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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Maintenance Is One Thing, Repair Another

John Blanchette The Spokesman-R

The question is too legit to quit being asked, so Joe Cravens plunges ahead and poses it himself.

“Am I maintaining a successful program,” he wondered, “or am I trying to establish a new one?”

That’s a tough one, all right, especially since there’s a more immediate issue for his Idaho Vandals behind Door No. 3. Big Sky Conference basketball heads into its final fortnight this evening with the Vandals at Eastern Washington and in more than a little danger of missing the league tournament for the first time in 16 years. From an average of 20 wins over the past eight years, the Vandals come to Cheney a short-of-breath 9-12.

Doesn’t sound like maintenance. And if these are the humble beginnings of a new order, the Vandals have certainly thrown themselves into the role.

They have, in the words of their coach, “been pretty innovative” in finding ways to lose close games in the money minutes. Downstate last week, innovation blossomed into art - Idaho blowing a 14-point lead at Boise State and a seven-point edge in the final 5 minutes at Idaho State.

Hey, no one expected the Vandals to sublet in the Top 25. The December schedule was booby-trapped and the roster was missing the Big Sky’s all-time scoring leader (Orlando Lightfoot) and the league’s best rebounder since Larry Krystkowiak (Deon Watson).

“I’m not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree,” Cravens said, “but I know you don’t fall out of bed and replace guys like that.”

Cravens’ arrival last year also coincidenced with a rather unpublicized - even unlikely - flowering of the Big Sky. Last year, in its best showing ever, the Sky ranked 11th out of 33 Division I leagues in the NCAA’s final Ratings Percentage Index. This season, Sky teams own wins over two Pac-10 teams and the leaders in the clubhouse of the WAC and Big West - and are 5-0 against the Southwest Conference.

Still…

“We’ve earned all 12 of our losses and all nine of our wins,” said Cravens. “It’s turned into a season of missed opportunities, but there are opportunities left for us.”

And for us, this is an opportunity to understand radical changes afoot in Idaho basketball.

The job Joe Cravens has is not the one that Tim Floyd and Kermit Davis and Larry Eustachy turned into a trampoline.

“The parameters,” Cravens said cautiously, “have definitely changed. Schedule-wise they’re different, academically they’re different, recruitingwise they’re different.”

What’s he talking about?

The same thing Wisconsin-Milwaukee coach Steve Antrim talked about when he was a finalist with Cravens for this post.

“They wanted somebody to settle in, start recruiting freshmen and take some losses to build over a few years, and I wasn’t prepared to do that,” Antrim told The Spokesman-Review Jim Meehan 2 years ago. “It’s hard to do with four-year kids and Idaho kids. That’s not what has taken them to the NCAA Tournament.”

Cravens’ mandate: more regional talent, fewer junior-college players, no Prop 48s. The graduation rate has to have a priority up there with the winning percentage.

This is not a bad way to go. All those victories the past eight years didn’t do much to fill the seats at Kibbie Dome, quite possibly because campus and community didn’t feel much kinship with the help recruited from Mississippi and Texas.

So of the 10 players Cravens has brought in during his short tenure, only half have been signed out of JCs unheard of since Floyd first set foot in Moscow. Alas, there aren’t many Orlando Lightfoots in Rocky Mountain high schools lusting to attend Idaho, and the lack of a superstar, parlayed with UI’s record, has sent attendance plummeting.

This tack will make things challenging enough in the Big Sky, where only Montana gets by without much JC help. Cravens has called that the program he’d like to model, but he’ll hardly get the chance: the Vandals’ vamoose from the Big Sky after next season for new digs in the Big West.

That’s digs, as in hole.

They do things differently in the Big West. The hardest award to give away in that league is Freshman of the Year, because most players spend freshman year at a junior college or sitting out after coming up short on an SAT. New Mexico State, the Big West’s best program over the past five years, is flat allergic to high school players. Fouryear lettermen in Las Cruces are a myth; often, so is a diploma.

Cravens is conceding nothing. He can’t, and shouldn’t. He will say, however, that the Vandals “certainly have to look to recruiting a different type of player. There’s a good player in the Big Sky and a good player in the Big West, and they’re different animals.”

But one challenge at a time. Right now, clinging to the sixth and final tournament spot is about all the Vandals can handle.

“Things might look a little different if we’d pulled out a couple of those tight games - just made a few more jump shots,” Cravens said. “But there’s only one solution: play better.”

That’s definitely not maintenance. That’s repair.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review