We hardly knew you, Mr. Simmons

Published 10:31 am Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Just guessing here. I don’t pretend to get into their brains.

But now that LSU’s great hoops experiment with the Ultimate One-and-Done Superstar is over, your average LSU basketball fan is most likely scratching his head, dumbfounded, and thinking, “Gee, that wasn’t quite as much fun as I thought it was going to be.”

It certainly wasn’t all it was cracked up to be now, was it?

Here it is the eve of the NCAA tournament, and the Tigers are nowhere to be found in the Big Dance.

Head coach Johnny Jones respectfully declined the opportunity to try to get his troops motivated to play in the NIT.

Maybe he’d seen enough too.

So LSU’s lasting final memory of Ben Simmons’ Tiger toe tap will be a technical foul for spiking the ball in frustration in the waning moments of rock bottom, i.e., a must-win 71-38 loss to Texas A&M in the semifinals of the SEC tournament.

If anything kind of summed up the curious season, that one shining moment was it.

Not a ton of fun.

Jones said Tuesday that he hadn’t seen Simmons since Sunday.

He may never see him again. Certainly the fans won’t. Simmons, after all, was just a mercenary passing through, little more than double-parked on campus while serving his one-year college penance before the NBA and shoe companies could make him a mega-millionaire, possibly the No. 1 pick in the next draft.

Good for him. He seemed like a decent enough kid, albeit with an understandably casual approach to the school’s available academia.

But how’d it turn out for LSU?

Other than selling a whole bunch of tickets, not so well.

The Tigers, 19-12, are sitting home for the NCAA tournament — and were apparently embarrassed enough by the final straw in Nashville not to accept other postseason alternatives.

Jones is catching all kinds of heat, perhaps forever destined to be known as the Coach Who Couldn’t Get Ben Simmons to the NCAA Tournament.

Jones could be forgiven if he wishes to never hear the term “one-and-done” spoken in his presence again.

But should a talent like Simmons fall in his lap again, you can bet Jones is not going to turn him away.

So hopefully they learned something.

Frankly, LSU didn’t handle it well. Jones didn’t handle it well.

I’m not sure they were ready for the hoopla. They were basically blindsided.

As appetizing as it sounds to be in the situation, most schools probably would have been.

Noted broadcaster Tim Brando speculated that if a team is going to be totally centered around one one-and-done — and it will be, whether it wants to be or not — the school better be big-brand basketball royalty and headed by an A-list coach.

Kentucky can live by it. Mike Krzyzewski at Duke can get away with it.

LSU isn’t quite there yet, and neither is Jones.

Simmons became so much bigger than the program — at least from outside observers — that the Tigers were afterthoughts.

It wasn’t LSU playing then-No. 1 Oklahoma — it was No. 1 Oklahoma taking on Ben Simmons.

The national view could have cared less if LSU made the NCAA tournament. It was seen as a travesty than Simmons would never get the experience.

Nobody outside Louisiana was interested to know that Keith Hornsby was the glue of the team or that Craig Victor was the player the Tigers could most count on in the clutch.

It was the Season of Simmons.

It’s hard to blame Simmons.

He put up the numbers. He’s first team on most of the All-American teams. His play was there, and the biggest knock seemed to be that he wasn’t selfish enough.

In fact, one of the most common gushes by television commentators was how he made players around him better.

And maybe he did at times. They often got accused, being mere mortals, of not being good enough to handle his passing wizardry.

But he sure didn’t make them a better team — a team, mind you, with two other probable future NBA players, Antonio Blakeney and, allegedly, Tim Quarterman.

Hard to figure why, but it was a group with some talent that never really seemed to become a team.

There didn’t seem to be any apparent resentment of Simmons and the attention that relegated teammates into the far shadows.

But that was the public view for postgame news conferences. Who knows what was happening in the locker room?

For whatever reason, there was never really much in the way of chemistry, never appeared to be any sense of urgency.

That’s not all Simmons’ fault.

But don’t expect to ever see a statute of Simmons outside the Maravich Assembly Center either.

l

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU

athletics. Email him at

shobbs@americanpress.com