Best under pressure

Best under pressure
OSU coach has ties to Missouri.

By STEVE WALENTIK of the Tribune’s staff

Published Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Travis Ford thrives on pressure.


AP photo
Oklahoma State first-year Coach Travis Ford began his playing career as a point guard at Missouri. He transferred to Kentucky after his freshman year and began a quick rise through the coaching ranks after graduation.
Tribune file photo

Always has.

Norm Stewart remembers paying the Oklahoma State coach a visit at his home in Madisonville, Ky., back in the late 1980s, when Ford was a 5-foot-9 point guard prospect.

The former Missouri coach found Ford shooting alone outside, and he immediately put him on the spot, telling him to make a jump shot with the coach watching.

Ford stepped up and sank it.

"Under the circumstances, it was impressive," Stewart recalled.

He remembered that shot more than a year later during Ford’s freshman season with the Tigers in 1990. Missouri was locked in a tight game with Iowa State on the road, and with time running out, Stewart drew up a play for the rookie to take a potential game-winning shot.

"One of the coaches I think said, ‘You can’t do that,’ " said Stewart, who might have been questioned less if he’d put the ball in the hands of one of his more established stars, such as Anthony Peeler or Doug Smith.

Stewart said: "Yes, I can. He’ll make it. He has to."

Sure enough, Ford dropped in the jumper as Missouri pulled out a two-point victory.

Missouri (15-3, 2-1)
			Hgt.	Pts.	Reb.
G	4	J.T. Tiller	6-3	7.3	2.8
G	11	Zaire Taylor	6-4	5.2	2.8
G	24	Kim English	6-6	7.1	1.6
F	1	DeMarre Carroll	6-8	15.6	7.0
F	15	Keith Ramsey	6-9	4.3	3.4

Oklahoma State (13-4, 1-1)
			Hgt.	Pts.	Reb.
G	00	Byron Eaton	5-11	13.3	3.6
G	1	Terrel Harris	6-5	14.3	4.9
G	2	Obi Muonelo	6-5	14.3	4.9
G	23	James Anderson	6-6	17.9	5.5
F	44	Malcolm Kirkland	6-8	3.2	2.8

● Time: 8 p.m.

● Place: Gallagher-Iba Arena

● TV/Radio: KZOU/1400 AM, 102.3 FM

Keys to the game

● With the Big 12 Conference’s two highest-scoring teams going head-to-head, shooting will be more important than ever. Oklahoma State leads the Big 12 and is second nationally in 3-point field-goal accuracy, shooting 42.5 percent from beyond the arc. The Cowboys have five players capable of knocking down long jumpers consistently. Missouri will have to contest those shots. The Tigers also have to figure out a way to carry their recent hot shooting on the road. MU has made 25 of 45 3-point attempts (55.6 percent) in its past two games but is shooting only 28.2 percent from beyond the arc in six games away from Mizzou Arena.

● Missouri will try to avoid the slow starts that spelled doom in two of its last three games away from home. The Tigers fell behind Illinois 20-9. They staked Nebraska to a 7-0 lead in their Big 12 opener in Lincoln. In both cases, things got worse before they got better, and Missouri wound up losing.

● MU senior forward Leo Lyons could be a difference-maker. He had a career game against Oklahoma State last season, scoring 27 points and grabbing 18 rebounds while making 12 of 13 shots in a 75-73 loss in Columbia. The Cowboys are even less equipped to match up with him this season with a starting lineup that includes only one player taller than 6-foot-6.

Ford’s knack for coming through in the clutch continued even after he left Columbia, transferring closer to home at Kentucky just before the NCAA imposed a postseason ban on the Tigers for recruiting violations. In his second season in Lexington, Ky., he led the Wildcats to the 1993 Final Four, and in a national semifinal against Michigan, Ford sank two free throws in the closing seconds of regulation to send the game to overtime.

Ford, whose Cowboys will play host to Missouri at 8 p.m. tonight at Gallagher-Iba Arena in Stillwater, Okla., has remained unaffected by pressure since he left the court for the bench.

With the endorsement of former Kentucky Coach Rick Pitino, Ford landed his first coaching job at Campbellsville University in 1997.

Starting in the NAIA might seem like a stress-free environment, but not for a 26-year-old with no head-coaching experience who was taking over a program that had gone 31-26 in the two seasons before he got there. But by the time Ford left three years later, Campbellsville was 23-11 and playing in the NAIA Tournament.

From Campbellsville, Ford went to Eastern Kentucky, where in five seasons he turned around a struggling program and guided it to its first NCAA Tournament appearance in 25 years.

Then it was on to Massachusetts, which was long removed from the success it enjoyed under John Calipari. In his second season, he led the Minutemen to the 2007 Atlantic-10 regular-season title, and he followed up that success a year later by guiding them to the finals of the National Invitation Tournament.

That brought Ford the most pressure-packed job of all last April when he was hired at Oklahoma State.

At the tender age of 38, he was handed the keys to a program erected by Henry Iba, one of the legends of college basketball. He stepped into a job that had been in the hands of one of the game’s great coaching families, the Suttons, for 18 years, a run that included 17 postseason appearances and two Final Fours. And he did so only after the Cowboys had tried and failed to lure OSU alumnus and national championship-winning Coach Bill Self away from Kansas.

If it was a difficult situation, Ford has not made it look so. Oklahoma State is 12-4 and has split its first two Big 12 Conference games, beating Texas A&M at home on Jan. 10 and losing in overtime at Baylor on Saturday.

For years, Oklahoma State played at a methodical pace under Eddie Sutton, who taught his teams to value each possession. But the Cowboys have quickly adjusted to Ford’s up-tempo system, which he learned from Pitino. They are the highest-scoring team in the Big 12 this season.

"It fits us better," senior point guard Byron Eaton said. "We’re not just a dominant big team where we can walk the ball down and call sets and run plays."

Eaton had to shed more than 30 pounds to man the controls off the Cowboys’ attack. Ford, himself, had to go through a similar transformation at Kentucky, losing more than 15 pounds before his junior season with the Wildcats.

A former McDonald’s All-American, Eaton has played in a four-guard lineup filled with skilled shooters such as James Anderson, Terrel Harris and Obi Muonelo. Ford dismissed 6-11 Ibrahima Thomas from the team in December, leaving the Oklahoma State to rely on a rotation with no player taller than 6-8.

OSU is also lacking depth.

"We’ve got some really positive strengths to this team, but we also have some weaknesses that we can’t necessarily cure right away," Ford said. "Those are some things we’re going to just try to camouflage and play around them as much as possible. We are who we are. We’re not overly deep, we’re not overly big and we’re not overly physical."

Ford is going to try to make it work just the same.

Reach Steve Walentik at (573) 815-1788 or swalentik@tribmail.com.