'Canes join the NCAA mutiny
Dispatches from the long March, part 8
A 61-year-old college basketball coach is an oxymoron, unless he has multiple NCAA tournament trophies in his office, or a Hall of Fame plaque. Jim Larranaga doesn’t have those, not yet, but the night is young.
He is 73 now, a long way from the guy who filled it up for Providence and preceded Ernie DiGregorio and Marvin Barnes, or the guy who sat by Terry Holland’s side during the Ralph Sampson years at Virginia. Holland died of Alzheimer’s a month ago Sunday, which was the day Larranaga’s Miami Hurricanes came from 13 down to beat Texas in the Midwest Regional in Kansas City.
At last he will coach another team in the Final Four, starting with Connecticut on Saturday, and at last Miami will go to its first Final Four because it hired Larranaga when he was 61. His team is ranked 40th in the KenPom.com ratings, which he has always prized. That’s fourth among this Quirky Quartet. Metrically the ‘Canes are a bigger underdog than Florida Atlantic, just up the road in Boca Raton. But Larranaga has negotiated the transfer portal and the analytics and the small-ball game more smoothly than most of his juniors. He would be the oldest coach to win an NCAA championship.
Larranaga and his team are a bottomless pit of why-not. They have won two ACC regular-season titles now, bumping up against, and beating, the tyrants of Tobacco Road. They have a Nicaraguan power forward, Norchad Omier, who could find rebounds in a car wash, and they have transfers like Omier (Arkansas State), Nijel Pack (Kansas State) and Jordan Miller (George Mason) to join ACC Player of the Year Isaiah Wong. Last year they got to a Final Eight with point guard Charlie Moore, who was on his fourth school, and Oklahoma transfer Kameron McGusty.
On Sunday they were dormant and defensively, nearly halfway through the second half, but they came back to win, 88-81. They simply outscored the Longhorns, who were missing Dylan Disu and playing with a hobbled Marcus Carr but, like Creighton, offered no whining excuses. They also did it in retro fashion, with 13 2-point buckets and no successful threes in the second half. Instead they lived on the foul line, drawing 18 fouls in that half, and Miller had a “full Laettner,” making all 12 foul shots and all seven field goal attempts. That’s the way they are these days. They took on Houston, which ranked second in KenPom defensive efficiency before the tournament, and won in no-sweat style, 89-75, and Pack had seven 3-pointers. There are a lot of problems for a defense to solve, and Miami can slow-play you, too. It’s a reflection of Larranaga, who knows there are several chapters in any cat-skinning manual.
Like Miller, Larranaga came from George Mason. In 2006, the Patriots became one of the most unlikely Final Four-crashers in history, having beaten Connecticut, North Carolina and Michigan State along the way. Usually that gets you a better job immediately, but Larranaga was already 56. Virginia and Providence never seemed interested. Not that he gave up; George Mason was 27-7 in 2011.
That’is when Miami hired him, but almost anyone could have. He had spent 25 years coaching Bowling Green and George Mason. That’s a lot of bus rides and not much attention, which is why you’re rarely hear him complain about the average crowd at Miami (5,820). He knew what was awaiting. His grandfather was Cuban, and for years Larranaga had a second home in Sarasota, although basketball rarely let him enjoy it.
The Wild West nature of today’s transfer mechanisms, and the largesse of Miami’s boosters, gives the Hurricanes a chance to win for a long time. And clearly anything’s possible if South Florida has become a college basketball haven. Miami didn’t even have basketball from 1971 until 1985, even though the great Rick Barry played there in the early 60s.
But now you have Miami and Florida Atlantic, and you also have Nova Southeastern, in Fort Lauderdale, which just went 36-0 and won the NCAA Division II title, averaging over 101 points a game.
Its coach, Jim Crutchfield, is only 68. Depending on how the old guy is feeling in Coral Gables, maybe he should expect a call.