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Mutts have their day at tourney
© St. Petersburg Times CHICAGO -- We begin with a clarification. A Saluki is a dog. An Egyptian dog. In fact, it is the oldest purebred breed in the world and is known for its speed and hunting skills. That is, unless, you are referring to a Southern Illinois Saluki. In which case, a Saluki is a mutt. Make no mistake, this is a team crawling with mutts. With recruiting strays. With guys who wanted to play for Illinois, Michigan or Missouri but were considered a lesser basketball pedigree. And look at them now. They just made Georgia their own personal fire hydrant. This is a team that has put the shimmy and the twist back into the Big Dance. A team innocent enough to act excited when thinking about the Sweet 16 and talented enough to make it happen. "This is what we've dreamed about since last spring," center Rolan Roberts said Sunday. "But dreams and reality are two different things." These are the kinds of players who were all-conference instead of all-state in high school. Before beating Texas Tech and Georgia to reach the semifinals of the East Region, none of them had even been in an NCAA Tournament. Their coach was such a non-commodity, he spent 18 seasons as an assistant at Purdue before the little school in Carbondale, Ill., came calling. Yet it was Bruce Weber who left Chicago a winner. Not Texas Tech coach Bobby Knight, who won national titles at Indiana. Not San Diego State coach Steve Fischer, who won a national title at Michigan. Not Georgia coach Jim Harrick, who won a national title at UCLA. The team from the Missouri Valley Conference is moving on while the team from the SEC is moving out. "Maybe we don't have the swagger that the guys from Georgia do, but we wanted to taste what it was like to win in the tournament," forward Brad Korn said. "Maybe we wanted to taste it a little more." The last time the Salukis won an NCAA Tournament game was 1977, which is like two lifetimes ago in dog years. The best part of this is the Salukis recognize their place in the world. They made the Sweet 16 their goal this season because they knew it was an attainable, if somewhat lofty, quest. They did not talk about the national title or the Final Four. Leave that for the schools with the McDonald's All-Americans and the lottery picks. What Southern Illinois had was enough pluck, enough desire and -- barely -- enough talent to pull off consecutive upsets in the first two rounds. "Obviously Georgia has more talent than us," Weber said. "They have a couple of guys, (Jarvis) Hayes and (Ezra) Williams, who are probably future pros. We don't have that. But we felt as a team, if we battled, we could win. We did, and now I'm so proud of them." The NCAA has its party-crashers every year, be it Gonzaga, Southwest Missouri State or Valparaiso. Non-descript schools with non-desirable seeds. But Weber believes there is a new dynamic at play in regular season and tournament upsets. The amount of underclassmen turning professional has made life more dicey for the bigger schools. Florida coach Billy Donovan, for instance, might have been victimized because he recruited too well. Without the NBA as a lure to younger players, Donovan would have arrived in Chicago this week with Mike Miller, Donnell Harvey and Kwame Brown. And he would have left with Creighton in his hip pocket. Instead, the Gators had a team lacking senior leadership and without enough talent to make up the difference in a double-overtime loss to Creighton. "You need veteran players," Weber said. "I heard (Michigan State coach) Tom Izzo talk the other day about why so many mid-majors are beating the top teams. It's because we have juniors and seniors that have been there, and the top teams are losing their kids to the NBA. "Older kids are going to beat younger kids." Which brings us back to Southern Illinois. Or, as the case may be, Eastern Missouri. Carbondale is tucked into such a faraway corner of Illinois that it is actually much closer to St. Louis than Chicago. None of the Salukis ever laid awake in bed as prep seniors and pictured how they would look in a Southern Illinois uniform. Kent Williams, a junior guard who grew up in Mount Vernon, Ill., admits he dreamed of playing in the Big Ten for Illinois. But Sunday evening, standing in a locker room filled with other players with similar broken dreams, he smiled at the celebration swirling around him. Maybe, he said, the Salukis proved you don't have to be from a major conference or be a big-time recruit to play in the tournament. Maybe, he said, some little kid will go to bed tonight dreaming of playing at Southern Illinois. Wouldn't that be nice.
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