FOUR YEAR THEORY?

by Dan Tella, draspate@indiana.edu

I have a theory about prestigious college basketball programs. I call it the Four Year Theory. It shakes-up the unspoken rivalry between the elite of the elite college basketball programs. It's unavoidable. Even for Duke. Like I said, every great college basketball program has one dry-spell of roughly 4 years every quarter century.

Let me first establish what exactly the prestigious programs are. In this category I put Indiana, Duke, North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, and UCLA. We have no time for argument. I do not put teams like Michigan State in this category because their greatness began in the late '90's (practically last year) when Mateen Cleaves signed with State instead of Michigan. Remember that? In a stellar recruiting move, Wolverine stars Luis Bullock and Robert Traylor picked up then-HS-Senior Mateen Cleaves for a day of tomfoolery. They drove to ex-con booster, Ed Martin's, crib in the fancy suburbs of the “D.� They pretended to care what he was saying as he handed them all cash-filled envelopes. Then they crashed the car on the way home by driving like hippies. Obviously, none of them owned the car. It looked really shady. Cleaves decided to get the flip out of that whole fiasco and sign with rival State so that he could turn and immediately laugh at the crumbling Ann Arbor program. He ended up with a National Championship ring. Bullock and Traylor ended up in front of a grand jury. But MSU is still not a great program.

To be in the prestigious group you need to have shown consistent dominance for about 20 years. When you look back, you see that all of these programs have had short 2-4 year droughts at some point over the past two decades. I know I called this the Four Year Theory. Sounded infinitely more prestigious that way. And you weren't going to keep reading with a weak title like “The 2-4 Year Drought,� by Unsure-of-himself Ranter. But anyway, Duke went through theirs during the mid '90s when Laettner, Hill, and Hurley had just left and Wojo and Langdon were still in high school. By the way, I love seeing Wojo get all jovial like a little has-been troll sitting next to coach K. A little has-been troll that balled for Duke, though.

With North Carolina it happened at the turn of the century when Vince Carter and Jamison had just left and Sean May and Felton were still in high school. These teams can be best remembered for starting two football players for a significant period of time (Ronald “Hyped More than Vick� Curry and Julius “Scarier than Tuberculosis� Peppers), and as Matt Doherty's failed homecoming. Kentucky 's dry spell preceded all of theirs in the early '90s right before Mashburn came to Lexington.

Currently Indiana is going through their dry spell. I go to Indiana, and therefore hate the fact that when I try to brag to a chap from Lexington, Chapel Hill, Durham, Lawrence, or Westwood that I experienced one of the great ones, I'll have to lie about which years I was here. After Mike Davis gets fired this year, these past 4 years will be referred to as the Mike Davis Years. It really has gotten that bad here. Indiana went 20 straight years making the tournament (at the time the longest streak in the nation. Have gone 0 for 2 in the past two years.) They are looking to make it a three-peat. But no need to dwell in the negative. I still got to storm the court when we beat the culturally insensitive Illini. And that makes for a lot better grandkid/girl-in-bar/job-interview story, than any tournament streak.