The party’s over … until the next time the sign is lit up out front.
Thursday afternoon that was the feel you got at Rocket Arena when the Miami RedHawks’ 31-0 run through the regular season — making them only the fifth Division I team this century to have a perfect record going into the postseason — came to an end with a stunning 87-83 loss to UMass in the quarterfinals of the Mid-American Conference Tournament in Cleveland.
Miami, the No. 1 seed in the tournament and the No. 20 ranked team in the nation, had beaten the No. 8 seeded Minutemen twice in the season. Both games had been close, as were many of the setbacks for UMass, a team better than its 16-15 record suggests.
Although Miami led by 11 points with 8:33 left, the Minutemen went on a 13-2 run and after that, the game was back and forth until a couple of uncharacteristic bad passes, some missed shots and its game-long inadequacy inside sent the RedHawks home.
UMass outrebounded Miami, 41-24; outscored the RedHawks 54-30 in the paint and had 23 second chance points.
Now Miami must wait and see if the NCAA Tournament’s Selection Committee gets skewered by its own myopic analytics — and the debate over Miami’s strength of schedule — or if it’s able to see and value the true measure of the RedHawks performance this season and how they rose to the moment night after night for months.
The NCAA Tournament Field will be announced Sunday evening, but Thursday afternoon there was no denying the music had momentarily stopped for the RedHawks and none of them knew quite how to react.
In the Miami dressing room after the game head coach Travis Steele said the players were “a little bit shell shocked.”
He said he was the only one who did any talking: “The guys are obviously very hurt ... Very hurt!”
Miami did send two players out for the postgame press conference: senior Peter Suder, the MAC Player of the Year, and promising freshman Trey Perry, the player Suder said last week gives the team some needed swagger.
While both said they thought their team deserves to be in the NCAA Tournament — “We proved that we’re a really good team and really fun to watch,” Suder said — each seemed resigned to whatever happens.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
“I can’t control what I cannot control,” Suder said as he paraphrased Steele.
“We just have to wait and see what happens on Sunday,” Perry said quietly.
Just as it had been the more aggressive team in the game, UMass was more aggressive in its support of the RedHawks when it came to the NCAA Tournament.
“I definitely think they deserve to be in,” said the Minutemen’s Leonardo Bettiol, who finished with a game-high 25 points and eight rebounds.
“Going 31-0, no matter who you play, is extremely impressive. It’s crazy to think. They had an amazing season. I would love to see them in the tournament and have a second MAC bid (counting the tournament winner).”
UMass’s Frank Martin, who is one of the best head coaches in college basketball — he previously guided Kansas State to a 117-54 record over five seasons and took South Carolina to the Final Four in 2017 — was more pointed in his support of Miami:
“I’ve been around the block a couple of times, and it would be a complete embarrassment if the league didn’t get two teams in the tournament.”
Travis Steele, Miami’s coach, moved between even-keeled and edgy when talking about Miami’s NCAA Tournament chances:
“I’d be hard-pressed to (come up with) a way where we don’t make the tournament. I’d be very, very surprised if we did not.”
When someone brought up the possibility of the MAC getting its first two-bid inclusion into the NCAA Tournament since 1999 — when the Wally Szczerbiak-led RedHawks lost in the MAC Tournament, got an at-large bid and made it to the Sweet Sixteen — Steele shook his head:
“I know the MAC would probably like it, but to be quite frank, I could care less. For me it’s about just putting ourselves in the best position, which I think we’ve done. Our guys have earned the right, in my opinion, to play in the NCAA Tournament.”
Asked about coping with the uncertainty until Sunday, Steele said:
“I’m not letting anybody take my mind. I’m not going to waste one second. When you’ve been fired before (at Xavier), you don’t care anymore. You don’t care what people think. You don’t have to be politically correct and all that stuff. I’m just telling you, I’m going to live life the way I live it ... unapologetically.”
‘We belong in the tournament’
The MAC did the RedHawks no favor, putting them in the 11 a.m. tournament opener at Rocket Arena.
“Really 10 a.m. with the time change,” said Steele.
For a team that plays most of its games — including recent 9 p.m. tipoffs to accommodate TV — a Thursday morning start was a jolt to the system.
Suder noted that in his four years of college basketball — two seasons at Bellarmine and two at Miami — he’d never had such an early tip off:
“It was definitely an adjustment, but they had to do the same thing, and they came out and just played better than us.”
Neither team was allowed a shootaround beforehand Steele said.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Brant Byers led the RedHawks with 17 points but went 1-for-7 from three-point range. Eian Elmer added 16 points; Antwone Woolfolk had 14, but after going 6-for-6 in the first half, he didn’t take another shot in the second half. Suder and Luke Skaljac each had 10.
In the final three minutes the RedHawks missed several open-look shots. Steele didn’t focus on the lack of a shootaround as a reason for the misfires, but he believes the league should at least review some of its decisions: “You’d want to protect your top team I’d think.”
Miami’s strength of schedule is under review, in part because dozens of power conference teams turned down or simply ignored its request for a non-conference game.
It’s a plight many mid-major programs face because the upper echelon teams want to bolster their resumes with games against other top-tier teams or the cupcakes near the very bottom of the 365 teams in Division I.
Miami ended up with one of the lowest-rated non-conference schedules in D-I — 344th according to one ratings group, 364 by another — and that’s triggered much of the debate.
Martin — who knows both sides of the coin, having coached power conference teams and now UMass, which just came to the MAC from the Atlantic 10 — spoke passionately about the way the system is rigged against mid-major programs who want to beef up their schedules and improve their NCAA Tournament profile.
But as Leonardo Bettiol said in the press conference: Going unbeaten against everyone put in front of you is still “extremely impressive.”
Grant Hill, who will call the NCAA Tournament and the Final Four for CBS and TNT Sports agreed: “Undefeated means something, and so my hope is that they would make it. They’ve got a chip on their shoulder. I think to see them get into the tournament, they want to prove themselves against some of the bigger teams.”
As he has been, Miami’s athletics director David Sayler has been unwavering in his support:
“Having a perfect regular season is a legendary accomplishment and one game today doesn’t change that in my mind.
“I believe the committee will get it, and certainly anyone who played the game and knows what the grind of a season is like, going undefeated in league play, they get it as well.
“Every ounce of my being tells me they’ll see it like that and make the right decision.”
Although there has been talk that the RedHawks could land in the First Four at UD Arena as a No. 11 seed, some experts don’t see them starting out in the tournament prelim.
“I haven’t given that two seconds of thought,” Sayler said. “The bottom line is that whatever the committee decides we’ll just have to live it with it.
“But I truly believe we belong in the tournament.”
‘Gotta keep the wife happy’
What bothered Sayler most — and rightly so — was how the narrative of the RedHawks wondrous season was now being eclipsed by the NCAA Tournament debate:
“I just don’t want the team’s accomplishments to be diminished. For people to spin it into something else would be a shame.”
For the past couple of months, the RedHawks not only have lifted the school, its students, alums and former players — Ron Harper and Ira Newble, two Miami hoops greats from the past were courtside Thursday — but all of college basketball.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Steele talked about how his players will have memories that will last a lifetime.
“The beauty of sports is that it teaches you a lot of life lessons as well,” he said.
And that brings us back to Sayler who the past couple months resembled some hoops hipster with his long, swept-back hair that he said was a result of superstition and a promise as the team kept winning.
“I’d planned to get it cut, but now I might just keep it,” he said with a laugh. “I like it alright and my wife is good with it. If she wasn’t, it’d be gone. Gotta keep the wife happy.”
She and everybody else from Miami will be just that Sunday night if they learn one loss didn’t trim the RedHawks from the NCAA Tournament field.
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