And here's the worst team in Division I
First-year Division I Savannah State couldn't have picked a worse year to schedule the Gators. *
Dave Curtis | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted January 18, 2006
SAVANNAH, Ga. -- The motto at the university here, tucked on 165 acres less than a mile from Victory Drive, says what everyone in the athletic department wants to believe.
"You can get anywhere from here," reads every piece of Savannah State University promotional material.
It's hype for the Georgia's oldest historically black college, and it's hope for the school's athletes and coaches.
For them, anywhere but here is a wonderful place.
The quest to get there, however futile, begins again tonight. The Tigers basketball team, ridiculed in the national media last season and almost as awful this season, heads to the O'Connell Center to play unbeaten Florida. The matchup, set to tip off at 7 p.m., might be the most lopsided in Division I basketball this season.
"Maybe the best against the worst," says first-year Savannah State Coach Horace Broadnax, who then leans back in his chair and laughs.
That assessment isn't far off. The Gators enter the game second in both national polls. And in the Ratings Percentage Index, the most popular tool to measure and compare all 334 Division I teams, UF was eighth Tuesday and SSU was 333rd. Last is North Florida, a provisional Division I member that beat Savannah State 81-62 on Dec. 12.
Broadnax chooses to laugh at the numbers, in part to forget his program's frustrating present and recent past. Such signs of joy are rare around here, and most of them came around 9 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 18.
That night, in the season-opener, SSU beat visiting Wilberforce, an NAIA school. The 63-59 victory snapped a 57-game losing streak that included last year's 0-28 campaign, only the second time in 50 years a D-I team finished winless. Four of the losses were forfeits from the 2003-04 season, when the Tigers used an ineligible player.
A celebration ensued for 13 Tigers players, none of whom had won a college game.
"We didn't do much, though," junior Michael Bennett says. "We had to get on a plane and go play Oregon and Pacific."
That flight left the next morning, and SSU hasn't won since. The Tigers have dropped 17 in a row, including an overtime home loss to Webber College, another NAIA school. Fifteen of the losses have come on the road. In all, Savannah State has lost 70 consecutive games to Division I opponents.
"It's really frustrating," says freshman forward Chris Linton, a Jacksonville native. "What gives me hope? It's hard to say right now."
Last March, things appeared as hopeless as ever for Savannah State. Broadnax, who had spent the past three years practicing law in Orlando after stepping down as coach at Bethune-Cookman, took over a program former coach Ed Daniels had left in shambles.
Five years earlier, before Broadnax, Daniels and Athletic Director Tony O'Neal arrived on campus, school administrators pushed for a jump to Division I. Like many schools in the Southeast, dreams of big victories and bigger paychecks spurred the decision. Savannah State had been a Division II program -- and not a successful one. The school's last above-.500 season came in 1985-86.
"The school moved to Division I in name," says Broadnax, also a former star guard at Georgetown. "But the resources necessary didn't come with it."
The lack of resources is why Broadnax coaches a team with 5.5 scholarship spread among its players, far below the 13 the NCAA allows in men's basketball.
It's why the program had no assistants when Broadnax arrived and why it took until September for him to officially hire Jay Gibbons and Raheem Waller for his staff.
"Like I tell people constantly, the move is made," says O'Neal, who was an associate AD at Bethune-Cookman when he left for the SSU job in 2004. "Now, how do we make it work? How do we give ourselves a chance at this level?"
O'Neal said he has added 11 full-time employees in the athletic department in his tenure, including the two assistants for Broadnax. The money, he says, has come mainly from better budgeting for men's basketball road games, where the Tigers receive guaranteed fees for playing a team from larger conference.
The next major change could come later this month, when the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference rules on Savannah State's application for membership.
Joining the league would add money and rivalries to a school that lacks both. It also would give Tigers teams a chance to compete for automatic bids to NCAA championships.
And it will bring stability to a basketball schedule that features just seven home games. Broadnax's team played in Oregon, Colorado, Texas, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., before Christmas.
"That's the one mistake we won't make again," he says. "The schedule really hurt us. We were worn out, and we couldn't practice or prepare for games."
The tough travel was just part of Broadnax's first-year stress. When he met with his eight returning players last spring, five chose to leave the program.
That left the staff recruiting players such as Linton, who had no scholarship offers in May and planned to try to walk on at Florida A&M or Bethune-Cookman.
But one of Linton's coach at Ribault High called Gibbons, who offered Linton scholarship money after watching him play one pick-up game. Broadnax and Linton admit the freshman's 22 minutes per game this season is more than he averaged last season as a senior at Ribault.
Then there's junior Michael Bennett, who sits in Tiger Arena on a slow Friday afternoon. One of the three returning players, Bennett's practice jersey hangs loose on his frail frame and pipe-cleaner arms. The glasses he wears will stay on when practice starts in a half-hour, making him look more his major -- chemical engineering -- then his passion -- small forward.
"I just love to play the game," says Bennett, recruited only by two junior colleges out of a Maryland high school. "I want to keep playing, maybe play in Europe.
"But this is the biggest challenge I've ever gone through."
As he attends classes, eats in the cafeteria and walks through campus, Bennett says students tease him about the program's struggles. Although 1,011 attended SSU's home loss to Bethune-Cookman last Wednesday, school spirit is sparse.
At the on-campus bookstore, customers can't purchase a "Savannah State basketball" hat or shirt. There's no media guide for the men's basketball team. At The Tiger's Den, a bar with a view of the Tigers' football stadium, no SSU memorabilia hangs on the walls.
Still, Broadnax and his players seem undeterred. They promise to compete tonight and hope to perform better than in their 45-point loss to Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, their 60-point loss to Oregon, their 64-point loss to Colorado.
Almost anything, it seems, would constitute improvement. Any place, after all, is better than where the Tigers are now.
"I promise you that we're working hard," O'Neal says. "As competitors, we have pride, and we're going to get this thing turned around. But it's not going to happen overnight."
Dave Curtis can be reached at
dcurtis@orlandosentinel.com
Should Savannah State Move Back 2 Division-II???
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