Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 7, 1991 TAG: 9104170684
SECTION: THE METRO TOURNAMENT PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Scott Blanchard / Sportswriter
DATELINE: TALLAHASSEE, FLA. LENGTH: Long
Just in case he still thinks it's a dream.
"Most guys work an entire lifetime to try to get an ACC [coaching] job," Kennedy said recently. "I woke up one morning and had one. . .It hasn't totally hit me yet."
Florida State, in the Metro Conference for 14 years, becomes the Atlantic Coast Conference's ninth member at the end of this school year. It could have landed in the ill-fated 16-team Metro or in an expanded Southeastern Conference.
"First of all, I was in disbelief [when the ACC option came up]," Kennedy said. "My wife and I kid, we say we never get lucky."
Now, Kennedy believes, he's about to get two more things: better recruits and more television exposure for the Seminoles. Florida State played a non-conference schedule this year that included Nevada-Las Vegas, Arkansas, Syracuse, Florida, Auburn, LaSalle and South Florida. That was by design.
"I thought if we stayed in the Metro, we would definitely need another vehicle for recruiting and national exposure," said Kennedy, who is 93-55 in five years at Florida State and will be trying to win the school's only Metro tournament title this week in Roanoke. "I scheduled those games to kind of offset what i didn't feel we were getting to [lure top recruits].
"There was a concept of possibly plateauing out [within the Metro], and I certainly wanted to protect against that. You step into the ACC and now all that's taken care of: You play great teams, y ou have a great home schedule, you get on television. When you're in the ACC, you don't have to try to overcreate a recruiting pitch. I mean, it's the ACC."
Kennedy said his staff is recruiting players in Arizona, California, Illinois and Michigan as part of a strategy that he said will focus on Florida's top players and on the top national players.
"We tried to do all that in the Metro, but we fell short a lot," he said of recruiting nationally. "In the ACC we might still fall short, but at least we can get through the front door. We've been [to Arizona, California, Illinois and Michigan] before, but not with the impact that we're there now with."
Some may wonder if a program that has never won a Metro title - the Seminoles have been tournament runners-up five times - will get swamped in the powerful, deep ACC. Kennedy's first three years in Tallahassee produced 60 victories, one NIT bid and two trips to the NCAA Tournament that resulted in two first-round losses. Last year, however, Florida State won 16 games
while struggling with an injury to shooting guard Tharon Mayes; this year, the Seminoles were 5-5 before winning 12 of their next 17. They're considered a rising prospect for the NCAA Tournament.
Kennedy hinted that Florida State's personnel must improve for the Seminoles to prosper in the ACC. On the current roster, the Seminoles have one player Kennedy knows must be the standard for future recruits: Douglas Edwards, who two years ago generally was rated the No. 2 recruit in the country after Georgia Tech's Kenny Anderson.
"I do know if you put five Douglas Edwardses out on the court, you're going to be in good shape," said Kennedy, in the first year of a five-year contract. "And in that league, some teams do that. . . .It's just going to be interesting to see how well we can compete initially, and then from that starting point I think we'll know how many years it will take us to hopefully be an upper-echelon team in that league.
Florida State athletic director Bob Goin certainly doesn't expect disaster next year.
"If we don't win a game in ACC basketball nest year, we'll have something to talk about," Goin said.
How about this topic: academics. After the ACC admitted Florida State, some observers and fans questioned whether the Seminoles' academic reputation measured up to the lofty reputations of most ACC schools. For example, the ACC has a league-wide rule prohibiting admittance of Proposition 48 non-qualifiers; Florida State had admitted Prop 48s (among them, Edwards).
Kennedy and Goin say they will have none of it. For one thing, Goin said, the Florida Board of Regents had a plan for gradually eliminating state school's acceptance of Prop 48s, Under the plan, 1990-91 school year was the last that Florida State could take a Prop 48 non-qualifier. And, Kennedy and Goin said Florida State's average SAT score for incoming freshmen is near 1,100.
"We rank third or fourth in the ACC academically - based on [SAT and] ACT [scores], based on our fellowships, based on our graduation rates," Kennedy said, then referred to the weak-academics rap. "That's the perception because football's been so powerful. This is not Oklahoma."
But Florida State soon could experience a basketball popularity explosion as did the football-crazy Sooners a few years ago. Shortly after the announcement was made that Florida State would join the ACC, Seminoles ticket manager John Sheffield said, general public season-ticket sales for the Seminoles' finalMetro year jumped 50 percent - from 4,000 to 6,000.
At least 200 Seminoles fans are expected to travel to Roanoke for the tournament, double what Florida State had expected initially.
Predictably, there is little pessimism in Florida State's basketball offices these days.
"To the very end of it, I didn't want to get overly optimistic that we would all of a sudden be an ACC school," said Kennedy, who praised Goin and school president Bernard Sliger for steering Florida State into the ACC. "It's amazing that now since the decision has been made, everybody realizes what a great, great decision it was."
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