Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Texas Southern coach Davis not afraid of tough schedule, including Arizona Wildcats

TUCSON, Arizona -- Mike Davis coached Indiana to the NCAA title game in 2002, and he’s dead set on getting back there again.

With Texas Southern, that is a school in the low-major Southwestern Athletic Conference that’s based in a saturated Houston sports market where attention can be scarce.

He’s trying to get there by playing all-road nonconference schedules that appear more suicidal than any in Division I — including a game Wednesday against Arizona at McKale Center — then trying to parlay those results into a better NCAA tournament seed, better NCAA tournament results and, eventually, better recruiting leverage that can build increasingly better teams.



It’s crazy, right? Davis has been called that.

At least, he says, by people who don’t listen.

“I just want to win a national championship,” Davis said Monday by telephone from Houston. “People are saying there’s no way you can do that at Texas Southern. It’s like when Phil Knight started Nike, when there were Converse and Adidas. People said ‘Why would you do that?’ But look at what Nike does now.”

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