3 INGREDIENTS FOR NCAA UPSET
Winning recipe often includes veteran roster
This is why we watch.
Productivity across the country grinds to a halt for two days each March — a 48-hour period many fans consider the best in sports each year — as we wait for our Cinderellas to emerge. We wait for the double-digit seed we knew nothing about that will captivate us and exhilarate us and have us screaming at our TVs as it pulls off a most unlikely upset. We wait for another. A third, perhaps. These upsets never get old.
We’re holding out hope that someday we’ll witness the impossible, a No. 16 seed taking out a No. 1, the one thing that’s never happened amid all of the chaos and unpredictability of the NCAA tournament. But until then, we’re comforted by teams such as high-
flying, dunk-happy Florida Gulf Coast, which last year beat No. 2 Georgetown and then became the first No. 15 seed to advance to the Sweet 16.
Since the NCAA tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985, seven No. 15 seeds have beaten No. 2 seeds; it’s happened three times in the last two years. Seventeen No. 14 seeds have beaten No. 3s, including a most unlikely underdog — Harvard — taking out New Mexico last March.
We remember Kyle O’Quinn, the gregarious Norfolk State senior forever immortalized in March Madness lore because of a No. 15-No. 2 upset of Missouri in 2012. His eyes wide in disbelief, his smile stretching from ear to ear — the image snapped just after the final buzzer encapsulated the unbridled joy of an improbable upset.
We remember C.J. McCollum pushing Lehigh past Duke in Greensboro, N.C. We remember Stephen Curry before he was Stephen Curry leading Davidson to an Elite Eight in 2008. We remember meeting Shaka Smart and learning what “Havoc” meant during VCU’s Final Four run in 2011. We remember Butler, both times. We remember the first No. 15 to take out a No. 2, Dick Tarrant’s Richmond Spiders upsetting Jim Boeheim and Syracuse in 1991. We remember names, faces, moments.
“I stressed to my players, it isn’t necessarily the better team that wins,” Tarrant says. “It’s the team that plays better basketball in that 40-minute time frame. If you can play real good ball between tip-off and the finish, you can beat much better teams who are bigger, stronger, faster.”
Says Boeheim: “It happens because, for the last 10, 15, 20 years, those smaller schools think they can win — even more so now. The pressure kind of goes to the favored team.
“It’s difficult. You don’t like it, but it happens.”
Three ingredients for an NCAA upset:
VETERAN PLAYERS
Midmajor teams are generally full of three- and four-year players, making the ones that reach the NCAA tournament experienced squads with good chemistry and camaraderie. Lehigh and Norfolk State, which pulled off No. 15-vs.-No. 2 upsets within hours of each other in 2012, had lots of juniors and seniors. McCollum was a junior and twotime Patriot League player of the year. O’Quinn was a senior and Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference player of the year.
“With experience comes games under your belt and all you’ve been through,” O’Quinn says. “Going into the game, we obviously knew the odds were against us; that was the toughest part to deal with. Once you get over that aspect, you start thinking, ‘ Man, this could be my last college game.’ I think for the sen- iors, which was a lot of us, we just said we had one last shot to get one last game. We didn’t want it to be our last game.”
Norfolk State and Florida Gulf Coast won games in their program’s first NCAA tournament appearance, but that’s rare. Consider the cases of Lehigh, Harvard and Davidson.
All three had been to the NCAA tournament in the year or two leading up to their big upsets, so a significant portion of their players were unfazed by the spotlight and not overwhelmed by the moment.
“(We) certainly talked about not wanting to just be satisfied by just being there,” Harvard coach Tommy Amaker says. “We really talked about advancing.”
Says longtime Davidson coach Bob McKillop: “The year before (2008), we had played Maryland. We had had a lead. I think we had like an eight-point lead in the 16minute mark of the second half. We did not know how to respond to that. When we had the deficit against Gonzaga and against Georgetown (a year later), we knew how to respond.
“We had been there in that tournament setting before. That’s one of the difficulties for teams that are not regular participants in the NCAA tournament. Those rosters do not get that kind of experience.”
Teams in the 2014 NCAA tournament field that fit this mold include Manhattan, Harvard, North Dakota State and Western Michigan.
A STAR PLAYER
Now they’re on NBA rosters. But they became household names because of dynamic NCAA tournament appearances.
“Having one great player that people don’t realize how good they are (is key),” says ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla, who mentions Wally Szczerbiak, who led Miami (Ohio) to the Sweet 16 in 1999 as a No. 10 seed.
Multiple players fit this mold in recent years. Curry. McCollum. Kenneth Faried at Morehead State. O’Quinn. If a double-digit seed has a guy like that, you better watch out.
“When you have a player who can elevate his level of play, it helps any team in that type of environment,” Lehigh coach Brett Reed says. “The floor was opened up for C.J. … He just rose to the moment.”
“I knew the only way we were going to be able to win was going to be if I took over the game and left my mark,” McCollum says. “I told my brother and parents going into the game, if I got 30, we’d win.”
McCollum scored 30 in Lehigh’s upset of Duke in 2012. Faried had 12 points and 17 rebounds in Morehead State’s No. 13-over-No. 4 upset of Louisville a year before. O’Quinn posted 26 points and 14 rebounds to lead Norfolk State past Missouri. Butler’s Gordon Hayward carried the Bulldogs into the 2010 national championship game.
The best example: Curry’s 2008 NCAA tournament. He scored, in succession, 40 points against Gonzaga, 30 against Georgetown, 33 against Wisconsin and 25 against Kansas.
“Without doubt, Stephen Curry’s presence was the first ingredient to our upsets,” says McKillop, the Davidson coach. “He was as vital to pulling off those upsets as he was vital to leading us to the number of wins that we had during the season. I never talked to him about needing to step up. I talked to him very directly and clearly that the rhythm of the season must become the rhythm of the postseason.”
Underdog teams with players who fit that mold in this year’s NCAA tournament field include Louisiana-Lafayette with Elfrid Payton, Texas Southern with Aaric Murray, Eastern Kentucky with Glenn Cosey and Weber State with Davion Berry.
A DIFFERENT STYLE OF PLAY
Former FGCU coach Andy En- field does not like to say Florida Gulf Coast did anything out of the ordinary last year, even though the Eagles’ fun, fast-paced, dunk-friendly offense gained its fair share of attention — including from the Harlem Globetrotters.
“We just spread the floor and tried to play up-tempo basketball,” says Enfield, now with Southern California. “We also averaged nine steals a game. We tried to get our offense going with our defense. I guess you could say we had a style to our team, but I don’t consider our style unusual.
“At the midmajor level, our style enabled us to compete at a higher level because of certain strengths we had.”
Smart and VCU have proved over the years — and certainly during their 2011 Final Four run — that their swarming “Havoc” defense is extremely difficult for opponents to prepare for, especially on short turnarounds.
“Style of play differences have been good for us when we play teams that just haven’t seen ours,” Smart says.
In fact, for teams and programs that play in a unique way, it can be almost easier to play in the NCAA tournament than it is to compete in conference play.
Teams in the 2014 field that fit this mold include Manhattan and its motion offense, Weber State and its run-and-gun style, New Mexico State and the system it runs through 7-5 Sim Bhullar and Stephen F. Austin and its turnover-generating defense.
MATCHUPS VS. MAGIC
It’s worth noting there are some people who might not root for Cinderellas quite like the rest of us. They’re the ones broadcasting the games.
“Ratings were always critical, so you always wanted the right matchups and the right games,” says American Athletic Conference Commissioner Mike Aresco, who worked as the executive vice president at CBS Sports and oversaw NCAA tournament coverage. “The truth is, every now and then the Cinderella story was terrific. But you also wanted those big guys duking it out at the end.
“You’re always torn, because those brand names are the ones that typically generate the ratings, but I can remember so many upsets, so many great moments. That tournament is always going to have them. It’s part of the charm.”
That’s what we bank on each year when we fill out our brackets and turn on our television sets. We never know who will fill those roles.
And at the end of the day, even those involved in Cinderella stories laugh at the idea that they could identify the next one.
“If I could,” Smart says, “I should retire from coaching and go to Vegas.”