College Basketball

PLAYER, SCHOOL	SEASON	PER GAME
Pete Maravich, LSU	1969-70	44.5
Pete Maravich, LSU	1968-69	44.2
Pete Maravich, LSU	1967-68	43.8
Frank Sehry, Furman	1953-54	41.7
Johnny Neumann. Mississippi	1970-71	40.1
Freeman Williams, Portland State	1976-77	38.8
Billy McGill, Utah	1961-62	38.8
Calvin Murphy, Niagara	1967-68	382
Austin Carr, Notre Dame	1969-70	38.1
Austin Carr, Notre Dame	1970-71	38.0
Rick Barry, Atar	1964-65	37.4
Elvin Hayes, Houston	1967-68	36.8
Marshall Rogers, Texas-Pan American	1975-76	36.8
Butch Komives, Bowling Green	1963-64	36.7
Dwight Lamar, SW Louisiana	1971-72	38.3
Darrell Floyd, Furman	1954-55	35.9
Rich Fuqua, Oral Roberts	1971-72	35.9
Freeman Williams, Portland State	1977-78	35.9
Kevin Bradshaw, U.S. International	1990-91	35.5'
Rick Mount, Purdue	1969-70	35.4
Oscar Robertson, Cincinnati	1957-58	35.1
*average of 37-6 adjusted by awarding two points for each three-point field goal

Pistol Whipped
Today's top guns average almost 20 points fewer than Pete Maravich did. Why's that?

When Arizona State's Eddie House went for 61 points in last Saturday's 111-108 double overtime win over California, jacking up 30 shots (of which he made 18) and driving hard to the hoop to earn 19 free throw attempts (he made 18 of them, too), it brought back memories of a time when players routinely took over games and single-handedly destroyed the opposition. Yet even with that outburst, House's scoring average increased to a mere 24.0. You might think that with the advent of the shot clock and the three-point shot—both of which were introduced in the mid-1980s—that high scorers would be commonplace in today's game. But you'd be wrong.

Of the top 25 single-season scoring averages in NCAA history, only three were put up after the shot clock was brought in (chart, right). In 1969-70, the season in which LSU's Pete Maravich averaged an NCAA-record 44.5 points per game, six other players also averaged at least 30. Two of them—Notre Dame's Austin Carr and Purdue's Rick Mount-averaged more man 35. The current NCAA scoring leader, George Washington guard SirValiant Brown, was averaging 25.8 points a game through Sunday. All of which begs the question: Where have all the gunners gone?

Consider for a moment what Maravich accomplished. He came in as a sophomore (freshmen were ineligible in those days) and averaged 43.8 points a game. He increased that to 44.2 the next season and to 44.5 his senior year. "Growing up in Kentucky, I went to Memorial Coliseum every time Pete Maravich came to town," says Jimmy Dan Conner, a guard for Kentucky in the mid-1970s. "It was a happening."

Certainly it's not a lack of talent that's keeping scorers down today. In fact, the opposite is probably true. Because there are so many more talented players now than there were in Maravich's day, teammates of even the hottest shooters are less inclined to allow themselves to be cast as lesser lights alongside a shooting star. "With the way kids transfer today, I wonder if some of the other top players would leave if one guy was doing all the shooting," says Marquette coach Tom Crean. Adds Jamal Crawford, who through Sunday led Michigan in scoring with 17.4 points a game, "To be honest, a person's teammates would stop that nowadays. Everybody wants to be a scorer."

Coaches and coaching techniques have changed, too. "Years ago the coaching world was offensively oriented," says former Marquette coach Al McGuire. "Teams played defense by holding the ball on offense because there was no shot clock." Today's coaches, by contrast, are obsessed with defense, and many of them have their best shooters coming off the bench as three-point specialists while their better defenders play most of the minutes.

The increased roughness of the game keeps scoring down, too. Last month, while Cleveland Cavaliers general manager Jim Paxson, who played 11 seasons in the NBA, was in Chicago attending the Great Eight tournament, he turned to Don Donoher, who coached Paxson at Dayton, and said, "Can you believe how rough it is out there? It's rougher than the NBA games I played in."

"College basketball has gone more to the coaches since my era" says Calvin Murphy, who averaged 38.2 points in his sophomore season at Niagara, 1967-68. Indeed, the wardens are running the asylum, and they know their history: Only once since the NCAA began tracking annual scoring leaders in 1947-48 has a player led the nation in scoring and won a national championship in the same season. (That was Clyde Lovel-lette, who scored 28.4 points per game for Kansas in 1951-52.) That was a remarkable feat, but unless today's players can convince their coaches that it can be duplicated, the days when college basketball was ruled by the likes of Pistol Pete and his gunnery mates will remain a distant memory.

Surprising Tulsa
The Eye of the Hurricane

It isn't often that a player comes along who can shoot threes, play defense against guards, block shots and rope cattle all in the same weekend, but Eric Coley, a 6'5" senior forward at Tulsa, is able to tie all those things together. Coley has been enamored of the cowboy life ever since he was a young boy visiting relatives in Oklahoma. "I got a Welsh pony I called Girlfriend for my 13th birthday," he says. Before eighth grade he moved from Rochester, N.Y., to Eufaula, Okla., where he lived with an uncle. He owns three quarterhorses, one of which he boards near his Tulsa apartment, and he likes to go calf roping on weekends. He has saddles lying around his living room, and he fantasizes about going into professional rodeo once his playing days are over. "I absolutely love it," Coley says. "When I'm at the rodeo, I can just be me."