Stress Test for Harrick

It hasn’t been a very pretty year for Jim Harrick and Georgia basketball, and that has nothing to do with the 2-3 record the Bulldogs bring to the Wooden Classic today at the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim.

For a moment Friday, Harrick succumbed to his old penchant for hyperbole as his team prepared to play Cal today in the first game of a doubleheader with USC and Missouri.

“Probably harder than any I’ve experienced,” he said, before being reminded of the aftermath of his firing at UCLA in 1996.

“No, nothing like that,” he said.

Still, the string of trouble at Georgia in the last year almost seems enough to make the falsified expense report that got Harrick fired at UCLA for lying to school officials look insignificant.

There is a trail of academic shortcomings among Georgia players and recruits, and an increasing sense that Harrick -- who since winning the 1995 title at UCLA has taken Rhode Island and Georgia to the NCAA tournament -- is willing to take considerable risks on players.

By far, the most serious news broke last winter when two basketball players and a Georgia football player were charged in connection with the alleged rape of a female student in a dorm. The charges against Tony Cole and Steve Thomas were dismissed in August after a jury had acquitted football player Brandon Williams, convincing prosecutors they were unlikely to convict the other defendants.

Harrick refused to reinstate Cole, despite the dismissal of the case, citing a list of transgressions that included altercations with teammates, abuse of phone privileges and threatening assistant coach Jim Harrick Jr.

“I made a mistake with Cole,” Harrick said.

“You know, I went 42 years of teaching and coaching and never had a guy’s name in the paper for social misconduct. I guess if you coach long enough, sometime something will happen.”

Thomas, suspended for the first three games of the season, was found not guilty of violating the school’s honor code by a student judiciary panel this week. He will be allowed to return if he regains his academic eligibility at the semester -- a crucial issue for the future of a Bulldog team playing without a center.

Despite all the turmoil, if Thomas returns, Georgia will again be worthy of a top-25 ranking, and almost certainly an NCAA tournament bid for the third year since Harrick arrived from Rhode Island four years ago.

“With Thomas out, we’ve kind of been disoriented,” Harrick said. “But it’s early. We’ll be fine if we get him back.”

The 2-3 start is far from impressive, but Georgia has had the sort of unrelenting schedule that helped the 2001 team make the NCAA field at 16-14. Even with two starters out -- forward Chris Daniels was suspended for one game for playing in an unsanctioned summer charity game -- Georgia played Texas, now ranked second in the nation, to a 77-71 loss in the opener.

The other losses were to instate rival Georgia Tech and to No. 20 Minnesota on a shot at the buzzer. The Bulldogs beat Belmont and Colorado, in another game decided at the buzzer.

Jarvis Hayes, a 6-foot-7 swingman, is the Bulldogs’ best player. But the most intriguing might be Damien Wilkins, a transfer from North Carolina State. He’s the son of former NBA player Gerald Wilkins and the nephew of Dominique Wilkins, the former NBA star who is the only player in Georgia history whose jersey has been retired.

Wilkins clashed with Coach Herb Sendek at North Carolina State but has fit in fine at Georgia.

He is only the latest player Harrick has been willing to take a risk on. The others are far better known.

He took in Lamar Odom at Rhode Island, after Nevada Las Vegas had shunned Odom when the NCAA questioned his test score.

Odom established his eligibility at Rhode Island and steered clear of trouble while starring for the Rams for one season before the Clippers made him the fourth pick overall in the 1999 NBA draft.

Perhaps encouraged by Odom’s success, Harrick tried to bring troubled Kenny Brunner -- the onetime Georgetown player involved in a notorious swordplay incident after transferring to Fresno State -- to Georgia two years ago.

University President Michael Adams, a friend of Harrick from the days both were at Pepperdine, at first supported him, then quashed the effort.

“Odom, Brunner, were all OK’d by the president and the athletic director at the university,” Harrick said. “I went and sat down with them and asked them what they thought, ‘Give me your opinion.’ ”

Adams later put a stop to it, and the Brunner courtship was over. “I’ll just say the responsibility belongs to me and I accept it,” Harrick said.

Most recently, Harrick was criticized when three of four recruits for this season failed to qualify for admission.

Harrick claims he was caught off-guard by the number of players from the state of Georgia who fail to reach NCAA-minimum test scores. (The state ranks near the bottom of the nation in average SAT scores.)

He also cites the familiar “opportunity” theory.

“You’re also trying to help young guys, you’re trying to educate young people, pick the right group,” Harrick said.

“And there’s no parent, no player, no high school coach that you deal with who’ll ever say, ‘My guy won’t make it.’ They all tell you, ‘Aw, he’ll make it, don’t worry. We’ve got everything covered.’ You come down to it, they don’t make it.

“It does make you look bad. It’s not something you wish on yourself. You do the best you can.

“You have good recruiting years and some years aren’t so good. We came back, we’ve had a great recruiting year. We signed five guys and all of them are qualified.”

Harrick feels a bit beleaguered, but truth be told, basketball is a bit under the radar at Georgia, especially during football season. He has traded a basketball school with a football program at UCLA for a football school with a basketball program at Georgia.

But as always, scrutiny and Harrick seem to go hand in hand.

“I think if you ask any coach, even John Wooden, ‘Have you ever made any mistakes?’ they have,” Harrick said. “Yeah, you try, and you make mistakes.

“All of a sudden it becomes, ‘Harrick’s a good coach, but ... ‘ But what? I don’t know what the ‘but’ is.”