Welcome to Final Four week, dogs and cats. Let’s get to know our four participants (much sourcing from Wikipedia, Google Maps, and my heart).
Washington State University
Founded: 1890
Type: Public land-grant research university
Enrollment: 28,581 total; 20,286 Pullman campus; 17,329 undergrad Pullman campus
Nickname: Cougars
Official Hashtag: #NerdBall
Unofficial Hashtag: #CougarTown
Distance Traveled to Madison Square Garden: 2,166 miles
NIT Titles: None
NIT Final Fours: One (2011)
NIT Archetype: Up-and-Comer
Institutional Vibe: Ag School, But Make It Washington
Washington State is the Iowa State of Washington. Or the Virginia Tech of Washington. Or the Kansas State or the Mississippi State or the Auburn or the Oklahoma State or the Oregon State or the Michigan State of Washington. It’s a school that’s hard to define without also defining its rival, because it and its rival are two poles of the classic intrastate college rivalry. Washington State is traditionally the ag school. It’s more blue-collar. It’s more conservative. It’s looked down on when University of Washington people get snobby. Located in Pullman, upwards of an hour from even Spokane, it’s an isolated, beautiful place. It also doesn’t have as many fancy things as its in-state rival, the more affluent, more liberal, more “cultured” public institution of higher learning. It is the everyman’s school in the state of Washington.
There isn’t all that much basketball history out on the Palouse. Klay Thompson played there, and Tony Bennett coached there, and you can find other names you’d know if you combed deeply enough through the years, but among power conference schools who’ve been power conference schools as long as WSU’s been a power conference school, few have as little historic success as Washington State. Which, along with geography, makes this trip to New York a big deal for the program and not altogether insignificant for the school as a whole. Before this year, Washington State hadn’t played basketball past the Pac-12 Tournament since 2012, when they lost in the CBI championship series (it was a best of three, it went three games, WSU lost Games 2 and 3) to Pitt. An entire decade without a postseason berth, and now a trip to Madison Square Garden? This is big!
It’s been an odd season for the Cougars, who racked up a lengthy list of bad, close losses in nonconference play and then spent two weeks in February losing five straight games. They were an NIT bubble team, they cracked the field when the committee went big on predictive metrics rather than résumé, and they haven’t looked back. Three straight decisive victories, the last two on the road against SMU and BYU.
The predictive-metrics piece of this is big, because Washington State’s a team built on what it itself likes to call “NerdBall.” It’s a more apt naming of what society currently calls “moneyball,” (Moneyball was about money, not just numbers) and what it really means is that head coach Kyle Smith uses things like statistics and game theory to shape his coaching. A lot of this comes out in the overall style of the team—they shoot a lot of threes, they crash the offensive glass, they have one of the best turnover margins in the country—but a lot of it is also in-game decisions, most visibly decisions on when and who and how to foul, and when and where and why to look for threes rather than twos. It’s this innovation, coupled with transfer senior Michael Flowers (who has a tragic story behind him, if you’re looking for a cry), that has the Cougars this far; and it’s this innovation, coupled with a young roster, that has the Cougars expected to be a competitive team in next year’s Pac-12. We would guess WSU will be ranked in the top four of the league come media day.
In the meantime, though, there’s a national championship to be won, and while the Cougars are expected to have the smallest crowd on hand in New York, they’re probably the best team there.
Texas A&M University
Founded: 1876
Type: Public flagship land-grant research senior military college
Enrollment: 72,982 total; 57,428 undergrad
Nickname: Aggies
Official Hashtag: #getBETTER (with a rocketship emoji)
Unofficial Hashtag: #NotACult
Distance Traveled to Madison Square Garden: 1,431 miles
NIT Titles: None
NIT Final Fours: None
NIT Archetype: Giant-in-Waiting
Institutional Vibe: Insecure
Spend enough time in Texas and you will either grow mildly concerned about and scared of Texas A&M or you will buy the hell in. Multiple times in the last six months—once in October, once a few weeks ago—I spoke with someone who’d recently been to A&M for the first time, and the prominent emotion shared both times was one of unease. “Well, they have a lot of traditions…”
It’s a special school, if you do buy in. There’s a reason so many love it. There’s also a reason so many make fun of it, especially here in Austin, where the University of Texas could lose to A&M ten straight times on the gridiron and still probably feel like big brother (see: A&M’s reaction to Texas and Oklahoma joining the SEC). Altogether, A&M’s mostly weird. Weird enough that every conversation with an A&M person about A&M feels oddly loaded, like they’re preparing to defend their honor.
Historically, Texas A&M hasn’t been much of a basketball school. There are programs out there that haven’t made an NIT Final Four because they’ve been spending all their time in that other tournament, and A&M is not one of them. What they do have at A&M is one of the largest alumni bases in the country, and a committed alumni base at that, which has Buzz Williams among the highest-paid college basketball coaches nationally (he was listed twelfth on a recent USA Today list, but it was unclear how many private schools that included, or if that mattered, and then I got paywalled and I can’t justify paying legitimate currency to the newspaper hotels hand out so they can brag about how much they recycle).
Williams is a great coach, and one of the best testaments to his coaching is how much he adjusts year-over-year. He’s coached fast teams (Marquette, 2012). He’s coached slow teams (Virginia Tech, 2019). He’s coached teams that dominate the offensive glass (Marquette, 2013). He’s coached teams where the only priority once the shot goes up is getting back on defense (Virginia Tech, 2017). By the end of his time at Virginia Tech, his defenses had a similar shot chart to Tony Bennett’s at Virginia, forcing teams to beat them from deep. (Are we going to mention Tony Bennett in each of these blurbs? You can’t stop us if we do.) That was the idea early in College Station, too, but he’s gotten away from it, and this year’s team’s identity is one of aggression. They force turnovers. They generate second opportunities on offense. They get to the free throw line. They stink at shooting. They’re a strong, feisty team, without much in the way of height but with a few great weapons on offense (Tyrece Radford is shooting 42% from deep on 108 attempts, Quenton Jackson’s averaging 14.5 points on fewer than ten shots per game), and they play outstanding defense. They murdered the Wake Forest offensive gameplan in the quarterfinals, cutting off possessions before they began. They dismantled an Arkansas offense two weeks ago which Gonzaga then struggled to deal with in San Francisco.
The biggest NIT story involving the Aggies, and involving Buzz Williams, has been Williams showing up to his opening-round press conference carrying pages of printed out statistics arguing Texas A&M should not have wound up in the NIT. It was a very Buzz Williams move, if that gives you any idea about this guy’s deal. Was he correct? I don’t know, but the Aggies lucked out. They avoided the NCA* *********t, they’re in New York now, and as with their semifinal opponent, Washington State, the program’s future looks bright. Potentially very, very bright, seeing how well the athletic department’s recruiting elsewhere in the young NIL era. Imagine how the boosters could pitch recruits after bringing home a national title when many thought they’d been excluded from the tournament. Sensational stuff.
Xavier University
Founded: 1831
Type: Private university (Catholic [Jesuit])
Enrollment: 6,651 total; 5,145 undergrad
Nickname: Musketeers
Official Hashtag: #LetsGoX
Unofficial Hashtag: #SeanWasFramed
Distance Traveled to Madison Square Garden: 566 miles
NIT Titles: One (1958)
NIT Final Fours: Two (1958, 1999)
NIT Archetype: Recovering Underachiever
Institutional Vibe: Cincinnati Rich
You can only be so rich in Cincinnati, which I know isn’t actually true, but it feels true, and that’s why it feels like Xavier is kind of an Ohio-brand Georgetown or Villanova. A lot of this is the proximity to and rivalry with the University of Cincinnati, a large public school that leaned into bad-boy branding back in the Bob Huggins era, something Xavier then pulled the reverse on when projecting its own identity. Really, Xavier’s kind of just-another-midwestern-private-school, something like Marquette or Butler or Creighton, historically a mid-major but currently reaping the benefits of conference realignment in a basketball-first league. Had the Big East not come calling, they’d be more equivalent to Dayton. The Big East came calling. Sorry, Dayton. Should have had an inexplicable run of decades of moderate national success.
Why the Big East came calling is that the Big East, for reasons unknown to us (we’ve always been quite kind to the Big East), hates the NIT. And for a long time—18 years, starting in 2001 and ending in 2019—the Musketeers did not play in the NIT, most often (17 of the 18 times) because they were playing in that other tournament. The stretch goes even deeper than that, if you want it to. Beginning in 1986, Pete Gillen’s first spring in charge of the program, Xavier made the NIT only four times prior to 2019, and they only missed the NCAA-run postseason entirely (meaning, they didn’t play in the NIT or the occupying tournament) an additional four times. That’s a 76% rate of making the NCA* *********t over a time period that saw Xavier move from the Midwestern Collegiate Conference (now the Horizon League) through the A-10 and up into high-major land. One of the guys in charge on that journey? Sean Miller, who was announced the other day as Xavier’s new, renewed head basketball coach. Sean Miller’s back, Xavier’s banking on a light punishment if the NCAA survives long enough to hand one out for Miller’s alleged crimes at Arizona, he isn’t coaching this tournament but I like to think he’ll be pacing the hallways of Madison Square Garden, calling his sponsor every time he gets the urge to offer a high school kid’s parents a Skyline to-go bag full of cash.
Actually coaching Xavier this week is Jonas Hayes, the interim coach who’s been leading the team ever since Travis Steele and Xavier “mutually parted ways.” Hayes has the X-Men playing some of their best basketball of the season, taking a talented roster that crashed and burned once conference play started and leading it to survival against Cleveland State, a thumping of Florida, and an emotional comeback win over Vanderbilt at home. It hasn’t been an easy trip—Paul Scruggs, a senior and the team’s highest-usage offensive player, tore his ACL in the Florida win—but here they are, with a lot of height, some ability to score in transition, and a fanbase forecasted to travel mediumly to the Big Apple.
St. Bonaventure University
Founded: 1858
Type: Private (Catholic [Franciscan])
Enrollment: 2,419 total; 1,850 undergrad
Nickname: Bonnies
Official Hashtag: #Unfurl
Unofficial Hashtag: #DefinitelyACult
Distance Traveled to Madison Square Garden: 250 miles
NIT Titles: One (1977)
NIT Final Fours: Six (1952, 1957, 1958, 1960, 1971, 1977)
NIT Archetype: One Last Run for the Seniors
Institutional Vibe: No, really. This is a cult.
Find you someone who loves you like St. Bonaventure loves the Bonnies. But actually, don’t. Because that person will wear your skin as a cloak.
Since St. Bonaventure lost in the Atlantic 10 Tournament, we have heard more from the Bonnie faithful than we’ve ever heard from anyone ever, which is especially surprising because the school is tiny, possibly just a roadside attraction off New York State Route 417. St. Bonaventure ostensibly exists to educate and to shape upstanding moral beings and all that, but what really seems to be happening here is that a cosmic prankster thought it’d be funny to build a basketball program somewhere along the highway between Erie and Binghamton and put a little school around it. All that love Saint Peter’s is getting would easily come St. Bonaventure’s way, were the school’s own basketball history not so rich. Back when college basketball was becoming college basketball, St. Bonaventure was a frequent sight in the AP Poll and at the NIT, and that legacy never fully went away. It joined the A-10 when the A-10 became the A-10, entering in 1982 as the league finished its pivot away from being the “Eastern 8,” and while it’s never been a basketball powerhouse, it’s rarely spent much time completely outside of the picture. Its worst stretch, historically, came on the heels of a 2003 scandal which contributed to the chairman of the board of trustees dying by suicide. (A junior college transfer was ineligible [had a welding certificate, not a full associate’s degree] but the school let him play—yes, that’s all it was, this is a horribly sad story and we’re going to move on now.) But from those ashes came the Mark Schmidt era, and the Mark Schmidt era, generally speaking, has been a mighty success.
This was supposed to be one of the best Bonnies teams ever. While we pegged them as our preliminary NIT favorite back in October, others didn’t share our belief in the Bona’s potential for grandeur. After they swept Boise State, Clemson, and Marquette back before Thanksgiving, the Associated Press ranked the team the 16th-best in the country. We were right. The AP was wrong. Bonaventure is ours, and we’re thrilled to have them.
Part of what led to the, well, I guess you could call it a “decline” but that feels misleading, is that the Bonnies had an injury or two. Part of it is that there was a big Covid pause back when the Omicron variant surged. The end result is that St. Bonaventure only goes six players deep now, with four starters often not missing a minute. Of those starters, all are seniors, with Osun Osunniyi the best-known nationally but talent across the board. It’s a thin, hardened crew, and the road trip that has been this NIT for them (St. Bonaventure was surprisingly not one of the 16 seeded teams in the tournament, and was evidently a poorer ghost seed than also-unseeded Virginia, which had some Bonnies fans all sorts of riled up) lends the program some battle-hardened vibes.
There’s been a lot of hype surrounding the Bonnie crowd at MSG, and while I’m a little wary of that hype, given just how small of a school it is and how big an arena MSG is, they say they’re coming, and being in the state of New York makes them a hint of a hometown team. (St. Bonaventure’s directly below Buffalo on a map, and these guys are going to have to drive through two other states to get to NYC, but it’s a New York address!) Men’s basketball is to St. Bonaventure as the price of oil is to West Texas, and the Bonnie faithful are riding high. Will this impact the tournament? It’s hard to know. Home court advantage is significant in college basketball, and crowds play a large role in that, but there are so many factors at play that it’s hard to see the Bona’s receiving as much of a boost as they do in Olean. Still, they’re a good match for Xavier, and the winner, though likely an underdog in the championship game, won’t be an underdog by much.
***
The teams are in New York already. The vibes are anticipatory. The semifinals will be tomorrow at 7:00 PM and 9:30 PM EDT, on ESPN (Xavier vs. Bonaventure, the early game) and ESPN2 (A&M vs. WSU, the late game) respectively. The championship will be Thursday at 7:00 PM EDT on ESPN. Go ahead. Pinch yourself. It’s happening.
