Sports Then and Now

By taking a look at March Madness and the way college basketball teams advance through the tournament, it’s easy to see how valuable an elite shot blocker can be. Protectors of the rim have always been an important part of the college game and have been some of the best players in the history of the sport. Unfortunately, the blocked shot didn’t become a statistic until the ‘80s, so greats like Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain couldn’t leave their mark completely. However, the last 30 years or so have given us plenty of great shot blockers. Here are the best of the best.

Hakeem Olajuwon

Olajuwon was easily one of the most dominating forces college basketball has ever seen. His defensive prowess led the Houston Cougars to the Final Four in each of his three seasons playing for the school. Had he stayed for a fourth year, Olajuwon would almost certainly be the all-time leader in blocks. He totaled 454 rejections with an average of 6.61 blocks per 40 minutes.

David Robinson

Known as the Admiral, Robinson is one of the best shot blockers of all time, which is all the more impressive considering he didn’t start playing basketball until his final year of high school. Robinson recorded a total of 516 blocks in his four-year college career at Navy, averaging 5.55 blocks per 40 minutes. Robinson is one of only six players to block at least 14 shots in a single game and he holds the record for blocked shots in a season with 207. His knack for rejecting shots earned Robinson both the Naismith and Wooden Player of the Year awards.

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As one of the stories of the year, the Wichita State Shockers have gone undefeated in the regular season of their college basketball season. After making it to the Final Four the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament last year and earning a record of 34-0 this season, the Wichita St. basketball team is now where they have rarely been—in the limelight of sports prominence. For the casual sports fan, the Shockers have not often come to mind when it comes to choosing a winner for their March Madness brackets. However, Wichita St. basketball has come a long way since its beginning, starting under the name Fairmount College.

The Beginning of Shockers Basketball

Under the original name of the “Wheatshockers”, the Fairmount College basketball team competed in its first season in 1906. Head coach Willis Bates and his six players finished the season 2-4. You don’t need medical translation to know that going 2-4 isn’t the best start to a program, but Fairmount College would eventually make strides forward, including the development of the full-court zone press under Coach Gene Johnson.

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Start of Success

The Shockers would begin to see success after joining the Missouri Valley Conference, when the school hired Ralph Miller from East High in 1951. Miller convinced his star player in high school, Cleo Littleton, to come with him to the college. Littleton became one of the first African-American players in the Missouri Valley Conference. He was also the first to score 19 points per game as a freshman—a school record that stands today. Under Miller in the 1964, Dave Stallworth would become the Shockers’ first consensus all-American, scoring a career average 24.2 points per game. Miller would later be inducted into Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame after building the Shockers’ basketball program.

Wichita State’s First Great Season

In the season following the school’s induction into the state university system as Wichita State University, the Shockers would go 19-7 and win the Missouri Valley Conference in the 1964-65 season under Gary Thompson. In the NCAA tournament of that season, Wichita St. would defeat SMU and Oklahoma St. in order to earn a berth into the Final Four—an accomplishment tied for the school’s deepest-ever run in the tournament. In their Final Four matchup, Wichita St. would lose to defending national champs UCLA Bruins by a score of 108-89.

One More Run Before Insignificance

11 years after Wichita St.’s greatest season at that point, the Shockers would win their next Missouri Valley Conference title. With one of the school’s best-assembled teams, including freshman-phenom Cheese Johnson, the 1975-76 Shockers returned to the NCAA tournament. A heart-breaking loss by one point to Michigan—the eventual runners-up—in the first game of the tournament would then be followed by the Shockers’ Elite 8 season in 1981 in which Wichita St. defeated Kansas. The Shockers would subsequently go through a period of mediocrity through the 1990s.

Return of the Shockers

Under new Athletic Director Jim Schaus, Wichita St. would begin to see success again in the 2000s. The hiring of coach Mark Turgeon would prove advantageous as he brought the team to three consecutive 20-win seasons and the school’s first conference championship in 23 years. The program has continued to gain momentum as the Shockers won the NIT tournament in 2011 and reached the Final Four of the NCAA tournament last season. Now, Wichita St. is poised to make a deep run in the tournament with the likelihood of a one seed and the confidence that only an undefeated season can give you.

Derek Kellogg has the UMass Minutemen contending for an NCAA title.

1 – Chaz Williams

The best live sports betting sites on the internet, such as Sportsbetting.ag, will tell you that the biggest reason Massachusetts is likely to snag an NCAA tournament berth this season is Williams, a 5-9 sparkplug of a guard who has led the Minutemen in scoring at 15.9 points per game while handing out a dazzling 7.4 assists per game. The scoring and passing Williams has injected into this team’s offense has made UMass very hard to guard. The extent to which Williams has broken through this season – a season that might not have unfolded if Williams had left early for the NBA draft – is a product of the patience displayed by Massachusetts head coach Derek Kellogg, who elaborated on his relationship with Williams and the need for Williams to stay one more season in order to become a more NBA-ready player:

“The reality of it is, my job is just to get him the right information. Sometimes when you’re the coach talking, it can get construed that you’re asking me to come back for yourself or the team. The decision was, do you want to be a potential second-round pick or do you want to go back and do something special? The things that were important to Chaz and his family, I think he does want to be on line to graduate. He does want to do something special at a university and try to lead a program and a team back to national prominence and get to an NCAA Tournament. I explained to him, you’re on the verge of doing something not a lot of players have done here. You’re on the verge of taking a program and helping get a program back and resurrect a program. Let’s shoot for something special.”
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St. Louis Billikens

1 –Dwayne Evans

When checking out Lowvig.ag, you will be bombarded with information. Saint Louis bombards its opponents with intelligent and rugged play, epitomized by Evans. Here’s the most likely NBA prospect for Saint Louis. Evans is by far the best player on the Saint Louis roster, not just the team’s primary scoring threat. Evans powered the Billikens to the Atlantic 10 championship last season with his constant energy and his ability to get into the paint on offense. Strong and intelligent, Evans displays a level of poise as a ball-handler which makes up for a deficit in terms of quickness. Evans knows how to maneuver his body through a defense with the ball, and he knows how to get to the rim. When you look at him in game action, you are inclined to think that he’s not fast enough to get to the rim or within five feet of the basket for a floater, but he regularly does precisely that, and defenses just don’t wind up stopping him – it’s strange but undeniable. What might be his best attribute as a player is that Evans is an outstanding defender, averaging over one steal per game and almost one blocked shot per game – this at 6-6 on the wing. Being the leading scoring option on a team would make many players unwilling to make a big investment on defense, but that’s not how Evans rolls. Read the rest of this entry →

It was pure joy for players and fans in Richmond when VCU punched their NCAA Tournament dance ticket.

There was a time when the weekend of the ACC and Big East men’s basketball tournaments was as anticipated as the opening week of the NCAA Tournament.

When I was a middle and high school student in Virginia during the early 1980s, the only time our teachers would ever bring a television into the classroom was on the Friday afternoon of the ACC Tournament so we could watch that opening game in between science, math or English lessons.

In the Big East you could always count on classic battles between Georgetown, St. Johns, Syracuse and Villanova as each looked to secure bragging rights in a conference that was built for basketball.

That, of course, was the days before the 64 team tournament (now 68) when only the best team or two from each league was assured of making the tournament field and even high quality squads had to make a deep run in the conference tournament to guarantee a spot in the NCAA field.

Since 1985 when the NCAA field expanded from 53 to 64 teams after having as few as 22 teams participating just a decade earlier, the role of the conference tournament in power leagues like the ACC, Big East and SEC in determining which teams make the NCAA field has steadily declined.

Now, instead of the third or fourth seeded teams in these tournaments feeling they needed to make a run to the title game to ensure a spot in the NCAA field, they now enter the tournament knowing an early exit won’t hurt them and the extra rest may actually be helpful for their NCAA run.

Occasionally, like Georgia in the SEC in 2008 or Connecticut in the Big East last year, a team that must win the conference tournament to make the NCAA’s can still emerge and capture the crowd. Read the rest of this entry →

Bevo Francis

The Sports Then and Now Vintage Athlete of the Month for February is one of the most prolific players in the history of college basketball. However, unless you followed sports in the early 1950s, chances are you have never heard of  Clarence “Bevo” Francis.

Quite simply, Francis was the most prolific basketball scorer of his generation and an intriguing answer to trivia questions. Read the rest of this entry →