N.M. State coach makes most of 2nd shot
SAN DIEGO – Chris Jans never would be in this position if nobody dared to take another chance on him.
He knows it. He almost blew it. In April 2015, Bowling Green fired him after his only season there as men’s basketball coach. He brought it on himself and apologized for what he did — getting intoxicated, behaving badly and slapping a woman’s buttocks at a bar.
Later that year, Wichita State coach Gregg Marshall pulled him back up and hired him as a staff consultant.
New Mexico State officials picked him to lead their program last April, setting off moves that have placed Jans and the Aggies on the national stage Friday as a fashionable pick to upset fifth-seeded Clemson in the NCAA tournament.
“I’m very fortunate to have an inner circle of people that believe in me,” Jans said this week. “It starts with my wife, and certainly I relied on my faith to get us through a very trying time. And like I tell everybody, I’m forever grateful to Gregg Marshall and the Wichita State administration for allowing me to get back on my feet and put myself in a position to have another chance to run my own program.”
Fittingly for Jans, Marshall’s Wichita State is among the eight teams at Viejas Arena for first-round games Friday. Even more fittingly, Jans got here with a team that is stocked with second-chance cases like himself, including transfers from several other colleges. His star player, Zach Lofton, is even getting a fifth chance of sorts. He’s playing for his fifth college after graduating from Texas Southern and getting dismissed from Minnesota for not meeting team obligations.
They call themselves the Junkyard Dogs. The Aggies roster lists nine transfers, including point guard A.J. Harris (from Ohio State before Jans arrived) as well as players from Utah and Denver who aren’t eligible until next season.
All had their own reasons for trying over, such as hopes for a better fit. Transfers from junior colleges usually were unqualified or overlooked out of high school. This is a fresh start for them, too.
“We play scrappy and grind,” said Shunn Buchanan, a transfer Jans recruited from Northeast Mississippi Community College.
They have come together to stress defense and rebounding and have won 28 of 33 games despite undergoing drastic turnover after coach Paul Weir left to take over in-state rival New Mexico.
“They like one another,” Jans said. “We’ve been blessed that way. They’ve bonded well with a lot of guys of different backgrounds and not being together as a group very long.”
It started with a big choice by school officials. They accepted the risk with Jans, 48. An editorial in the local paper, the Las Cruces Sun News, called his hiring “an informed risk” and said “none of us want to be remembered for our worst or most embarrassing moment.”
Jans spoke about the incident at his introductory new conference at New Mexico State, calling it “an embarrassment for college basketball.” Then he took over the team and found his roster in tatters, part of the upheaval that often comes with a coaching change. Eight players left from last year’s team despite having eligibility remaining, forcing Jans onto the recruiting trail to fill his lineup and install his brand of basketball.
He soon connected with Lofton, whom he heard was interested in moving to another team as a graduate transfer. Besides Minnesota, where Lofton never got to play a game, he’d ranked second in scoring at Illinois State in 2013-14 with 11.3 points per game. Before that, he played at San Jacinto College as a freshman.
“I just wanted to go somewhere a little bit bigger,” Lofton said of his transfer. “At first it was my intention to go somewhere a little bit bigger than New Mexico State, but here it felt like the right fit.”
He averages 19.8 points for the Aggies, who had grown accustomed to success under Weir and previous coach Marvin Menzies. They’re making their sixth NCAA tournament appearance in seven years after winning the Western Athletic Conference. But they are doing it in a different way with another new coach.
New Mexico State ranks fifth nationally in rebound margin and fifth in field goal percentage defense (39.2%).
“They bought into playing with that nasty type of attitude and that approach that we’re not the biggest bunch, and we don’t shoot the ball extremely well from (three-point range),” said Jans, who previously led Bowling Green to a 21-12 record in his only other season as a Division I head coach. “We’re one of the worst free throw shooting teams in the country, but we’re going to fight you tooth and nail to the end. And we’re going to rely on defense and rebounding and toughness to pull us through on those nights when the ball is not going through the hoop.”
It’s a far cry from where they were at the beginning of the season in November after losing an exhibition game to Texas Tech 84-54 in Midland, Texas.
“We got our tails whacked,” Jans said. “We got crushed. It was an embarrassing game. We got beat by 30. It was a wakeup call for us, and I really believe that was the impetus for change.”
Sometimes that’s just what it takes, as long as there’s another chance to try again.