 "Photo: Courtesy of VMI Media Relations")
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The sexy thing to do in college basketball is to replace your outgoing head coach with an up-and-coming coach from a mid-major school. It worked for Tennessee with Bruce Pearl, for Ohio State with Thad Matta and for Duke when they hired Mike Krzyzewski away from Army.
Everyone down here seems to want to replace Dave Odom with either a certain coach from Virginia or a certain coach from the Big South. I've got someone who fits both of those descriptions. Duggar Baucom.
Baucom's VMI Keydets, after scaring Gregg Marshall's Winthrop team in the 2007 Big South tournament final, finished last year in fifth place in a particularly weak conference.
But here's the catch: they averaged 100.9 points per game in 2007, in addition to setting records for most 3-pointers and the most steals. Guard Reggie Williams led the nation in scoring at 28.1 points per game.
Baucom's game plan is for his team to take 100 shots - 50 of them for three - every game and to create 30 turnovers on defense. Even if that's not necessarily winning basketball, it's got to be more fun to watch than what we have now.
But why can't it be winning basketball? The Keydets beat then-Big South leaders UNC-Asheville (a team that took USC down at home earlier this season) by 22 points. A similar game plan led tiny Loyola Marymount to the Elite Eight in 1990. It even works in the NBA, after Mike D'Antoni's run-for-your-life approach sparked a 31-game turnaround for the Phoenix Suns in 2004-05.
USC has the personnel, in a chronically undersized but quick team that shot 36.4 percent from three-point range, to make this system work. A system that requires speed, creativity, a strong shooting stroke and quick hands to create steals could not be better-designed for guard Devan Downey.
Downey scored more than a quarter of USC's points this season. For a team that averages 101 points per game that turns into 25.7 points per game, an increase of more than seven points from his average this year, and if he takes more shots and more 3-pointers, there's no telling how high that average could soar. Imagine Brandis Raley-Ross hitting 51 percent of his 3-pointers, his average this season, but taking eight or nine looks every game instead of the two and change he's getting now. VMI's average begins to look conservative.
The individual single-season scoring record is Pete Maravich's 1,381 points in 1970 for LSU. Could Downey have a shot at that record if the Gamecocks hire Baucom? Bo Kimble, of the 1990 Loyola Marymount Lions, has the sixth-highest mark. I'm ready to believe.
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