Tubbs on today's college hoops
Tubbs says today's low scoring games are a yawner (Scott Wright, Daily Oklahoman)
If scoring gets much lower in college basketball, Billy Tubbs believes the Food and Drug Administration will have to get involved.
"They're going to have to put warnings on these games,” the former Oklahoma coach said. "Warning: Watching this game could make you drowsy.”
The days of Billy Ball — which regularly produced 100-point games — are mostly a thing of the past. And not just at Oklahoma but all across the country.
Scoring jumped immediately after the addition of the 3-point line in 1986, but it has been in a downward trend over the last 17 years, falling nearly seven points per game since 1991.
When Texas Tech hosts Oklahoma at 3 p.m. today in Lubbock, Texas, the game will feature two teams that, on average, score fewer than 71 points per game and allow fewer than 66. Their last meeting was a 63-61 OU victory in Norman.
And similar scores are being posted nightly throughout college basketball. Games like that are becoming hard to watch for the old run-n-gun coaches of the 1980s and ‘90s.
"If you can't score 60 points in a basketball game, you ought to quit,” Tubbs said. "Who wants to see it? There are games that get down to the last three minutes, and they're exciting, but they're boring as hell for the first 47 minutes.”
Even the teams that try to run the floor today don't produce points the way Tubbs did at Oklahoma — or Jerry Tarkanian at UNLV or Nolan Richardson at Arkansas. The biggest difference is that the current teams are using defense to get the ball back and set up their offense, where the teams of the past used defense to get easy points.
It's the difference between scoring with jump shots and scoring with layups.
Those high-flying Tubbs' teams at Oklahoma were really fun to watch (as were Tark's and Richardson's teams, and even Tom Penders' teams at Texas).
I had lost interest in college hoops before TP came to Houston for exactly the reasons described by Tubbs -- so many teams just play a gawdawful boring style of ball. As much as it pains me when Lanny or Fluff clangs a crazy three pointer from well outside their range with only 8 seconds run off the shot clock, I'd rather have that than some variant of the run-out-the-shot-clock-weave as a team's main offensive set.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 02/16/08 12:48 | Sports | Technorati
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