Jay Bilas, an ESPN college basketball analyst and former Duke player under coach Mike Krzyzewski in the mid-1980s, takes a shot at some Q&A with Post columnist Steve Serby.
Q: Who are your sleeper teams in the NCAA Tournament?
A: Wofford is a team that could be like Davidson was in 2008, when they had Stephen Curry. They’re legit, they can really play. Buffalo is very, very good, and they’ve got a chance to do even better this year because they’re gonna be a higher seed. They should be a top 6 or 7 seed. Utah State I would say is really good out of the Mountain West, and they’ve got a kid named Sam Merrill who averages about 20 points a game. And then Murray State because they’ve got Ja Morant. He’s like Russell Westbrook, so when you’ve got a lottery pick on your team, you can beat anybody.
Q: Who are the best players nobody knows?
A: Fletcher Magee of Wofford is like a a JJ Redick-caliber shooter. He has made well over 100 3s this year, and he’s right there as the all-time leading 3-point shooter in NCAA history. I would say he would be No. 1 on the list of players you need to get to know. And then there’s a kid from Buffalo named CJ Massinburg who is legit, a terrific scorer. From Nevada there’s a player named Jordan Caroline. If Furman makes it in — and that’s a big if — but they got a kid named Matt Rafferty, a 6-8 senior, one of the most efficient players in the country. The guy scratches in every category on the box score. He’s really, really good.
Q: Who does Zion Williamson remains you of?
A: Nobody. And I’ve said that all year long from the first time I saw him. Anybody who makes a comparison to Zion Williamson is making it up, because there’s never been anybody like him on a basketball floor. Ever.
Q: In what way?
A: Because he is 285 pounds, he’s got a 45-inch vertical, and he’s as nimble as a cat. There’s never been anybody like him to play this game, ever. He’s not the best player I’ve ever seen, but I’ve never seen anybody like him. It’s like having a Mack truck dancing a ballet and going, “That was fantastic.” The perfect casting.
Q: What’s his position in the NBA?
A: Wherever he wants. I mean, it doesn’t matter where you put him. He’s not a position player. He’s a player. NBA people use the term “unicorn.” You’ve never seen anything like this guy. He’s not existed before.
Q: So he’ll help the Knicks if they get him?
A: He’ll help anybody. He’s gonna make a billion dollars if he stays healthy.
Q: What are your thoughts on St. John’s?
A: St. John’s is kind of an odd team. They’ve won some really good games, and they’ve lost some games that make you scratch your head. In a normal year, they wouldn’t make the tournament. They started off 12-0, and then they’ve had a losing record since that 12-0 start, and got a losing record in the league. They’re basically under water in the Big East. They’re very talented, but they’re not very consistent on the defensive end. I think they’re very fortunate that the end of the line to get into the tournament. There are a lot of bad teams there, so they’ll probably leapfrog some of ’em and still get in.
Q: What do you think of Shamorie Ponds?
A: Big-time player. I love him. Competes. He can get 30 in any game they play, and has.
Q: Seton Hall?
A: Seton Hall’s done a remarkable job, I think, to put themselves in position to make the tournament. I think they’re probably gonna make it in as well. After losing what they lost last year, and then to be in position to make the tournament again — the Kentucky win is gonna be a separating factor for them in order to make the field, and I think they will. Playing the non-conference schedule that they did, and doing well against it was important. Myles Powell’s been awesome. He never takes a play off. He’s another guy who’s hit about 100 3s give or take, and gets to the foul line. … He’s just in attack mode all the time.
Q: So you like coach Kevin Willard?
A: I love Kevin, I think he’s a great coach. For him to have lost all that they lost last year and to be in position to make the tournament again, I think really shows you he’s built a good program.
Q: What do you think of the Quadrant system?
A: I’m not crazy about it just because it’s so wide. You can beat the 75th-ranked team on the road and that counts the same as beating the No. 1 team at home, and I don’t think that makes a lot of sense. It’s just like when folks talk about non-conference record … strength of schedule for non-conference. As long as your total body of work is good enough to get you in, or good enough to seed you or better than somebody else’s, what difference does it make? If I play in a kick-ass great league that gives me nothing but fistfights every day, why do I have to go out and do that in non-conference? And if you’re in a lousy league, then OK, go out and challenge yourself to death in a non-conference. But why say total of body of work if you’re gonna separate it out like that?
Q: How are you spending Selection Sunday?
A: I’ll be up in the studio. We have “Gameday” shows, and then we’ll be on the air from 5 in the afternoon until probably 10, 11 at night.
Q: Do you enjoy Selection Sunday?
A: I do, yeah it’s fun. It’s like drinking out of a firehose, but it’s a lot of fun. … You have a thousand things coming at you at once. You have 68 teams that are thrown out there all at one time, and you don’t know what the matchups are for the tournament until they’re revealed. So you might have a good idea who’s gonna make it, but you don’t know who’s playing whom and where.
Q: Do you fill out a bracket?
A: We get all of about three minutes to do it.
Q: Have you had success doing it?
A: Yeah, most years I’m pretty good.
Q: What are the best college teams you’ve seen as a broadcaster?
A: Kentucky in ’96 was really good. … North Carolina in 2009 was great, and probably Duke in 2001 was spectacularly good. … Kentucky in 2015 was a great team, the one that Wisconsin beat in the semifinals. If they had won that game, I think they would have won the whole thing.
Q: What is the best single college game you’ve witnessed?
A: The ’92 Duke-Kentucky game, I was a grad assistant coach in that game. But the best game I’ve been to as a broadcaster — people think it was that Syracuse-UConn six-overtime game, but I worked with Dick Enberg on the 2005 Elite 8 game between Arizona and Illinois [Illinois rallied from down 15 with 4 minutes left for a 90-89 overtime win], and that was the best game I’ve ever done.
Q: Whatever comes to mind: Howard Cosell.
A: Amazing. And gave me great advice on law school.
Q: What was his advice?
A: Go (laugh). He told me to go. He waxed on poetically about how great a law degree would be for me.
Q: Bill Raftery.
A: As good a friend as I’ve ever had.
Q: Dick Enberg.
A: A magnificent wordsmith, and as pure heart as anyone you could ever come across.
Q: Dick Vitale.
A: Passionate.
Q: Bob Knight.
A: Brilliant.
Q: What was it like working with him?
A: It was a great lesson in the game every time we would talk basketball.
Q: Where does he go down in history?
A: Mount Rushmore status.
Q: Lou Carnesecca.
A: Character. Both having it and bring one.
Q: Rollie Massimino.
A: Rollie gave you a warm feeling every time you were around him. He never left a meal with his shirt clean.
Q: Big John Thompson.
A: A giant, in every sense of the word. One of the brightest, deepest thinkers I’ve ever spoken to, and just an absolutely magnificent basketball coach that does not get the credit he deserves. He’s among the greatest coaches of all time.
Q: Roy Williams.
A: One of the best I’ve ever seen at his job. Another guy that doesn’t get credit for how technically brilliant he is as a basketball coach. His players love him. I mean, not like him, love him. And would walk through fire for him, and I have seen why.
Q: Jay Wright.
A: Jay Wright is the next generation of Coach K. He gets it on a level that most coaches don’t. He would be a Hall of Famer in college, pro, you name it.
Q: Gonzaga coach Mark Few.
A: Mark Few is one of the true good guys in the game. Is always happy where his feet are planted, and is one of the sweetest, most genuine people I’ve ever known.
Q: Chris Mullin as a player.
A: Fantastic shooter and competitor. He was poetry to watch on the basketball floor with his movements, and never backed down to anybody.
Q: One memory of playing against Michael Jordan?
A: When he hit his head on the backboard in one of the games we played. I’ll never forget that. I don’t think anybody who saw it will ever forget it.
Q: Playing against Ralph Sampson.
A: It was a helpless feeling because he was so incredibly good. The first time he scored 32 points, and I was despondent after the game, and a couple of weeks later he scored 40 on Clark Kellogg and Herb Williams, both of them played a dozen years each in the NBA, I felt a little better about myself after that.
Q: The rivalry between Coach K and Dean Smith.
A: Very intense. Both of them were very respectful, but it was very intense. And it was a different time back then where there wasn’t as much familiarity among everyone. Now there’s more coverage, the players know each other before they get there. It was pretty clear that we were rivals. There was not a lot of pats on the back and warm handshakes. It was very businesslike.
Q: What’s it like for you now when you do a game at the Dean Dome?
A: It’s great. That might be, outside of Cameron Indoor Stadium and Allen Fieldhouse, my favorite place to go. The people are fantastic, they couldn’t be better, couldn’t be nicer. I’m 55 years old. I’m so far removed from being a player, I haven’t had a dog in the fight since I was an assistant coach. So people can believe this or not, but I don’t care who wins. And I’ve never cared since I’ve been broadcasting. I think one of the beautiful things about what I do is you get by the curtain of every team. So you see how they prepare, you get to know the players and the coaches, and you know how bad they want it, and if you can’t respect that, then you need to find a different business. I’m very appreciative of where I went to school — I love where I went to school — but I couldn’t have more admiration and respect for North Carolina. To me, if you can’t see that, you’re willfully blind. It’s a fantastic place and a marvelous program. I’ve said this back when I was a player: If you switched uniforms, the fan bases would love the other team and hate the team they have. That’s what fans do. If you stuck around and listened to the senior speeches after the Duke-Carolina game last week, they were magnificent. You’re not gonna find better guys than Carolina’s got. They’re just the same as the great guys that Duke has. [Former Tar Heel] Hubert Davis I worked with for years, there’s not a person on this planet I admire more than Hubert. He is as good a human being as I’ve ever met.
Q: I read an article that once ranked you as the No. 4 most-biased announcer.
A: When you hear something unreasonable, you just dismiss it, so I don’t really care. The thing I laugh about is: So what’s biased? My mouth or your ears?
Q: Describe losing to “Never Nervous” Pervis Ellison and Louisville in the 1986 NCAA championship game.
A: Back then the losing team had to sit out on the court. We basically sat on our bench and watched the other team celebrate, get their rings and everything … or watches, I think they had watches back then.
Q: How depressing was that?
A: It wasn’t any fun, because we felt like it should have been us. It was sobering. It was certainly the most difficult loss any of us have ever suffered. Sort of a devastating thing to go from winning 37 games to that being the end of it.
Q: Describe the 103-73 championship game loss to UNLV when you were an assistant coach at Duke in 1990.
A: They beat the hell out of us. It got away from us quick. It was never a game.
Q: What about the revenge game in the Final Four the next season, when the Blue Devils eliminated the previously undefeated Running’ Rebels, 79-77, on your way to the national championship?
A: It wasn’t so much revenge as it was trying to win that game and win that championship. Actually that Vegas team was better than the team the year before. But the Duke team was better, too, than it was the year before. Stacey Augmon didn’t have one of his better games, but that was an exhilarating feeling to win a game like that where you beat an undefeated team that was supposed to win it.
Q: What are your thoughts on “One Shining Moment.”
A: I don’t even [remember] that being played in each of those years. The thing I remember is bringing some of my teammates down to the floor, guys that I had played with that were at the game — like Quin Snyder and Billy King — so that we could kind of celebrate a little bit in addition to the players.
Q: Describe your recruitment by Jim Boeheim.
A: I was the first kid from California that Syracuse recruited, and Boeheim jokes now that after he found out he could get a kid from California, he went out and recruited the good players out there. He came out for a home visit, but he basically said, “Look, I’m not gonna come out like the other guys and watch you play every five minutes and babysit you. And when you come here, I’m not gonna be chasing after some other guy.” And that made an impact on me, because he said, “Look, I’m gonna be here paying attention to our players.” I thought that was kind of a different approach.
Q: Describe Coach K’s recruitment of you.
A: It was exactly the opposite. Coach K was always there. He flew out to watch me play in a pickup game once cross-country, and then flew back. It was very intense recruitment, and he was on top of every detail. I trusted him from the jump.
Q: Lute Olson was the other coach who recruited you.
A: I came down to four different coaches — it was Lute Olson at Iowa, Boeheim at Syracuse, Coach K at Duke and then a guy named Ted Owens who was the head coach at Kansas at the time. Olson was the most charismatic. Heck, he had my mom signed right away. She thought he was Paul Newman. I remember I sat at his kitchen table, his wife had made us breakfast, and he had his contract and the plans for the Carver Hawkeye Arena, and I think his contract was a 10-year deal, and he told me, “I’m gonna be there your whole four years.” And then I think one year later he was at Arizona.
Q: What is the first thing you would do if you were NCAA president?
A: I would remove amateurism restrictions and let the players have the same economic rights as everybody else, literally. Everybody else has free-market rights and is allowed to earn and receive their fair-market value, including every other student. The only one not allowed is an athlete, and I think that’s profoundly wrong.
Q: What inspired you to write your book “Toughness”?
A: My wife did. I had written an article on the subject, and the article got some attention, and the response led her to say that I should expand on it.
Q: What were you trying to get across in that book?
A: Just that while coaches and teachers, a lot of people talk about toughness, it had never really been defined to me, and it’s not what you might originally think it would be. It’s not just about physically knocking people around, or trying to be a bully. It has more to do with persistence, and the will to prepare for the idea of just to keep plugging.
Q: Boyhood idol?
A: My older brother Dave. He’s seven years older than me and was a fantastic athlete, and I sort of followed him around like a wide-eyed little kid marveling at what he could do.
Q: Who were your favorite players growing up?
A: Jerry West, and there was a player at UCLA named David Meyers, who happens to be Ann Meyers’ brother, and he was a great player at UCLA. When I got into high school, Magic Johnson was my favorite player.
Q: What was it like meeting John Wooden for the first time?
A: Awe-inspiring. I’d grown up in Los Angeles, and Wooden retired probably when I was in fifth or sixth grade. So every kid that I grew up with wanted to play for UCLA when he was there. Every night you turned on Channel 5 and watched them play. They had the games on tape delay, and so I watched every UCLA game. And Dick Enberg did the games … and they never lost (laugh). It was one thing you could count on was the sun rising and UCLA winning.
Q: How do you know tennis star Tracy Austin?
A: I went to high school with her. I had a couple of classes with her, and she was exceedingly nice, could not have been nicer.
Q: Three dinner guests?
A: Martin Luther King, Jackie Robinson, Billie Jean King.
Q: Favorite actor?
A: Jack Nicholson.
Q: Favorite actress?
A: Meryl Streep.
Q: Favorite singer/entertainer?
A: Jeezy.
Q: What is it about his music that you like so much?
A: It’s hard-edged and gritty.
Q: Favorite meal?
A: Anything fish would be good for me.
Q: Who are your pre-Selection Sunday Final Four picks?
A: Virginia, Gonzaga, Duke and North Carolina.
Q: And your national champion is …
A: Virginia.