Hold Your Heads High, Wildcats

The Tournament may be over for us, but no one will ever forget an incredible season played by incredible guys with an incredible coach from an incredible school. We have SO MUCH to be proud of!

In honor of the Cats, here are some of my favorite photos from our year of greatness…

Don’t Wildcats EAT Jayhawks?

Extinct: Bulldogs, Hoyas, Badgers
Now on the Endangered Species List: Jayhawks

LET’S GO WILDCATS!

No Cinderellas Here

 

Shedding the slipper: Experienced and tested Davidson is no Cinderella

DETROIT — The bracket says this was a big-time upset: The Midwest’s No. 10 seed knocking off the No. 3 seed. Same thing if you went by the names on the jerseys: Wisconsin, champion of the vaunted Big Ten, losing to Davidson, champion of the Southern Conference.

From courtside, however, Friday night’s Sweet 16 game looked like one thing and one thing only: A colossal mismatch in which a more athletic, better-shooting, more aggressive defensive team (Davidson) broke open a 36-36 halftime deadlock to make mincemeat of its overmatched opponent (Wisconsin), 73-56.

Perhaps the selection committee got the seeds backwards.

“You might say we’re ‘teeny’ Davidson,” said point guard Jason Richards. “But we’re not going to back down from anyone.”

As the only double-digit seed and 2,000-student school headed to the Elite Eight, Davidson will presumably get tagged with the “Cinderella” label in the coming days, a la George Mason two years ago. It could not be less accurate.

Yes, the Wildcats’ current NCAA tourney run is quickly taking on a similar feel to those 2006 Final Four darlings — just like Mason knocked off tourney staples Michigan State, North Carolina and UConn, Davidson has now offed Gonzaga, Georgetown and Wisconsin with top seed Kansas looming on Sunday — there’s really no comparison between the actual teams.

George Mason did not take top-10 squads North Carolina, UCLA and Duke to the wire in its non-conference season like Davidson. George Mason did not go 20-0 in its conference like Davidson. George Mason was not ranked in the Top 25 by the end of the regular season like Davidson. And with all due respect to former Patriots guards Tony Skinn and Lamar Butler, George Mason did not have a backcourt the likes of Richards and Stephen Curry.

Friday night against a Wisconsin team that came in with the nation’s most efficient defense, Curry and Richards put on a show as impressive as anything seen this tourney. Curry, following up on his 40- and 30-point outputs in the first two rounds, scored another 33, while Richards delivered the eye-popping stat line of 11 points, 13 assists and zero turnovers.

“I think this is a pretty darn good backcourt,” said Davidson coach Bob McKillop.

Curry, whose star has risen so high in the span of eight days that LeBron James came just to see him play (mouthing a visible “Wow” on an acrobatic reverse layup by Curry late in the game), put on another dazzling shooting display, hitting 6-of-11 three-pointers, but his most important stat may have been this one: Four steals.

Davidson blew open Friday night’s game with a 21-3 second-half run that was fueled as much by defense as it was Curry’s continued hot hand. Time and again, Wisconsin’s guards would try to feed their big men in the post only to find them smothered by Wildcats counterparts Thomas Sander and Andrew Lovedale. Time and again, Curry or Richards would get a hand on the ball as a Badger attempted to drive the lane, and a teammate like Max Paulhus Gosselin would come up with the loose ball.

And time and again, Richards would race the other way in a matter of seconds, finding an open Curry in the corner or a streaking Sander down the lane. It looked a whole lot like watching another transition-specialist, North Carolina, another powerhouse the Wildcats faced earlier this season (losing 72-68).

“That’s the type of game we play at Davidson,” said Richards. “We get up and down the fast break, find shooters on the wings.”

The game’s most telling sequence came with 13:01 remaining and Davidson leading just 51-45. Curry stripped plodding Badgers forward Joe Krabbenhoft as he drove the lane. In a matter of seconds, he spotted up in the corner on the other end, took a pass from Richards, paused to wait for the trailing Krabbenhoft to fly past him like a stuntman jumping from a building and drained a three-pointer to put the Wildcats firmly in control.

Davidson held Wisconsin to 37 percent shooting while hitting 49.1 percent itself and caused the normally polished Badgers to finish with more turnovers (12) than assists (nine).

“We didn’t have to change our basketball system because we were facing Wisconsin,” said Lovedale. “We wanted to do what we did all year.”

If it seems like Davidson plays unusually poised in these tourney games for a team that spent the majority of its season facing the likes of Georgia Southern and Western Carolina (during one break in the action Friday, the uber-cool Curry casually chatted up Wisconsin counterpart Michael Flowers about their respective hometowns), one need only look at their early-season schedule.

North Carolina. Duke. UCLA.

The Wildcats played all three of them and took all three to the wire. They didn’t come away with any W’s — at one point, in fact, they were 4-6 — but they came away with the confidence of knowing what the rest of us are only find out now: That they’re every bit as good as some of the best teams in the country.

“We were right there ’til the end [against those foes],” said Curry. “That proved we can compete with anyone but we couldn’t finish games. Now we have another shot at the big guys, and we’ve gotten better. We’ve learned to play 40 minutes.”

They needed all 40 minutes to put away previous tourney foes Gonzaga and Georgetown, but Friday night’s contest was unofficially over with about eight minutes left. By then, the Davidson band had broken out its favorite tune, Sweet Caroline, and the large swath of fans behind the Wildcats’ bench — nearly all of them wearing red-and-white “Witness” shirts purchased by Curry’s NBA-alum father, Dell — sang along in celebration.

Moments earlier, they’d watched Curry toy with yet another overmatched defender, hanging in the air and shoveling the ball from his knees to the hoop in the aforementioned reverse layup that brought LeBron to his feet. His team’s lead had grown to 17 and would soon reach as high as 21.

“They’re a great team,” said Wisconsin forward Marcus Landry. “They really outworked us and out-scrapped us.”

Re-read those previous words from Landry. If there’s any major-conference team in the country synonymous with outworking and outscrapping people, it’s Wisconsin. Yet when Curry started his now-customary second-half scoring binge (he scored 22 of his 33 after halftime) and the Wildcats rolled off a back-breaking 12-0 run, the Big Ten champs looked as helpless as … well, a Georgia Southern or Western Carolina.

So it’s probably wise at this point for hoops followers to re-think their preconceived notions about Davidson. Cinderella? Only to someone who hasn’t actually watched the Wildcats play.

“Last year, you might have been accurate to say we were a Cinderella had we advanced [beyond the first round] because were a surprise,” said McKillop. “We brought back five starters, we won 20 conference games, we played the heavyweights early and played them close. This team has expectations you wouldn’t normally see a ‘Cinderella’ have.”

Not to mention a pair of guards most major-conference teams can only dream about.

What It’s All About…

Life Is Beautiful With Davidson’s Generosity 

By Pat Forde

DETROIT — Davidson center Thomas Sander was halfway through his senior economics seminar Wednesday afternoon when a fellow student excitedly raised his hand.

“I’ve got a pretty cool announcement,” the guy said to the class. And then he read the e-mail that had just dropped from college president Tom Ross, containing the coolest invitation in the history of March Madness:

If you’re a Davidson student, the Sweet 16 is on us. And you’re all invited.

“Everyone was going crazy, saying ‘I’m going to Detroit!’” Sander recalled.

College kids love free stuff. But a free trip — tickets, hotel and a bus ride included — to see your Cinderella school play Big Ten champion Wisconsin in a once-a-generation NCAA tournament game? This was better than Ed McMahon showing up at your door with a Publishers Clearing House check.”It’s unbelievably generous of the trustees,” said Davidson freshman Kevin Hubbard, who talked to me by phone from campus Thursday. “They really did not have to do this.”

That’s the key point here: They did not have to do this, but they did it anyway. No other school still playing in this tournament would.

This was a spectacular act of pure goodwill in a sport that has become so coldly mercenary it threatens to lose some of its abundant charm. Just about everything in College Sports Inc. is sponsored, logo’d, seat-licensed, underwritten or overpriced — and the first casualty of the money grab has been the peers of the athletes themselves.

In gymnasiums and football stadiums across the country, students are herded into the cheap seats while the prime locations go to boosters and donors who can be gouged for tens of thousands of dollars. Or students get hit with athletic fees as part of their tuition to help pay for the latest phat facility or colossal contract extension for the coach.

Here in Detroit, they’ve rejiggered the standard basketball-in-a-dome seating plan to sell more tickets. About 57,000 seats have been sold as of 5 p.m. Thursday at Ford Field for the games Friday night. The good news is that more fans will be in the building than ever before at a regional semifinal. The bad news is that there are more bad seats than ever before.

Among the school allotments, many universities take care of the fat cats first. Students? Hey, if some of you can make it, great. You’ll get a few tickets. But don’t expect the school to do anything for you along the way.

Then along came No. 10 seed Davidson, basking in the glow of a surprising run and willing to share some of the reflected glory. Members of the school’s board of trustees are digging into their own pockets for about $100,000 to provide at least five buses, 250 tickets and 125 hotel rooms for the student body to see their Wildcats.

Because it’s the right thing to do.

What a beautiful counterconcept.

“The sense of intimacy that exists on our campus is unparalleled in NCAA Division I basketball,” coach Bob McKillop said. “You hear all about the free laundry [a laundry service is offered to all Davidson students]. But when the board of trustees votes in a meeting on Tuesday to go into their personal pockets and put out the money so that every student can go to this game … that reaches a level that’s unprecedented.

“I’m stunned by it. Thrilled by it.”

So was everyone else on the campus. The news crackled like sheet lightning across the small liberal arts enclave of 1,700 students located 30 miles outside Charlotte.

Athletic director Jim Murphy heard a student say, “The library is going crazy.” So was the student union. And the dorms.

The only catch was that the school needed an RSVP from each student by 4 p.m. Wednesday. That put some urgency into the student body.

“Everyone ran to their computers,” said Hubbard, a freshman from Queens, N.Y.

Brenda Fuentes, a sophomore from Long Island, got the e-mail on her phone at 2:23 p.m. on Wednesday. She and two of her friends dashed to the computer lab, sending in their RSVP at 2:42.

But a lot of students didn’t hear about the offer until after 4. By 6 p.m. at the president’s office, staffers had received 450 requests and still had about 700 unread e-mails.

“I’m surprised the wireless didn’t crash on campus,” Murphy said.

The only downside of this story is that the offer became too much of a good thing. Davidson couldn’t come up with nearly enough buses in 24 hours to accommodate demand. Buses will roll from campus at 6 Friday morning and return sometime early Monday morning — why not think you’re playing two, right? — but the school won’t be able to transport two-thirds of the student body after all.

“The response is overwhelming,” said Davidson trustees chairman John McCartney. “More overwhelming than the logistics of getting the kids up there. It’s too bad the suggestion [from a fellow trustee] didn’t come until Tuesday. I wish I had thought of it on my own, and I wish I had thought of it earlier.”

Having thought of it at all is part of what sets Davidson apart from the Sweet 16 crowd. Athletics and academics are so well-entwined at the school that there is no disconnect between the athletes and those who cheer them on.

Brenda Fuentes describes herself as a good friend of star guard Stephen Curry. They have classes together. See each other on campus all the time.

She said she ran into Curry on campus Tuesday, after he’d become the face of Madness by scoring 70 points in upsets of Gonzaga and Georgetown. Curry told her that over the weekend he got 1,800 new friend requests on his Facebook page.

“You’re a big shot,” Fuentes teased. “Can you still hang out with us little people?”

At Davidson, they’re all little people. That’s the charm.

They offer 21 intercollegiate sports at Davidson, so a good number of students are participating in something. They also offer zero jock majors at a school known for its academic rigor.

“Davidson is a place where nearly a quarter of our kids participate in intercollegiate athletics, and they’re in a very, very demanding academic environment,” McCartney said. “I think the whole community recognizes the level of commitment and effort by the basketball team to be able to reach this level while still maintaining their academic standing. This is a gesture of appreciation.”

The players deserve the appreciation, but do not overlook their coach. McKillop, a longtime New York high school coach who is now in his 19th season at Davidson, was producing chills Thursday while talking about this breakthrough season.

“I don’t know that I could ever imagine the feeling that this would generate on our campus, in our community and within me personally,” McKillop said, eyes glistening for a moment. “I am at ease now in my life. I have never been more at ease, more comfortable, more grounded than where I am right now.

“I think it’s a response to the pursuit of something and seeing it happening right in front of your eyes, knowing the investment and realizing how many people were part of this investment, and now are sharing in this investment.”

Later, in a hallway outside the Davidson locker room, McKillop invoked the final scene of the movie “Life Is Beautiful” (“La Vita e Bella,” in the original Italian), a heartbreaking World War II concentration camp story. A father sacrifices his life so that his son can endure the horrors of internment and ultimately escape, and the boy rides away joyfully atop an American tank in the closing scene, thinking he has won a game.

The father prevailed. That’s what McKillop loved.

“Whether or not we have gotten to the Sweet 16 or won 28 games, we have won because we’ve lived up to our belief,” McKillop said of Davidson’s improbable rise to this position. “We did not surrender. Our world today is full of surrender at the first sign of a challenge to people’s hopes and dreams. We did not surrender.”

There will be no surrender from Davidson Friday night. Be sure of that. And no surrender from the hundreds of Davidson students who are at Ford Field thanks to the largesse of a school that gets it, money be damned.

ELITE 8 BABY!

Are you freaking kidding me?!?!?!? Davidson just DESTROYED Wisconsin, 73-56. Next stop: the #1-ranked Jayhawks.

‘Think the extraordinarily generous trustees would dip back into their pockets for alumni if Davidson makes the Final Four?

KU, prepare to be KO’ed!!

Badgers for Breakfast

Good morning, y’all!   A fellow alum posted this awesome picture of our Davidson Wildcat feasting on badger.  I couldn’t resist. 

 It’s a GREAT day to be a Wildcat!!

Sizzling

That’s all I have to say about that…

Magnificent Indeed

Davidson needs more Curry magic

SCOTT FOWLER

RALEIGH –

IN MY OPINION Davidson’s win against Gonzaga on Friday was one of the biggest in school history — the first time one of coach Bob McKillop’s 19 Davidson squads had ever beaten a ranked team or won an NCAA tournament game.But the players’ celebration was necessarily brief. If Gonzaga was like climbing a 10-foot ladder for Davidson, Georgetown will be like climbing a crane. If Davidson could somehow beat Georgetown today (2:50 p.m. tip-off), a national spotlight would shine on the Wildcats for at least four more days.

To pull off that upset, Stephen Curry will have to be magnificent. Again.

Curry’s 40-point performance in the win Friday against Gonzaga was amazing, but it would be even more amazing if he scored 30 against Georgetown. No player has scored more than 27 against Georgetown all season. I think Curry will need to score in the high 20s for Davidson to win, and one other unsung hero would need to emerge.

“They are a very physical team,” Curry said of Georgetown. “I think they are a little bigger than us from top to bottom.”

Georgetown might play better defense than anyone in America. North Carolina fans still remember the way the Hoyas shut the Tar Heels down in overtime last season, upsetting UNC to move to the Final Four.

Said McKillop: “You have to find a crack here, you have to find an opening there. … You need to steal points against them to be successful.”

Georgetown loves to play a zone and will likely open up in a matchup version today. But when the Hoyas play man-to-man, they will first try to stick Jeremiah Rivers on Curry. That will be a matchup between two former NBA players’ sons — Stephen the son of Dell, Jeremiah the son of Doc s.

When I asked Georgetown coach John Thompson III how he would guard Curry today, he joked: “You got any suggestions? Because no one has guarded him yet.”

More seriously, Thompson said the Hoyas would not “re-invent the wheel” to guard Curry.

“We are not going to try to come up with the special `Davidson/Curry’ defense,” the coach said.

Curry said he expected Georgetown to use a lot of zone, and the Hoyas are very adept at switching on screens so as not to allow shooters any space. He also expects the sort of physical defense that UCLA played against him this season (when Curry went 6-for-19 and scored only 15 points).

“I see it a lot, cutting through the middle trying to get open, I get elbows and shoulders just to get me off my cut,” Curry said. “I think I’m pretty good at getting around it and maybe using my quickness to counteract my lack of size.”

Curry often tries to get his teammates involved early in the game, passing up the deep shots he takes in the second half. He scored only 10 in the first half vs. Gonzaga, then led Davidson’s comeback from 11 points down in the second half with 30 more.

One big advantage for Davidson today: It should feel like a home game. North Carolina fans will fill the arena early — the Tar Heels play the second game in Raleigh against Arkansas, at 5:20 p.m. — and no UNC fan worth his salt likes Georgetown after last season.

Will that be enough? Only if Curry has one more heavenly performance left inside that frail frame.

Georgetown’s defense

The Hoyas (28-5) are once again one of the NCAA’ top defensive teams. A look at the numbers:

0

Number of individual players who have scored 28 or more points against Georgetown this season.

10

Number of teams that have scored more than 60 points against Georgetown this season.

36.6

Field-goal percentage Georgetown’s defense allows (lowest in the nation).

58

Total point average of Georgetown opponents this season.

Holy Sweet Sixteen!

DAVIDSON SENDS GEORGETOWN PACKING!

We came back from a 16-point deficit to give ‘em a run for their money over the last five minutes of the game. Davidson alums everywhere know that Wildcats NEVER give up!

On to Detroit for the Sweet Sixteen, facing No. 3 Wisconsin.

Kudos to the Davidson College Basketball blog for excellent coverage of our winners all season long!

As always, here are the highlights…

Sweet Caroline!

For those of us poor souls who had to work on Good Friday (and I even work for an agency with Catholic roots), yesterday was pure torture. Mostly because I wanted to be home watching

DAVIDSON BEAT GONZAGA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank God for the Internet. I watched the scoreboard obsessively and spent the last 10 minutes of the contest on the verge of having a heart attack. I know I drove everyone crazy. But I don’t care because our boys WON!!! Round 2, here we come!

Highlights from the game…