Murray, Louisville Are Holding Slim Hopes

Talk about a team on the bubble.

A season after going 12-20, Louisville is 10-3, ranked 24th and has beaten Kentucky, but is staring at two tough games, against No. 5 Cincinnati tonight and No. 13 UCLA on Saturday.

Even a victory over the Bearcats or the Bruins won’t make the Cardinals’ case for the NCAA tournament, though.

That’s in the hands of the NCAA, as Louisville waits to hear in the next couple of weeks if an appeals committee will overturn the postseason ban the school faces as part of its punishment for violations by former assistant coach Scooter McCray.

The NCAA isn’t in the habit of reversing itself, but Louisville is playing with a scrap of hope.

“I hear rumors there’s a strong possibility, but I don’t want to bank on it too much,” said Louisville’s Cameron Murray, the former USC player who rebuilt his body and his game over the summer but still figures to have his hands full Saturday with Baron Davis.

“I don’t want to bank on it because if it doesn’t happen, you might lose your spark, lose your drive and what you’re focusing on. If we can finish with maybe six losses--you do that, and you’re eligible for the tournament, you’ll go.

“If we can’t go, but we win our conference, we’ll be in the top 10 or top 15, and people will have to talk about us. They’ll have to say, ‘They would have been in the sweet 16 or the final eight.’ ”

That would be a far cry from where Louisville was last season.

“We were one of the worst teams in Louisville history last year, even if we did have one of the toughest schedules in the country,” said Murray, who endured his own failings in a miserable one-for-10 performance in a loss to UCLA at Pauley Pavilion.

It was the worst season in Coach Denny Crum’s 27 years at the school, and the memories of six Final Fours and the 1980 and ’86 national championships are receding as his Hall of Fame career winds down.

Murray worked hard over the summer in Los Angeles after coaches pointed out his shortcomings, sticking to a regimented five-days-a-week program to improve his conditioning, quickness and shooting.

“I really needed to lose my butt,” he said.

He ran the dunes at Sand Dune Park in Manhattan Beach, and shot on his parents’ court in La Verne with his brother, Tracy Murray, the former UCLA player now in the NBA.

Murray has made an impression, shooting 52% compared to 33% last season. He also has made nearly 49% from three-point range, making 17 of 35.

But back in Kentucky in the fall, he got the news: Louisville was banned from the NCAA and Conference USA tournaments for one year--his senior year--as part of a three-year probation because McCray had arranged for a discounted hotel room for the father of forward Nate Johnson and later used his credit card to keep the senior Johnson from being evicted because of a delinquent bill.

Louisville argued in its appeal hearing last week that the sanctions were too severe, citing statements before the infractions committee by the NCAA’s lead investigator that the violations were “secondary” not major, and therefore Louisville was not considered a repeat violator.

But the NCAA ruled Louisville a repeat violator, and contends the school should have realized that would be the case after getting two years’ probation without sanctions in 1996 because of questions about Samaki Walker’s use of two cars in 1995.

All Murray knew was that it suddenly looked as if his career would end without his ever reaching the NCAA tournament.

“It hit me pretty hard,” he said. “I had set my goal to get to the tournament. It would be my first time. I decided after working so hard, losing 20 pounds, getting down to 7% or 8% body fat, there was no way I could just turn back.”

SHARPENING THEIR CLAWS

Cincinnati, also on NCAA probation but eligible for postseason play, lost its unbeaten status in a game against North Carolina Charlotte that turned on an officials’ error in the final seconds. Conference USA has since publicly acknowledged the mistake.

But Coach Bob Huggins said he could almost see a loss headed the Bearcats’ way anyway.

“They just weren’t as sharp, and weren’t quite as hungry,” he said. “I think that’s human nature. We tried every way we possibly could to convince them that we weren’t as crisp, we weren’t as sharp, weren’t playing with the same type of aggression. I think that happens [to an undefeated team]. What you do about it, I’m not sure.”

Cincinnati’s first loss also ended forward Pete Mickeal’s personal winning streak at 87 games.

He had won 72 in a row at Indian Hills Community College in Iowa, then 15 at Cincinnati.

CONFERENCE CALL

The Big Ten has emerged as the nation’s strongest conference, deeper than the top-heavy Atlantic Coast Conference and about as unpredictable as the hyper-competitive Pacific 10, which UCLA Coach Steve Lavin has dubbed “Stanford and the Pac-9.”

The top five according to the Ratings Percentage Index formula: 1. Big Ten, 2. ACC, 3. Pac-10, 4. Big East, 5. Southeastern Conference.

Sorting out the Big Ten has even been tough on the polls.

Michigan State is No. 11 this week--and in a quirk, five conference teams were ranked in succession:

No. 14 Iowa, No. 15 Wisconsin, No. 16. Purdue, No. 17 Minnesota and No. 18 Indiana.

Ohio State, only 8-22 last season and in the midst of a remarkable turnaround led by high-scoring Michael Redd and point guard Sconnie Penn under second-year Coach Jim O’Brien, isn’t even ranked this week after falling from No. 21.

The Buckeyes complicated things by holding a struggling Purdue team to the Boilermakers’ lowest point total since 1985 in a 72-43 Ohio State victory Tuesday, prompting Purdue Coach Gene Keady to tell his team, “This is not Frank Sinatra.”

“I told them, ‘Are you happy now? You did it your way,’ ” Keady said. “This is a team game.”

The next key game is tonight’s between Iowa and Michigan State, the last teams with only one conference loss.

Iowa will have an addition for the game. Sam Okey, a 6-foot-9 transfer from Wisconsin who was the 1996-97 Big Ten freshman of the year, is expected to make his debut.

BE LIKE MIKE

Michael Jordan both popularized No. 23 and made it almost audacious to wear it.

But about 150 Division I players wear No. 23 this season.

Among them: Steve Francis of Maryland, Chris Carrawell of Duke, Matt Barnes of UCLA, Tommie Prince of Pepperdine, and the nation’s leading scorer, Brian Merriweather of Texas-Pan American.

Oh, and one other fellow, Pennsylvania’s leading scorer, Michael Jordan.

QUICK SHOTS

The sooner the NCAA quits fighting the judgment ordered by a federal jury in the case involving restricted-earnings coaches, the better it might be for the member schools that ultimately must pay for it. The NCAA once could have settled for $60 million. And the $67-million judgment last May has jumped to $74.5 million after a judge’s ruling to adjust for inflation. Interest and millions of dollars in legal fees continue to mount as the appeal process continues.

Arizona Coach Lute Olson, upset about the timekeeper’s work in the final seconds of the Wildcats’ 79-78 loss to New Mexico, later called the clock operator at New Mexico “very inept or very dishonest,” the Arizona Daily Star reported. New Mexico had the ball with 4.6 seconds left and Damion Walker scored at the buzzer after John Robinson II took the ball off an inbounds pass, drove to the top of the key and passed to Walker underneath.

Maryland guard Francis suggested in a television interview recently that he isn’t planning to leave for the NBA after one season at the school: “Next year there will be two seniors and I’ll be the captain, so I want to come back for that,” he said. . . . The news on the Stanford injury front is that three-point shooter Ryan Mendez, out the last 12 games because of a stress reaction in his left knee, has regressed after trying to come back, but backup point guard Michael McDonald, out 16 games because of a sprained right foot, has been cleared and could be playing within a week. . . .

With Washington point guard Dan Dickau out for the rest of the season because of a broken bone in his foot, the job belongs to Senque Carey, a talented but inconsistent freshman. . . . North Carolina Charlotte forward Charles Hayward, who spent last season undergoing treatment for leukemia, played in 10 games this season before being hospitalized after doctors discovered his disease had returned.