Parente: Rhody Rams Will Never Run With the Big Dogs

Michael Parente

“Listen here you beautiful bitch, I'm about to f**k you up with some truth.”
-- Kenny Powers, Eastbound & Down
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There’s certainly no shame in losing to Duke University, because as old pal Pete Gillen once told us, “Duke is Duke,” and if you’re a fledgling, star-crossed program like the University of Rhode Island, you have as much of a chance of upending the Blue Devils in a game that matters as Sister Jean does of ripping a slab of raw meat from the jaws of a starved lion.

​The real shame is Rhode Island’s never-ending identity crisis. Is this a “national program,” as chest-thumping boosters once claimed during the short-lived Jim Harrick era, or is this merely a stepping stone / halfway house for young, unproven coaches and disgraced basketball pariahs in need of a public relations makeover?

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The harsh reality is Rhode Island will never be Connecticut or Arizona, let alone Duke or North Carolina, and yet Athletic Director Thorr Bjorn would gladly offer Dan Hurley –  or any other coach who’d listen – his own private charter and basketball-only practice facility just to trade places with Loyola for one season.
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Watching the aforementioned Ramblers complete their improbable run to the Final Four this past weekend as a No. 11 seed while the Rams couldn’t get past the second round (again) with their 19th-ranked RPI has to be a kick in the groin to loyal fans and alumni.

Beloved Rhody lifer “Rod From Cranston” must be rolling in his grave wondering, “Why not us?”

The answer’s simple: Not only are you not Duke, Kentucky, UCLA, or any of the other name-brand programs, you’re not even Loyola. Those guys actually won a national championship, albeit in 1963, whereas you’ve never even been to the Final Four despite 10 trips to the NCAA Tournament. That puts you on a short list of 42 schools with double-digit appearances who’ve yet to reach the national semifinal.

So, what now? What incentive is there to remain interested in a program that in all likelihood has less than a 1 percent chance of winning a national title?

Other than the elusive chase, nothing.

This is college athletics in a nutshell, the ultimate struggle between the haves and have nots where you’re continuously typecast as Tiny Tim. The hopeless romantics love to compare Rhode Island to the University of Connecticut, which fielded a team for 98 years before winning its first national championship in 1999, transitioning from perennial regional power to national powerhouse.

There’s one slight problem with that comparison: You’re not UConn, either. It took you 55 years just to get to the tournament, let alone win a game. Connecticut made seven trips before your first appearance. Save for a brief “dry spell” from the early ‘70s to the late ‘80s in which the school only qualified for the NCAAs twice in 22 years before the Jim Calhoun era, UConn has always been one of the more respected programs in the northeast. There are seasons in which you have to fight Brown for attention.

Here’s the other thing Connecticut has that you don’t: Money. In the 2015-16 fiscal year, Connecticut ranked 46th out of 230 Division I schools in revenue generated by athletics, raking in more than $79 million. You’d have to scroll down to the 100s to find Rhode Island on that list at 111th overall, generating just a shade above $26 million.

To put those figures into further perspective, only 44.5 percent of that money for Connecticut was allocated from student fees and school and state funding, whereas 78 percent of your money comes from those aforementioned handouts with less 25 percent generated through ticket sales, broadcast revenue, apparel and other means of income that would require the general public to care enough about your program to help support it financially.

Of the top 50 schools on that list in terms of total revenue, only eight relied on more than 10 percent of allocated money to pay the bills, which means during the average fiscal year, schools like Texas A&M, LSU and Penn State – notice they all have legitimate football programs, too, which is a whole other story – will generate 20 to 30 times more than you do via ticket sales, apparel and TV revenue. Good luck competing with that.

This ever-expanding gap between the haves and have nots is a.) why you shouldn’t even mention UConn in the same sentence as URI and b.) why you can’t keep a solid, likeable coach such as Hurley from jumping ship and taking his talents to Storrs, even with the promise of private jets and gyms.

If you can’t spend like a big-time program, at least have enough sense to act like one. URI enjoyed the high life this year for the better part of two months, ranked among the top 20 in the AP coaches’ poll with a lengthy win streak rivaling that of any other D-I school in the nation. There was even a point when the Rams were ranked higher than defending champion North Carolina and the storied Kentucky Wildcats.

Then they won the school’s first-ever Atlantic-10 regular season title – not the conference tournament, mind you – and celebrated as if they’d just beaten Bill Walton’s ’73 Bruins, cutting down nets, dancing on the scorers’ table and swimming in a sea of blue and white confetti at The Ryan Center. The hangover lasted through the following Tuesday when they got embarrassed by 30 on Senior Night against St. Joseph’s and continued right up until their unceremonious exit from the NCAAs two weeks ago against Duke.

By losing their final two regular season games and then failing to win the A-10 Tournament against underdog Davidson, the Rams played themselves out of a potential No. 5 or 6 seed in the middle of the bracket and instead wound up in the dreaded 7/10 game against Oklahoma. The prize for surviving the Round of 64 was a date with death against the second-seeded Blue Devils.

That kind of stuff doesn’t happen to programs accustomed to winning. The only reasonable expectation for a school like Rhode Island is to rely on savvy, out-of-the-box recruiting to build a team good enough to compete for a potential run to the Sweet 16 by the time all the key players are juniors and seniors. If a few extra balls bounce your way (i.e., you play the game of your life against the No. 1 or 2 seed, or another bracket-buster clears a path for you), maybe – maybe – you’ll dance all the way to a regional final before the clock strikes midnight, at which point you’ll get run off the court by a team with four 18-year-old McDonald’s All-Americans.

If you manage to get that far, your up-and-coming, 40-something coach will jump ship for his first real payday at a major school, or your down-on-his-luck veteran boss will have done just enough to earn his way back into the good graces of all the big-time D-I schools who wouldn’t even look his way five or six years ago.

Any way you slice it, you’ll never retain a talented, overachieving coach for more than one solid, two- or three-year joyride through the NCAAs. Tom Penders, Al Skinner, Harrick and Hurley will drink to that. And since you’re merely a public rest stop on the road to financial freedom for every desperate coach looking for his first big break, you’ll never enjoy sustained success no matter how much Hurley or others talk about developing a program that’s build to last. They all swipe right at some point. They always do.
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Once inevitability sinks in, it’s still possible for URI fans to enjoy the ride until the “Check Engine” light starts blinking. It’s actually quite a thrill as long as you know your place in college basketball’s vast landscape. Lick your wounds with pride. Just don’t expect to run with the real greyhounds. 

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