As a Tulsa fan, I should hate Memphis with a passion greater than almost any program in the country. They routinely embarrass our team on the court, they complain daily about leaving their worthless conference behind, and even when it looks like we might catch a bone, Antonio Anderson just rips it right back at the buzzer. (youtube)
And yet, I constantly find myself not hating Memphis in the least and even (gasp) rooting for them at times. Mostly I hate that Tulsa isn't even the same ballpark as Memphis in recruiting, on the floor, in the stands. Not since that 2000 season has Tulsa even come close to a level like that and that year is a speck that gets smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror every day. It's all a sobering reminder that maybe Tulsa does indeed deserve that nasty label of "mid-major".
But there's hope for a Tulsa fan watching Memphis roll through the NCAA tournament every year and it lies in the fact that deep down Memphis doesn't really look all that different. In spite of the conference, in spite of the tv contract, lacking access to the BCS fountain of youth, with at-large bids dwindling and selection criteria geared towards getting more 12-loss BCS teams in the tournament than ever before, Memphis ran roughshod over the traditional powers for a 4-year stretch on the court and on the recruiting trail. In one season, they destroyed UConn, Oklahoma, Georgetown, Arizona, UCLA, Michigan St, and Texas before bowing out in overtime of the national championship against Kansas. And that's in a single season! And through it all, the good old boys couldn't steal their coaches or their recruits or their fans. The death of the "if you can't beat 'em, just steal their coach" era was upon us! And then, just days after an uncharacteristic beating at the hands of Missouri in the sweet 16, it all started to crumble...
5 months later, here we are. Calipari is waxing poetic about his "dream job", the 2008 season and all of its glorious records are vacated, and the smug air that lies behind the reporting of all these incidents is stifling.
"What does this have to do with Tulsa?" you ask. "Isn't this a good thing? Doesn't it mean Tulsa is now the team to beat in conference USA?" Maybe we are, but only for this season and it's not the way it was supposed to happen. See, no true Tulsa fan ever wanted to drag Memphis down to our level. Sure, we took our fair share of shots, but deep down we knew that our program could get to that level as well and what would the pundits say when 2 Conference USA teams were playing in the Final 4!
In the end, I believe Memphis will recover. You can't change the fact that one of the best young point guards in the NBA went to the University of Memphis, you can't change the fact that a country full of players spent their impressionable years watching an athletic Memphis team play NBA ball for the last 5 years. In fact, from all indications, their recruiting won't suffer at all from the changes. (Rivals) The new beginning with Josh Pastner may be just what the doctor ordered. But it won't change the fact that our big brother, the one we looked up to for all those years, the one we hoped to emulate some day, was cheating all along and we're left looking into the darkness for another path, a clean path to the promise land hoping along the way that it's our program that's the next hero for the cause.
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