STAGE BLIGHT
It’s time to win for OSU
INDIANAPOLIS, IND. — Phil Forte, Leyton Hammonds and Jawun Evans climbed the portable metal stairs, reached the podium high above the assembled media and settled into chairs in front of a March Madness backdrop.
In the world’s greatest hoops cathedral Thursday, OSU basketball officially was back on the big stage.
But don’t get the idea that the NCAA Tournament is foreign territory to the Cowboys.
Coach Brad Underwood took the Stephen F. Austin Lumberjacks to NCAA glory last March with a first-round upset of West Virginia. Hammonds played in first-round OSU losses to Gonzaga in 2014 and Oregon in 2015.
This is Forte’s fourth NCAA Tournament, which equals the combined number for Bob Kurland and Byron
Houston.
Heck, Travis Ford was fired last March, and he had coached the Cowboys to five NCAAs in the previous seven years, which was the ratio for Eddie Sutton’s first seven seasons.
So Pistol Pete’s Stetson is old hat in the big dance. Getting here, like against Michigan on Friday at Bankers Life Fieldhouse, has not been the issue. Winning has been. The Cowboys have lost five straight NCAA Tournament games. Not since March 20, 2009, when Byron Eaton’s killer crossover created a three-point play with 6.7 seconds left in the game and beat Tennessee, has OSU won in the NCAAs.
Since that 77-75 victory for the brighter shade of orange, 112 schools have posted NCAA Tournament victories. None of them from Stillwater. It’s time for OSU to get back in the business of winning in March.
“Obviously that’s your mentality coming in,” said Forte, who has averaged 9.7 points in three NCAA Tournament games. “Being 0-3 is something in the back of my mind.”
NCAA Tournament success once was standard procedure for the Cowboys. Sutton returned to his alma mater in 1990, and in his 15 full seasons, OSU went to 13 NCAAs, won 22 NCAA games and reached two Final Fours and six Sweet 16s.
“We have a long history at Oklahoma State of success in the NCAA Tournament,” Underwood said. “This should not be a foreign place for Oklahoma State basketball. The history of our program proves that out.”
But since March 20, 2005, when the Cowboys beat Southern Illinois in the round of 32, OSU basketball has posted that one solitary victory in the NCAA Tournament. It’s time the Cowboys not only reach this stage, but advance on this stage.
“It’s very important,” said OSU center Mitchell Solomon. “Got a new coach and a lot of fan support behind us. A win this weekend can even further that momentum that we have in Stillwater and keep it rolling.”
This is prime opportunity for the Cowboys. Michigan is tough, having won 10 of 12, including a spirited four-game run to the Big Ten Tournament title. The Wolverines arrive with the better seed in this 7-10 matchup. But OSU has stars; Evans and Jeffrey Carroll are the kind of players who can carry a team through the March Madness minefield. And there’s no guarantee that Evans, a sophomore, will return next season.
Basketball programs go through droughts. Michigan, for example. The Wolverines are basketball royalty. Seven Final Fours. The 1989 NCAA championship. A 52-25 NCAA Tournament record, the 14th-most wins ever.
But the Wolverines didn’t even make the NCAA Tournament between 1998 and 2009. Then John Beilein, hired away from West Virginia in 2007, got Michigan into the tournament in ’09, and those 10th-seeded Wolverines beat Clemson in the first round, the day before Eaton’s heroics. Michigan has won 10 NCAA Tournament games since.
“That was the goal,” Beilein said. “It wasn’t just to get there and say, ‘OK, we did it.’”
Michigan is the company OSU basketball ought to be keeping. Instead, the Cowboys are in a group with the likes of TCU, Texas Tech, Nebraska, Oregon State, Washington State, Seton Hall and some SEC schools that think of basketball only as an activity to bring football recruits to on a winter night. Of the 75 schools in the major conferences (including the Big East), only 16 have gone longer without an NCAA win than have the Cowboys.
No better place for that to change than here in the basketball capital of the world, where in 1993 (vs. Marquette) and 1999 (vs. Syracuse), Sutton won NCAA Tournament openers that were virtual tossups. That was back when the big stage was not a destination, but a path, for Cowboy hoops.