Star from Down Under helps Baylor face uncharted waters
Maybe his teammates were stuck, but not Aaron Bruce. He had options. He didn't have to stay at Baylor.
After the NCAA handed Baylor an unprecedented half-season suspension in June, other schools began flirting with Bruce, wanting to know if the best freshman point guard in America -- better than Daniel Gibson, better than Darius Washington, better than Jordan Farmar -- was interested in transferring.
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| For months, Scott Drew and Aaron Bruce have pointed their energy toward Wednesday's opener. (AP) |
And still he had another option. Two of Bruce's uncles played professionally in Australian Rules Football. One uncle, Steve Ryan, is an ARF legend. Bruce played that sport into high school, and with his genes and athletic ability he was considered one of the country's top prospects. Average salary: $350,000. This summer, using Ryan as their conduit, a handful of ARF teams wanted to know if the NCAA's brutal treatment of Baylor would tempt Bruce to come home to play football.
It would not.
"Australian Rules Football is easily Australia's most-followed sport, but it was never in my plans," Bruce says. "My heart was always with basketball at Baylor."
And so on Wednesday, when the Bears become the last of the 334 teams in Division I to make their 2005-06 debut, Aaron Bruce will lead them. Exactly 89 days since the start of practice, and 307 days since it played in the 2005 Big 12 Tournament, Baylor will return to action at Texas Tech.
Baylor coach Scott Drew has no idea what to expect.
"I just hope our guys can sleep (Tuesday)," Drew says. "Our guys will be so excited during that first shoot-around (Wednesday) ... I hope we have something left when the game comes around."
Everywhere else in the Big 12 and beyond, coaches ought to have a handle on their rotations: Who should be starting, who should be coming off the bench and when, and so forth. Baylor? Not really. Drew knows who he's going to start, but he has no idea if he's right.
"It happens every year," Drew says. "Some guys in the preseason, you think they'll have great years but when the games start for some reason it doesn't happen. And vice versa. When the lights come on, everything changes. We don't know right now how that's going to affect us."
About the only thing Drew knows for sure is that Bruce will be his team's best player. Bruce might be the best player Drew ever has at Baylor, regardless of how long Drew coaches there. Bruce is that good. Last season, as a freshman, he averaged 18.2 points and 3.8 assists and shot 39.9 percent on 3-pointers despite being the No. 1 target of every opposing team, and despite being surrounded by just five scholarship players.
This season, as it gets farther removed from the Dave Bliss tenure that led to severe NCAA sanctions -- including the elimination of its 2005-06 non-conference schedule -- Baylor has 10 scholarship players. The biggest boost has been to the backcourt, where Bruce will be accompanied by talented freshmen Henry Dugat and Curtis Jerrells.
Drew also added to his frontcourt, most notably 6-foot-8 Kevin Rogers but also 6-10 Finnish import Jari Vanttaja and 7-0 Senegalese redshirt freshman Mamadou Diene. Those freshmen will support Baylor's top returning players, non-Bruce division: senior center Tommy Swanson and junior forwards Tim Bush and Patrick Fields.
To prepare Baylor for a Texas Tech team that already has played 15 games, Drew took the Bears on a mock road trip to Dallas on Dec. 19 for an intra-squad scrimmage complete with a night in a hotel, team meals, the whole thing. In recent days, Drew has been piping crowd noise into his practices.
But these are uncharted waters. Drew knows that. He knows he probably hasn't handled the last three months perfectly, that some detail he overlooked during this unprecedented layoff could cost his team a game this season. Scariest of all, Drew has no idea which detail that is. He won't know until the season is finished, when he can look back on the first half-season in NCAA history.
"We have the patent on this," Drew says. "After the season, we'll be the sole experts on this situation."
