Beware the ‘Clones!
No Larry Brown-coached Kansas basketball team won in five trips to Iowa State. Roy Williams’s first team in 1989 fell at Ames. KU enjoys a 160-58 bulge in the series, but the Jayhawks are only 10-7 since 1989 in ISU’s noisy Hilton Coliseum.
The Cyclones have a new coach, there are personnel problems and Kansas will be favored Saturday. Yet treachery lurks around every windswept corner in Ames. Throw in ISU’s surprising 2-0 Big 12 start, and the Hilton hurdle gets even higher for Kansas.
But though Iowa State has won some big ones from KU up north, any old-timer will swear that none of them measures up to ISU’s 39-37 upset of Wilt Chamberlain and Co. in 1957, when quarterback Gary Thompson was also earning All-America honors.
Talk about being primed. KU nipped ISU, 58-57, to win the Big Seven holiday tournament Dec. 26 in Kansas City – when it appeared KU got away with a traveling call at the wire. There was no shot clock, and coach Bill Strannigan and Thompson hatched a ball-control plan that once saw 21 passes before a Cyclone took a shot in that Jan. 14 classic.
It’s 37-all with five seconds left, ISU inbounding the ball. You knew whom they’d go to, right? KU smothered Thompson, so 6-foot-8 center Don Medsker took a pass at the top of the key and swish! Forget KU’s 12-game win streak.
ISU was not a boisterous campus, but some 9,000 swarmed the floor of the dank, dingy old armory; the town went nuts. That was a game that got Chamberlain thinking seriously of leaving early for the pros. He hated stall-ball.
Later, Oklahoma State handed KU its only other loss of the regular season, then Kansas fell, 54-53, in triple-overtime to North Carolina in the college championship battle. Iowa State proved that even Chamberlain was human, and Okie State and Carolina reiterated it.
l The odds are not in favor of Louisville’s Bobby Petrino making it big as the Atlanta Falcons football coach after a good college career at Louisville. Nick Saban stumbled at Miami after glossy activity at Michigan State and LSU and has fled the pros for gold and glory at Alabama.
Think of some of the massive flops that our league’s Bud Wilkinson and Dan Devine, and Arizona State’s Frank Kush, experienced. Devine left Missouri, got fired at Green Bay, then won a national title at Notre Dame.
Other bunglers like Tom Coughlin (first at Jacksonville, now New York), Butch Davis, Steve Mariucci, Dennis Green, Mike Riley and Steve Spurrier leap from the files.
The first college icon to score pro dominance was Paul Brown, from Ohio State to the Cleveland Browns he founded. Jimmy Johnson, once at Oklahoma State, won a national college title at Miami, then earned two Super Bowl titles with Dallas. Rascally Barry Switzer was a national titlist at Oklahoma and later got a Big Ring with Dallas. Bobby Ross shared a national title at Georgia Tech and led San Diego to a Super Bowl appearance before flaming out at Detroit and winding up at Army.
Often overlooked as one who made a successful leap is Dick Vermeil, who got UCLA a Pac-10 title and Rose Bowl win, went to Philadelphia where he took the Eagles to a Super Bowl, then won the Super Bowl with the St. Louis Rams before staying too long at Kansas City. He’s the only guy who’s won coach of the year honors in high school, junior college, college and the NFL.
Don’t bet the farm on Petrino’s doing that well.
