After Painter's Boilermakers had been drubbed by Virginia Commonwealth in the third round of the NCAA Tournament, the coach offered this assessment:
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"If you watch VCU during a certain time of the season, you wouldn't have seen what you just watched out there. And then during another part of the season, you watch them in a four- or five-game stretch, and you literally think they can beat anybody in the country. And that was an honest thought that I had before we played them. I made that statement. VCU can beat anybody in the country on a neutral court."
VCU coach Shaka Smart, whose name is also turning up on the list of candidates for any job out there, can go Painter one better: He had the same thought even earlier. When did he think his team could go deep in the tournament?
"As soon as we got picked," Smart said Monday.
VCU's run to the Final Four, where it will face fellow Cinderella team Butler on Saturday, is a hopeful sign for the large number of college programs that don't reside in one of the power conferences. This year, two of the Final Four teams are from non-power conferences. Last year, there was one. After years of slamming their heads against the wall, the little guys, many of whom go by the unwanted label of mid-major, are showing what they can do.
"If you have five really good players and a pretty good bench," said UConn coach Jim Calhoun on a conference call of Final Four coaches, "there's no such thing as a small school."
"This is about who is in the jersey," said Kentucky coach John Calipari, "not the name on the jersey."
The landscape of college basketball has changed because of the advent of the one-and-done player who moves on quickly to the NBA. Four of VCU's top five scorers are seniors. The other is a junior. (VCU starts one freshman, center D.J. Haley; he played just five minutes in the Kansas win.) The well-traveled Smart, who will turn 34 four days after the championship game, is really the new face on the team. He's been there only since April 2, 2009.
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The seeds of VCU's success were sown at the end of last season, when the Rams were snubbed by the NIT and landed in the CBI, where they won five straight games, capped by a pair of victories over St. Louis University in the final two-game series. Smart said the extra games and practices helped the team learn to play together, and though the atmospheres are markedly different, got them ready to handle a long season.
"We thought they were very talented," SLU coach Rick Majerus said Monday. "I told my staff, their guard (Joey Rodriguez) was maybe my favorite guard. He wasn't the most talented, but he was my favorite. They've got very good talent, great athletes, good shooters and a special guard. We knew they were good."
This season didn't always go smoothly, and the month of February, when the Rams went 3-5, was so bad that Smart started off the team's first practice in March by burning the February page from a desk calendar, symbolically putting the month to rest. (He may have been too dramatic; his assistants thought he was going to burn his hands.) On March 6, VCU had what Smart points to as the turning point for his team, a 16-point win over top-seeded George Mason in the semifinals of the Colonial Athletic Association tournament.
"You might say, so what, it's a team from the Colonial," Smart said. "George Mason at that point was the most dominant team in the country. They were beating teams by an average of 14 to 15 points. To us, at least, they signified a team that could certainly make a deep run in the tournament and obviously a few years back did.
"When our guys beat them convincingly in the league tournament, that demonstrated to them, if we follow the plan we can do this same thing against anybody."
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