A Car Wreck 40 Years Ago Helped Davidson Win

You’ve got to love Davidson coach Bob McKillop’s analogies. McKillop doesn’t go in for the “one game at a time” coach-speak. He tells his team stories and draws lessons from them – a much better way to go.

So this week, after No.21 Davidson's four-point loss to No.12 Oklahoma, McKillop told the squad about this wreck he had 40 years ago south of Richmond. He was driving a 1962 VW Beetle from New York to Greenville, N.C., to go to a funeral.

At 4 a.m., near Richmond on Interstate 95, an exhausted McKillop went to sleep while driving. He plowed through a sign, ended up in a ditch but escaped serious injury. It scared him, and altered his driving habits.

From then on, McKillop told his team, whenever he’s tired while driving, he rolls down the window, sticks his arm out there and moves it around. And he turns up the radio and sings. And he reads every billboard on both sides of the road rather than just keeping his eyes straight on the highway.

So how does this translate to basketball? McKillop wanted his team to move more (the arm), talk more (the singing) and look around more to see what’s happening (the billboards). All that happened in Davidson’s impressive 97-70 pounding of Winthrop Friday night.

One other note: Winthrop coach Randy Peele was upset after the game about many things, mostly about the way his own 1-3 team played. But he also mentioned that trying to defend Stephen Curry (30 points, 13 assists) is frustrating, and not just because Curry is so good.

“They don’t let you defend him,” Peele said of the officials. “If there’s any type of physicality, there’s a whistle.”

Peele was also very complimentary of Davidson, Curry and forward Andrew Lovedale in particular. But it sounded like Peele was implying that Curry is getting the “star” calls this year in college basketball that Kobe Bryant or LeBron James gets in the NBA.