From New York Times

Knowing What It’s Like for Davidson’s Coach
By ADAM HIMMELSBACH
Published: March 30, 2008

The day after George Mason reached the Final Four in 2006 with a stunning victory against Connecticut in the regional final, Patriots Coach Jim Larranaga shared a quiet moment with his wife, Liz. The frenzied run the 11th-seeded Patriots had made seemed surreal to Larranaga, and he sought another frame of reference. So he pretended he was someone else.

“My wife asked me, ‘If Bob McKillop did something like this, how amazed and happy would you be for him?’ ” Larranaga said in a telephone interview. “I thought about Bob coaching Davidson to a Final Four and realized how amazing that would be. I used him as a gauge, and it made me appreciate what we had done.”

Two years later, McKillop and Davidson are a victory from matching George Mason’s improbable feat. The 10th-seeded Wildcats will face top-seeded Kansas on Sunday in the Midwest Region final in Detroit.

Larranaga and McKillop have maintained a friendship since their high school teams played in a 1967 playoff game. Larranaga attended Archbishop Molloy in Queens; McKillop went to Chaminade on Long Island.

Larranaga graduated from Providence in 1971 and spent five years as an assistant varsity coach and a freshman coach at Davidson. When Larranaga became an assistant at Virginia in 1979, he recruited several players from Long Island Lutheran, where McKillop was the coach.

“I didn’t actually get any of them,” Larranaga said. “So Bob kind of still owes me.”

After George Mason received an at-large bid to the 2006 N.C.A.A. tournament, McKillop asked Larranaga how he had done it. Larranaga emphasized the importance of a strong nonconference schedule.

This season, Davidson played nonconference games against North Carolina, U.C.L.A. and Duke.

“Bob didn’t win any of those games, but he figured an awful lot out about how he could,” Larranaga said. “He told me it wasn’t that they couldn’t play with them, it was that they had difficulty sustaining the effort for 40 minutes. Obviously, that’s not a problem anymore.”

Davidson defeated seventh-seeded Gonzaga, second-seeded Georgetown and third-seeded Wisconsin to reach the regional final.

On Saturday morning, Larranaga called McKillop to offer his congratulations and to share in the moment. He said there was a lot of chuckling, but there was no discussion of strategy.

“I told him the greatest compliment to your team is that CBS switched away from your game against Wisconsin because it was a blowout,” Larranaga said. “And he cracked up laughing. That game was supposed to be a nail-biter, but he blew out the Big Ten champion.”

As for Sunday morning preparations, Larranaga recommends keeping the mood light and finding a good bus driver.

In 2006, the bumpiest moments on George Mason’s road to the Final Four literally came on the road. En route to the regional final at the Verizon Center in downtown Washington, the Patriots’ team bus struck a parked car.

“The driver opened his window and talked to the policeman who was leading our escort,” Larranaga said. “He told us to go ahead because the car was illegally parked, anyway. He told us we couldn’t be late.”