CAN SOUTH FLORIDA BE A BULL MARKET IN HOOPS?

January 16, 2009

by Ray Mernagh



South Florida impressed me.

There I said it (okay, I wrote it) and lightning didn't strike me through my keyboard. Almost everything about the South Florida Bulls, save their punctuality, impressed me Wednesday night against Pitt. I was shocked too because before the game -- while waiting for the Bulls to fight their way through a city that might as well be Tampa for the way it's drivers respond to a few inches of snow, and as Pitt players amused themselves by putting on a dunking exhibition for the Oakland Zoo -- I went up and down their schedule trying to find their best win and... I guess it's Northeastern... by default. The best results of their season are losses. No DePaul fans your game doesn't count -- any team worth their D-1 status should be beating the Blue Demons (and are come to think of it).

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The Bulls seemed to get good shots every time they ran the sets that Stan Heath continually called out from the bench. Gus Gilchrist, the 6-10 freshman who's college choices have included Virginia Tech (shootings on campus changed his mind, plus the alleged lack of an available job for his trainer/advisor/official spokesperson Terelle Woody), Maryland (lack of an understanding -- guess good advisors are hard to come by these days -- that intraconference transfers are frowned upon in the ACC and result would be he'd only have 2 1/2 years of eligibility and would have to sit out longer than anticipated), and finally South Florida, where he filed a hardship waiver and was almost granted his full four years after being cleared by the NCAA on November 5th and ruled eligible to play at the end of the fall semester (December 14th) of this, his freshman year.

Gilchrist is incredibly fluid for 6-10, and has a beautiful stroke from the perimeter. He scored 22 points on 10-15 shooting (2-5 from the arc) even though it was apparent that he's still in the figuring things out stage. Woody, seated on the USF bench in warm-ups, is presumably helping him do just that for about 30K minus benefits. Gilchrist is going to have to gain some interest in rebounding, but his offensive repertoire is one that seems destined for the NBA at some point. So Gilchrist is a big building block for Heath.

Dominique Jones is the other building block that's in place, a sophomore shooting guard who also scored 22 points. Jones was highly efficient, getting his 22 points on ten shots. Jones seems a lot more comfortable now that he's not sharing the floor -- and presumably shots -- with Mike Mercer. Mercer, a junior transfer from Georgia, tore his ACL earlier this season and is done for the year. Jones had a productive freshman season and has played up to that standard in the last few games. He's a talent. Chris Howard is a junior point guard who scored 13 points, most on acrobatic drives to the cup, but probably isn't considered building block #3. That would be freshman point guard Anthony Crater.

Crater is a transfer, originally out of the hoops hotbed of Flint, Michigan. He left Ohio State just a few weeks ago because of playing time (he was averaging about ten minutes of burn per game). His AAU coach claims Crater left because Thad Matta broke a promise to the young man that he would start. Crater, who for a very brief time about three-to-four years ago was considered the best point guard in his class before falling to the 20th, was more or less backing up Juco transfer Jeremie Simmons. Now I know Jeremie Simmons' game, have watched him since the summer before his senior year at Von Steuben in Chicago. Simmons is a quiet kid and it says here that he's tried to fit in as a Buckeye by deferring to his new teammates a bit too much. But one thing Simmons always does, once he steps on the hardwood -- like any other kid with both Chicago and Steve Schmidt's Mott Community College on his resume -- is compete HARD. I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that Crater thought he couldn't beat Simmons out for the next two years.

Crater will play all he wants next December because he is a better point guard than anyone Heath has right now. Unless of course Heath finds a guard that's better. That's the way it works in big-time college basketball. One funny side note to the whole Crater situation: the reason that Heath has a spot open is because the point guard he recruited extremely hard decided against USF. That kid? Jeremie Simmons.


So Stan Heath has himself a roster to build on with one elite talent in Gilchrist, a good talent in Jones, and a possible talent in Crater. And let me be clear that I have no problem with how Stan Heath has assembled his roster. He's the coach at South Florida, a school that plays in a league it really has no business being in basketball-wise. If he doesn't get it to a competitive level, he'll be fired.

His task now is to try and convince other players that coming to Tampa to play in the Big East is worth it, that he's building a program that can compete on college basketball's biggest stage. More efforts like Wednesday night's in Pittsburgh will surely result in some wins.

Those wins, if they're big enough, could accomplish that task.

The sad part is, it still probably won't matter.

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Ray Mernagh is the Basketball Editor for the Pittsburgh Sports Report and writes for Basketball Times as well as his own blog, Hoop Wise. Ray's first book, 1 Chance 2 Dance: A Season Inside Mid-Major Hoops in Mid-America, focuses on 18 months of MAC basketball.
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