UTEP vs UAB Basketball Recap

UTEP 52, UAB 50

The pain was too much for Mike Davis to bear, and frankly, who could blame him?

The head coach of the UAB Blazers stormed angrily off the court at the end of Saturday night's two-point loss to the UTEP Miners. The display of frustration came from a very understandable place. Make that, many understandable places.

The last time UAB reached the NCAA Tournament, the year was 2006, and a different Mike - Mike Anderson - was coaching the boys from Birmingham. In the middle of the past decade, Anderson led UAB to three straight NCAA appearances from 2004 through 2006 and established a culture of winning in the Deep South. Davis - who succeeded Bobby Knight at Indiana and led the Hoosiers to the 2002 NCAA national championship game against Maryland - inherited this special subculture, and in his four seasons at the helm of the Good Ship UAB, Davis has led the Blazers to 83 wins, or an average of roughly 21 wins per season.

However, for all those victories, the UAB program hasn't been able to get back to the Big Show. Two straight NIT appearances in the past two seasons just don't cut it at the school Gene Bartow made famous when UAB began playing basketball in the very late 1970s and early '80s. Davis needed this year to be an NCAA-worthy campaign, and after beating Butler and Cincinnati in the non-conference portion of the slate, it seemed that Birmingham would be dancing once again at tournament time.

But then came the late-season swoon, the affliction that has haunted Blazer basketball ever since Mike Anderson departed. In each of the previous two years, an NCAA bid turned into an NIT ticket because UAB shot too many threes, produced too few high-quality offensive possessions, and delivered far too infrequently at the offensive end of the floor. This season, Davis hoped things would be different, but it's painfully clear they aren't.

Once perched atop Conference USA, the 2010 edition of the Blazers - at 6-0 in the league through Jan. 29 - gave every indication that they had turned the corner as this season headed into February. But then came the decreasing offensive numbers and the mounting stack of losses that have become depressingly familiar for Blazer fans at this time of year. UAB's inconsistency translated into three conference losses over the span of two weeks. On Feb. 13, UAB stood at 7-3 in C-USA. However, that stretch appeared to be in the rearview mirror of history once the Blazers battled back and won four straight to move to 11-3 in the conference. Entering this final week of regular-season competition, all UAB really needed to do was win one of two games against elite teams from the league. Wednesday's home game against Memphis went by the boards, but UAB still had a chance to hogtie UTEP on a significant Saturday at the Don Haskins Center in El Paso, Tex.

We now arrive at the present moment, and an explanation for why Mike Davis was so upset following this loss.

The pain of this defeat was manifested not just in the fact that UAB had allowed a golden opportunity to slip through its fingers, but in the realization that the referees didn't punish UTEP at a time when they could have.

UTEP broke a 50-all tie with 0.7 seconds remaining on a dunk by Derrick Caracter, but before the game had ended, a number of people leaped from their seats and rushed onto the court. Such a set of actions merited a technical foul on UTEP in a game the Miners led by only two points; yet, the officiating crew did not award the Blazers with two technical foul shots. This was the most immediate reason why Davis angrily shot into the tunnel following the final horn, when UAB failed to get off a shot with just under one second left in regulation. Yet, Davis also had to be smarting because he had seen this horror movie before. For yet another year, UAB had its heart ripped out on the first weekend of March, completing a late-season slide that had the letters "N-I-T" written all over it.

That's indeed how a coach gets angry. UAB and Mike Davis can only hope that such anger will lead the Blazers to the C-USA Tournament championship next week in Tulsa. If UAB can't do the deed, another NIT appearance will be glumly accepted by a team with much bigger goals in mind.