“Can’t make it if you can’t get it off.” – Tylor Perry, on how North Texas adjusted to Chucky Hepburn
“In the first half they just lost me a couple times. In the second half, I don’t think they lost me.” – Chucky Hepburn
“Remember. That’s one thing coach always says: if you can’t make history, be that team that’s remembered.” – Eric Gaines
“I’m just extremely proud of everybody, including Aziz, man. Everybody just fought. That’s why we’re going to keep our heads high and that’s why we are going to remain positive. We fought to the end and had several chances to win. Again, I’m just proud of everybody.” – Trey Woodbury
Last year gave us a phenomenal championship game. 2019 gave us one special quarterfinal. But to find one semifinal as good as last night’s, you might have to go back to Valpo/BYU in 2016. To find two in the same tournament? 2007, the year all four 1-seeds made the Final Four.
It was an incredible night of basketball, under both the “great” and the “unbelievable” definitions of that word. Wisconsin froze. North Texas grinded. Utah Valley and UAB played just the game you’d expect two teams with that level of athleticism to play.
Wisconsin is getting dragged right now, and that’s probably deserved. A nine-minute scoring drought is bad. A nine-minute scoring drought to close the game is worse. They did hold North Texas to only ten points over that drought, but they didn’t score for nine minutes.
Still, how about that North Texas defense? There’s a reason this team would be favored if it played any of Virginia, Illinois, and Northwestern right now, and so much of that reason is that on the ball, North Texas defends with ferocity. That’s what it is: Ferocity. North Texas is ferocious. We can compare them to a steamroller, we can compare them to flypaper, but the thing they are is ferocious. Over their last ten games, they’ve held teams below 50 just as often as they’ve let teams score 60.
Wisconsin, to its credit, also defended well. There were moments of panic on the offensive end, but defensively, you can tell they know what to do, and they do it well. The program admittedly has cursed vibes right now, and this was a horrifying way to enter the offseason, but you can build a high floor off of being a well-drilled team that’s buying in on the defensive end. There is work to do in Madison, but Wisconsin will be back.
In the second game, UAB again showed the value, yet again, of having Dudes. Ty Brewer only missed four shots last night. He took 17. He had five steals to go with the 30 points and twelve boards. With Jelly Walker continuing to struggle from the floor, it’s been different guys stepping up: Trey Jemison against Vanderbilt. Ty Brewer against Morehead State. KJ Buffen against Southern Miss. Last night, it was again Brewer, but the point is: This team has options. I don’t know how exactly Andy Kennedy is constructing these rosters. Almost everyone is a transfer, but there’s a mix of guys transferring down from bigger conferences (Gaines – LSU, Buffen – Mississippi, Jemison – Clemson) and guys making lateral moves (Walker – Tulane) and guys moving upwards (Brewer – ETSU). Is this tapping untapped potential? Is this identification of talent? Is this simple strong transfer recruiting? Part of it is just that these are grown men—per KenPom, the team had the fifth-most D-I experience in the country this year, behind Penn State & IPFW & Notre Dame & Virginia—but these grown men are playing particularly well.
Utah Valley was a sensation, as they’ve been all tournament. It’s weird, when a team scored 74 in regulation, to say what I’m about to say, but UAB shut them down. It was the first time in over a month that UVU hadn’t reached one point per possession (credit, again, to KenPom on all stats in here). How did UAB do it? A lot of it was switching up half-court defenses, but a lot of it was purely focus. We’ve kept saying it, but it’s been a big part of this tournament: Utah Valley punished teams this year who didn’t get back on defense. I’m not sure the Wolverines’ slow start had as much to do with the looks UAB was giving as it had to do with UAB just getting its guys back to their baseline before Utah Valley could throw a lob.
Notes on the in-person experience:
- The crowd was small. I think fewer than three thousand people attended the two-game evening. This is to be expected when two of the schools are mid-majors and one’s a low-major and the games are on a Tuesday night within driving distance of only one of the four schools.
- The crowd was loud. Both the Wisconsin sections and the North Texas section had moments of absolutely roaring. Utah Valley’s fans were loud the whole night. The UAB family/administration section (I think that’s what it was) came to life late, and came to life in a big way, after the band had carried most of the load throughout the evening. High noise-per-person last night in Las Vegas.
- The Green Man Group is way better than I thought it would be. I was a Green Man Group doubter, but those guys are so much fun, and they’re also really strong showmen. I don’t know enough about percussion to comment on them as a drumline, but they were so fun to watch. During their halftime, I was sitting near the Baylor contingent (Scott Drew brought a little crew out, for reasons unclear to me), and you know a halftime show is good when guys who’ve seen hundreds of basketball games are completely engrossed.
- The Utah Valley crowd erupted when President Tuminez was shown on the jumbotron. Find you another school that loves its president this much.
- Fran Fraschilla was wearing great sneakers. White Nikes, I believe.
- The North Texas Mullet Child™ is reportedly Grant McCasland’s son.
- In the North Texas media guide, they advertise that McCasland was once kicked out of practice as a walk-on at Baylor for refusing to let a future NBA player dunk on him.
- General Admission life is stressful. Hard to leave your signs and have a wee.
- All four mascots were in attendance but Bucky was the best at playing to the crowd. Pro’s pro.
- The PA team was very willing to pander. Jump Around was played twice.
- My read on what happened with the refs in the UAB/Utah Valley game is that they missed a bad call or two against Utah Valley early, and then they got rattled, which ultimately led to them missing bad calls against UAB. I felt like they’d lost control by the end and were doing a lot of guessing, but thankfully the game was good enough that this didn’t become the story.
- I was surprised how vicious some fans were. I forget which UAB player hurt his shoulder on a block call, but a Utah Valley fan yelled that he “got what he deserved,” which was insane. Bad behavior. A Wisconsin fan either called the ref or Moulaye Sissoko “a cartoon.” Hoping that was the ref. I don’t think calling a guy from Mali a cartoon is ok, even if wasn’t intended that way.
- Twitter is amazing and highly useful for live sports. Was really helpful in knowing what fans knew on TV, interacting with people watching at home, etc. I always forget that, but The Barking Crow is heavily indebted to the existence of Twitter. Specifically, my part of The Barking Crow is indebted to it.
- The North Texas “band” was a bunch of older folks wearing North Texas polos, which makes me think it wasn’t even the UNLV band and was actually just local music teachers or something. It’s been rumored that UNT’s sending the real deal tomorrow.
More on the championship game tomorrow, which is Round 4 between UAB and UNT this year. What a month for the USA.
