Every major college basketball fan base owns a healthy dread of irrelevancy, a fear of that rapid fall from grace that leads to national columnists across the country spending 1,200 words trying to explain what happened.
Lorenzo Romar and Washington basketball are staring down a crossroads season
It’s been a decade since the Washington Huskies were a Final Four favorite and Lorenzo Romar was one of the hottest coaching names in Division I. Now both are looking to show signs of being able to get back to that place.
Joe Nicholson-USA TODAY Sports
Somewhere right beneath that fear is the one that comes along with complacency. Hoop heads want to spend their winter months daydreaming about league titles and Final Four runs, not guaranteed top half of the conference finishes and a decent shot at a nine or a 10 seed.
In this modern era, however, conference respectability and postseason consistency have more of an effect on a program’s national perception than ever before. It’s a fact which has made it easy for programs to slide into an old married couple-esque period of comfort, where the on-paper results keep the folks in charge of the program happy, but the lack of excitement has the fan base feeling like it’s going through the motions.
A decade ago, Lorenzo Romar was about to embark on a season that would make him one of the hottest coaching names in college basketball. He led the Washington Huskies to 29 wins, a Pac-10 tournament championship and a No. 1 seed in the big dance. Although UW was upset by Louisville in the Sweet 16 that season, Romar proved he wasn't a fluke by bringing the Huskies back to the Sweet 16 a season later, marking the first time Washington had ever won NCAA Tournament games in back-to-back years.
Since then, things in Seattle have been ... OK. The Huskies have won a handful of games in the Big Dance, they’ve captured a pair of conference regular season and tournament championships, and they’ve never finished a regular season under .500 or failed to win fewer than 16 games.
But that excitement and that promise of big things on the horizon which was present when Nate Robinson and Brandon Roy were lighting up the West Coast? All that fizzled out faster than “The OC.”
For the first time since he took the job in 2002, Romar has a Washington team with precisely zero players on its roster who have played in the NCAA Tournament. UDub is coming off a season in which it won as many games as it lost in conference play for a second straight year, and which saw it left out of postseason play entirely for the first time since 2007.
The Washington fans who were willing to accept the slide towards complacency because of the shot of life Romar injected into the program at the beginning of his tenure are starting to reach for their Internet pitchforks and torches. Head coaches can usually sense these things, and it sounds as though Romar is well aware of his current situation.
"I'm just anxious and excited to get out there and see what we can do with this group," Romar said last week. "If we just say, we got to get to the tournament, then they're saying we don't know how to do that. We've never done it before. We were in this position before in 2004 when none of them had tasted the tournament either. That year we started out 0-5, but that year guys found a way to learn how to compete and be together, and there it went."
Much of the angst surrounding Husky basketball centers around a feeling that the program did little to capitalize on a period where its conference was as mediocre as it’s been in recent memory, even though Romar had the talent to do so.
Washington has eight former players on current NBA rosters, more than every Pac-12 team outside of UCLA (14) and Arizona (12). Those other two programs have combined for 27 NCAA Tournament wins since the start of the 2005-06 season. UW has won just six over that same period, and has missed out on the tournament entirely five times, one absence more than the Bruins and Wildcats put together.
Despite being consistently picked to finish somewhere between 6-9 in the Pac-12 heading into 2014-15, Romar has been bullish during the preseason about his belief that he has a squad capable of making the field of 68. He has a solid base to work with in conference POY candidate Nigel Williams-Goss (13.4 ppg) and fourth-year junior Andrew Andrews (12.3 ppg). But there are few known commodities after those co-captains, and replacing first-round draft pick C.J. Wilcox would be a tall task for any coach.
A loaded 2015 recruiting class that includes local stars Dejounte Murray and Matisse Thybulle has helped silence a few of the critics in Seattle, but Romar still needs to prove to the fan base that he’s capable of whipping up the type of excitement and energy that the program experienced a decade ago. So while it’ll be easy to point to the future regardless of what happens over the course of the next several months, this still feels like a bit of a crossroads season for Washington hoops.
Few things in life are more exciting than an unexpected gift at an unexpected time, and taking this Husky team to the NCAA Tournament would be the perfect offering from Romar to fan base understandably worried that the juice might gone from their relationship for good.
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