The roads around Princeton were icy enough on this February morning that Pete Carril told his secretary to stay home for the day.
So when the phone rang in the men’s basketball office, the 61-year-old head coach ambled over to a desk and removed the cigar from his mouth as he picked up the receiver.
“Basketball office,” Carril said in his low, gravelly voice, the product of too many cigars and too many basketball practices. “Yeah . . . yeah . . . thank you. Well, we haven’t had a real good year, you know. But thank you.”
With that, Carril hung up and walked back to his his seat, re-lit his stogie and resumed the conversation that had been interrupted.
When Carril, now in his 26th year at Princeton, agreed to be interviewed, he joked to a member of the school’s sports information staff: “I guess that’s one good thing about all this losing. I don’t have to do as many of these.”
Especially at this time of year.
The calendar last Monday read March and Carril’s Princeton Tigers had three games left. And that was that. There will be no NCAA Tournament for Princeton.
Pennsylvania has claimed the Ivy League title and the league’s automatic bid to the tournament. There is no backdoor play Princeton (14-9 and 6-5 in the Ivy League) can execute to earn a spot. The NCAAs won’t be the same without the Tigers.
Carril and Princeton have become a cult favorite in March Madness. They’ve lost in the first round each of the past four years-to Georgetown, Arkansas, Villanova and Syracuse-but in each case, they put on an old-fashioned, purist’s brand of basketball that has hit a responsive chord with fans everywhere.
By playing with patience and precision and total disregard for individualism, Princeton-a school that cannot offer athletic scholarships and carries a $25,000-a-year pricetag-has shown it can hang with anyone. Its largest margin of defeat in those NCAA games was eight points.
“That guy (on the phone) said he saw our game against N.C. State,” Carril said, referring to one of Princeton’s few shining moments this season, a nine-point victory over the Wolfpack on national TV. “He said he really liked the way we played.”
Even in a down year, Carril said, “We still get a lot of calls like that.”
Many of the calls and letters come from coaches-CYO, Biddy, high school, you name it-who want to know the secrets of Princeton’s precise, tempo-throttling offense and the nuances of the Tigers’ matchup zone defense. Other calls come from newfound fans.
And then there have been the calls from ESPN, which discovered a few years ago that viewers don’t want to see 6,000 up-and-down-the-floor shootouts a year. When ESPN shows a Princeton game, the cable network’s ratings are among its highest of the year.
“We got an awful lot of national publicity during those four years,” said Carril, who spent one season at Lehigh before coming to Princeton in 1967, where he’s compiled a 457-233 record. “People everywhere were talking about Princeton basketball. I guess some of the people in the circles of power said, `This is good stuff. Let’s get it on TV.”‘
Why not? It makes for terrific theater, a bunch of kids just out of the library taking some powerhouse to the wire.
“Every possession is under a microscope when you play Princeton,” said North Carolina State coach Les Robinson, 0-2 against Carril the last two years. “The psychological part is the toughest. It’s like every possession is the last two or three minutes of a game.”
The goal of each Princeton possession is a backdoor layup or an open three-point shot. Entering last weekend, the Tigers led the nation in three-point shooting percentage (44.4 percent). Defensively, they allow fewer points per game (53.4) than any team in Division I.
Carril’s teams slow the tempo for a simple reason-they have to. If they could run, they’d run forever.
“You go with your strengths,” Carril said. “It’s the same in any sport.”
But the 1992-93 season has shown the Princeton system does not automatically win Ivy League titles.
“In a sense, it’s harder to play here at Princeton than at some other place,” said Carril, who said he plans on recruiting one more class and then retiring in four years. “We can’t hide a bad passer. We can’t hide a bad dribbler. Every guy that catches the ball is the point guard. That’s tough if that guy can’t dribble, pass or shoot.”
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Who would be the perfect Princeton player? He’d have to be smart, schooled in fundamentals and, most of all, team-oriented.
“I’ll take a guy like Michael Jordan,” said Carril, who scoffs at the notion his system wouldn’t work with premier talent. “To me, he’s the most fundamentally sound player in the game today. Fundamentals! Two-hand chest passes, hook passes, whatever it takes, he’s got it. But everybody notices how high he jumps.
“I’ve heard people say, `I guess it’s rough to coach that guy.’ I don’t think so. I’ve been watching him play for years and I think I can count on one hand the number of times that he did something that went against his team winning.”
The better the players, the better the Princeton system works-just like any other team. The coach pointed to a rack of NBA game videos in his office.
“Chicago’s system is very similar to ours,” Carril said. “They have a lot of backscreens, they have a lot of dribble handoffs, they have some backdoor cuts that are nice. They play at a faster pace and finish everything off with a stuff. That’s the difference.”
The difference between this year’s Princeton team and those that rolled to four straight Ivy League championships-the most consecutive titles since the Dick Harter and Chuck Daly-coached Penn teams won six in a row from 1970-75-is in one word: talent.
“Even though we lost five players (from last year’s team)-three of them starters-there was a sense that we couldn’t go under this year,” Carril said. “I notice the disappointment in my players. And if there’s any flaw, it’s that they haven’t grasped or attached themselves to a sense of what was done here before.”
The Ivy League was in jeopardy of losing its automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament in 1989 because its last four champions-Princeton had gone from 1985-88 without winning a league title-were not able to provide a competitive first-round game. Princeton went out that year and lost, 50-49, to Georgetown in a game considered one of the classics in NCAA Tournament history.
“Penn is capable of doing the same things we did,” Carril said. “I don’t see any 40-point blowouts with that team.”
Still, it won’t be the same.