Basketball Matters Again

Despite losing its last game by 21 to Central Florida tonight, Tulane men's basketball is beginning to gain relevance again in my everyday conscience. Yes, the team is still 9-13 after tonight, still lost a game to Division II (II!) St. Edwards this season, and still can't field five bonafide mid-level Division 1-calibre talent...but you've got to feel somewhat good about what Dave Dickerson has done and hopefully will do with this team.

Outside of Quincy Davis and David Gomez, you can't really say that Tulane fields a team that match up well with the cream of CUSA. I blame this squarely on Shawn Finney; for someone who we all thought could recruit when he was first hired, Finney really didn't do that good of a job, and Dickerson is reaping the benefits.

But hand it to Dickerson...he's taken what he's got and managed to coach Tulane into a mid-level CUSA team. While Katrina was a program crippler, the worst loss Dickerson suffered occurred when sophomore PG Taylor Rochestie decided to transfer to Washington State. His injury and subsequent transfer was a double blow to the program in the short term...Rochestie was one of those four-year guys that would have, in my mind, ended up being a special player in Tulane history after all was said and done. He's the type of player that Dickerson would have put the keys to the offense in his hands and said, "Go". Tough, wanted the ball in his hands at the end of games, could score in multiple ways, played like he had something to prove 24/7...oh well, I wish him the best in the Pac-10.

Now that I got that out of my system, I can now honestly say that, for the first time in about three years, I'm purposefully looking to see whether or not Tulane won their basketball game. Call me a fair-weather fan all you want, but you can't blame me; I mean, the first time I saw a Tulane game was in Perry Clark's 2nd season as head coach, and they had just beaten my then favorite team, The UNO Privateers, in double overtime at Fogelman. I went to Tulane during the Honeycutt-era. Going from THAT to the Finney era was unbearable. It was five years of bad, boring basketball.

Thankfully, Dickerson has put a little life back into the program. And even though Tulane will lose its share this season, at the very least they are winning most of their games at Fogelman (6-2 so far). Have five years of Finney-ball made us forget just how important that is? No matter who Tulane played against in the Clark era (and before, I think), you knew they had a fighting chance because of Fogelman, what with the student section questioning certain players IQs, and with 3,612 people sweating their asses off and screaming and stomping on the aluminum benches. I still haven't forgiven Finney for installing air conditioning in Fogelman...maybe one of the stupidest moves in the history of stupidest moves. That wasn't going to make people start coming to games, and it didn't make Fogelman any MORE intimidating did it?

Just writing about this reminds me just how much work Dickerson and the team must do to erase the last five years out of my mind.