COLLEGE BASKETBALL / CHRIS DUFRESNE : Amid All the Hoopla, the Game Shows Troubling Signs

As good as the college basketball season has been, it could have been better.

Jason Kidd could have been a senior at California. Rasheed Wallace and Jerry Stackhouse could have been juniors at North Carolina.

Joe Smith could have taken Maryland to the promised land.

Scotty Thurman could have come back to Arkansas.

Long Beach State Coach Seth Greenberg could have passed a chalkboard with X’s and O’s on it instead of an epithet.

Chris Daniels could have lived, Billy Packer could have held his tongue, Coach Don Haskins of Texas El Paso could have walked into the Hall of Fame instead of a hospital.

As good as the upcoming NCAA tournament promises to be, it is hard not to sense the sag.

The game delivered its share of moments: Miles Simon’s three-quarter-court shot to beat Cincinnati, Deon Jackson’s impossible turnaround three-point shot to keep Bradley alive in the Missouri Valley Conference tournament, Canisius.

Yet, face it, many of the best would-be college players today are playing in the NBA: Kidd, Wallace, Stackhouse, Smith, Antonio McDyess, Mario Bennett.

The departures have diluted the product and demanded that freshmen--gifted but not always emotionally equipped--fill the void.

Players are being rushed into production, oozing with talent but lacking fundamentals.

Players leaving early has changed the game, changed how coaches coach it and how they recruit for it.

Shooting percentages in college basketball have dropped each of the last seven seasons. So, remarkably, have free-throw percentages.

Television ratings have plummeted 36% the last three seasons.

Is the college game in trouble?

It’s too soon to tell, but not too soon to talk about it.

Players coming out of high school are better than ever, but also more petulant. They want to play now. Two in a thousand will make the NBA, but most think they can.

Earlier this season, almost the entire Nebraska team boycotted a practice because of differences with Coach Danny Nee. A lot of the trouble had to do with playing time.

“They want to do what you see on ESPN every night on the highlights--dunk it,” Purdue Coach Gene Keady says of today’s players. “They don’t want to practice free throws. I’m not blaming them; that’s just our era.”

Keady recruited Glenn Robinson knowing he wasn’t going to stay at Purdue four years.

Georgia Tech’s Bobby Cremins took freshman guard Stephon Marbury knowing he will never reach his senior year--probably not his sophomore year.

Keady says players are harder to coach.

“They don’t know anything about passing, footwork or shot selection,” he says. “None have seen a shot they didn’t like. And none want to play with their backs to the baskets.”

The days of great teams growing old together--Grant Hill, Bobby Hurley, Christian Laettner at Duke--are history.

Keady’s Purdue team is one of this year’s more enduring stories because it is led by six seniors, an anomaly in today’s game.

In a way, Keady lucked out because none of his seniors were good enough to turn pro early.

Many coaches don’t believe the game has been diminished.

“There’s about 4,000 Division I basketball players,” North Carolina Coach Dean Smith said recently. “Perhaps seven or eight went to the pros. The only effect I could see would be on North Carolina, Maryland [which lost Smith], Alabama [which lost McDyess]. It obviously would have effect. But it shouldn’t affect the others.”

No one is arguing a player’s right to leave early to seek his fortune.

“It’s the American way,” Smith says.

But coaches should remember the 1979 NCAA title game was not the highest-rated game of all time because people wanted to see Jud Heathcote coach against Bill Hodges.

The game is about stars. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird then, Allen Iverson and Marcus Camby now.

And when stars go out early, it hurts.

Kentucky Coach Rick Pitino thinks the flow of underclassman to the pros will slow with the NBA’s new salary cap, which limits rookie salaries.

“What you’ll see is more high school players, because they can’t gain admission, go pro, but you’ll see Camby and [Tim] Duncan, people like that, all come back.”

Camby and Duncan increased their NBA stock and made millions more by returning for their junior seasons.

Others should take heed.

Yet, the word out of the south is that the freshman Marbury will bolt Georgia Tech for the NBA next season.

Cremins is already out recruiting his replacement.

Too bad. Marbury is good. But he could have been better.

HOME STRETCH

--Obviously inspired by being labeled an NCAA “bubble” team in this column last week, Marquette went out and whipped Louisville and Cincinnati in consecutive games.

Good work Marquette, you’re in.

--Yes, Purdue could end up with a No. 1 seeding. Hard to believe considering how bad the Boilermakers looked in December at the John Wooden Classic.

Purdue is currently ranked No. 4 in the Associated Press poll, but the issue is far from settled. The Big Ten doesn’t have a conference tournament, so Purdue has only one game remaining to state its case--Saturday against No. 19 Iowa.

The teams chasing Purdue--No. 5 Kansas, No. 6 Georgetown, No. 8 Cincinnati, No. 9 Villanova--all can make a claim for a top seeding if they win their conference tournaments.

--Only a pratfall in the Atlantic 10 tournament can prevent Massachusetts from staying home as No. 1 in the East Regional.

So what if the Minutemen lose in the Atlantic 10 tournament and become top-seeded elsewhere?

“It may not be all that bad,” UMass Coach John Calipari said. “The hardest thing is when you stay home. The tickets, the distractions, everyone going crazy. When you’re away, people don’t know who you are. You can walk the streets.”

--Last year, the NCAA selection committee made more of an effort to consider at-large bids for regular-season champions of second-level conferences who lost in their NCAA qualifying tournaments.

The theory: Why punish a great season because of one bad night?

Last year, Manhattan and Santa Clara received NCAA berths despite losing in their tournaments. Manhattan rewarded the committee’s decision with a first-round upset of Oklahoma.

So what does the committee do now, with regular-season champions falling left and right?

Davidson won the Southern Conference title at 25-4, but Western Carolina claimed the automatic bid. Wisconsin Green Bay (25-3) was champion of the Midwestern, but didn’t win its tournament. Iona finished 21-7 in the Metro Atlantic, but Canisius walked away with the NCAA bid. Bradley has 22 victories, but lost the automatic berth to Tulsa in the Missouri Valley tournament.

Other regular-season champions who lost in their conference tournaments include Santa Clara (West Coast), Mount St. Mary’s (Northeast) and Murray State (Ohio Valley).

Wisconsin Green Bay and Bradley will almost certainly receive at-large bids. And because of New Orleans’ victory over Arkansas Little Rock, the committee will have to now consider two teams from the Sun Belt.

If the NCAA selectors open their hearts to all these others, it will be bad news for bubble teams from more conventional conferences.

Stay tuned, Illinois.

HONOR ROLL

No one asked, but here are my regular-season awards.

Coach of the year: Keady. No coach has done more with less under more strain than Keady, who has turned an average group of players into title contenders during a season of personal duress. Best of the rest: Jerry Dunn, Penn State; Tim Floyd, Iowa State; Denny Crum, Louisville; Calipari, Pitino.

Player of the year: Camby. He holds off a late-season charge by UConn’s Ray Allen.

First team: Guards: Allen and Iverson. Forwards: Danny Fortson (Cincinnati) and Keith Van Horn (Utah). Center: Camby.

Freshman of the year: Shareef Abdur-Rahim (California). Also considered: Antawn Jamison (North Carolina) and Marbury.

LOOSE ENDS

Maryland, 16-11 and desperately seeking a victory to bolster NCAA credentials, catches a break by drawing war-torn Duke in Friday’s ACC tournament quarterfinals. Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski said this week that starting guard Chris Collins, who injured his right foot in Sunday’s loss to North Carolina, probably will not play.

If UMass wins the Atlantic 10 Conference tournament, it will become the second team in NCAA Division I to win five consecutive regular-season and tournament championships. North Carolina State accomplished the feat from 1947 through 1951.

Arizona’s controversial decision to cancel a game at St. Joseph’s in January might have loomed large had St. Joe’s not lost two overtime games to UMass. Had the Hawks swept the Minutemen, they would have entered this week’s Atlantic 10 tournament at 16-9 instead of 14-11 and been fighting for an NCAA berth. “If we were 16-9, I’d be jumping up and down, throwing a tantrum,” St. Joseph Coach Phil Martelli says. Why? A win over No. 11 Arizona would have increased the Hawks’ power rating and been a determining NCAA tournament factor. Arizona canceled the game, citing poor weather conditions in Philadelphia.

Rick Barnes and Dean Smith, fined $2,500 each for screaming at each other in last year’s ACC tournament, then chastised by Commissioner Gene Corrigan after a regular-season spat this year, will square off again in Friday’s tournament quarterfinals. Barnes, who coaches Clemson, and Smith, the 35-year legend at North Carolina, are determined to keep things civil this week. “I’m not going to talk about it any more, it’s over and done with,” Barnes said.