Basketball
Arkansas State shares an in-state rivalry with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Trojans (UALR). In recent years, the basketball series has gone in favor of Arkansas State with ASU winning five of the past six games (updated 2007–2008 season). This series has become one of the more intense rivalries in the Sun Belt Conference. The schools play each other twice per year, with one game each in Little Rock and Jonesboro.
In 1987, Arkansas State University received a bid to play in the National Invitation Tournament. The first game was against the University of Arkansas and was played in Barnhill Arena in Fayetteville, Arkansas. While the Indians led for the majority of the game, the Razorbacks eventually won in overtime. The game is the only meeting between the two universities in Men's Basketball.
In 1999, ASU went to the NCAA Tournament for the first time, losing to Utah in the first round.
In the 2006–2007 season, ASU won the Sun Belt Conference West Division Championship, finishing just ahead of the University of Louisiana at Monroe. The Indians went on to lose to the North Texas Mean Green in the finals of the Conference Tournament. After an 18 win, 15 loss season and a finals appearance in the Sunbelt Conference Tournament that year, ASU managed only a 10 win, 20 loss record the next season. One of the worst performances in school history, this record was a huge contributing factor in head basketball coach Dickie Nutt's resignation.
On March 19, 2008, Arkansas State named John Brady as the university's 15th head basketball coach. Brady had previously coached at Louisiana State University, taking the Tigers to the Final Four of the NCAA Tournament in 2006. Brady is the only head basketball coach in the Sun Belt Conference with Final Four experience.
Read more about this topic: Arkansas State Red Wolves
Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)