ARIZONA WILDCATS BASKETBALL
Gimino: Mr. Steady faces toughest task yet
More losses, and Cats could tune out Pennell
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Thursday: Oregon (6-8, 0-2) at Arizona (9-5, 0-2), 6:30 p.m.
Saturday: Oregon State (8-6, 1-1) at Arizona, 2 p.m. Saturday
Both games are on FSNA, 1290 AM and 107.5 FM
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Arizona interim basketball coach Russ Pennell and his father, Dewey, were getting their usual Starbucks reinforcements . . . and a little earful on the side.
The guys behind the counter Tuesday were wide-eyed basketball optimists, reminding the Pennells that Arizona struggled during the 1996-97 season before putting it all together to win the national title.
An old woman in a wheelchair, a longtime Wildcat fan as Pennell would later learn, was sitting nearby and listening in.
She turned and pointed.
"I like you," she told Pennell, "but that was terrible last week."
Welcome to Russ Pennell's world.
Everyone's got an opinion, which rises and falls with each game . . . and all those folks aren't afraid to express it.
Pennell has the e-mails to prove it. Funny how those e-mails suggest he's a much worse coach after being swept in the Bay Area than he was when the Wildcats beat Gonzaga and Kansas.
But while everyone else bounces up and down, Pennell has been Mr. Steady, repeatedly talking about this team's tiny margin of error, even if nobody wanted to hear it. The Wildcats, he keeps saying, will win because of their blue-collar style, not their (relative lack of) blue-chip talent.
He harbors no expectations of staying on at Arizona, in any capacity, after the season ends.
Pennell will simply be who he can be. That is his world.
"When I go talk to someone, I don't go, 'I better be careful; I'm the interim.' I don't really care," Pennell said. "This is who I am, this is the way I coach, and you've got to deal with it."
Pennell has had a firm grasp of reality, of the true expectations, from the start. You have not heard one grand declaration from him.
He knows he was plopped into the middle of a capable, but flawed, team that simply isn't like the Arizona teams Tucson came to know and love.
"I think we're a very good basketball team when we play together. I don't know if we're one of the elite teams, but I think we can play with just about anyone," Pennell said.
"I certainly don't think we can bring half our game and just wow people with our talent. That is not who we are.
"I go into every game thinking we can win, and, hopefully, at the end of the year the body of work says you're good enough to be invited to the NCAA Tournament."
Basically, it's like this: Arizona can no longer play OK with OK effort, and expect to win.
Pennell wouldn't argue with the woman at Starbucks about his team's effort Sunday at Stanford in a 76-60 loss. Terrible.
I will almost always defend these players because of the unprecedented circumstances they have endured. Two interim head coaches in two years?
But that doesn't give them a pass for failing to try to box out or to be unwilling to acquire a few floor burns.
With a better effort, maybe Arizona would have beaten Stanford. Maybe not.
But the team's margin of error in getting to the NCAAs is too thin to waste an opportunity by failing to show up.
That's the message Pennell hammered home by holding practice as soon as the team returned Monday.
In so many words, Pennell told the team, "I like you, but that was terrible."
"Nobody attacked anybody's character the last two days. We got after their actions ," Pennell said.
"I think when you're dead-on honest with people, and you look them in the eye and you don't talk behind their back and you don't insinuate it through a third-party, I think the kids respect that."
Arizona is 9-5 overall and 0-2 in the Pac-10, facing a must-win home weekend against the Oregon schools.
After this, the Cats travel to play USC and UCLA, which means they will have faced the league's two toughest road trips in the first three weeks of the conference season. More adversity.
If the losses begin to pile up, with an interim coach who won't be around in a few months, the danger is that the players start tuning out, playing for themselves, going their own ways.
Isn't that part of what we saw last season?
"I guess that could happen," Pennell said. "I don't feel that has happened yet. If it does, I think I would know it.
"These guys have been great to coach. The one thing I have really appreciated is that when we have confronted them, they have been very quick to try to do what we ask them to do.
"As long as they keep doing that, we'll be fine."
Anthony Gimino's e-mail: agimino@tucsoncitizen.com
either. John Wooden said he always had "shooting in practice." I enjoy watching Wise & Hill shooting. Chase has great range in his 3 pt. shot, but he is so streaky. Maybe its the pressure defense that's causing his poor shooting. It's pretty simple for these teams to double team Hill & pressure Chase. That seems to be the formula to beat us. I hope we can beat these Oregon teams. Go Cats!
WELL SAID!
It is now or never, for this group!
There isn't a snowball's chance in h*ll that Jordan comes back, and even if Chase does (which seems more likely all of the time), there is NO WAY that next year's team will be as good as this one CAN be.
Robert