Someone to Blame Tiger fans are turning on Athletic Director R.C. Johnson. by DENNIS FREELAND A crowd of several hundred people was quietly leaving The Pyramid Saturday after another Tiger basketball loss when a fan in the section above them yelled loudly: "Go to hell, R.C.!" The crowd's response was interesting. Some laughed. Some clapped. Others nodded their heads in agreement. But no one visibly objected. No one seemed surprised. These weren't casual fans either. For the most part they were season ticket holders and Tiger Club members. They seemed to understand their leather-lunged colleague's frustration. Back in the late '70s, near fistfights erupted in the stands when one fan would yell at Coach Wayne Yates. He had detractors but he also had supporters. If anyone in this group of Tiger fans supported R.C. Johnson, they didn't make their feelings known, at least not Saturday, at least not publicly. The U of M athletic director did not attend the game. He was accosted in absentia, if you will. The fan, and many like him -- such as the caller to Sports Call 790 last week who asked Johnson how much money it would take to get him to leave Memphis -- want to put a face on their wrath and with V. Lane Rawlins heading for the airport, that countenance belongs to Johnson. The fans want Tiger basketball back the way they remember it. They are tired of this mediocre program pretending to be Tiger basketball. Many of them blame Johnson for the fall. This will be the fourth consecutive year that Memphis has not been invited to the Big Dance. The last time the school went through such a drought Yates was turning the program over to Dana Kirk. After Kirk suffered two losing seasons, the Tigers became one of the elite programs of the '80s -- making the NCAA tournament seven times in the decade with an overall record of 212-75. No wonder 21 percent favored Kirk in a recent Flyer Internet poll on who should be the next coach at Memphis. They want to go back to the days when Tiger fans waited for the national polls to be released each Monday then would argue for days that their team was better than the ones ranked above it. Tiger fans don't get excited about the polls anymore; they haven't had a dog in that hunt since 1996. In the past, national networks came to town to show Memphis vs. national powerhouses like Kansas, UNLV, and Missouri. The Southern Miss game, carried on ESPN Regional, just doesn't stack up. Tiger fans long for the days when sports highlight shows featured Keith Lee, Vincent Askew, or Penny Hardaway. Today, Tiger basketball flies well beneath the radar of SportsCenter. It's as if Memphis doesn't even have a college team. This is what it feels like to root for UAB or USM, but not Memphis. Tiger fans want to be arguing about where the selection committee will place Memphis and how high the team will be seeded. Instead they are talking about the lousy state of Memphis basketball. How there were more than twice as many no-shows as people in attendance at The Pyramid Saturday. How the city high school championship games on Friday outdrew the U of M by 100 people. They want someone to blame, and no one is more convenient than Johnson, who became athletic director at the end of December 1995. Since his arrival on campus, the Tigers have a basketball record of 69-64. Since Johnson fired Larry Finch in the middle of the '96-'97 season, the Tigers' record is 39-41. It won't soon improve. Some Tiger fans and boosters will never forgive the insensitive manner in which Johnson showed Finch the door. His only major hire at the U of M was the ill-fated Tic Price. And now the short-term future of Tiger basketball rests with the one-man selection committee -- Johnson. He has a chance to be a hero -- if he can talk John Calipari or some other wildly popular coach into taking the reins of Tiger basketball. But by now Johnson surely knows that Tiger fans are impatient and growing more so with every loss. There is no room for error. THIS & THAT: The leading scorer in the tiny Trans America Athletic Conference is Detric Golden who's averaging 18.3 points per game. He recently scored 45 against Jacksonville State. Troy State is 16-8 overall, and in first place in the TAAC. Before Golden, the school had won a combined 16 games the past two seasons and spent most of 1998 as the worst of 309 teams in Division I basketball. Jimmie Hunter, playing for Life College in Atlanta, ranks sixth in NAIA scoring at 22.7 points per game. Hunter has had multiple 30-point games for Life, which has compiled a stellar 26-1 record. Why isn't Delaware's Mike Bray turning up on more lists of potential Tiger coaches? The Blue Hens are 19-6 (11-4 in conference play). Bray is 94-50 in his only head coaching job. You can e-mail Dennis Freeland at freeland@memphisflyer.com.