In sports, all answers are just bridges to the next question.
Last weekend, the Stanford men’s basketball team dispensed with the question about its mediocrity: NCAA tournament upsets over New Mexico and Kansas propelled the Cardinal into the national spotlight and a Sweet 16 matchup against Dayton on Thursday afternoon (4:15 Pacific) in Memphis. Any remaining doubt about Coach Johnny Dawkins’s job security also is presumed to be quashed. Next season will be his seventh on the Farm.
Which raises the next question: What does this post-season suggest for the future? That’s the subtext of almost every conversation this week. Reporters want Dawkins and his players to explain their success, to describe why this year is different from the ones that preceded it. Why now and not before, that’s what they yearn to know. Because that might help anticipate what’s ahead as well as clarify what’s happening now.
“They had to grow,” says Dawkins of his players. He thought maybe they would make more progress last season, but “it just wasn’t meant to be.” This is a coach who keenly understands patience; he says he’s been a beneficiary of it, from Bob Bowlsby, the athletic director who hired him, and Bernard Muir, the current athletic director who stuck with him. He talks unhesitantly about his own growth, particularly in learning to better discern what groups of players do best and finding ways to maximize those strengths.
There are plenty of potential themes to the Dayton game. The Flyers have more depth than the Cardinal, and Dawkins says they’re tough—“real physical”—with an ability to run. Most oddsmakers give Stanford the edge on Thursday, so after a six-year absence from the NCAA tourney, the Cardinal is now favored to reach the Elite Eight. If that happens, all Dawkins is going to hear day in and day out is “how?” and “why now?”
Powell. (Photo: Hector Garcina-Molina / Stanfordphoto.com)He’s already told us, really, in his repeated declarations of how much he enjoys working with this team. It’s in the bond that his program builds between players and coaches. It’s in the commitment players make, in what they’ll sacrifice and the effort they’ll make to improve. Senior forward Dwight Powell has been able to play in the NCAA tournament because he defined being an undergraduate as a four-year experience that included a degree, as opposed to a campus visit on the way to the pros. Why is Stanford this deep in the post-season? It’s partly because Powell is still on the roster—he’s a first-team all-conference player with mature skills, but at least as importantly, he’s an example to underclassmen of what’s necessary to achieve a goal.
Dawkins grabbed the media’s attention this week when he described how Powell declined last year to even look at an NBA evaluation of his draft prospects. “I don’t even need to know because I’m not going,” Dawkins quoted Powell as saying. Powell confirmed his coach’s account a few minutes later in a session at which he and junior guard Chasson Randle took their turn in front of a what’s-different-this-year fusillade. They offered little, except perhaps for Powell’s observation that after watching other teams celebrate from a distance, they let the pain “sink in.”
That can’t be the 2014 team’s legacy. Even if the wheels come off the current ride Thursday, the motivation has changed. Expectations will be much higher. Powell says the younger players have seen how much work is required. Even better, he says, they understand and accept that winning consistently is only going to get harder.
The true signature of the Stanford program is supposed to be a relentless pursuit of excellence. Some nights it will be reflected in effort, not outcome. Defending well is its own reward. Look for that Thursday for sure. Some nights what we’ll notice is how tall the front line is, or how hot a particular shooter is from three-point range. And we’ll miss the characteristics that matter most to the success of this team and perhaps future ones, too.
If you’ve moved on to the inevitable next question, if you’re wondering about the season after this, and the season after that, you’re going to have to decide how much you believe that the most important aspect of the program is the mix of faith, patience and determination that has found its footing at the exact moment of the Big Dance. No matter what happens Thursday.
Mike Antonucci is senior writer for Stanford.
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