WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 11, 2017 E4 SPORTS5C
GREENBURGH, N.Y. Derrick Rose
returned to the New York Knicks
on Tuesday after going AWOL
and skipping Monday’s game
against the New Orleans Pelicans.
Rose and the Knicks assured any-
one who would listen that all is
better now.
But really, what are the
chances?
The Knicks run on chaos like
Madison Square Garden turns on
the lights with electricity. And
Rose’s explanation seemed to
have as many holes as the Knicks
defense. So while the Knicks in-
sist that a family emergency was
resolved and Rose was not just
back but, after paying a fine, back
in good graces with the team
ready to move on, it was one
more strange chapter in a disap-
pointing season.
Rose said he left for Chicago
two hours after leaving the morn-
ing shoot-around, but during no
time in that window of driving to
the airport, waiting for a plane,
flying to Chicago for two hours,
landing and driving downtown
from the airport could he bring
himself to answer the texts or
calls from team officials or team-
mates. And the same went for
anyone who knew him in Chicago
— with team officials trying to
search for anyone who had an
idea if he was safe.
“I just had to get to my family,”Rose said. “I talked to them after-
wards. Everybody’s on the same
page now. They understood right
away after I explained myself to
them. I talked to them late last
night and this morning. ... I didn’t
want to take any calls at the time.
I needed that space to myself, and
I needed to be around my mom.”
Asked if he felt an obligation to
return the calls, Rose admitted he
should have.“Yeah, but things happen,” he
said. “Of course, that’s not the
person I am. I explained to my
teammates I didn’t want any dis-
tractions to the team, especially
what we have going on right now,
and I apologized to them earlier,
just letting them know it will nev-
er happen again.
“This never happened to me
before, and I explained that to the
team and the front office.”
According to Rose, he flew to
Chicago on Monday afternoon,
resolved the issue and was back
in communication during the
game, speaking to Knicks general
manager Steve Mills.
Knicks coach Jeff Hornacek
took a long time to get to the
postgame media session, certain-
ly speaking with team officials to
find out what happened, but he
then said after the game and reit-
erated Tuesday that he was un-
aware of anything postgame
other than Rose being unharmed.
The Knicks coach insisted that
rumors of dissatisfaction be-
tween Rose and the team are un-
founded.
While Rose was on the bench
for the fourth quarter of Friday’s
and Saturday’s games, Hornacek
said there has never been a rift
between the two.
“I think somebody asked me
about, maybe in the press confer-
ence last night, if it had some-
thing to do with the Milwaukeegame,” Hornacek said. “I was like,
‘No, there was nothing.’ He was
happy we won, you know. These
guys support each other. Most
players, when they don’t get into
the game, they probably get a lit-
tle frustrated, but he was happy
for our team and never said any-
thing else. And you know, when I
talked to him this morning, he
said, ‘Coach, it has nothing to do
with basketball, it’s all about what
I had to do with my family.’ ”
Asked about reports that Rose
had told people around him he
was unhappy with what was hap-
pening in New York and there
was friction between the coach
and point guard, Hornacek dead-
panned, “Yeah, I guess we are.
I’ve got to go talk to him.”
“That’s crazy. I never had a
problem with a coach in my life,
no matter what team I’ve been in
on,” Rose said. “I put that on my-
self, because I let that space and
opportunity start something, es-
pecially when people didn’t know
what was going on. So I put that
on myself with not telling the
Knicks. It was just bad timing,
but I’m not perfect, far from it.
The front office and my team-
mates, they knew where I was
coming from when I told them
what happened.”Popper writes for the The (Bergen
County, N.J.) Record, part of the USA
TODAY Network.NBA
Knicks, Rose adamant no rift exists
BRACE HEMMELGARN, USA TODAY SPORTS
“They understood right away after I explained myself to them,”
Derrick Rose said about his teammates and Knicks officials.Emergency was
only reason for
absence, he says
Steve Popper
@StevePopper
USA TODAY Sports
took us 35 years, but we’re here
now.”
Boulware jolted through a
range of emotions after the final
gun. He cried. He screamed. He
hopped up and down. He sang
We Are the Champions at the top
of his lungs with a few team-
mates. And that’s only a partial
snapshot of his postgame. But
this was a quieter moment.
“We’re just resilient,” he said.
“We’ve got a lot of fight in us. We
battled, and we battled, and we
battled. I don’t know how it hap-
pened — but we won.”
We’ll get to how they won in a
moment. You might have heard,
but Alabama has spent the last
few seasons in relentless con-
quest of college football. The
Crimson Tide went into the
night looking for their fifth na-
tional championship in eight
years.
Which brings us back to that
College Football Playoff selec-
tion committee member. During
its weekly meetings to put to-
gether the rankings, Radakovich
was recused from voting on or
even discussing Clemson — but
not Alabama. All season, he
watched the Tide and he saw,
well, what we all saw. Alabama
was unbeaten. Alabama seemed
inevitable.
“Throughout the year, they
were just so superior to every-
one,” he said. “As we looked at it
as a committee, it was Alabama
and then we kind of moved on to
everybody else. But everybody’s
got to play between the lines. Ev-
erybody’s got to play the game.”
As it turned out, Clemson
could play Alabama’s game. The
Tigers defense bottled up the
Tide, and Alabama left Tampa
with serious concerns about
quarterback Jalen Hurts’ inabil-
ity to pass and legitimate ques-
tions about coach Nick Saban’s
decision a week earlier to dump
Lane Kiffin as offensive coordi-
nator and replace him with Steve
Sarkisian.
More startling, though — and
this part took a while to develop
— Clemson’s offense finally
broke through against Alabama’s
defense. Watson’s playmaking
turned the second half into a dif-
ferent game.
“We worked ’em a little bit,”
junior running back Wayne Gall-
man said.
It wasn’t just that they beat
Alabama — “To be the best,
you’ve got to beat the best,” the
Tigers kept saying afterward,
parroting their coach — but how
they did it. Trailing 14-0 in the
first half and by 10 in the third
quarter. Putting together an 88-
yard drive for the go-ahead score
in the fourth quarter.
Then, after Alabama retook
the lead with 2:07 left, Clemson
drove again for the champion-
ship.
“That’s the best part about to-night,” Swinney said. “You beat
Alabama. You did it on a two-
minute drive; it wasn’t some flu-
ky plays. You beat their defense,
and that’s the best of their team.
You left no doubt.”
Look at it another way. Clem-
son won despite doing the very
things Swinney had warned all
week that it could not afford to
do.
The Tigers
lost two turn-
overs. And
just like last
year, they lost
Alabama
tight end O.J.
Howard on a
busted cover-
age. (“Same
freaking
play,” Swin-
ney said.
“Same play!
How do we
do that?”)
They won anyway. At half-
time, Swinney told the Tigers
they had taken Alabama’s best
shot and trailed only 14-7.
“A l l w e h ave t o do is go out
there and be who we are,” Swin-
ney said, as recounted by former
Clemson quarterback Tajh Boyd,
who had practiced with the
team, mimicking Hurts, and wasin the locker room at halftime.
“That’s more than good
enough,” Swinney told the
Tigers.
The Tigers were more than
good enough to complete a jour-
ney that began when Swinney
was promoted in 2008 to replace
Tommy Bowden. The program
gradually morphed into a na-
tional power. A
year ago, Clem-
son was 14-0,
playing for the
national title
against Ala-
bama, and lost
45-40. Swinney
predicted then
that the Tigers
would win one
soon.
This year
seemed like
their best shot,
because of Wat-
son’s dynamic
skills. But for most of the season,
the idea of any team other than
Alabama winning seemed like a
very long shot.
“What they’ve done the last
seven years is absolutely incredi-
ble,” Clemson co-offensive coor-
dinator Jeff Scott said of the
Tide. “We wanted to change that.
Somebody was gonna beat themat some point, and we wanted to
be that group. I think there were
probably a lot of people around
the country pulling for us to-
night, just because they wanted
to see somebody new on top of
college football. Hopefully we
brought a lot of hope to a lot
of those people around the
country.”
He’s probably right — Clem-
son was America’s Team on
Monday night — but no one is
suggesting Alabama’s dynasty is
done. The program didn’t topple;
the Crimson Tide will return
next season bristling with talent.
Presumably it’ll be a pretty hun-
gry bunch.
“What a run they’ve had,”
Swinney said, “and I know
they’ll be right back here next
year.”
But Clemson might not be go-
ing anywhere anytime soon, ei-
ther. The program had already
demonstrated staying power.
What does it say to finally reach
the top — and to knock off ’Bama
to get there?
“It says you’re the best,” Scott
said.COLLEGE FOOTBALL
Clemson ‘left no doubt,’ Swinney says
v CONTINUED FROM1CKIM KLEMENT, USA TODAY SPORTS
Dabo Swinney, named Clemson head coach in the middle of the 2008 season, has double-digit
wins in six consecutive seasons, culminating with Monday’s victory to win the national title.“We’ve got a lot
of fight in us. We
battled, and we
battled, and we
battled. I don’t
know how it
happened — but
we won.”
Clemson linebacker Ben BoulwareFOLLOW REPORTER
GEORGE SCHROEDER
@GeorgeSchroeder for breaking
sports news and analysis.The starting quarterback on
Clemson’s 1981 national champi-
onship team said he and his
teammates would have done
what Alabama failed to do Mon-
day night — beat the current
Clemson Tigers.
“I believe we would have won,”
Homer Jordan, who in 1981
helped lead Clemson to its first
national football championship,
told USA TODAY Sports on Tues-
day by phone. “I believe in us and
our team. It would be a heck of a
battle, I’ll tell you that. Their de-
fense is something else. But so
was ours.”
Jordan said the different styles
of play would have tipped things
in favor of the ’81 team over the
current team, which won the
school’s first national football
championship since Jordan and
his teammates beat Nebraska in
the 1982 Orange Bowl.
In ’81, Jordan passed for
1,630 yards and nine touchdowns
for the season. By comparison,
Deshaun Watson, who led the lat-
est version of the Tigers, passed
for 4,593 yards and
41 touchdowns.
“They play finesse football and
we just kind of played real physi-
cal,” Jordan said. “That was the
era we were in. Just smashmouth.
Guys back then got their heads
knocked off. We could play that
way.”
Danny Ford, who coached the
’81 team, said he wouldn’t pick a
winner between the Clemson
teams of different eras.
“Oh, no, I’d have more sense
than that,” Ford said. “This team
was a pretty good football team,
but we were a pretty good foot-
ball team, too.”
BART BOATWRIGHT, THE GREENVILLE (S.C.) NEWS
Ex-coach Danny Ford, left,
and ex- QB Homer Jordan.
Ex-QB:
Clemson
couldn’t
beat 1981
title team
Josh Peter
@joshlpeter
USA TODAY Sports