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John Shinn
The Norman Transcript

April 05, 2006 01:41 am

— In 98 years of basketball, Oklahoma has been to the NCAA Tournament 24 times, advanced to the Final Four on four occasions and won 14 conference championships.
But there’s a perception Oklahoma athletics director Joe Castiglione will have to fight as he begins the search to replace Kelvin Sampson — A-list coaches don’t want to come to a place where football has always been the main attraction.
Castiglione met the question head-on while Sampson was over 700 miles away being introduced as Indiana’s new coach.
When Sampson was introduced at Indiana, he said he wanted to coach the Hoosiers because he believed Bloomington was a place where championships could be won.
“I think back to being an outsider looking in and when you think about Indiana, you think about a place that has not just won championships, but has a championship tradition,” Sampson said. “Tradition is important. You can’t create it. It just can’t happen.”
The Hoosiers have won five national championships and numerous Big Ten titles. Few programs can match their success. Only UCLA (11) and Kentucky (seven) have hung more national championship banners.
But Castiglione believes Sampson just left a program where that could be done.
“A place like Oklahoma, with the resources we have right now, I absolutely believe it’s possible,” he said. “And I wouldn’t want to hire any coach that didn’t share the same passion, the same belief that we share.”
But getting a coach at a traditional basketball power to believe that could be difficult.
OU’s facilities take a backseat to few programs. Following the 2002 trip to the Final Four, the Bruce Drake practice court was built along with state-of-the-art weight and training rooms.
Sampson said one of his goals at Indiana will be getting its facilities up to OU’s standard.
“The facilities at OU are as good as there are in the country,” Sampson said.
Facilities are important and money will certainly be an issue, too.
But money can’t buy interest.
OU’s fanbase has always treated basketball like a vacation home, where attendance is voluntary rather than mandatory.
Castiglione tells a story that goes all the way back to his days as a young athletic administrator at Missouri. In the mid-1980s, the Sooners and the Tigers were two of the preeminent powers in the Big Eight. Most years he would accompany Missouri during its annual trek to Norman.
Missouri was loaded with talented players and OU basketball had become a national power. The Sooners won four conference titles from 1984 to 1989 and entered the NCAA Tournament as the No. 1 seed three times.
But what Castiglione remembered most was the empty seats at Lloyd Noble Center.
“This dynamic that’s existed with basketball has been here forever,” he said. “Yet people have done an exceptional job overcoming it in a lot of ways.”
Sampson reached the NCAA Tournament 11 times in 12 seasons at OU. The Sooners also won the Big 12 tournament three times and shared the 2004-2005 regular-season title.
On paper, the attendance figures look fine.
Lloyd Noble Center holds 12,000 and OU averaged 11,806 for its 15 home games this past season. But those figures were for tickets sold.
Sooner fans are notorious for purchasing season tickets and only showing up for big games against arch-rivals or top-ranked teams.
Castiglione said that has to change for OU to truly reach an elite level.
“We have to get people out of this cherry-picking mentality of thinking they’ll buy the tickets and use them three or four times a year,” he said. “For some reason, we can’t get a number of those people out of that habit. We’ve tried every little technique that is known in marketing and promotion. Some of them are things we started for the first time and other schools are copying and having success. We’re trying everything. We’ll keep doing it. We’re trying to make something happen that’s never really happened at Oklahoma.”
Castiglione hopes the coach he brings in will help change that and finally end the belief nothing can co-exist with football.
“What we want to do is embrace what we have,” Castiglione said. “We want to find out whether or not it is in fact possible to command a high level of interest in both.”
John Shinn366-3536jshinn@normantranscript.com

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