Tramel's ScissorTales: Did the Big 12 make a mistake not taking Louisville a decade ago?
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The University of Louisville is without a president. And without an athletic director. And now, without a men's basketball coach.
The Cardinals fired Chris Mack this week after 3½ seasons and a 68-37 record, but an 0-1 record in the NCAA Tournament. Mack was hired in the wake of repeated Rick Pitino scandals.
Louisville football, once riding high, has settled into mediocrity, after the firing of coach Bobby Petrino.
Seems like a good time to ask. Did the Big 12 dodge a bullet when it passed on Louisville a decade ago?
In 2011, the Southeastern Conference successfully recruited away Missouri and Texas A&M from the Big 12, leaving the latter with only eight schools. Nebraska and Colorado had left the Big 12 a few months earlier, and the conference seemed in peril.
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The Big 12 added Texas Christian and West Virginia, the latter winning a joust with Louisville that stretched to politicians and school presidents. Big 12 schools disagreed, and Big East members West Virginia and Louisville fought for what seemed to be the last seat in a Big 12 lifeboat.
West Virginia won out.
Louisville was rescued two years later, joining the Atlantic Coast Conference, along with Pittsburgh and Syracuse.
It seemed like lost opportunity for the Big 12. But in light of what’s happened to Louisville since, was it?
First, a refresher course.
The Big 12 in 2011 was in flux. Clearly frazzled, and without solid leadership itself, with Chuck Neinas as interim commissioner, Big 12 members disagreed on whether to add two, three or four new members to the eight legacy schools.
TCU was an easy choice and has been an excellent addition to the Big 12.
But much debate ensued over West Virginia or Louisville as the 10th member.
Sources said Texas, in particular, was opposed to Louisville, I assume for academic reasons, though I don’t know that for sure.
Sooner officials preferred Louisville, perhaps because then-OU president David Boren and U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky were old Capitol Hill pals, back when Democrats and Republicans could have such relationships.
But OU athletic director Joe Castiglione liked West Virginia, too, and thought adding both was a good idea. Include Pitt in the mix, and the Big 12 would be back to its original number, with an Eastern axis of Louisville, West Virginia and Pitt.
Texas’ argument won out, and only West Virginia was added.
In retrospect, was that the right call?
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We know what happened with the Big 12. Financial stability ensued, and most of the next decade was successful. The summer 2021 decisions by OU and Texas to pledge to the SEC were bolts out of the blue.
Nothing suggests that 2011 expansion decisions could have changed the eventual defections by the Sooners and Longhorns. But would a different decision on Louisville have changed the last decade of Big 12 history, good or bad?
Louisville and West Virginia each had distinct assets. WVU had a stronger football pedigree, a bigger fanbase and more television appeal, though none of those advantages were massive. Louisville had nearly-unmatched basketball tradition, blossoming across-the-board athletic success and a metropolitan market with tons of potential.
West Virginia has been a fine addition to the Big 12, despite the geographic challenges.
But Louisville athletics soared in the first few years of the ’10s.
Pitino’s basketball team reached the 2012 Final Four, then won the 2013 NCAA championship. Bummer for the Big 12.
Charlie Strong’s football teams went a combined 23-3 in 2012 and 2013, then Petrino took over after Texas hired Strong (funny, the Longhorns didn’t want Louisville but didn’t mind taking Louisville’s football coach). Petrino’s arrival coincided with the ‘Ville joining the ACC, and the Cardinals were more than solid in their new conference – 9-4, 8-5, 9-4, 8-5 in their first four years, and quarterback Lamar Jackson won a Heisman Trophy.
Louisville women’s basketball team, which had beaten OU in the 2009 Final Four, returned to the NCAA championship game in 2013.
Louisville’s baseball team reached the College World Series in 2013 and 2014.
Frankly, it appeared the Big 12 had missed the boat on Louisville. The Cardinals were displaying a powerhouse athletic department.
And as Joe C. had suggested a few years earlier, the decision didn’t have to come down to Louisville or West Virginia. Take them both, go forward with 11 and see if more expansion was needed. It’s a lot easier to get to 12 from 11 than to get to 12 from 10. Or just add Pitt, a solid brand and a terrific academic institution, and get to 12 immediately.
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But Louisville’s wheels came off. Pitino was embroiled in recruiting and personal scandal. Cardinal basketball has bogged down. Since March 2015, Louisville has one NCAA Tournament victory, and that over Jacksonville State in a 2017 first-round game.
Meanwhile, the Louisville football program imploded in a solitary season, 2018, under Petrino. He was fired after a 2-8 start that year, and under replacement Scott Satterfield, the Cardinals are 18-19 overall, 12-14 in the mediocre ACC.
Louisville women’s basketball remains a powerhouse, and baseball seems fine, despite a sluggish 2021 season. But baseball and women’s basketball do not an athletic program make.
Is the Big 12 better off without Louisville? Frankly, the basketball stuff has been embarrassing to the ACC, which prides itself on propriety. From prostitution to marital infidelity to major recruiting violations, Pitino’s last years at Louisville read like “Valley of the Dolls.”
Louisville’s hiring of Petrino, after his personal-life scandal at Arkansas, seemed no better, though his problems were mostly confined to the gridiron.
Still, Louisville is a big brand. It’s hard to find big brands when conferences like the Big 12 are shopping.
Despite the Pitino/Petrino meltdowns, those early ’10s successes would have been great for the Big 12, and Louisville’s potential remains superb, especially in hoops. Louisville basketball is a national franchise on the level of North Carolina or UCLA.
If the Big 12 had Louisville and Pitt, then expansion in the wake of OU-Texas to the SEC would have been less dramatic. Perhaps only two additions. You know me. I love Brigham Young. So adding Cincinnati or Central Florida could have been another West Virginia-Louisville debate. Or, I suppose, the Big 12 could have added the same four (Houston is the fourth addition) and gone to 14 members.
Who knows?
But the Louisville tale remains cautionary. Those who voted against the Cardinals a decade ago have some ammunition in defending their choice.
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Revisiting the Wiggins-for-Paul trade scenario
I’ve always liked Andrew Wiggins as an NBA player. Maybe that’s because he seemed to always torch the Thunder while a member of the Minnesota Timberwolves.
Let’s see. In 22 Thunder-Timberwolf games, Wiggins averaged 21.1 points and shot 44.6 percent from the field, including a couple of monster performances.
But Wiggins, the overall No. 1 pick in the 2014 draft, never lived up to such status. Until now.
Wiggins, averaging 18.1 points a game and shooting 41.2 percent from 3-point range for the Golden State Warriors, was named Thursday an All-Star Game starter.
That’s what happens when you play for Golden State instead of Minnesota. Your profile with the fans is quite a bit higher. The fans voted Wiggins third among Western Conference frontcourt players. But it’s not like the media or the players themselves shunned Wiggins – he was fifth in the player voting and sixth in the media voting.
According to the Elias Sports Bureau, Wiggins joins Bob Boozer in 1968 and Kyle Lowry in 2015 as first-time all-stars named as starters in their eighth NBA season or later.
Forty overall No. 1 picks have made an all-star team since the modern draft era, but Wiggins is the first to wait so long to achieve such status.
"One of the proudest moments just to see what Wiggs has done since he got here a couple of years go," Warrior coach Steve Kerr said. "The journey he has traveled has been rocky at times, and to see how hard he's worked and to see all the work rewarded, just could not be happier for him.”
Let’s be honest. Wiggins is a product of his environment. That was true in Minneapolis, negatively, and it’s true in San Francisco, positively.
It all brings me back to an idea I had in summer 2019, after the Thunder traded Russell Westbrook to the Rockets for Chris Paul.
My plan? Trade Paul for Wiggins.
My theory: Wiggins was a whale of a talent, stuck in a dysfunctional organization. Wiggins had a massive contract that was risky, but CP3 had a massive contract, too.
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Wiggins was 24 in summer 2019. Still incredibly young. Heck, he’s still young, at 26. His defense and shot selection were not good in Minnesota. Was that because he wasn’t a good defender or a good decision-maker, or because the Timberwolves’ were mostly void of structure and development?
Wiggins has proven to be a more productive player with the Warriors, not because he’s improved so much, but because he’s placed in better situations, from the practice court to the locker room. Much like he would have been with the Thunder.
What could Wiggins have done with OKC?
Well, Year 1 wouldn’t have gone as well for the Thunder. That Paul-led team was tremendous, making the playoffs as a No. 5 seed in the rugged Western Conference, then losing a first-round, seven-game series to Houston.
The Thunder doesn’t have that kind of season with Wiggins, though it wasn’t like OKC was void of a point guard. Both Dennis Schroder and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander were on that team.
The Warrior-version Wiggins would have been both a blessing and a curse to the Thunder.
The Thunder traded Paul to Phoenix before last season and got minimal return, at least compared to the Paul George deal.
Wiggins in OKC this season and last season would have prevented widespread tanking, so the Thunder’s lottery hopes would have been far less. Probably no Josh Giddey on this team.
But the Thunder would have had two young, borderline all-stars. SGA has yet to make an all-star team but figures to. Wiggins now has. That’s not a combination that’s going to rival LeBron James and Anthony Davis, but SGA and Wiggins, coupled with the Thunder’s culture and treasure chest of draft picks, would have made for an interesting future.
The future as is remains interesting. More upside without Wiggins. More downside, too, as the Thunder is experiencing.
At the least, Wiggins’ success with the Warriors shows that a Paul-for-Wiggins trade should have been at least something to consider.
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Oklahoman Moseley retires after 35 NFL seasons
Don Moseley still reels off the names of Lindsay High School coaches from a half century ago.
Joe Tunnel. Charlie Heatley. Joe Holladay. S.J. Foster. H.O. Estes. R.V. Hayden. The kind of coaches who made a big difference in a bunch of kids’ lives. Even when they no longer could compete in sports.
Moseley is retiring in March after 35 years as an athletic trainer with the Tennessee Titans/Houston Oilers franchise. He calls himself “fortunate and blessed” to have had such a career in the National Football League.
And it all started in Lindsay, where Moseley had to give up athletics because of his asthma. But Lindsay coaches persuaded him to become a team manager, and all these years later, he’s still helping athletes get healthy and teams ready for competition.
“I never intended to be at this level,” Moseley said, after working with the likes of Warren Moon and Steve McNair, Mike Munchak and Derrick Henry, all these years. “Opportunities came about. It’s been a fun ride.”
Holladay, who had played basketball at OU in the 1960s and would go on to work almost 30 years with Roy Williams at Kansas and North Carolina, tried to get Moseley into OU as a football team manager, but the slots were taken. Tunnel got Moseley a job at the famed Dunlap Sporting Goods in south Oklahoma City. Moseley spent three semesters at the University of Central Oklahoma, then got a call from OU head trainer Ken Rawlinson, offering a student gig at OU.
That led to graduate school at Arizona, a training job at San Angelo Central High School in west Texas and finally Cameron University.
The Oilers trained in San Angelo in the 1980s, and Moseley got to know their staff. Even helped with the Oilers’ training camp after he went to Cameron.
In 1987, the Oilers offered Moseley a job, and he’s been with the franchise ever since.
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“I grew up loving sports,” Moseley said. “Getting to be around it my entire life, doing something you love to do, being able to help these guys come back from injury, that’s the most rewarding part by far.”
Moseley worked under coaches like Jerry Glanville, Jack Pardee and Jeff Fisher.
“Jerry Glanville was a very colorful and interesting coach,” Moseley said. “That was a lot of fun. Jack Pardee was a really incredible guy. We were fortunate to have Jeff Fisher the next 17 years. Jeff was a great guy, friend of the family, awesome guy to work with. All the coaches have been special.”
Moseley helped train players from Bruce Matthews, who spent 19 years on the Oilers’/Titans’ offensive line, to Heisman Trophy-winning Jason White, who got a training-camp look in 2005.
And Moseley was part of the crew that made the Titans a Nashville institution. The Oilers moved to Nashville in 1997 but played that first season in Memphis, which was not hospitable, since it wanted an NFL franchise for itself. The Oilers played in 1998 in Vanderbilt Stadium, then renamed themselves the Titans in 1999 as they moved into a new stadium, Adelphia Coliseum.
Those Titans beat Buffalo in a playoff game with the Music City Miracle kickoff return, then went all the way to the 1-yard line on the final play of the Super Bowl, before Kevin Dyson was tackled by the Rams’ Mike Jones, preserving St. Louis’ 23-16 victory.
The Titans became a Nashville sensation and even made the University of Tennessee start sharing football fans.
“I have a lot of pride and satisfaction, helping bring the organization to Tennessee,” Moseley said. “It was a real struggle, the whole move. Now you can’t go anywhere without seeing somebody wearing a Titan cap or T-shirt. When I first came to town, nobody knew who we were or what we were.”
Now Moseley is retiring, after 42 years in athletic training and 35 years in the NFL. From Lindsay to the Super Bowl.
The List: Ranking the Big 12/SEC Challenge games
The annual Big 12/SEC Challenge arrives Saturday, with 10 basketball games, and it’s about time the Big 12 got back in the business of winning the event. The Big 12 has won the challenge only once in the last four seasons, after winning the first three. The SEC won 6-4 in 2018 and 5-4 last season, the Big 12 won 6-4 in 2019 and the leagues tied 5-5 in 2017 and 2020.
Here the Saturday games, ranked in importance to the Big 12:
1. Kentucky at Kansas, 5 p.m., ESPN: Battle of the bluebloods and blue jerseys. The Jayhawks are ranked fifth, the Wildcats 12th. KU needs to win at Allen Fieldhouse.
2. Tennessee at Texas, 7 p.m., ESPN: Volunteer coach Rick Barnes makes his return to Austin, where he coached the Longhorns for 17 mostly-successful seasons. The Vols are ranked 18th, so a Texas victory would be big.
3. Baylor at Alabama, 3 p.m., ESPN: The Crimson Tide was ranked as high as sixth but has been floundering, so this is a chance for fourth-ranked Baylor to get a road victory.
4. Louisiana State at Texas Christian, 11 a.m., ESPN2: The 16-4 Tigers are ranked 19th, and the Horned Frogs just got blown out at home by Texas. A solid SEC chance for a steal.
5. Kansas State at Ole Miss, 3 p.m., ESPNU: Prime opportunity for the Big 12 to steal a road win. The 10-10 Rebels are in last place in the SEC, at 2-6.
6. Oklahoma State at Florida, 3 p.m., ESPN2: Should be a solid matchup. The 12-8 Gators are 3-5 in the SEC. The 10-9 Cowboys are 3-5 in the Big 12.
7. West Virginia at Arkansas, 1 p.m., ESPN2: The Mountaineers seem shaky, at 13-6 overall, but 2-5 in the Big 12. Meanwhile, the Razorbacks are 15-5, 5-3.
8. OU at Auburn, 1 p.m., ESPN: Rough assignment for the Sooners. The Tigers are 19-1 overall, 8-0 in the SEC and ranked No. 1.
9. Missouri at Iowa State, 1 p.m., ESPNU: Old Big Eight matchup, from the days when Mizzou hoops were better than Iowa State’s. Not anymore. The Tigers are 8-11, 2-5. Meanwhile, the Cyclones are ranked 23rd.
10. Mississippi State at Texas Tech, ESPN2: Should be a win for the 13th-ranked Red Raiders. Mississippi State is 13-6, 4-3.
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Mailbag: Billy Donovan’s popularity
At least one reader took exception to my column saying that Billy Donovan should be remembered fondly by Thunder fans.
Mike: “I definitely don’t think Donovan deserves any boos, and I don’t think apathy is intentional or cruel. I think it’s a result of the period he coached here where things went from great to something less satisfying to the fans. So, few people thought of him as a great coach. I also don’t believe Donovan had the type of personality that endeared himself to the fans. Most of the Thunder people who are highly thought of from the past feel the warmth because they gave the warmth. Billy never seemed to me to ‘buy in’ to OKC the way some others have – guys like Kenrich Williams and Mike Muscala, who made it a point to demonstrate the warmth they had for the city and state. Billy left – right or wrong – when things got tough. You may believe that is normal, and it is. But to fans, you get back what you put in as far as the love goes.”
Tramel: Interesting take. Mike could be right. But who did stay when things got tough? You could say Westbrook when Durant left. But when things got really tough, Westbrook was ready to go – which was fine by the Thunder. No one should begrudge Westbrook for that. But Donovan stuck around a year longer than did Westbrook when things got rough. Donovan coached that Chris Paul team to unexpected success. So that seems a hollow argument.
As for personality, sure. Donovan wasn’t totally endearing. But he was authentic. He wasn’t putting on a façade. He was a good coach whose best team didn’t quite get over the hump, so he didn’t reach immortality status in OKC. That’s no reason why he shouldn’t be held in high regard.
Berry Tramel: Berry can be reached at 405-760-8080 or at btramel@oklahoman.com. He can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including FM-98.1. Support his work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Did Big 12 make a mistake not taking Louisville a decade ago?
