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South Regional Notebook
Thursday, March 9
Florida faces daunting task in SEC tournament



Billy Donovan is no Dale Brown, which is a positive pretty much any way you look at it. But with the Florida coach facing the bizarre scenario of sharing the Southeastern Conference title and still needing to play four games in four days in the tournament, he might borrow from the playbook of the league's Loon Emeritus.

Inside the C-USA tournament
The Storyline: Can anyone beat -- or even bother -- Cincinnati?

The key stat: The Bearcats ran the table in the league, going 16-0 and winning those games by an average of 16 points. Any chance that will change?

The Star of the Show: Cincy center Kenyon Martin leads the nation in spiked shots and crushing dunks. But he's rounded out his game admirably, adding a jump shot and ball handling to the package.

The Potential Sleeper: Memphis has gone through a miserable season -- head coach fired after some tawdry business right before the games started, a rocky run under interim coach Johnny Jones, constant speculation that John Calipari will be on board next year -- and suddenly jelled at the end. The Tigers have won five straight, including three straight road games for the first time in forever. Playing at home won't hurt, either.

The Current Slumper: Marquette has overachieved this season to put itself in line for an NIT bid, but the Golden Eagles have been introduced to the wall down the stretch. They've lost seven of their last 10.

The pick: Let's venture out on a rather sturdy limb and pick the Bearcats.

In 1987, faced with the same challenge for his LSU team in the SEC tournament in Atlanta, Brown announced that he would not sleep throughout the course of the event. He was going live, 24/7, for four days. This was Brown's motivational way of persuading his Tigers that fatigue could be conquered with the proper mindset.

So the SEC tourney literally became all Dale, all the time. He called reporters' rooms in the dead of the night, whispering sweet nothings into their fuzzy heads. "This is your 3 a.m. barometric pressure check," Brown would say, beginning rather short conversations.

He was, of course, totally nuts. And his team, 8-10 in the league going into the tournament, totally bought it.

The Tigers made it to the final before finally succumbing, losing 69-62 to Alabama. Then LSU, as a No. 10 seed in the NCAA Tournament, went all the way to the final eight before losing to eventual national champion Indiana by a point.

Sometimes, crazy works.

And sometimes, teams can summon the strength to play four-in-four. In fact, seven teams have done it since the SEC revived its conference tournament in 1979, the most recent being Georgia in 1997.

But only one team has actually won the tournament that way. Auburn in 1985, the No. 8 seed going into the tourney, ran the table. (Having Chuck Person didn't hurt.)

Florida's task is both easier and more difficult than Auburn's that year. Winning four in a row in a golden year for SEC hoops seems preposterous, but it's not out of the question.

The Gators, who open against Mississippi on Thursday, are third in the Eastern Division but 10th in America according to the latest ESPN/USA Today poll. They certainly have the talent to beat anyone in their path in Atlanta, and they have the depth to play four.

Best of all, they're cozily situated in the same bracket with Auburn, the emasculated runner-up in the West. Without suspended star forward Chris Porter, who doesn't figure to play this week, the Tigers lost to Florida by 29 in late February.

After that would figure to be Tennessee, a team that beat the Gators twice this season but needed a total of three overtimes to do it. The talented Volunteers haven't won a single SEC tournament game since 1996, so they've got some proving to do.

Win the first three and Florida would be likely be looking at either LSU or Kentucky, who are on course for quite a collision in the Saturday semifinals. The Tigers can go body for body with Tennessee in terms of talent but are similarly unproven in this event (no SEC tourney wins since 1993). Kentucky all but owns the event and the venue (won seven of the last eight tournaments and are a daunting 12-0 in the Georgia Dome) but has been susceptible all season to dysfunctional shooting.

Florida obliterated LSU earlier in the year and split with Kentucky. It wouldn't be scared of either team.

Now comes the hard part: Is a team built around full-court pressure and built upon freshmen and sophomores up to the grind? Can Florida play BillyBall -- running and gunning and playing in the 90s -- for four straight days? Can its young stars maintain their mental edge for that long?

Maybe. But Donovan would like to see his team have a capable Plan B on the nights when the 3-pointers aren't falling -- which is bound to happen at least once in four games.

"We've got to find different ways to somehow win the game," he told the Gainesville Sun.

"They (the players) need to figure out that when they're not making shots, they have to find other things to do -- get out on the fast break, get a second shot, get fouled, get to the free throw line or go inside maybe a little bit more," Donovan said.

The exemplar of such resourcefulness is Kentucky, which shared the league title with Florida, Tennessee and LSU despite being on course to finish as the worst shooting UK team since 1962-63. There's no telling how the Cats are going to shoot from night to night, but opponents can always count on hellish defense and brutish rebounding.

If there has been one constant from Rick Pitino to Tubby Smith, it has been consistent effort. Kentucky simply never mails it in -- especially at this time of year.

"If they're having a poor shooting night in the SEC tournament or the NCAA Tournament, it's not going to hit them like a ton of bricks," Donovan said.

Kentucky usually is the brick wall hitting opponents about now. Pitino was a preposterous 17-1 in the SEC tournament, and so far Smith's winning percentage in this event as the UK coach is higher -- he's 6-0. In the NCAAs, Pitino was a razor-sharp 22-5, but Smith has him beaten there, too. He's 9-1 as the UK coach.

Smith has also had the advantage of playing a maximum of three games in this tournament. Donovan now needs to win four. Paging Dale Brown, come in Dale...

Around the South
  • Cotton picking his future: Alabama forward Schea Cotton said he will return home to Southern California after the season is over for Spring Break to ponder a jump to the pros. The sophomore has played just one year of Division I ball after transferring from junior college. He led the Crimson Tide in scoring this season at 15.8 points per game. Tide coach Mark Gottfried will also be holding his breath in regards to star recruit Gerald Wallace, who also is said to be mulling a possible leap to the pros.

  • Can you say "Football State"? Despite having one of the best seasons in school history, Tennessee actually returned part of its ticket allotment for the SEC tournament. The Volunteers turned back 208 unsold ticket books from an allotment of more than 1,300.

  • Reversal of fortunes: March is the greatest month for college basketball players, but also the cruelest. Nobody knows that right now any better than Murray State guard Aubrey Reese.

    A year ago he was the toast of Championship Week after swishing a miraculous jumper at the buzzer to beat Southeast Missouri State for the league tournament championship and NCAA bid. This year the OVC Player of the Year endured a nationally televised disaster in the same event, against the same opponent.

    Reese made his first shot against SEMO less than 90 seconds into the game, then missed his next 17. He entered the game averaging 21 per contest and left it with three.

    The iron -- and the irony -- were most unkind.

    After the game was over he buried his head on his mother's shoulder and sobbed.

    "This game," Reese said, "was what you have in your nightmares."

    "He's devastated," said Murray coach Tevester Anderson. "He's a gamer, a winner. This tore him apart."

  • Triangle talk: Watch OVC champion Southeast Missouri run its precise offense of passes and cuts and see if it looks familiar: It's the triangle offense the Chicago Bulls rode to six NBA titles. And the Indians make it work wonderfully with no Michael Jordan in sight.

    Pat Forde of the Louisville Courier-Journal is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.


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