From worst to first? Well, not quite. How about 335th out of 336 teams to first?
In the context of college basketball, that’s exactly what first-year University of Denver coach Joe Scott has done. He has taken the nation’s second-worst ranked team that no one cared about and turned it into a first-place team that no one cares about.
His Pioneers pulled off the improbable Thursday night. They beat Troy 80-66 at Magness Arena to gain a first-place tie in the Sun Belt West Division. Granted, Denver is 10-12 overall and in a three-way tie at 6-5, and the Sun Belt West isn’t on any NCAA Tournament Committee member’s watch list.
But seeing Denver atop any college basketball standings after last year is akin to a hack club pro leading the Masters. A year ago was when coach Terry Carroll flipped out and bolted the team, leaving the Pioneers to tailspin to 4-25, their worst record in 38 years.
What’s the difference?
“Where do I start?” senior center Adam Tanner said. “Last year felt like I was in junior college for a third year. This year, I actually feel like I’m in a Division I program.”
I live near Denver’s campus, and every time I wandered into the arena last season, I saw some opponent going in for an uncontested layup. You, your office secretary and three guys in the back warehouse could’ve shot 50 percent against those guys.
But Scott has brought the same principles that pulled off the miracle of turning Air Force into a basketball school and applied them at Denver. The Pioneers play defense. They play smart. They can shoot.
Entering Thursday, Denver held opponents to less than 45 percent, a figure that will win a few games in the Sun Belt.
“We never practiced defense (last year),” Tanner said. “This year we do the same amount of defense as offense.”
Making it all the more remarkable is the fact that Scott is doing it with six players. Returning starting guard Tyler Bullock left Dec. 6 to be closer to his sick grandfather in Lincoln, Neb., and Denver’s best player, senior David Kummer, went down for the year with a broken fibula.
Beyond the top six, not one Pioneer averages four minutes a game.
Three regulars are freshmen, including Kyle Lewis, the baby-faced point guard who looks like he’s still a freshman at Kent Denver, not the University of Denver. Still, he’s averaging 9.4 points a game and while he has only 31 assists in 22 games, he doesn’t do anything dumb.
Unfortunately, no one but a few folks from the neighborhood and the 40 or so students who were among Thursday’s paltry crowd of 1,022 know about it. Building enthusiasm for a program in a pro sports town in arguably the worst college basketball state in the union may be Scott’s biggest challenge.
DU is at least trying. Average attendance has jumped from 1,472 to 2,397. At noon Sunday, Denver hosts Louisiana-Lafayette, one of the teams with which it’s tied. The West champ gets the No. 2 seed in the conference tournament.
“At Air Force it took four years to make them understand that basketball’s important,” Scott said. “We want that here.”
