INTERESTING STUFF

2001-02

• RULES CHANGES

• NOTES

• SPORTING NEWS ARTICLE

RULES CHANGES

NOTES

SPORTING NEWS ARTICLE ABOUT SEASON

They arrived at Maryland with only a sprinkling of acclaim, but their four-year journey to the national title made the Terrapins' seniors unforgettable.

On the play of his life, the play that made him an NCAA champion, Byron Mouton could have landed flat on his face. The ball was sailing over the baseline and seemed entirely out of reach. To rescue it required him to think fast and act without concern for his health. In other words, he had to hustle. This, he learned at Maryland.

Terrapins basketball has been funny that way. What the players did not bring into Cole Field House, they were likely to absorb while playing under its arched ceiling. "I came a long way," Mouton says. "People don't realize the difference between the Tulane Byron and the Maryland Byron. At Tulane, I probably would have let that ball go out of bounds. I would have watched it."

Mouton's moment -- easily buried beneath the statistical excesses of his more celebrated teammates -- developed with 3:56 left in Monday's national championship game at the Georgia Dome and Maryland leading Indiana by only 4 points. Although the margin would grow rapidly to blowout proportions, to a 64-52 outcome, the game still was very much a game at that juncture. Terps point guard Steve Blake missed a 3, and the ball headed out of bounds along the baseline. Mouton hopped on one leg and scooped the ball with one hand to Blake, whose pass to power forward Tahj Holden was redirected inside for a quick score by guard Drew Nicholas. Thus began an 11-0 surge that delivered the Terps their first national title.

Other schools that have won recent NCAA Tournament championships took basketball stars and made them into teams. Khalid El-Amin and Richard Hamilton became UConn's 1999 champions. Jason Williams, Mike Dunleavy and Shane Battier coalesced to win it for Duke last April. Maryland won its title with the recruiting equivalent of Five Guys Named Moe. The Terrapins, even star seniors Juan Dixon and Lonny Baxter, once were deep enough on those ubiquitous lists of top high school prospects that it required the nerve of a spelunker to locate them.

"No one really gave these seniors a chance when they came to Maryland," assistant coach Dave Dickerson says. "But they are the best in college basketball now, and they really appreciate what that means."

This NCAA championship might have seemed unremarkable to those who began following college basketball as the tournament commenced. The Terps were a No. 1 seed. They were Atlantic Coast Conference champions. Their roster included a first-team All-American. Teams such as this are the ones that cut down nets and invent dances on the hardwood floor.

This, however, is anything but an ordinary, overwhelming, overdog champion. This is a team whose components largely were dismissed or derided by numerous recruiting analysts and the apprehensive Terrapins fans who trusted their assessments. This is, remarkably, the first team since 1978 to claim an NCAA championship without a McDonald's All-American on its roster.

That does not make these Terps the answer to a trivia question. This is much more. This is the culmination of a fundamental shift in the nature of the college game, a game whose surface has been eroded by early NBA draft entry but whose core strength was revealed in the beauty of the games played last weekend at the Georgia Dome. This is an endorsement of the value of experience, with the Terps starting three seniors who have passed their 23rd birthdays.

Specific to Maryland, this is an affirmation of the approach to player development followed by coach Gary Williams. He battled for many of the elite-level players produced in the Baltimore-Washington corridor during the past half-decade, and let some of them escape. Among those who left the area to play elsewhere: Keith Bogans, Joseph Forte, James White and DerMarr Johnson. And that's just a sampling.

Instead of those headline-grabbing talents, Williams signed Blake, Baxter, Chris Wilcox and Dixon, an all-city guard from Baltimore who became Maryland's career scoring leader. The typical Terp was ranked somewhere between 40th and 80th by analysts. Williams and Maryland helped turn them into stars. And champions.

The most highly recruited Terp wasn't even successfully recruited by the Terps -- not out of high school, anyway. Mouton, a 6-6 small forward, had been close to making the McDonald's game and close to choosing Kentucky, but Rick Pitino's departure from Lexington in the spring of 1997 led him to waste two years at Tulane.

By the time Mouton wound up at Maryland, much of that high school-star polish had been worn away by his inert play with the Green Wave. Starting two years, he attempted nearly half his shots from 3-point range even though, honestly, he was lousy at it. Because of his size and athletic ability, Mouton was appealing to the Maryland coaches despite what they saw on Tulane game tapes. Maryland assistant Jimmy Patsos spoke to a coaching friend from Conference USA, then-Cincinnati assistant Mick Cronin, to question whether this was a risk worth taking. "Mick said, 'He needs you as much as you need him,' " Patsos recalls.

"I wouldn't rebound. I wouldn't get in transition. I wasn't a great defender," Mouton says. "Coming here and sitting out a year was big for me. I played all five positions. Sometimes I played point. Sometimes I played guard. Sometimes I played center and had to hold Terence Morris down. That year was tough, and it helped me learn to play the game."

The ideal that defines Williams' approach is this: He coaches basketball players. Not power forwards. Not small forwards. Not shooting guards. He tells his players there are no kickers on his team -- no specialists.

Patsos says that when the staff is conducting offseason workouts, there is no effort to segregate big men and guards. "It doesn't matter who's in the group. Everyone learns a lot about all facets of the game." All the big men do ballhandling drills. All the guards learn to play in the post.

Maryland also uses as fuel the notion that its players are, well, mutts -- unwanted and unloved by the talent evaluators. The Terps know precisely how many McDonald's All-Americans have been in their company. "Since I've been here, we've had one, Danny Miller, and he left the program," Dixon says.

"We play a certain way, and I think you have to get certain types of players," Williams says. "We look for guys that maybe other schools think, 'He's not big enough,' or whatever. For us, he might be a really good player, even though he doesn't have the All-American label or whatever after his name.

"As you're in coaching, you're a teacher. You like to get guys that are willing to work. To walk down every day in practice and have guys willing to listen and to work hard to get better, that's pretty special. I know some players that are more difficult to coach than what I have."

Maryland's intelligence and experience helped build a double-digit first-half lead. The Terps confidently ran at Indiana's potent 3-point shooters, trusting the scouting report that insisted the Hoosiers were no threats to drive.

The most important difference between Maryland and Indiana, though, was obvious each time Hoosiers star Jared Jeffries caught the ball in the post. Instead of commencing to dribble and attempting to back down Wilcox or spin off him into the lane, Jeffries turned to face him. Wilcox's strength convinced Jeffries he had to try something different. Wilcox finished with 10 points and seven rebounds in 24 minutes, but his effort in suppressing Jeffries might have been more vital than Dixon's 18 points or Baxter's 15 points and 14 boards.

Wilcox and Jeffries were high school seniors in 2000. Jeffries was a McDonald's All-American. Wilcox was not. "When he was inside in the McDonald's game, I was outside working on my game," Wilcox says. He played only 8.6 minutes per game as a freshman, when the Terps reached the Final Four and lost to Duke. He says he learned while spectating that playing hard was not optional.

"There's always a list of players out there that if you don't recruit them, you're a bad recruiter -- no matter how many games you win," Williams says.

"There are people who care more about recruiting than they do about how many games you win. I've never figured that out."

The thing about the recruitniks is they can manufacture the conviction that if a team had landed that one additional superstar talent, their team would have had the equipment necessary to claim a championship.

They no longer can aim that contention at Williams. He had what he needed.