As I am a huge fan of the sport, I was able to catch at least a little bit of most of the teams in consideration for the tournament. That said, I still have my teams and those three teams dominated my attention, for better or worse. These three teams supplied me with pretty much every emotion possible as they ran the gamut from the pinnacle of excellence to the essence of terribleness. So I don't spend the whole of my bracket post talking about these teams, I thought I would give them their own space here. This will allow me to not only talk about their seasons, but also to give a little consideration toward the future.
Notre Dame: Blerg
I wasn't a fan of the Irish before I went to Notre Dame, which makes it all the crazier to me that this is already my eleventh season as a fan. Tournament greatness has escaped the Irish over that span, but at least there's always been a competitive squad in place. Indeed, the Irish have always been a team that could conger up massive upsets, season-saving winning streaks, and give the hope of any given season finally being "the one." That is, until this year.
This chart pretty much says the same thing as the above paragraph, but with numbers instead (all numbers from KenPom):
If there's one main compliment to be made about the Mike Brey era, it's that his teams rarely stink. Besides this year's team, the only other team that isn't quite tournament quality would be the underwhelming 2005 squad, and they weren't that far off from being good. Even the 2006 team (AKA. The Passion of Chris Quinn) that lost every single close game in new and inventive ways was a top-30 team.
The obvious question is what on earth happened this year? The easy answer would be that Jerian Grant's suspension crippled the team. Grant was the best player on the team, and honestly, one of the best I've ever seen play for Notre Dame. During the telecast of the ND-UNC game last Monday, Jay Bilas theorized that ND would have been a top-25 team if Grant was around. If that premise is true, then Grant's absence would explain everything. While I agree that losing Grant was huge, I think this team was a little bit "doomed" from the start, for a couple reasons:
1. They weren't that good when Grant was playing - After the Ohio State game (Jerian's last game before the suspension), ND was 52nd in the KenPom ratings. This is certainly better than the end product turned out, but it would still rank among one of the worst results of Brey's career. These mediocre numbers weren't conjured out of thin air or anything; the team was 8-4 with home losses to Indiana State and North Dakota State (decent teams, but still). The root of this mediocrity was the terrible defense. Brey-coached team are rarely good on that side of the ball, but losing a decent defender in Grant isn't enough to explain away a defense that barely cracked the top 200.
2. Garrick Sherman - Garrick was the number one option in the offense but he just wasn't very good. His O-rating was 99.0 (average is 100), with a usage rate of over 28% (just shy of top 100 in the nation), which means we spent a lot of time feeding a mediocre player the ball. I still appreciate his overtime heroics from last year's Louisville game, and it's not necessarily his fault that Brey featured him so much, but he might just be my least favorite ND player ever.
The good news is that I think this will be a one year blip. The returning core of Grant, Jackson, Vasturia, Connaughton, and Auguste should be formidable, and incoming talent should be as strong as ever. I'm not under the impression that ND is necessarily going to start contending for ACC championships, but I think the program can get back to that comfortable level of winning that it's enjoyed for a while now.
Creighton: Making History
I am not often prone to hyperbole. That said, this season of Creighton basketball is likely to go down as one of the most special seasons in this sports fan's life, for many reasons. The most obvious reason would be the future Wooden Award winner, Doug McDermott. There's been a number of great players on the teams I root for over the years, but I don't think there's ever been as dominant of a season as the one #3 is having. Watching games while rooting for your favorite player is one thing; watching games rooting for someone like McDermott to pass the next hall of famer on the all-time NCAA scoring list is a whole different beast. While I will always be a Creighton fan and have high hopes that they're going to be great next season, it still might be tough to adjust to just regular old basketball next season.
Of course, that "regular old basketball" is a completely different animal from what it was before. Largely because of McDermott's success in his first three years (A Catholic orientation, huge arena, and dedicated fan base didn't hurt either), Creighton just wrapped up its first regular season in the Big East. Not only did I get to enjoy Doug's march to 3,000, but I got to do so against a brand new set of tradition-laden opponents. Many of the great matchups against teams with large trophies from their past endeavors suggested future rivalries that may become some of the best in the sport. While I've always enjoyed rooting for the Jays, these last couple of years have been quite the ride. I'll be sad to see it end, but thanks in large part to this extended run of good fortune, the Jays are set up to succeed for the long run.
Saint Louis: Saying Goodbye
The 2012 season was the campaign in which I started playing close attention to advanced metrics in college basketball. While this opened up my eyes to a lot of new things, none was as great as my newfound love of Saint Louis basketball. I came about the Billikens in a fairly innocuous manner: I was perusing the KenPom team rankings and saw that Saint Louis, a team that hadn't made the tournament in years, was all the way up to #10 with very little national fanfare. Since I knew nothing about them, I decided to find the next game of theirs that was on TV. That game happened to be their penultimate conference affair of the season, a Tuesday night game against Xavier. When they went on a massive run to start the second half, Chaifetz Arena was rocking and I was hooked. Rick Majerus' brand of ferocious defense and smart yet aggressive offense was a perfect match for my sports-watching sensibilities.
If you follow basketball at all, you probably have a decent idea of what's happened since then. In case you don't, here goes: In the tourney, Saint Louis got stuck with a nine seed and an insanely tough draw in Memphis. They made it past that and gave Michigan State a hell of a game before losing by four, in what would be Coach Majerus' last game. He would leave the team during the summer for health reasons, and then died tragically on December 1st. The interim coach Jim Crews performed admirably and helped to rally the team to win the A10 regular season and tournament championship. The team bowed out in the third round again, this time to a plucky Oregon team that refused to miss threes.
That brings us to this season, which feature the last vestiges of Majerus' thumbprint in the starting lineup. The five seniors have been strong, but the team has faltered a bit without the depth from previous years' teams*. Luckily, the team is still the top seed in the A10 tourney, and will likely draw a decent seed in the NCAA tournament. I don't have the same hopes of a final four run that I did last year, but there are reasons to believe that the Billikens could see the second weekend with a favorable enough draw.
*I love this picture and quote, but the funny thing is that Saint Louis was actually a better team the last couple years than this year. It goes to show that getting a top ten ranking requires a lot of luck in addition to a lot of skill.
Of course, at some point later in March the Billikens will lose, and the senior starters will no longer be senior starters. At that time, Saint Louis will barely resemble the outfit I fell for three years ago. I haven't been terribly impressed with the efforts from the bench players, so I don't necessarily have a lot of hope for next season. This leads me to conclude that this will likely be the end of my short-lived Billiken fandom. It's been a great run, but I doubt that I'll DVR games next season to make sure I catch say, Tanner Lancona in action. Luckily, the beauty of college basketball is that there are always other awesome teams out there that need a random guy from Ohio to root for them. Since I seem drawn to teams coming out of nowhere to be good (Saint Louis and last year's Colorado State team), I have a couple of teams in mind. In the meantime, I will enjoy what little time I have left with Dwayne Evans and Jordair Jett. The resolve and unselfish nature of this team will be something I always remember.
After the loss to Wake today, ND's numbers are even worse: 102 overall, 38 offense, 200 defense.
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