Sean Miller spoke Friday night of a coach’s will for “perfection,” and it was best exhibited in the game’s final minute.
As Miller inserted three walk-ons in a 54-34 game, he noticed that forward Drew Mellon didn’t properly get the attention of the official scorer. He didn’t fully “check in.”
As Mellon walked onto the court, Miller rushed to grab him, point him to the scorer’s table, and instruct him to properly check in. It’s that type of attention to detail, the demand for perfection, that typifies Miller’s approach.
Don’t let anything slip.
ESPN last week said it polled 112 college basketball coaches and asked them to pick a national Coach of the Year.
Miller didn’t get a vote. Utah’s Larry Krystkowiak got 19 votes.
With a pat lineup returning from last year’s Final Four, Wisconsin’s Bo Ryan finished seventh overall. Gonzaga’s Mark Few, whose team has only played one team in the current Top 25, was fifth.
John Calipari, whose loaded Kentucky team you could coach to the Final Four, finished third.
There are three reasons this happens: Arizona’s isn’t sexy any more and it is expected to roll in a subpar Pac-12; the Wildcats play games that begin so late in Eastern precincts that even the college basketball diehards don’t watch; the Pac-12 Networks isn’t a known or entirely available entity nationally.
The fact that ESPN hasn’t made the Feb. 28 Arizona at Utah showdown its Saturday “Game Day” special — the Game of the Year in the West — reveals a lot about basketball life in the Mountain time zone.
ESPN is clinging to four options for Game Day venues on Feb. 28: BYU at Gonzaga, Syracuse at Duke, Texas at Kansas and Arizona at Utah. It hasn’t set the start time for any of those games, but the smart money is on BYU at Gonzaga, because the Zags are viewed as a cuddly Cinderella story in a location (Spokane, Washington) so remote that it always seems like a fresh story.
Arizona is likely to be 14-1 in Pac-12 play going to the Salt Lake City game. Utah is apt to be either 13-2, or 12-3 if it can’t sweep on the Oregon trail.
The game should decide the conference championship and the Coach of the Year and maybe Player of the Year.
It would be a good time for ESPN to recognize that college basketball in the Pac-12 isn’t always USC vs. Cal, and that Miller is coaching as well as anyone in the game.
