Hansen's Sunday Notebook: Meticulous Miller, Cats deserve more national love

Sean Miller spoke Friday night of a coach’s will for “perfection,” and it was best exhibited in the game’s final minute.

As Miller inserted three walk-ons in a 54-34 game, he noticed that forward Drew Mellon didn’t properly get the attention of the official scorer. He didn’t fully “check in.”

As Mellon walked onto the court, Miller rushed to grab him, point him to the scorer’s table, and instruct him to properly check in. It’s that type of attention to detail, the demand for perfection, that typifies Miller’s approach.

Don’t let anything slip.

ESPN last week said it polled 112 college basketball coaches and asked them to pick a national Coach of the Year.

Miller didn’t get a vote. Utah’s Larry Krystkowiak got 19 votes.

With a pat lineup returning from last year’s Final Four, Wisconsin’s Bo Ryan finished seventh overall. Gonzaga’s Mark Few, whose team has only played one team in the current Top 25, was fifth.

John Calipari, whose loaded Kentucky team you could coach to the Final Four, finished third.

There are three reasons this happens: Arizona’s isn’t sexy any more and it is expected to roll in a subpar Pac-12; the Wildcats play games that begin so late in Eastern precincts that even the college basketball diehards don’t watch; the Pac-12 Networks isn’t a known or entirely available entity nationally.

The fact that ESPN hasn’t made the Feb. 28 Arizona at Utah showdown its Saturday “Game Day” special — the Game of the Year in the West — reveals a lot about basketball life in the Mountain time zone.

ESPN is clinging to four options for Game Day venues on Feb. 28: BYU at Gonzaga, Syracuse at Duke, Texas at Kansas and Arizona at Utah. It hasn’t set the start time for any of those games, but the smart money is on BYU at Gonzaga, because the Zags are viewed as a cuddly Cinderella story in a location (Spokane, Washington) so remote that it always seems like a fresh story.

Arizona is likely to be 14-1 in Pac-12 play going to the Salt Lake City game. Utah is apt to be either 13-2, or 12-3 if it can’t sweep on the Oregon trail.

The game should decide the conference championship and the Coach of the Year and maybe Player of the Year.

It would be a good time for ESPN to recognize that college basketball in the Pac-12 isn’t always USC vs. Cal, and that Miller is coaching as well as anyone in the game.

The Tucson Conquistadores achieved goal No. 1 last week when Tom Watson agreed to play in the Champions Tour event March 20-22 at the Omni Tucson National Resort.

The only marquee name not yet committed is Fred Couples, but it would be a surprise if Couples doesn’t announce plans to play in the Tucson Classic in the next week or so.

Watson won the 1978 Joe Garagiola Tucson Open, and in 1984 won the inaugural Seiko-Tucson Match Play Championship at Randolph North.

Tucson’s Champions Tour event now includes former Tucson champions Jeff Sluman, Craig Stadler, Lee Janzen, Kirk Triplett, Andrew Magee and Larry Mize. Also, Tucsonan Don Pooley, who retired from active Champions Tour play a year ago, has been given an exemption into the field.

In his third year of EuroLeague pro basketball, Santa Rita High School grad Terrell Stoglin had the game of his young life Friday in Lebanon. The lefty point guard scored 74 points in Sagesse’s 138-130 double-overtime loss to Champville. Stoglin made 14 three-point baskets in the game and 18 of 22 free throws. He now leads the Lebanese pro league with a 33.2 average. 

The San Francisco Chronicle last week did a special section on style and fashion in the Bay area and in doing so featured the wardrobe of ex-Arizona basketball player Andre Iguodala, who has on his personal staff a clothier and closet organizer. The images of Iguodala’s closet — notably his collection of hundreds of basketball shoes — was numbing. He has been paid $98 million in his NBA career and has a contract worth another $23 million that runs through 2016-17. Not bad for a man who scored 594 career points at Arizona, which isn’t as much as Nick Johnson scored last season. 

The Pac-12 Networks last week paired ex-Wildcats Kevin O’Neill and Matt Muehlebach as part of their basketball studio show. The chemistry worked. O’Neill is terrific, a tell-it-like-it-is analyst who joins Pac-12 Networks football analysts Rick Neuheisel and Nick Aliotti as among the best in the college game. Muehlebach has done most of his work as a game analyst, but is just as insightful in the studio, working with the man who helped to recruit and coach him at Arizona. 

I like what Catalina Foothills football coach Jeff Scurran says about the Arizona Interscholastics Association’s bungling attempt to reposition and reclassify all of the state’s high school sports teams: “This could well be the veritable straw that broke the camel’s back for the outdated AIA. They have forgotten they are a service organization, not one that dictates to schools. We need seven divisions of football because open enrollment, budget differentials, travel and the leveling of competition.” The AIA’s initial attempt at reclassifying schools had tiny Immaculate Heart High School, with 90 students, playing in the same division for some sports, including volleyball, with Sahuarita High, which has 1,150 students. If Tucson football powers Cienega and Ironwood Ridge remain in Division I football, with the Phoenix superpowers, they won’t likely contend for the state championship again, and they’ll both make four or five bus trips to Phoenix every season. That’s not good for anybody. 

Salpointe Catholic grad Talbott Denny has started 30 games in his basketball career at Lipscomb University and combined for 20 points last week in games against North Florida and Jacksonville. It’s not all hoops at Lipscomb; Denny is a mechanical engineering major, a junior guard who is averaging six points a game for the Bisons. 

Tucson High grad Tom Wilhelmsen is a salary arbitration showdown with the Seattle Mariners. The middle reliever, 31, is asking for $2.2 million this season; the Mariners offered $1.4 million. Wilhelmsen made $528,800 last season when he was 3-2 with a 2.27 ERA in 79 1/3 innings over 57 games. 

For the first time in more than a decade, La Fiesta de los Vaqueros, the Tucson Rodeo, will not conflict with a pro golf tournament or spring training baseball. The organization’s annual Rodeo Parade will be historic: Three-time national championship Arizona baseball coach Jerry Kindall is scheduled to be the grand marshal on Feb. 26. The only other UA sports figures to be grand marshal were Lute Olson in 1988 and Mike Candrea in 2002. 

Sitting on the front row during Arizona’s victory over Oregon State on Friday night was Karl Eller, one of the most distinguished guests at the school in any capacity. Eller, an all-state football player at Tucson High and a UA football letterman in the mid-1940s, grew up across the street from Arizona Stadium in a boarding house his mother operated. He also delivered the Arizona Daily Star at 3:30 a.m. every morning for three years as a teenager. He became one of the founding fathers of the Phoenix Suns, was the head of Columbia Pictures, operated the vast Circle K enterprise, and is the benefactor of the UA’s Eller College of Management. At 87, Eller spends most of the year in La Jolla, California. 

I bumped into Peter Hansen at the San Francisco airport last week. Hansen, who played on Arizona’s basketball team from 1999-2002 and was a special teams standout on the UA football teams of 1998-2001, was on his way to Atlanta on a football recruiting trip. As Stanford’s inside linebackers coach, he works with ex-CDO High standout Blake Martinez. Hansen has done well since graduating from the UA with an economics degree. He played professional football in France, professional basketball in Denmark and was part of the San Francisco 49ers coaching staff for two years. 

One fascinating link to today’s Super Bowl is ex-Salpointe and UA offensive lineman John Fina. After his senior season at Arizona in 1991, Fina was working out for pro coaches at Arizona Stadium. Among them was Cleveland Browns first-year head coach Bill Belichick, who liked what he saw in Fina and also in UA offensive line coach Pat Hill. After meeting with the two, Belichick offered Hill a job on the Browns staff, and hoped to draft Fina. The Buffalo Bills beat Belichick to Fina, taking him with the 27th pick in the first round of the 1992 draft. Hill went on to be Fresno State’s head coach, and Fina, a Tucson businessman, played 11 seasons in the NFL.

Arizona has produced seven Pac-12 basketball Players of the Year: Sean Elliott, Chris Mills, Damon Stoudamire, Mike Bibby, Jason Terry, Derrick Williams and Nick Johnson. All of them averaged at least 16 points a game.

Is T.J. McConnell due to be No. 8?

In the last week, Oregon State coach Wayne Tinkle and Pac-12 analyst Bill Walton both weighed in on McConnell’s value and POY worthiness.

McConnell averages 9.0 points a game; the lowest average by a Pac-12 Player of the Year was Cal guard Jorge Gutierrez’s 13.0 three years ago.

Gutierrez won the award in a down year of Pac-12 hoops. He was viewed as a defensive stopper. He had 39 steals that season; McConnell already has 48 this season, including eight Friday against the Beavers.

“He is the consummate playmaker, leader, winner. He’s our team’s heart and soul,” said UA coach Sean Miller. “A lot of other players get credit and deservedly so. But nobody’s more important to Arizona than T.J.”

After Arizona beat Utah 69-51, a game in which McConnell scored 16 points and had six assists, Utes coach Larry Krystkowiak referred to McConnell as “the head of the snake.”

Who scores more than McConnell? How about ASU guard Gerry Blakes and USC’s Katin Reinhardt? But it’s not about points.

I believe McConnell’s greatest play as a Wildcat came with 2:44 remaining in last year’s Sweet 16 against San Diego State. With Arizona up 54-51, McConnell dove to the floor, stealing the ball from Aztec guard Xavier Thames. Rather than call timeout in a jostle for the ball, he had the presence to whip it to Gabe York, who passed to an open Johnson for an easy layup. Game over.

You didn’t see that on “SportsCenter’s” Top 10 plays list, but it led to the year’s most important victory.

“No player we’ve recruited has been more impactful than T.J.” said Miller.

At the midpoint of the Pac-12 season, I, too, would vote for McConnell as Player of the Year in a close race over Stanford guard Chasson Randle.

Not bad for an undersized, 15-year-old guard who committed to Duquesne on Oct. 22, 2007, and eight years later has become a heavyweight.

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