ATLANTA – Even the best college basketball coaches don’t make shots. Players make shots.
So whatever magic Georgia coach Mark Fox drew up with 32 seconds to play Tuesday night, his Bulldogs tied with Georgia Tech inside Tech’s somewhat full Thrillerdome, junior guard Dustin Ware still had to hit the 3-pointer.
Even if the basket looked, in Ware’s words, “as big as the ocean,” he still had to drop it through after Tennessee State transfer Gerald Robinson hit him with a perfect pass off a slashing drive.
That Ware cleanly swished his seventh 3-pointer in nine attempts to give the Bulldogs a 73-70 lead in their eventual 73-72 victory is a credit not only to Fox – who told his staff Monday, “[Dustin’s] going to shoot the ball well” – but also to the player and his teammates, who believe their coach’s mantra that the tougher team wins.
But for every winner there also is a loser, which brings us to the Yellow Jackets and coach Paul Hewitt.
Hewitt is in his 11th season coaching Tech. He has failed to post a winning Atlantic Coast Conference in the regular season record in the past six years, dating back to the 2004 Final Four run, when the Jackets went 9-7 in league play.
Even worse, Tech has missed postseason play three of the last five years, and if this loss to Georgia is any indication, this might make four of six minus the madness of March.
If anyone needs to understand why, one might merely return to Tuesday night’s final 134 seconds, the Jackets up 65-60 and on a 10-0 run.
It seemed all but over at that point. Georgia looked both weary and worried. The Bulldogs had trailed by 10 points in the opening half. Now they had surrendered 10 points in a row after gritting their way to a five-point lead.
But the Bulldogs also knew Tech’s history this season. They knew the Jackets had lost by 17 points at Kennesaw State. They knew Tech also had lost by 20 to Northwestern, which never has reached the NCAA tournament.
Asked if they’d been told the Jackets would let them back in it, Ware paused.
Then he paused some more before saying, “Let’s just say that we felt like if we kept fighting and battling, good things would happen.”
This is what happened: Down five, the Bulldogs tossed the ball inside to 6-foot-10 junior Trey Thompkins, who promptly connected on a three-point play the old-fashioned way to pull the visitors within two.
You can argue over the intelligence of fouling Thompkins, but those are hustle plays in the heat of action. And what happened from there on out looked more like Tech tentativeness than Georgia tenacity.
First, senior guard Maurice Miller threw up a bad shot in close, with 10 seconds left on the shot clock, that led to a tying layup by Robinson.
Then Brian Oliver badly missed an awkward jumper followng a Hewitt timeout. Then came Ware’s 3-pointer, the decision to go for a quick 2-pointer by Tech despite less than seven seconds remaining in the game, then, finally, an inbounds play that wound up in Georgia hands at least partly because Oliver supposedly made a bad read while throwing the ball the length of the court.
Said Hewitt of that read: “The next time that he is in that situation, I know he will make a good decision.”
A few years ago, Tech made a bad decision my handing a Hewitt a fat contract with a six-year rollover. To buy him out supposedly would cost the school nearly $7 million.
In this economic climate, with the Jackets about to undergo a massive renovation to the Thrillerdome, the argument against paying that $7 million seems fairly sound.
But less than two weeks after losing to the Bulldogs on the football field, the Jackets could entice only 6,725 – many of those Georgia fans – to show up for a chance at revenge. It was as if they knew that even if their coach needed to push only one right button in the game’s final 134 seconds to secure victory, he would push none.
Coaches can’t make shots. But coaches worth $7 million buyouts should be able to draw up a play to get a shot. That Tech again appears to have no chance at March when it’s only December shouldn’t be ignored much longer.