Florida Atlantic comes in from the warm
Dispatches from the Long March, Day 5.
Maybe the fact that Lane Kiffin began his career resurrection on this campus rings a bell. Maybe you’ve seen the name on an I-95 North exit sign. If you’re an NFL draft need, maybe you remember where Trey Hendrickson, now Cincinnati’s most effective pass rusher, went to school.
Florida Atlantic has an enrollment of more than 30,000, but the site was just an obsolete air base when the school opened in 1964. President Lyndon B. Johnson was there for the ribbon-cutting; the organizers wanted President John F. Kennedy to come, but didn’t send the invitation until Nov. 22, 1963.
Hurricane Cleo and its aftereffects delayed the first day of class by nearly a week. There were 867 students at the time.
Men’s basketball didn’t arrive until 1988, and the Owls weren’t eligible for Division I tournament play until 1995. In 2002 they won the Atlantic Sun and lost in the first NCAA round to Alabama. Eventually it landed in Conference USA, a melting pot of transient schools that ranges from El Paso to Richmond, Ky. to Boca Raton. Florida Atlantic, in fact, is on the way up and out, moving to the American Athletic Conference next season. It has saved its parting gift for last.
The Owls edged Memphis in the first round of the NCAA tournament last Friday. They brought Fairleigh Dickinson to earth in the second round last Sunday. On Thursday in Madison Square Garden, they faced Tennessee, the best defensive team in the country, as muscular and imposing as a cab full of WWE stars.
In the end the Vols joined 33 other teams this season that have also lost to Florida Atlantic, this by a score of 62-55, and the Owls now prepare for Kansas State Saturday in the regional final. A win puts them into next week’s Final Four.
From a basketball standpoint this is really not a seismic event. Florida Atlantic was a No. 9 seed. From a university standpoint it’s like a hurricane that rains money. The average home crowd for an FAU game this season was 2,238. The Owls played two games in Columbus last weekend, and those crowds alone surpassed its entire home attendance for the season.
But it doesn’t matter if nobody’s watching or if everybody is. You can dance.
The coach is Dusty May, a former manager for Indiana’s basketball team, a coach-in-waiting even then. He would take notes during practices and, when he was jotting down sets instead of chasing down stray basketballs, he’d find himself in Bobby Knight’s volcano cone. He got on the assistant-coach carousel and wound up at Florida, where his son Jack plays today. When the FAU job opened, Florida coach Mike White recommended May to the athletic director, who was Mike’s brother Brian.
This is May’s fifth year. He had winning seasons in three of the previous four. You might assume that FAU is built on wayward souls who transferred in, and there are a few, like Conncticut transfer Jalen Gaffney and Texas Tech transfer Vladislav Goldin, the 7-foot-1 low post man, but this is mostly last year’s team, enhanced organically. It plays four guards most of the time, with only two rotation players over 6-4, and May commands it to “find space and attack it,” much like an Air Raid football offense. Florida Atlantic shoots 36.3 percent from three, and 37.2 percent of its points come from long shots. It beat Florida in nonconference play and wound up with a 34-3 record. For those who overlook the league, North Texas and UAB are in the NIT’s Final Four, to be settled in Las Vegas next week.
It takes a clear eye for talent. On May’s first working day at FAU, he visited Michael Forrest, who was the Broward County Player of the Year in nearby Fort Lauderdale. May signed Forrest, then dropped by the gym at 7:30 a.m. on an off-season Sunday and saw Forrest there, working and sweating alone. This, he knew, was a keeper.
May then heard about Johnell Davis, another multitasker from Gary, Ind. who wasn’t getting recruited. As a 15-year-old, Davis scored 20 for 21st Century, a charter school, in a sectional playoff game. More impressive was his impending graduation from the Dorie Miller Homes, a half-empty petri dish of crime that has now been demolished.
Instead of landing at a Mid-American Conference school nearby, Davis went for the sunshine and warmth. He kept getting better. Against Fairleigh Dickinson he shot 9 for 12 and scored 29 with 10 rebounds, five assists and five steals. Against Tennessee he scored 15 and hit nine of 10 free throws.
The Vols had roughed up a much younger Duke team in the second round and seemed likely to get through New York on the way to the Final Four. As it turned out, the knee injury that sidelined 5-foot-8 point guard Zakai Zeigler finally came into play, since FAU had a noticeable quickness edge in the backcourt. Zeigler might have been a nice counterpoint to the sound-and-light show that Kansas State’s vertically-challenged Markquis Nowell gave the Garden in the first game. Nowell, from Harlem, set an alltime tournament record with 19 assists, many of them delivered without looking, as Kansas State beat Michigan State in overtime.
Tennessee led 21-12. It was an orange eclipse, blotting out Florida Atlantic. Then came one of those scoring moratoriums that Vols fans have learned to dread. Florida Atlantic was able to sneak into halftime with only a 27-22 deficit.
Confidence might be the second most powerful force in sports, next to lack of confidence. Tennessee found it difficult to shoot with trembling hands. It went 11 for 31 in the second half, and Olivier Nhamkoua, who scored 27 on Duke, got six on this night. But Tennessee’s defense also took a holiday, with Florida Atlantic shooting 46 percent and getting to the foul line 14 times. An 8-0 run, before an increasingly convinced knot of FAU supporters and an upset-loving crowd, gave FAU a 10-point lead. For a team like Tennessee, that’s like trying to catch Secretariat at the Belmont.
Back home, former Texas football coach Tom Herman was getting situated at spring practice, and the public hazard known as Spring Break was gathering steam. But one hopes the casual student commuters realize what’s going on here. It’s not that basketball is putting Florida Atlantic on the map. It’s just that, thanks to basketball, you might not need it anymore.
Otherwise:
Gonzaga 79, UCLA 76: The Bruins were playing without defensive stars Jaylen Clark and Adem Bona, but the Zags were trying to play without defense altogether. In the first half UCLA shot 51.2 percent with one turnover and two fouls, and Gonzaga was more of a buffet table than a third-seeded basketball team.
It changed radically in the second half, when seniors Tyger Campbell and David Singleton went a combined 0-for-9 and UCLA gave up 14 offensive rebounds and 18 second-chance points. Gonzaga surged ahead by 10 with 2:40 to go.
Then came a frightful sequence of silly, clock-stopping fouls and missed free throws that allowed UCLA back in. Freshman Amari Bailey stuck a 3-pointer for a one-point lead with :14 left.
Where would Gonzaga go? Not to Drew Timme, who already had 36 ponts but would be hard to find within all those UCLA arms. No, Zags coach Mark Few laid all his chips on Julian Strawther, a Vegas kid playing in Vegas, who rose for a 3-pointer halfway between the foul line and the midcourt line and banged it.
For the third time in 24 months, Gonzaga has beaten UCLA. It’s not a rivalry when the same team wins, and you’re no longer a college basketball blueblood when you win one NCAA title in a 48-year span.
Connecticut 88, Arkansas 65
The Huskies have been the best team in the tournament by a margin almost as wide as their scores. They have won three games by 72 points and have made 31 of 67 threes. Here they shot 57 percent overall and held the Razorbacks to 32 percent, and had 22 assists on 31 baskets.
Jordan Hawkins led with 24 points, but Adema Sanogo continued his touranment spree with 9-for-11 shooting. This is obviously not the same group that lost Big East games to Seton Hall and St.. John’s.
Kansas State 98, Michigan State 96, OT
This one had 16 lead changes, 14 ties and untold double-takes, as Nowell, shaking off a turned ankle, dominated play. But Keyontae Johnson played 45 minutes and shot 10 for 18, and Ismael Massoud hit four 3-pointers that the Wildcats needed like plasma. Massoud is a 41.6 percent shooter from deep, and his corner shot that sprung from a out of bounds play finally put Michigan State to sleep.
A.J. Hoggard was heroic for the Spartans, scoring 25 and hitting 10 of 11 free throws, and Tyson Walker hit all kinds of necessary shots. The only sliver of a difference was that Kansas State scored 18 points off turnovers and Michigan State only two. But the prevailing image will be Nowell, shaking off a signal from coach Jerome Tang and then firing a lob pass to Johnson for a dunk. As Fran Fraschilla once said in reference to his St. John’s days, “If you’re coaching a New York player you have to make him realize you’re crazier than he is.”