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| Tom Pennington/Getty Images |
TEXAS A&M’S Alex Caruso missed a 3-point shot with 36 seconds remaining in the NCAA second round game between Northern Iowa and Texas A&M on Sunday in Oklahoma City. Northern Iowa was leading 69-57 at the time, and Caruso’s missed trey seemed to be their last faint gasp, as Northern Iowa’s win percentage was calculated to be 99.99% in that moment. A&M’s Admon Gilder rebounded the miss, however, and scored a put-back bucket with :34 on the clock, cutting the lead to 69-59, but the needle barely moved. UNI was still 99.96% to win at that moment.
And then this happened:
What the actual fuck?
Texas A&M wound up winning the game 92:88 in 2OT. Improbable? Impossible? A miracle? There really are no words to describe this. You have to see it to believe it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the greatest choke we may ever see in our lifetimes.
To give you some idea of the magnitude of this collapse, let’s use another recent shocking late-game turn – Super Bowl XLIX between the Patriots and the Seahawks. When Seattle found themselves with 2nd down on the Patriots 1-yard line in the closing minute, the Seahawks possessed an 87.4% chance of winning the game. The Hawks’ chances plummeted to 0.4% when they didn’t run the damn ball, and Malcolm Butler picked off the pass at the goal line. (About the only way you could have a bigger swing in an NFL game would be a chip shot FG blocked and run back for a TD on the last play of the game.) Somewhat of an apples-to-oranges comparison, of course, given that we’re talking about different games with different variables, but the point is that, percentage wise, UNI’s collapse is even more unthinkable. 538.com suggests A&M was about a 3000-1 bet to win the game at that point, having not found a comeback of the sort anywhere in college basketball in at least the past four seasons. (If I put a $100 on A&M to rally last weekend, and another $100 on 5000-1 Leicester to win the EPL last summer, I’d be retired and living in Tahiti already.)
This game capped off four days of utter NCAA nuttiness the likes of which we’ve scarcely seen. I’d basically given up on college basketball after last season, since the on-court look of the game was so bad. The new rule changes shortening the shot clock and adjusting the geometry of the court to create more space have had a positive impact on the quality of play.
One of the comments I heard quite a bit about the new rules was that, come tournament time, you’d be less likely to see the sorts of big upsets you’ve seen in the past, the theory being that most of those upsets occur through smaller schools with lesser talent playing entirely half-court games consisting of holding the ball for longer and reducing the number of possessions in the game.
This year’s NCAA tourney showed that to be utter nonsense. Upsets were everywhere in the first two days. Friday saw a 15-seed, 14-seed, and 13-seed all win – the first time that’s ever occurred on a single day of the tourney – including the most humdinging, bracket-busting upset of all time: 15-seed Middle Tennessee State’s 90:81 win over Michigan State. There’ve been eight 15-over-2’s in the history of the tourney, but this one was different: Michigan State was, in essence, the fifth #1 seed in this tourney, and were shocked to find themselves slated as a #2 going in. The Spartans, at 11-2 odds, were second favorites in Vegas to win the whole thing behind Kansas. Sparty was a 17½-point favorite going into this game, and the Blue Raiders from Murfreesboro were getting as much as +$2200 straight up from the Vegas sports books.
And all it took was watching the Blue Raiders jump out to an apropos 15-2 lead at the outset of the game to make you realize that the NCAA Selection Committee had gotten it horribly wrong. Middle Tennessee was clearly underrated. Upsets of the 15-over-2 variety in the tourney tend to be the product of the committee bumbling the selections, either placing an overrated team at #2 or an underrated team at #15, or it’s the case where the #15 team has some great player on their team who goes off: I very much remember 1993, when 2-seed Arizona got ousted by Santa Clara, a game I had interest in since I knew one of the Santa Clara players, and Santa Clara had a freshman point guard by the name of Steve Nash who was kinda good. Another example of this is Lehigh’s C.J. McCollum, now of the Portland Trail Blazers, going off for 30 against Duke in 2012.
And this year’s rule changes may have, in fact, contributed to leveling the playing field more than first thought, simply because everyone is trying to adjust to new rules and trying to figure out how to play. You can play neither offense nor defense in the quite the same way as before. Indeed, the field was the losingest in the tournament’s history, with more combined losses among the 68 entrants than ever before, thus suggesting a far more level playing field. The committee took more heat than the norm for the field they selected for this year’s tourney, but given how parity appears to be reigning and everyone seems to be about equal, how in the hell are you supposed to differentiate? And though a fair number of blue bloods from power conferences wound up reaching the Sweet 16, teams like Kentucky and Michigan State did not, and many more of them had the bejeezus scared out of them. Across the first week of the NCAA tourney, the overall quality of play was generally better than what I’d seen a year ago, and more importantly, the drama was better than ever. And that’s what’s most important in the end. We love the drama and absurdist theatre of the NCAA tournament. The kids don’t always play well, but they play their hearts out. Inspired comebacks, clutch shots, overtimes, buzzer beaters (or, in the case of Cincinnati, beater buzzers), weird schools you’ve never heard us from places like Nacogdoches, Texas, seemingly doing the impossible, strange twists and turns and unpredictable results. It’s all great stuff. It’s why we watch the tournament, and why we watch sports at all. Sports are life’s original reality TV.
And then Northern Iowa had to go and make us basically forget all of what we’d just seen by pulling off the most incomprehensible of chokes. The Panthers from Cedar Falls had already had a pretty memorable couple of weeks. That they were in the tourney at all was due to this wild and bouncy buzzer beater in the MVC championship game in St. Louis against the
Oh, I’m sorry, I meant to say that what you have is an act of God.
“Glory be to God … they were blessed the other night, and we were blessed tonight.”
– Texas A&M coach Billy Kennedy, when asked right after the game the Aggies’ victory.
Oh, fuck right off.
Let me just get this off my chest here. I don’t give a shit what religion you are. I don’t. Believe whatever you want to believe, and permit me to do the same. But don’t give me this bullshit about how you won because you were ‘blessed.’ I hate it when athletes say that sort of stuff. Fuck that shit. Quite honestly, I wouldn’t know why God would give a damn about a basketball game. The outcome is not divinely determined. It’s determined by human beings making plays – and also making mistakes. Also, to say that UNI were ‘blessed’ the other night also implies that they were just lucky and is disrespectful. Sure, they were fortunate a 50-footer went in the basket, but they were good enough to be in a position to win that game. Saying stuff like this just makes me want to hate you for being completely ignorant. Here’s to hoping you have to go and pray over why it is Oklahoma thumps your ass this coming Thursday in Anaheim.
But I digress. In the 100 years or so that I’ve been watching college basketball, I cannot ever recall seeing a comeback like this. Certainly, the game has changed over that time – but a lot of those changes didn’t really come into play in this instance, save for the fact that the clock stops after a made bucket in the final 2:00 of the game, which wasn’t always the case. The 3-point shot aids your attempt at a comeback, of course – but Texas A&M only made one such shot in this rally. The advent of the double-bonus on college hoops took away one path to a rally, in that in the past, when every foul in the bonus was a 1-and-1, the strategy you employed during a rally was simply to force the other team to throw it to their worst foul shooter, at which point you fouled the hell out of him and hoped he’d miss the front end of the 1-and-1. But again, free throws didn’t matter here – UNI shot no free throws at all in the final :30 of this game, their only points coming on a breakaway dunk after a long in-bounds pass, which was about the only thing the Panthers did right. Otherwise, it was mistake after mistake after mistake:
And here, we also have to give some praise to Texas A&M for a bit of creative strategy and some out-of-the-box thinking, which is the sort of thing you need in times of desperation. If you remember back to Super Bowl XLIX (and how I can ever forget?), you may recall the endgame situation: Pats up four, Seahawks on the Pats 5-yard line, and both teams have one timeout left, final few moments of the game. The Seahawks carry the ball to the Pats 1-yard line on first down, and conventional wisdom dictates that New England should call timeout to save some seconds for their offense in case Seattle scores. Even so, this is a completely dire situation for New England. So what does Belichick do? He doesn’t call the timeout, because a stopped clock would be an ally of the Seahawks, who are still losing the game. So now what do the Seahawks do? By not calling the timeout, and putting the onus on the Seahawks to manage the clock, the Pats are then able to take an educated guess as to what will happen: the Seahawks will likely have to pass on 2nd down, since an incompletion would stop the clock and it would save the timeout. Sure enough, the Seahawks do exactly that, the Pats play pass defense and recognize the formation, Butler jumps the pass route and makes the interception. It’s still somewhat miraculous, but Belichick had at least positioned his team for the possibility of a miracle to occur.
OK, so let’s apply some game theory here to the final moments in Oklahoma City. Texas A&M is down 10 points after Gilder’s layup with :34 left, but the clock is now stopped. Conventional basketball wisdom here is that you deny like hell the inbounds pass and try to force a 5-second call or a bad inbounds pass (which did happen once in this sequence), and if that doesn’t work, then you immediately foul and concede two free throws in exchange for stopping the clock. But there is a second school of thought about this, which is that rather than immediately fouling whomever receives the first pass, you immediately trap him and then foul on the second pass. You want to try to steal the inbounds pass, of course, but failing that, the goal is to force them into a bad area of the floor – the corner, along the baseline – double-team the ball and use the boundary of the court as a third defender. Now, there is nothing all that unremarkable about this strategy in and of itself, and teams are well-drilled in learning how to break the press. And it doesn’t make much sense, in a predicament such as A&M found themselves in, to be letting the seconds tick away when time is of the essence.
Except that it really doesn’t make a difference whether the time is ticking away as you trap in the backcourt or if you’re bringing the ball up the floor after the free throws, the most likely result of which being that you’re even further behind. You’re fighting on multiple fronts here. You’re fighting the clock, but you’re also fighting the score. You have to score as quickly as possible when you get the ball, and in this instance, that time is better spent trying to get the ball back nearer to the opponent’s basket than it is taking it out of bounds 94 feet away.
But more importantly, in choosing not to immediately foul, you have the element of surprise on your side, because the other team’s players expect to be fouled. Not doing so increases volatility and can also increase the potential for unusual or unlikely to occur.
In fact, this very scenario unfolded in Oklahoma City two weeks previously during the NBA game between the Zombies and the Golden State Warriors, a 121:118 OT win for Golden State that was the best game of this season, and just about any other season for that matter. Golden State trails by four points with :14 remaining in regulation, Klay Thompson drives for a layup to cut it to two with :10 left, OKC then immediately inbounds to Kevin Durant like they want to do since he’s an 89% free throw shooter – but the Warriors don’t foul. They trap Durant along the baseline and catch the Zombies by surprise. Durant & Co. stop moving, stop trying to get open, and even forget they have a timeout left. Durant tries a crazy diagonal cross-court pass which the Warriors knock free and steal, and now it’s a scramble drill and the Zombies are in a mess. They’re all over the place and commit a foul, and two Warrior free throws force the OT. And this is Kevin Durant we’re talking about here, one of the best and smartest basketball players on the planet. An unexpected approach by the Warriors leads to a moment of madness, an unexpected rush of blood to the head.
And indeed, part of the problem for Northern Iowa in this instance is that when the expected foul doesn’t come, they forget what to do. Go back and watch this again. They stop moving, the guy with the ball panics, they’re trapped in terrible areas of the floor and twice they resort of trying to throw the ball off defender’s legs and out of bounds, but the alert Aggies step away from the trouble and make the steal. And with each successive turnover, the A&M belief grows, the UNI panic further settles in, the frenzy builds and then it snowballs into a full-blown avalanche.
Even so, this is all low-percentage stuff – but if you’re A&M, you’re looking at the no-percentage stuff of not playing any more games, so you may as well try everything. And even with all of this effort from A&M, it got them no better than being tied. They still had to play the overtime, but Northern Iowa messed that up as well, screwing up their final possession in the first OT with the game tied and settling for yet another Jesperson heave-ho from mid-court. Foul trouble attrition then settled in during the second extra session, as it often does in such extended games, and the Aggies were able to wear UNI out with their superior depth. But even though the outcome was still somewhat in doubt well into the second OT, you just sort of knew that the Panthers had blown it and they would eventually succumb. All the announcers could say during the 2nd OT, again and again, were words along the lines of, “I can’t believe what we witnessed at the end of regulation.”
It’s an appalling meltdown, and you feel bad for the kids involved, all of whom had played great to get their team in that position in the first place. We take life lessons from losing, of course, but losing in the NCAAs is particularly bitter in that the losses aren’t necessarily applied again to playing the game: graduating seniors move into other life phases, don’t necessary continue to play, and the vast majority of them certainly never play at this high of a level again.
The biggest takeaway from that, as it turns out, is that most of us are going to lose the last game we play. Winning championships is rare. Going out on top is almost nonexistent. And when you’re an underdog in the NCAA tournament, I think you’d almost rather be blown out by 30. Being blown out by 30 sucks in the immediate aftermath, of course, but you’re able to divorce yourself from it over time and look at the bigger picture: losing in the NCAA tourney was, in fact, a reward for doing so many other things right. And the humor of it all sets in at that point. You got blown out by 30 and you probably deserved it, but at least you had a helluva good time along the way.
But what do you pull from a loss like this one? Don’t choke? Well, yeah, no shit. But is there a lesson or a moral victory to be found in this anywhere? Anywhere? I don’t know what to say. I got nothin’ on this one. Words are completely failing me.
