by Kent Sterling

I don’t read sports columns very often and get angry – not with Jay Marrotti’s work as scarce as it is today – but this morning I read what I think is a lazy and frankly stupid piece by a writer who is almost never either lazy or stupid.  Bill Rhoden is a great sportswriter, but today he is so far off that I worry for him.

The piece in today’s New York Times is headlined “Teamwork Is Great, but Talent Is Essential”, and the position he takes is that Butler lost the last two National Championship games because the Butler program is bereft of talented kids compared to the two teams that beat them in the finals.

The many ways that is simplistic and wrong make me dizzy.  My synapses are firing so quickly, and with such fury that I’m not sure I can get it all down in one post.

What about the ten opponents they beat on the way to those two games?  Was Butler good enough to beat them?  The talent seemed pretty thick during those games.

There are three teams in addition to Butler that have lost in back-to-back championship games – the Fab Five of Michigan, Phi Slamma Jamma from Houston, and the 1961 and 1962 Ohio State teams that existed in the gap between Grantland Rice and ESPN where nickanmes weren’t thrown around like hard candy at a parade.  Do you think a sportswriter had the temerity to insult those teams by questioning their talent?  Hakeem Olajuwon, Clyde Drexler, Jalen Rose, Chris Webber, Juwan Howard, Jerry Lucas, and John Havlicek were great collegiate basketball players.  I’m not saying Matt Howard and Shelvin Mack belong on that list.  Their accomplishments do that for me.

It’s beyond brash to assert that Butler somehow needs to change it’s recruiting tactics and targets to somehow get over the hump and remain relevant in college basketball.  It’s absurd to look at what Butler has done and try to figure out what needs to happen for them to get really good.  How many consecutive NCAA Finals does Butler need to play in before people like Rhoden sees them as something other than a rag-tag group of schoolboys who got lucky?

“Anyone looking for a deeper meaning to Monday’s national championship game between Butler and Connecticut need look no further than one simple truth: there is no substitute for talent,” is the opening salvo in Rhoden’s column.  Ask the coaches from Florida, Syracuse, Pitt, and Michigan State how talented Butler is.  Want to bet the Billy Donovan, Tom Izzo, Jim Boeheim, and Jamie Dixon don’t wish they had Shelvin Mack and Matt Howard on their squads rather than being sent home by those two outstanding basketball players and their teammates?

“In the wake of a second consecutive loss in a national championship game, Butler, which lost a 2-point game to Duke last year, must now decide how vigorously it wants to go about the task of getting better — of getting ‘long and athletic,’” Rhoden insults later in the column.  How much better does he want them to get?  In 29 years at Indiana, with 26 All-Americans, Bob Knight made it to one more championship game than Butler has played in over the last 53 weeks.

It’s as though Rhoden was simply waiting for Butler to be exposed in these last two tournaments, and finally when they threw up a game when the ball refused to go in the bucket, he had his ah-ha moment and clicked off this blather as though his warped sense of what talent is had been vindicated.

Rhoden accidentally stumbled onto some sense in the final graph of his ignorant opus, “Feel-good stories are fine, every once in a while. But in the realm of national championships and top-flight Division I competition, you can count on one incontrovertible truth: there is no substitute for talent.”

He’s right, and that’s why he needs to adjust whatever his definition of talent is.  Butler making it to two consecutive finals might be seen as a feel-good story by some, but for those who know some of these kids and have seen them win consistently, it was not surprising.  This team got to where they did because of talent as well as hard work, belief in a common goal, and dedication and focus.

This was no fluke.  This had nothing to do with luck.  Butler basketball isn’t rostered by some group of backwoods rubes who won contests.  They play basketball together better than almost anyone and that takes talent.