Year cut short but won’t be forgotten
Lions were on track to make tournament before virus caused cancellation
‘It’s been devastating. Many tears have been shed.’ — Penn State coach Pat Chambers
Penn State honored members of its 2012 football team — who stayed with the program despite NCAA sanctions — by putting their year on the facade at Beaver Stadium that is normally reserved for recognizing championships and undefeated campaigns.
Pat Chambers wants to mark the 201920 men’s basketball team in a similar manner after its historic season was cut short.
In a conference call Friday with the media, the Nittany Lions coach expects the group’s year will be added to a banner at Bryce Jordan Center that displays NCAA tournament appearances. That seemed like an obvious move, even though the team never officially was selected because the tournament was canceled last week amid COVID-19 concerns.
Beyond that, though, he said that a separate banner has been discussed to celebrate a historic campaign that saw Penn State tie its program-best Associated Press ranking at No. 9, spend 10 weeks in the top 25 and earn what many bracket prognosticators expected to a No. 5 or No. 6 seed in March Madness. A small consolation for a group that won’t get to see its mission through.
“It’s been devastating. Many tears have been shed. I’m getting emotional right now,” Chambers said, echoing star forward Lamer Stevens’ poignant comments about the situation last week.
Stevens’ announcement a year ago that he would forgo declaring for the NBA draft to return to Happy Valley for his senior season gave Penn State the sturdy foundation it needed to make a push for its first tournament berth since 2011. This Philadelphia native averaged 17.6 points and 6.9 rebounds per game in earning AllBig Ten Conference recognition and finished 7 points shy of Talor Battle’s program record for career points.
That push ended not on a basketball floor, but a weepy locker room late last week at Jordan Center, where the team gathered to officially learn that the season was over.
Chambers said he aches and hurts at such a finish for a player he called one of the greatest — if not the greatest — in Penn State history. And he wishes, at the very least, Stevens and his fellow seniors could have enjoyed being part of a Selection Sunday bracket revelation.
“I feel cheated when it comes to something like that,” Chambers said. “Not just for me, not for the nine-year guys that have been on this staff, but for the players like Lamar Stevens. What a storybook ending it would have been. A kid who could have went pro and started his professional clock decides not to. There were so many lessons to be learned there.”
Instead, the program must look toward a future for which it’s built a solid foundation.
Stevens and fellow seniors Mike Watkins and Curtis Jones Jr. will be gone, but three of the team’s top five scorers remain in Myreon Jones and Myles Dread — both sophomores — and freshman Izaiah Brockington. All of them averaged at least 8.1 points per game.
But what about the coach? Chambers figures to be in line for a sizable raise for leading the program to the history it has made in the past few months. Will he get it from Penn State?
He said it’s probably fair to expect that there will need to be some negotiation, but he’s “hopeful” he’ll be at Penn State for years to come and feels he has the support of his athletic director, Sandy Barbour, who stuck by him through disappointments in the past.
“She’s fired up. Sandy Barbour’s fired up,” he said.
“I’m appreciative of Sandy and what she’s done for me. This should be a case study here of being patient and sticking with somebody.”
He also said future basketball dates with Pitt could be coming.
The in-state rivals have played only occasionally this century despite almost 150 all-time meetings. They’ve not met on campus since 2013 or at all since 2017-18, when the Lions bludgeoned a Kevin Stallings-led Panthers team that ended up finishing winless in the ACC.
Now that successor Jeff Capel has built the program back up to respectability, Chambers feels a renewal could make sense for both sides.
“Jeff has done a great job there. They’re up and coming,” he said. “They’ve got some really good young talent, and that young talent is older now. I think they’re juniors now, so I expect him to be in the top half of the ACC.”