Rich Hofmann: NCAAs basically a reunion of Philly guys

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - Take a map, lay it flat, smooth out the creases. Take a compass and choose a place to stick the sharp point. There really is only one place. As Cornell coach Steve Donahue said, "I think the Palestra is the first thing that grabs you."

Draw a circle on the map. The radius around the Palestra needs to be a little more than 20 miles - but only because Villanova coach Jay Wright went to Council Rock High School. If not for that, the circle would be half the size, even that much tighter.

About 5 million people live within the circle, give or take. It is a lot of people, granted, but only a sliver of the U.S. population. If there were such a thing as equal distribution, it would suggest that one coach in this year's NCAA Tournament would have grown up within the circle.

Instead, there are seven: Temple's Fran Dunphy, Siena's Fran McCaffery, Richmond's Chris Mooney, Wisconsin's Bo Ryan, Maryland's Gary Williams, Donahue and Wright.

There must be something in the wooder.

"That's obviously one close to my heart," Donahue was saying yesterday, on the eve of his team's first-round tournament matchup against the Owls, an emotional train wreck of a game between two coaches who worked together for a decade at Penn.

"[The Palestra] was what grabbed me, just the whole sense of what goes on in that building," he said. "And then all the coaches back then - Jimmy Lynam, Jim Boyle, Jack McKinney, Chuck Daly, Rollie Massimino - and I think we have a close bond with each other even now with all the guys in the tournament . . .

"I feel great pride that I'm in that group," Donahue said. "You can't give me a better compliment than to say I'm a Philadelphia guy who came from Philadelphia and coached the way they coach, whatever that is. I think Dunphy is obviously the pinnacle of what a Philadelphia coach is: tough, single-minded, not a lot of sizzle, it's just about the game, there's not a lot of self-promoting."

It's just about the game. That is the essence of it, right there. Donahue is correct, too, about Dunphy. He is the quintessence when it comes to this topic. And when it comes to this tournament, well, remember the six degrees of Kevin Bacon? With these Philadelphia-bred coaches, it is pretty much the two degrees of Fran Dunphy - and, in most cases, one.