Drake Is Finding The Spotlight

By On Basketball John Feinstein
Sunday, February 3, 2008

The most remarkable story in college basketball this season actually began five years ago, when a son said something he thought his father already knew: "I've always wanted to coach with you."

It is the story of a school that went 20 years between winning seasons before going 17-15 a year ago. It is the story of a team picked to finish ninth in the Missouri Valley Conference that instead leads the league and is 20-1 after last night's win over Indiana State. It is the story of Drake University, a tiny, academic-minded school in Des Moines that last knew real basketball glory before man landed on the moon.

Keno Davis always had figured his father, Tom, understood how much he would enjoy working for him. Keno had grown up sitting on his dad's benches from Boston College to Stanford to Iowa -- all places where Tom Davis had known coaching success. Keno graduated from Iowa and got into coaching, working for Bruce Pearl at Southern Indiana and then for Gary Varner at Southeast Missouri State.

When Iowa decided it wanted someone younger to coach its team (Steve Alford was both hot and available at the time), Tom Davis was pushed into "retirement" in 1999 even after taking the Hawkeyes to the round of 16, where they lost to eventual national champion Connecticut.

"I told people then I was not retired," Tom Davis said earlier this week. "I was only 60. I was willing to come back for the right job."

Not surprisingly, given his r¿sum¿, his name popped up often when jobs opened. Each time Keno would call and say, "What do you think, Dad?"

Davis finally asked his son why it seemed so important that he coach again.

"That's when he told me about wanting to coach with me," Tom Davis said. "I guess I should have known; we'd been so close through basketball for so long but I hadn't thought about it. When the Drake job came up, it seemed right for a lot of reasons, but knowing that Keno wanted to go there with me probably sealed the deal for me."

Exactly why the Drake job would seem right to any college basketball coach is tough to say. The school tasted real glory once, when it reached the Final Four in 1969 and played UCLA and Lew Alcindor tough for 40 minutes before losing, 85-82, in the semifinals. Since then, the highlight film wouldn't be much longer than a movie trailer.

The Bulldogs last reached the NCAA tournament in 1971 (that was also the last time they won 20 games), the NIT in 1986. A year later, they were 17-14. That was the last winning season for Drake until 2003, when then-athletic director David Blank called Davis on a golf vacation in Palm Springs, Calif.

"Logistically it worked because I was still living in Iowa City," Davis said. "I knew they'd had tough times, but the school reminded me a lot of Lafayette -- small school, good kids, the chance to build something. Also, I figured I couldn't possibly make things much worse."

Davis's first head coaching job had been at Lafayette, where his only assistant coach was an intense young Maryland graduate named Gary Williams. In fact, Keno had been born the same week Lafayette beat Virginia in the first round of the 1972 NIT, which remains the Leopards' only postseason victory.

"I was thrilled when Dad took it," said Keno, who is named after one of Davis's high school players. "I never thought about succeeding him, just working with him and learning from him."

By last season, Drake agreed that whenever Tom retired, Keno would succeed him. Tom, who won 598 games, decided last season was the right time.

"I did it for a couple reasons," he said. "I thought we'd laid a foundation, but I also thought with the four seniors gone, there wouldn't be quite as much pressure on Keno his first year even though I liked some of the kids we had stepping in. I didn't think they'd be picked ninth[in the MVC], but I also never dreamed they'd be 19-1."

Neither did Keno or anyone else. After all, who would have imagined that two former walk-ons would emerge not only as starters but true stars? Jonathan Cox, a junior, is averaging 12.2 points and a league-leading 8.8 rebounds a game, and his story isn't nearly as amazing as that of senior point guard Adam Emmenecker, whose lone Division I scholarship offer was to play baseball at Boston College.

The Davises told Emmenecker he could walk on at Drake largely because they liked his attitude and his 4.0 grade-point average. Emmenecker did and had a total of 55 points and 59 assists in his first three seasons.

"He was still an important guy on the team, though," Tom Davis said. "He was always one of our leaders, the go-to guy for our players for anything: personal advice, academics, you name it."

In his first three years at Drake, Emmenecker had one B (in an advanced marketing class last spring), which is why his GPA is only 3.97. "He was really upset with that B," Tom Davis said.

Keno Davis gave him a scholarship and the starting point guard spot this season, and Emmenecker, who is 6 feet 1 and not much of an outside shooter, has provided a steady hand for the Bulldogs, who on Wednesday raised their conference record to 10-0 with a 75-65 victory over perennial MVC power Creighton before a capacity crowd of 8,000 at Knapp Center.

One of those fans packed into the building was Andy Pawlowski, a 1998 Drake grad who played on four teams that combined to go 29-80, including a 19-game losing streak his senior year. Pawlowski and his wife were driving from St. Louis to Portland, where he is about to start a new job with Nike, when he persuaded her to divert to Des Moines for the game.

"Feeling the electricity walking in was amazing," Pawlowski said. "It gave me chills. There were probably more people sitting in the student section than we used to have in the entire place when I played."

At one point in the second half, Creighton went on a three-point shooting binge and took the lead.

"I looked at Emmenecker at that point, and he was smiling," Pawlowski said. "The message to his team was, 'We're fine; we're going to do this.' These guys expect to win. When I played, we rarely felt that way."

Six of Drake's last eight conference games are on the road. There will also be a bracket-buster game at Butler, another one-loss team. All of which means there is still a lot of work to do.

"And now we're the hunted because we're in first place," Keno Davis said of his team's three-game lead in the MVC. "But the amazing thing about this team is that with each success, we seem to get a little calmer. We've never talked about goals; we've just practiced hard every day and played about as well as we can every game."

For now, everyone at Drake is trying to enjoy the ride. Tom Davis, who admits watching is harder than coaching, has enjoyed Keno's success as much as any he had himself. Keno misses his dad on the bench but talks to him almost daily about everything from practice schedules to pregame meals to the pressures of winning.

"I saw them play Wisconsin-Milwaukee on the road early in the season," Pawlowski said. "They blew them out. I noticed even in warmups how many guys they had who could really shoot. I told some of my friends at work, 'Watch out for Drake this year.' They laughed at me. Now I'm getting e-mails saying, 'Why aren't they ranked higher?' "

Every year since he graduated, Pawlowski has kept his calendar clear for the week the NCAA tournament begins just in case he needed to fly to a first-round site to watch Drake. He hasn't needed to make a plane reservation . . . yet.

"This may finally be the year," he said.

It might well be. And it all came about because a son wanted the chance to work for his dad.