NSU vs. ODU in basketball? Don't bet on it.

I can't be the only local citizen to wonder, after last week's football hullabaloo between Norfolk State and Old Dominion, whether the schools might be primed to revive their dormant basketball series.

Saturday's game was such a party for 20,000 of social and civic unity - with the promise of six more beginning in 2013. So maybe the time's right to try to re-create some hardwood goodwill, you know?

So I did some checking Monday with the people who could make it happen. And the short, killjoy answer is ODU coach Blaine Taylor's dearly departed 'stache will reappear on his upper lip before Spartans and Monarchs meet for a game of hoops.

It's not happening, that is, for reasons starting with uninterested coaches to lack of ultimate gain for ODU, the much bigger athletic dog on the block.

"It hasn't even been in our mindset," Taylor said. "We haven't necessarily called them, and they haven't necessarily called us. I do about 20 call-in radio shows a year. I probably get one question a year, sometimes none, on that subject."

Said Norfolk State's fifth-year coach Anthony Evans, "There hasn't been any true attempt to get a game, to be honest with you. With the success of the football game, if there's something in the future, then of course, if the interest is there."

Records show the schools' basketball teams met 17 times from 1965 to 2001, including three Division II playoffs. (ODU holds an 11-6 edge.) The "rivalry" hibernated from the early '80s to the late '90s, when it was rekindled twice at Scope.

The meeting during Christmas week of '99 was a lively event. The next day's print report featured yours truly in full gag mode: "(It was) a cold winter's night warmed by the roar and raw emotion of 7,135 people."

Evidently, all that emotion tapped everybody out or something. Thirteen months later, in January of '01, NSU-ODU drew barely half that crowd, 3,812, and deserved to be put back to sleep.

Taylor has since handpicked MEAC teams for nonconference games at the Constant Center and even visited Hampton University early in his tenure, a date he said he inherited from coach Jeff Capel.

But trust me, even if Taylor wanted to play Norfolk State, which he doesn't, he'd never do it anywhere but The Ted, and it's unlikely NSU would acquiesce.

Taylor said he started at ODU trying to produce the area's "universal team" of interest. It didn't suit that goal to fuel a crosstown rivalry.

Nonetheless, NSU athletic director Marty Miller - though he met my question about why the basketball teams don't play with a resigned chuckle - said he'd at least like to float the idea with his ODU counterpart, Wood Selig.

"We're gonna have to sit down and discuss it," Miller said. "I think the football game gives an indication about the kind of excitement that would be generated."

Maybe, maybe not. In any event, Taylor and Selig agreed the football series, in which each school will get three regular-season home games, isn't a template for basketball.

ODU and NSU practically have to schedule each other in football. The financial savings in moving a mammoth traveling party only across town for a viable game demand it.

And unlike fickle hoops, where one hot player can fire an upset, ODU football has precious little competitive risk playing Norfolk State. It spends twice as much on it as NSU and should annually have greater, deeper talent and the better team.

Selig said a previous conversation with Miller tells him, "If we wanted to consider it (in basketball), they would certainly be potentially receptive to that."

And you know, if cows wanted to fly, I'd be potentially receptive to seeing it.

Tom Robinson, (757) 446-2518, tom.robinson@pilotonline.com

Twitter @RobinsonVP