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Thursday, December 7, 2000
Senior class to be raisin' the roof
By Mechelle Voepel
Special to ESPN.com
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Years of examining (and eating) evidence confirms this fact: There are a lot more raisins near the top of a box of raisin bran than at the bottom.
|  | | Geno Auriemma, right, and Sue Bird are just two reasons UConn is favored to win it all again. |
As an analogy to basketball season, this generally works. When the year begins, teams know there's plenty of things out there to win: non-conference showdowns, all those December two-day "classics," league rivalry games, the league regular-season title, the league tournament championship.
But after all that's consumed, there's just one thing left: the NCAA title. And how many spoons, realistically, do you think have a shot at snaring that elusive raisin?
You might be thinking there's a ladle in Connecticut, a tablespoon in Tennessee and soup spoons in Georgia, Duke, Purdue, Rutgers and Notre Dame.
But what kind of utensil do they have at Louisiana Tech? Despite the loss of its senior backcourt from last season, earlier this summer you could have considered Tech in the soup-spoon group.
But the ACL injury to Catrina Frierson -- she's one of several big names felled by that demon ligament in the offseason -- might have knocked Tech back to teaspoon status. Several times last season, Frierson looked to be a really special player, with the kind of tenacity toward scoring that Tech is going to need this year now that Betty Lennox and Tamicha Jackson are gone.
Coach Leon Barmore (who last March expected to be playing a lot of golf about now, not running practice) was figuring on a double-double average from Frierson this year.
Still, Tech just doesn't have bad seasons. It doesn't seem to matter who graduates or who gets hurt or what assistant coach leaves (although Kim Mulkey-Robertson was not just another assistant, and she was there for eons) or how everybody else in the country is doing -- Tech is always good.
So is another Tech, the West Texas variety. Plenette Pierson symbolized the talented-freshman-on-a-roller-coaster last season, but you might not see many more downs from her.
What Texas Tech, Duke and Purdue have in common -- along with being soup spoons -- is that they all expect their hotshot freshmen to not only adjust quickly but excel.
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PRESEASON
PONTIFICATIONS
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ESPN.com won't unveil its women's college basketball preview until November. In the meantime, however, get ready for ESPN The Magazine's preseason top 10.
ESPN.com will begin unveiling Sally Jenkins' picks on Oct. 17, beginning with No. 10. Then check back on a daily basis as we continue to count down to the No. 1 team, which will be featured on Oct. 31.
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In fact, it's a fascinating bookend we'll have this season: the revered class of 2001 saying goodbye while the class of 2004 introduces itself. For instance, those fans who love to hate UConn can trade Shea Ralph for Diana Taurasi.
Even if the Huskies run away from the rest of the country, as they might be quite capable of, individual stories from all over will keep this season interesting.
The WNBA very much needs the talent this year's senior class should bring, and the plot lines will go way beyond whether Tennessee's Tamika Catchings establishes herself as the best of the class. Ralph and Southwest Missouri State's Jackie Stiles, for instance, are big names in the college game, but will their ability translate in the WNBA?
And how will the Kelly and Coco Miller thing work out? Some might say that it's inevitable that they'll have to deal with going their separate ways -- but is it? Could they help lead Georgia at last to an NCAA title and then hope some WNBA team thinks it's worth wheeling and dealing to get both of them?
If that speculation starts making your head hurt, don't even think about the Pac-10. Could this league get any more impossible to handicap?
Oregon's Shaquala Williams, last season's league MVP, joins Frierson on the sidelines with an ACL injury. Stanford appears to have talent, but who knows how consistent it will be. You could say the same about Southern California. Can this league produce a team good enough to earn the West's No. 1 seed?
Long as we're out west, how much restructuring and rethinking does UC Santa Barbara do now with the loss of three-time Big West MVP Erin Buescher? The Buescher situation -- a senior, she transferred to The Masters College in Santa Clara, Calif., an NAIA school -- is odd, to say the least.
USCB said her decision was "based on strong religious convictions and her desire to attend a small Christian college."
Really? That couldn't wait a little longer? She couldn't fulfill the final year of a four-year commitment at UCSB and then go study elsewhere?
Usually, when things don't appear to add up ... they probably don't add up. Bottom line, though, it's her life.
Which brings us to life itself. Virginia coach Debbie Ryan announced she was lucky in the battle against cancer, having caught it early. Ryan is an intensely private woman, and one can assume discussing such a personal issue publicly was very difficult for her.
No one will be more relieved to have the focus on the kids, on what they're going to show us this season, than Ryan. And she's got a team that might be hanging around with the soup spoons.
And in less than a month, we open the box.
Mechelle Voepel of the Kansas City Star is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. She can be reached via e-mail at mvoepel@kcstar.com.
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