Gregarious Patsos has the Greyhounds believing Loyola coach Jimmy Patsos doesn’t have a pregame speech planned when his team plays heavily favored Ohio State in the NCAA tournament Thursday night in Pittsburgh. He undoubtedly will think of something.
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According to Patsos, his first order of business Thursday is to take his Greyhounds to the Andy Warhol Museum.
“You gotta believe. You gotta dream,” Patsos said. “Who would have thought Andy Warhol would have the impact he’s had on American pop culture? Not him when he’s a little East Catholic kid. Not him when he was a little scrawny artist.”
| Up next |
| No. 2 Ohio State vs. No. 15 Loyola |
| When » Thursday, 9:50 p.m. |
| Where » Mellon Arena, |
| Pittsburgh |
| TV » TNT |
It’s Loyola’s first trip to the NCAA tournament since 1994. So why not make it as memorable as possible? Since March 5, when Loyola outlasted Fairfield 48-44 in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference championship game, Patsos has lit up television, radio and the Internet with his 1,000-watt personality.
It started the night Loyola clinched an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. In a stream-of-consciousness postgame news conference, Patsos talked about his mother drinking Manhattans in heaven with former Big East commissioner Dave Gavitt and described his relationship with guard Bobby Olson as “like two Siamese fighting fish.”
Patsos also referenced the Guggenheim Museum, the movie “Love Story,” Red Auerbach, Jerry Tarkanian, Gary Williams, Joe Lunardi, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and former Black Panther Bobby Seale, to whom he likened his team’s “militant” defense.
“It’s overwhelming,” sophomore Justin Drummond said of Patsos’ larger-than-life persona. “All we have to do is match Jimmy’s energy. When we do that we’re fine.”
Patsos, a former player at Catholic University and coach at Archbishop Carroll, served at Maryland under Gary Williams for 13 years before taking over at Loyola in 2004. Eight years later he finds himself in the NCAA tournament along with two of his former Maryland colleagues: Billy Hahn, an assistant at West Virginia, and Dave Dickerson, an assistant at Ohio State.
Patsos had planned to use Dickerson as a source of intelligence for the tournament. That changed on Selection Sunday.
“I had called Dave and said, ‘Hey I might pick your brain,’?” said Patsos, 45. “I thought we were playing Michigan State.”
Seeded No. 15 in the East Region, Loyola (24-8) might need more than a good scouting report against No. 2 seed Ohio State (27-7). The only opponent the Greyhounds faced this year in the class of the Buckeyes was Kentucky. Early in the second half, Loyola trailed by five points before coming undone in an 87-63 defeat on Dec. 22.
“You’re playing in front of 23,000, and 22,999 of them don’t like you,” junior Erik Etherly said. “We played with Kentucky for a half. We’ll use that experience. Since that game we’ve grown a lot.”
With Patsos keeping the Greyhounds loose, don’t expect a crisis in confidence.
“Do we have a chance? Yeah, we have a chance,” Patsos said. “They just played Sunday. We’ve been off. My wife’s from Pittsburgh, so we’ll have lots of fans. I don’t think Pennsylvania people are gonna root for Ohio people. A lot of things are going our way. You need everything to go your way.”
