By Ron Maly
All right, I'll give you one chance to name the top two teams in the Conference USA basketball standings. Yes, sir, you over there in the corner. Yes, you, the guy wearing the Cyclone sweatshirt. You were correct when you said Texas El-Paso and Southern Mississippi. Those teams, as you may have guessed, are coached by guys who are good buddies and who formerly worked at Iowa State--and won most of the time. Texas-El Paso, aka UTEP, is coached by Tim Floyd [pictured at the right]. Southern Mississippi is coached by Larry Eustachy [pictured at the left]. Floyd's team has a 6-2 record in Conference USA, and is 18-5 overall. Eustachy's Southern Miss squad is 7-3 in the league and also 18-5 for the full season. Floyd is in his first season after including coaching stops in Chicago with the NBA Bulls and in Los Angeles, where he coached Southern California, in ensuing years. He was at Iowa State from 1994-1998. He was succeeded at Ames by Eustachy, who stayed until 2003. We're all aware of the off-court problems Eustachy had at Iowa State, and he now is in his seventh season at Southern Miss. A game matching UTEP and Southern Miss will be played Feb. 16 at Hattiesburg, Miss. It figures to be a good one, and it'll have a lot riding on it.
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I admit it. I jumped on the Iowa State bandwagon early in the season when first-year coach Fred Hoiberg got his team off to a 13-2 non-conference record. I figured the preseason polls were wrong that said the Cyclones would finish in the Big 12 Conference basement. But it turns out the prognosticators knew more than some of us thought. Iowa State is last in the league with a 1-8 record and 14-10 overall. I'm very surprised. And I'm shocked with what's happened to the Iowa women's team. The Hawkeyes, too, were flying high early in the season, but now have leveled off to 5-6 in the Big Ten. While on that subject, I wish the sportswriters who cover the Cyclone men and the Iowa women would dig deeper and tell us why the teams they watch regularly aren't winning, instead of writing stories that are far too long and tell us little about what's really going on. The era of writing stories that are far too long and detail how one team or another rallied from deficits, but still came up a point or a few points short is long-gone. This is the 21st century and news travels very fast, boys. Don't waste space on stuff we already know.
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An e-mail from Kyle Ealy of Cedar Rapids:
"Ron,
"Turned on the Drake-UNI game Saturday afternoon while doing some writing for my blog. When doing one thing (writing), I'm usually not concentrating on the other (watching), but even I pushed myself away from the computer to watch the second half of the game. It was one of the better in-state games I watched in quite awhile. The players were in to it, the crowd was in to it and even the announcers were in to it. Good to see the Bullldogs pull one out...
"How about a little more love for my Green Bay Packers winning their record 13th NFL Championship? One little paragraph? C'mon!!
"Keep up the great work,"
Kyle
[RON MALY'S COMMENTS: Great hearing from you Kyle. I guess I had instructions from one of my old sports editors in the back of my mind when the Super Bowl game was over. Sometimes the guy would yell, "Keep it short!" So I guess I kept it short on the Super Bowl, didn't I?]
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