That One is Gonna Leave a Mark

It gets no worse. (Chuck Burton/Associated Press)

THE LOSE finds himself pressed into service here during a weekend getaway to the Central California coast. I would be remiss were I not to comment on what is, without a doubt, one of the greatest acts of Lose in the history of Lose, an act of Lose which will transcend time and stand forever.

On Friday night in Charlotte, N.C., we witnessed a first in the NCAA tournament, when #16 seed UMBC defeated #1 Virginia 74:54. This marks the first time in the tournament’s history that a #16 defeated a #1 seed. Prior to this game, 16-seeds were 0-135 against 1-seeds. There had been some near misses over the years – one game that went to OT and a couple of 1-point games, the most famous of which being Georgetown v. Princeton back in 1989 – and it was one of those scenarios that you can sort of intellectualize actually happening one day and yet, the more you think about it, seems completely nuts. In order for a 16-seed to beat a 1-seed, you’d think there’d have to be some bizarre circumstances at play. In the case of Princeton v. Georgetown in 1989, it was a case where the NCAA Selection Committee got it all completely wrong: Princeton were a way better team than anyone realized. In the one instance where a 16-seed beat a 1-seed in the NCAA women’s tournament – Harvard beating Stanford back in 1998 – #1 seed Stanford earned the top spot for their body of work over the course of the season, but I remember Stanford showed up to the tourney completely ravaged by injuries. It didn’t take away from Harvard’s achievement, mind you – you dance with who you brung, as injuries are a part of the game – but the point is that you’d think, for a 16 to beat a 1, you’d need these sort of confluences of events to occur.

But that really wasn’t the case in Charlotte. Sure, the Virginia Cavaliers were missing De’Andre Hunter, who broke his wrist right before the tournament, but one player shouldn’t have made that much of a difference. This wasn’t a case where the wonderfully named Retrievers of UMBC rode their luck and eked out a win. This was a 20-point domination. Virginia was the top defensive team in the country this season, allowing only 53 points a game, and the Wahoos hadn’t allowed a team to break 70 all season. UMBC scored 53 points in the second half. The Retrievers point guard Jairus Lyles cut the Virginia defense to ribbons in the second half. Whatever script you may have conceived on in your mind for how a 16-seed might beat a 1-seed, this certainly wasn’t it. 

Wait, we did WHAT? (Gerry Broome, Associated Press)

And it’s ironic that this fate has befallen Virginia, of course, as the Cavaliers were previously on the end of what’s considered to be the greatest upset in the history of the sport: a Hawaiian holiday gone horribly wrong back in 1982. The then #1 Cavs, led by the original unicorn – 7’4” Ralph Sampson – somehow lost 77:72 to Chaminade, who were an NAIA school at the time. But this loss to UMBC on Friday in Charlotte, as a #1 seed in the South Regional, instantly vaults to the top of the list of the most shocking losses in the history of the sport. It is unprecedented and historic. It has rendered the rest of the tournament somewhat moot – really, who cares who wins the tournament, at this point? Whomever wins the tourney will have earned it, of course, but what will ultimately be memorable about the 2018 tournament is the fact that a #16 seed beat a #1 seed for the first time ever. Whatever results were to follow from here for UMBC – not many, as it turned out, as they shot 29.8% in their 2nd round loss to Kansas State – or for any other team at all, are irrelevant. UMBC are the big winners here, heroes for the little guys from now on for as long as they play the game. They have managed to make themselves immortal, while Virginia has made themselves infamous.

Vegas had UMBC going off as a 20½-point underdog at the start this game, and with good reason: Virginia was the #1 overall seed in the tournament, a team which had had lost one game in ACC play, in overtime, and won the supposedly best conference in the country by four games. The Retrievers, meanwhile, fit the profile similar to many of the 16s over time, in that it’s a team that didn’t win their league – the America East, one of the weakest in the country – but got it going in the conference tournament. UMBC contrived to somehow lose by 44 points to the Great Danes of SUNY Albany during the season – a loss which, in retrospect, seems absolutely confounding – and just to get to the NCAA tournament, they had to win the title game on the road at Vermont, who’d beaten UMBC 23 straight times. While being better than most 16-seeds historically, the Retrievers weren’t that much better. 

But there was UMBC, on Friday night, running circles around the top-ranked team in the country. What in the hell is this? What am I watching? Can this be real? 

I should point out, at this point, that I have some connections to this game, which make this result a bit more personal than it may have otherwise. I mean, as cool as it would have been to see Penn beat Kansas, I wouldn’t have had much to go on when writing a blog about it. I didn’t even enter any NCAA betting pools this year, and had I done so, UMBC would probably stand for University of My Bracket is Crap right about now. But no, in fact, UMBC stands for the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the greater Baltimore metropolitan area happens to be the home of The Official Spouse of In Play Lose, so she actually knows about the school – it is apparently an outstanding science and technology institute whose greatest competitive pursuit in the past has been chess – although the conversation in the household went something like this:

Spouse: “UMBC has a basketball team?”

Me: “UMBC actually exists?”

Some more familial intrigue stemmed from the fact that The Official Mother-in-Law of In Play Lose is, in fact, an alumnus of the University of Virginia. She actually said on the phone the other day, “I’m excited for the tournament this year, because Virginia is really good.” Uh, so, yeah, there probably isn’t quite as much enthusiasm for the tournament anymore in the household. And, of course, I cannot help but point out that before he was the head coach at the University of Virginia, Tony Bennett was the head coach at my beloved Washington State, a university where losing is such an art form that they coined a verb for it, a school where the history of failure is so abject that I’ve retired their number and declared them ineligible for Lose of the Year. If/when I open The Hall of Lose in (city to be determined, we’ll have that discussion another time), Washington State will be first-ballot inductees. If there was ever going to be a guy who’d blow a 1-16 matchup in the NCAA tourney, it would be a guy with a connection to W.S.U. And the more that I’ve been thinking about this implausible loss by the Wahoos, the more that I think that W.S.U. connection needs to be explored and explicated.

I was wrong before when I said that I’d have nothing to say if Penn had beaten Kansas a 1-16 matchup this past week. This is because back in 1980, when the tourney expanded to 48 teams, Penn were a 12-seed – i.e., one of the four worst teams in the field – and it was during that tourney, in a Mideast Region game in West Lafayette, Indiana, that Penn began the longstanding NCAA tradition of 12-seeds beating 5-seeds by beating … Washington State. A 5-seed losing to a 12-seed in a field of 64 isn’t nearly as damning as losing to one of the four worst teams in the field! (I’ve heard all sorts of stories and rumors about how it came to be that W.S.U. lost this game, but I don’t feel like I’m at liberty to reveal them. I’ll just leave those to your imagination.) W.S.U.’s other most notable accomplishments in their few forays into the NCAA tournament include setting a record for the worst FG% in an NCAA Final against Wisconsin in 1941 – a mark which stood for 70 years before the Butler brickfest against UConn in 2011 – and a horrible, inexplicable loss to Boston College in 1994 which marked the end of the Kelvin Sampson era at W.S.U. (Sampson is now the head coach at Houston, who suffered this crushing defeat against Michigan on Saturday.) 

And I’ve always kept an eye on Tony Bennett’s progress at Virginia, simply because he took Washington State to heights it’s scarcely seen. The Cougars won 26 games and were a #3 seed in the tourney in 2007, lost a thrilling double OT game to Vanderbilt in the second round, and Bennett was the AP Coach of the Year. In 2008, they reached the Sweet 16 and exited against North Carolina with the run-of-the-mill sort of failure typical in the NCAA tourney – i.e., they couldn’t make a shot. Tony had taken over the program from his father, Dick Bennett, who was originally coaxed out of retirement in 2003 to take over the W.S.U. program when the university was absolutely desperate for a decent basketball program. The program disintegrated post-Sampson, and in the four years prior to the Bennett family’s arrival in Pullman, the Cougars had gone 9-63 in Pac-10 play. They were that bad.

Dick Bennett made a name for himself coaching his way up through the University of Wisconsin system, first at Green Bay and then in Madison. His crowning achievement was taking the Badgers to the Final Four in 2000 – where they lost to Michigan State 54:41 in a game that was so horrible and so unsightly that the NCAA started changing the rules in response to it. Dick Bennett’s approach to basketball involved three things: defense, defense, and defense. His teams were physical, ruthless, and went about defensively suffocating the opposition. The offense scheme seemed to consist mainly of holding the ball for most of the shot clock, throwing the ball in the general direction of the basket, crashing the glass and maybe getting an offensive rebound. It was sort of a mess, to be honest. It was unsightly, at best, and revolting, at worst. Seeing his Wisconsin team in the Final Four, throwing bricks and engaging in a 40-minute wrestling match with Sparty, made much of the basketball viewing public feel unclean.

But I was down with Dick Bennett taking over the W.S.U. program, because his arrival gave them an immediate presence and identity. The Cougars were going to be tenacious, they were going to fight you, they were going to be a complete pain in the ass. They were no longer some irrelevant team like Oregon State who you’d think nothing of on your Pac-10 schedule. You’d see W.S.U. there and think, “yikes, that game is gonna be a rock fight. That game is gonna be a complete nuisance.” There was something really cool about Dick Bennett’s three Cougar teams in that it ran contrary to everything you thought you knew, and liked, about the game of basketball. It seemed reactionary, almost revolutionary. You had to adjust your ideas about what the game was, but in this context, W.S.U. basketball had become strangely fun.

They didn’t win as much as anyone would’ve liked – they were young and inexperienced teams that just couldn’t make enough shots – but even so, during that time they beat Arizona for the first time in 20 years, and beat UCLA at Pauley Pavilion in L.A. for the first time ever, yes, ever. It was odd when Dick Bennett retired once again, saying that he wished they’d won more games and earnestly feeling like he’d disappointed people at W.S.U., when in truth, he’d done anything but.

And he left the program in the hands of Tony who, unlike his Dad, actually seemed to like offense. Tony was an NBA player who’d been one of the best 3-point shooters in college basketball back when he was at UWGB. The evolving of the Bennett family system involved adding intelligent offensive play to compliment the intense defense. One of the things which people constantly fail to realize is that in basketball, you can actually play defense with offense. In fact, the most devastating and demoralizing defensive act in the game is to hold the ball for the duration of the shot clock, thus making the opposition work hard, and then score anyway. The entire premise of those Princeton offenses which we mentioned earlier was that they would hold the ball forever and then ultimately get a highly-efficient shot – be it an open 3-point shot or a lay-up through a back door cut. This notion of high-efficiency shots is a concept that’s now en vogue in the NBA but wasn’t fully intellectualized in the 1980s or 1990s or into the 2000s. Tony Bennett’s W.S.U. teams not only could squeeze the life out of you defensively, but they also had guys that could shoot the three and create off the dribble and score in the low block after having killed off the shot clock, which made them even harder to beat than before. 

And having guys with those skills also means that, if necessary, you could also speed up the game. Back when I was first watching college basketball, in the 1970s and the 1980s, the most dominant program in the Pac-10 was the now-generally irrelevant Oregon State. Oregon State was absolutely infuriating because they would basically go into a stall with 10 minutes left in every game (remember, this was before the shot clock) and bore you to death, much as Dean Smith used to go Four Corners at the end of North Carolina games. What was so annoying about this was the fact that they didn’t have to do that to win. North Carolina and Oregon State had NBA players and could beat you 100:98 if they had to. If you got a big lead against them, they could speed up the game. Tony Bennett’s teams at Washington State had the same sort of vibe about them. They had the guys to play up-tempo if needed, play catch-up if needed. They could start fast and get the lead and then go about turning the game into an act of Chinese water torture.

And by ‘guys’ who can do that, I mean guys like Klay Thompson and Aron Baynes, both of whom are now NBA players and neither of whom were particularly highly recruited when they wound up at W.S.U. Since moving onto Charlottesville, Bennett’s program has produced NBA guys such as Malcolm Brogdon, who was the Rookie of the Year last season in Milwaukee and whose greatest attribute – the fact that he seems to know what he’s doing – runs counter to so many of the enormous-upside, athletic types NBA GMs seem to drool over, many of whom get onto the court and have no idea whatsoever what they are doing. Moving to Virginia and ACC country has availed Tony Bennett far more recruiting opportunities than being in Pullman, Washington, ever could have, but the type of player he looks for to fit his system – a smart guy, a hard-working guy willing to learn and work his ass off and develop in a multi-faceted way – has never really changed. Nor has his commitment to his father’s defensive principles. Tony Bennett’s Virginia Cavaliers of 2018 have evolved to become a more sophisticated version of the rock-fighting, subversive revolutionaries of Dick Bennett’s days.

But as they say, revolutionaries don’t make good rulers. And while I’ve just spent considerable airtime praising Tony Bennett just now, the fact of the matter is this: if a Tony Bennett team is considered to be the best team in college basketball, then college basketball is in really, really bad shape. Virginia’s program may have been garbage when Bennett arrived in 2009, but it does, in fact, have some tradition – i.e., the Ralph Sampson era of the 1980s – where W.S.U. had none. And in rising to the top of the ACC, that which was originally revolutionary about the Bennett style game ceased to exist. They’ve gone from scrappy outsiders to blue-bloods.

And ultimately, being a blue-blood in college sports is based upon a simple premise, which is that your talent is better than the other team’s talent. The greatest example of this is in college football, with Alabama winning all of the time. Alabama’s success on the gridiron is predicated on the idea that their defense is going to play like an NFL defense – and not a terribly complex one – and the other team won’t have good enough players to make difficult plays. It’s why they got into trouble in both of those Championship games against Clemson: the Tide did what do what they usually do, knocking receivers off routes and grabbing them every play and daring the refs to call it, which they never do, but Clemson had an NFL QB in DeShaun Watson who could throw to the back shoulder and into tight windows and make all the throws, and had receivers who could adjust and make the catches. Clemson had the talent to match Alabama, just as Ohio State did a few years ago as well. So many big-time college coaches ultimately fail in the pros because they have to actually scheme for a situation where every team has talent. Having better talent isn’t enough.

But the notion of “better” can be somewhat complex, however, and in the case of Virginia’s college basketball team, “better” does not necessarily mean more athleticism, because Virginia are used to playing teams with more athleticism than they have. What it does mean, however, is that the other side is going to have to be smart enough to figure out how to beat them – which is a tall order, since the game of college basketball at present is, fundamentally, such a low IQ endeavor. College basketball has suffered for years from a decided lack of imagination. Teams have become easy to guard and easy to defend. I’ve believed for years that the best way to make college basketball a better game would be to fire all of the coaches, since at the biggest programs, all of them have become intellectually lazy over time, finding it far too much effort to actually teach a kid how to shoot and far easier to preach the bullshit notions of toughness and effort on the defensive side of the ball. It’s far easier coaching defense than offense, after all. And since virtually no one has been bothering to actually preach and teach anything other than defensive effort, the cumulative effect on the game has been to turn it into a claustrophobic slog.

No one turns the game into a claustrophobic slog quite like Virginia does, and your typical sort of bland half-court set is going to play into Virginia’s hands. Your basic bland set in college basketball involves wasting 20 seconds of the shot clock running some sort of pattern your head coach has drilled into your heads which doesn’t go anywhere or accomplish anything, after which you go into a state of panic for the last 10 seconds of the clock and trying to somehow gin up a good shot. And you see this sort of behaviour from pretty much every team in college basketball. At a Duke or a Kentucky, you might have a guy with enough talent that they can then make something up and score a bucket, but Virginia’s entire game plan is based upon that an opposing offense is going to waste time and then run a fairly predictable set which they’ll be more than capable of defending as they pack in their defense tightly.

And what did UMBC do against Virginia? They sped up Virginia. They spread the floor, they created space, their point guard attacked the rim and kicked it to open shooters behind the 3-point line. So, in essence, they did exactly what every single NBA team does every single night. And see, that a #16 seed can come out and beat up the #1 seed in the tournament playing a style of game which seems so natural to NBA fans, yet completely foreign to the college game, speaks to the collective stupidity which has befallen college basketball. With the embracing of mathematics and analytics, the NBA has become one of the smartest games on the planet, while college teams continue to dumbly waste shot clock time (dumb because it allows the defense to get set) and then uselessly try to force feed the post. It’s no wonder the NBA has reached a point where they are not interested in drafting college seniors. Having spent four years in college, they’ve not learned anything. 

And neither have most of the coaches, for that matter: 

That’s a quote from 2016 from Marshall head coach Dan D’Antoni, whose team won a first round game this year in an upset. His brother, Mike D’Antoni, coaches the Houston Rockets, the smartest and, at present, the best team in the NBA. Mike also was the head coach of the “Seven Seconds or Less” Phoenix Suns, a team whose “Seven Seconds or Less” nickname, and most of their concepts of how to play the game, had originated in the days of Paul Westhead’s Loyola Marymount in the late 1980s – the phrase “seven seconds or less” referring to the fact that L.M.U. actually practiced with a 7-second shot clock in order to get used to playing at such a preposterous pace.

The point being, in bringing up stuff like Loyola Marymount and Princeton from the late 1980s, is that in order to compete against superior talent, one of the preferred ways to go about doing it was simply to think about the game differently, a notion which seems to have gone out the window over the years. UMBC were smarter than Virginia on Friday night in Charlotte. They knew how to attack, they stuck to a game plan and they were fundamentally smarter in their approach.

Which, ultimately, is how the little guys are going to beat the big guys in the game of college basketball. Oh, sure, you might have one guy on your team with elite level talent who goes crazy and leads you to an upset, à la C.J. McCollum of Lehigh vs. Duke, but most likely, you’re going to win by thinking your way through games and, more to the point, when you’re the smarter team, you don’t need to be the more athletic team. In this day and age, what you really need is a point guard who can drive and kick and some guys who can spot up and shoot. It amazes me that more lesser schools don’t play the same way UMBC played on Friday night.

UMBC didn’t play on Friday like they had “nothing to lose.” They’d played to win, and there’s a big difference between the two. And once they got down, Virginia just completely panicked and capitulated, continuing a disturbing trend of NCAA meltdowns which have plagued them since Bennett took over. They know how to play one way, and one way only, and when it starts going bad for them, they completely come apart at the seams. 

This certainly wasn’t the kind of history Virginia was hoping to make this season. Bennett is a class guy, and he did his best to handle this with grace, but the fact of the matter is that Virginia just suffered arguably the most embarrassing loss in the history of the sport, getting completely trucked by a 16-seed. I’m not sure how you come back from that. You can say it will “provide motivation” for next season, will add “fuel to the fire” and whatnot. That’s horseshit. This is the sort of loss you wind up having nightmares about. You almost have to start over, given the psychological wreckage. In time, you hope the Virginia players can come see the bigger picture here, realize that they were a part of history, and maybe even have a good laugh over it. But in the meantime, yikes. That one is gonna leave a mark.