Ball-Hogging's Alive and Well in Big Dance Losses

Where have you gone, Coach Bobby Knight?

Hoops Nation turns its fed-up eyes to you.

Apologies to Paul Simon there, but after that, someone else should be offering their remorse:

And that'd be every damn point guard who seems to have forgotten that a pass moves the ball faster than a buncha bloody bouncing.

This happens 'way too much during crunch time:

Coach Knight used to have a killer drill where he'd take enough air out of the ball so as to render dribbling useless.

Could be one reason why his teams won so many games.

Dudes usually got open for layups like those because of sharp ball movement.

The first clue is the defense wasn't in a position to stop those shots.

The tipping point between the Bob Cousys and Magic Johnsons of hoops lore and the hero-ballers could have been this coast-to-coast dash by Tyus Edney in 1995 to keep UCLA's March Madness hopes alive:

It's as if the ghosts of Old School Football were whispering from the grave about when you pass the ball, three things can happen, and two of them are bad.

But college football's moved on.

So should college hoops.

In their case, though, it'd be moving back to the future.