden Eagles should be picked to finish 66th in the 65-team NCAA tournament.

That’s probably what Holtz, who coached Minnesota and Notre Dame after a successful stint as football coach at Arkansas, would have led people to believe as well.

But there is a big difference between the two coaches.

“Coach Holtz won a national championship,” Williams said, referring to Notre Dame’s title in 1988. “We’re just trying to win our first game of the NCAA tournament.”

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