Never Quite There Northwestern

The mantra in Evanston, Illinois never changes. This is going to be the year. This is going to be the year. This is going to be the year.

ZZZ. That’s the sound of the rest of the college basketball world dozing off because it never is the year for Northwestern. Never has been the year, and may never be the year.

Northwestern is the only school playing in a major conference that has never been chosen to partcipate in the NCAA men’s tournament. Never. As in not once. Not ever. Not even once upon a time.

Dating back to 1939–before World War II–when the tournament began, the Wildcats have never been deemed worthy. They have never qualified automatically, never been invited as an at-large team because they played so well they couldn’t be ignored, never been invited because selectors just felt bad for them. Do the Wildcats have an unlisted phone number that the NCAA hasn’t ferreted out?

I don’t know if this makes Northwestern the worst program in the history of Division I college basketball, but it certainly makes the team a likelier nomination for the title than it does Michelle Bachman for her Holy Grail. The Wildcats have never even been a one-year wonder. If Northwestern was a professional soccer team it would have been demoted to Division II by now.

Many theories are advanced as to why Northwestern has been a multi-generational also-ran. 1) The Wildcats play in the oh-so-tough Big Ten against public universities with more students than people that live in Evanston. Answer: So change leagues if you don’t want to compete seriously. 2) Northwestern’s admissions standards are so much higher than the other teams in the league that it can’t recruit enough high-caliber players who can also spell. Answer: What about Duke and Stanford, to name two rather prominent college hoops programs that recruit kids with high grade-point averages and higher test scores? 3) Northwestern hasn’t had the right coach. Answer: Bill Carmody seemed like the right hire when he moved to the Midwest from Princeton, but he’s had 11 years to make the Wildcats a major player and he hasn’t yet. Which means that Northwestern still hasn’t had the right coach.

Recently, Northwestern has been like the boy who cried wolf. Every autumn for about three years now as the leaves turn colors, Carmody and players pronounce that they will produce the best team in Northwestern history; in other words “This is going to be the year.”

Then things go wrong. The best player gets hurt. The best player quits the team. A different best player gets hurt. It’s all supporting evidence that Northwestern is jinxed. Wonder if Northwestern could qualify for the NAIA tournament.

A couple of weeks ago at the annual gathering of the Big Ten clan in Chicago for pre-season hoops discussion, Northwestern showed up again with the attitude of–you guessed it–“This is going to be the year.” The Wildcats finished 20-14 last year, a rare visit to the rarefied atmosphere of a 20-win season, but really, why should we believe these guys?

Carmody, who can be a witty man, must have blackmail material in his files on Northwestern administrators for them to stick with him so long in the face of continual disappointment. It took only moments for him to be asked if 2011-12 is going to be Northwestern’s breakthrough year and how much does it weigh on his mind that the only sniff of the NCAA tournament Northwestern has had is watching it on television like the rest of America. Oh, except for that first tournament in ’39, which was played on the Northwestern campus.

“I was hoping to get through this press conference without that,” he said, “but I guess five questions in it’s all right. It doesn’t weigh on my mind. You have 340 teams and that’s the goal of every team, to get in the tournament. But the spotlight is on us more than other teams because we have not been there. We’re getting pretty close. I like our team. So I think we have a real good shot. And I think our guys, that’s what they’re really shooting for. And they feel this is it.”

Senior John Shurna, a 6-foot-9 forward who averaged 16.6 ppg. last year and is the team’s best player, certainly does. He’s also a bit sick of hearing about the never, never world for Northwestern.

“It gets brought up a lot,” Shurna said. “We’ve shown we can compete with the best teams.”

That’s what many losers say, as if bonus points in the standings can be acquired by keeping games close, or “competitive,” as Shurna put it. “I think things keep happening. Injuries happen.”

They always do at Northwestern. The Boston Red Sox won a World Series after 86 years of waiting. Northwestern has been waiting almost as long just to get into the playoffs. That must be some kind of North American sports futility record.

When Northwestern finally is chosen for NCAA play Wildcat fans will celebrate and the rest of the college basketball world will sigh, “Finally.” It’s hard not to root for such an occasion, even if Halley’s Comet may come around first.