Loyola (Ill.) ascends in MVC
Mentor Majerus influenced Moser’s methods
CHICAGO – After a net-cutting coronation for his team’s Missouri Valley Conference regular-season championship — the school’s first title in more than three decades — Loyola (Ill.) coach Porter Moser was yearning to pick up his cellphone and call an old friend.
Six years earlier Rick Majerus had called Moser on Selection Sunday to thank him for his role in St. Louis’ program turnaround (Moser was a Billikens assistant for four years before taking over the Ramblers in 2011).
As Moser’s family shared the moment with him, the 49-year-old coach wanted to return the gesture to his mentor at the culminating point of his own program’s historic turnaround.
“I wish I could call him right now to thank him,” an emotional Moser said of Majerus, who died in 2012. “He meant so much to me. I can still hear his voice.”
Majerus’ words of wisdom are written all over Loyola’s 2017-18 season. The legendary coach preached offensive spacing, and the Ramblers are second best in the nation with a 52% field goal percentage thanks to a spaced offense. He demanded a winning culture, to which Moser deliberately recruited; the Ramblers roster features seven players who won state championships in high school.
“If you want culture, you’ve gotta recruit culture,” Moser said.
But the biggest Majerus imprint of all comes with patience and trusting the process. After getting fired following four seasons at Illinois State in 2007, Moser came to Loyola with anxiety that he couldn’t win fast enough. That’s what made Saturday’s 68-61 regularseason finale so full-circle: The Ramblers celebrated their MVC crown — five years after joining the league from the Horizon — by beating Moser’s former team, Illinois State.
“Coach Majerus helped reaffirm how I wanted to build a program,” Moser said. “When you go through what I went through, it’d be easy to come in and get sped up, make bad decisions. I have letters in my office from coach reminding me to do it the right way — recruit good kids and don’t be in a hurry.”
The patience has paid off this season. With longtime kingpin Wichita State out of the Missouri Valley, Loyola seized the opening and won the regular season by an impressive four-game margin.
The Ramblers have won 25 games this season, the most since the school’s last NCAA tournament appearance in 1985. If they fail to claim an automatic berth in the conference tournament, they’re a bubble team, sporting a 32 RPI and an impressive non-conference road win over Florida on their résumé.
But if Loyola can learn one thing from Illinois State’s historic 28-win campaign last season, in which the Redbirds were Selection Sunday’s most notable snub as the first team on the bubble left out of the field of 68, it’s that an at-large bid for a mid-major is highly unlikely — and not a fate to leave up to the committee.
“The guys have been saying, ‘there’s no finish line,’ and that’s the mind-set we have to have,” Moser said. “We have to play hungrier than we’ve ever been.”
The top-seeded Ramblers tip off the Missouri Valley Conference tournament in St. Louis on Friday with an opening-round game against the winner of No. 8 Evansville vs. No. 9 Northern Iowa. They’re approaching the event as if a loss means the NIT.
“For us, we know what we’re up against as a (midmajor). We know we’ve gotta be the best team for three days,” senior guard Ben Richardson said. “This league is full of tough teams that can beat you on any single night. That’s why we constantly emphasize getting better.”
Richardson’s teammate since third grade, Clayton Custer, is the team’s point guard and leading scorer at 14.2 points per game. The pair won a high school state championship in Kansas together, and Moser says they play like “brothers.” Custer transferred from Iowa State and chose Loyola over Power Five schools Missouri and Creighton.
“When you’re a losing program, that’s hard to overcome in the recruiting pitch,” Moser said. “The pitch was, ‘If you’re a part of the group that changes this, they’ll remember you the rest of your lives.’ You’ve gotta get special kids that believe they can win. This group, they’re all believers.
“It all started with a vision. We got a lot of flak when we joined the Missouri Valley (in 2013). And now to have won the CBI tournament (in 2015) and the regular-season championship this year, it shows we’ve stayed true to that vision.”
Should Loyola claim the Valley’s automatic bid this weekend, Moser thinks his team has a Cinderella makeup. The Ramblers are a projected No. 12 seed in USA TODAY’s bracketology.
“This team shares the ball better than any team I’ve ever seen, and they can shoot the lights out,” Moser said, noting freshman big man Cameron Krutwig gives Loyola a unique inside-out game. “Selflessness is a huge part of having a great culture, and their chemistry off the court has a lot to do with it. You don’t have our type of offense with guys going out there and trying to get theirs.”
Richardson agreed. “I think we’d be a tough matchup in the tournament,” he said. “I think we can play with anybody.”