Fear not, Bears fans
Many close observers of college basketball believe that winning on the road is the most difficult thing to achieve in the sport.
After this past weekend’s action, count the Washington University men’s basketball team among the believers.
The Bears, previously undefeated in league action, dropped a pair of road games at NYU and Brandeis, respectively.
After falling decisively for the first time all season this past Friday before a packed Coles Center in New York, the young squad looked to come back to campus with at least one victory on the trip.
But Brandeis had other ideas. The Judges, who had lost three consecutive conference tilts entering the contest, were in desperate need of a UAA victory to keep any chance at postseason play alive. And they got one. Barely.
The Bears led by as many as eight points with under six minutes to go Sunday, but Brandeis fought back to take the lead, before Wash. U.’s Sean Wallis hit a basket with four seconds remaining to send the game into overtime.
It was in that first overtime that both Wallis and fellow sophomore star Tyler Nading both fouled out. Despite losing two of the team’s leading three scorers, the Red and Green managed to force two additional overtimes before ultimately bowing to the Judges.
So, what’s next for the men’s hoop team?
Just a week ago, the squad sat atop the UAA standings after an unprecedented 7-0 start in conference play. The Field House was packed for a victory over Brandeis, and the Bears surprised perhaps even themselves with an absolutely stunning comeback victory over NYU two days later.
The team stood at 16-1 overall and shot up to number seven in the national rankings. They even received one of the coveted 25 first place votes, meaning at least one D3 expert deemed the sons of Danforth the nation’s best team.
No realistic observer of UAA basketball, one of the nation’s top Division III conferences, believed Wash. U., or any other UAA team for that matter, would go undefeated in league play this year. After losing two starters from last year’s 17-8 squad, prognosticators predicted the team would finish a respectable, but not especially noteworthy, third place in the conference standings.
So, in a way, the team is a victim of its own surprise success. The Bears’ near flawless play in the first 17 games of its 24-game regular season schedule came without very many observers acknowledging that the team wasn’t supposed to be this good.
And now, with the squad facing back-to-back losses for the first time this year, the murmurings on Internet message boards and general chatter in the Division III hoops community might lead the casual observer to believe that the Bears’ season has uncontrollably spiraled downhill.
The skeptics and naysayers believe the Bears must now address their various Achilles’ heels. They’ll say that Wash. U.’s failure to win with Wallis and Nading sitting on the bench after both fouling out is evidence of the team’s lack of sufficient depth.
They’ll point out the uncanny 53 minutes played by freshman shooting guard Aaron Thompson on Sunday and the 44 played by classmate Cam Smith and say that the team is too inexperienced to make a significant run in the NCAA tournament.
What they won’t note, however, is that if the league season ended today, the Bears would still be league champs, taking an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament and very likely having home court advantage in the first two rounds of postseason action.
They won’t note that the Bears have already dealt with great adversity this season, that consecutive losses to two terrific opponents pale in comparison to the adversity the squad faced when junior sharpshooter and then-second leading scorer Danny O’Boyle was lost for the season due to a devastating injury he sustained in the team’s fifth game.
Key reserves Zach Kelly and Jonathan Bresheers have also battled injuries all season long, and the team has nonetheless managed to continue its winning ways.
Wash. U. ran into a hot NYU team, desperately in need of a win and desperately seeking revenge after falling in devastating fashion to the Bears just five days earlier. They played before a sell-out crowd in New York City against a nationally ranked NYU team, a tall task for a still young squad with only limited experience on the road.
On Sunday, they came up just short against a Brandeis team which, in spite of some early struggles in league play, has been highly regarded all season.
If the Bears had beaten Brandeis and returned to St. Louis at 8-1 in league play, the NYU loss would have quickly become a distant memory, a mere blip on an otherwise unblemished radar screen.
This is a basketball team which knows its limitations and has succeeded in spite of them all year. To claim that a pair of league losses marks the beginning of the end to what has been a thrilling journey would not only be unnecessarily alarmist, but also highly uninformed.
The Bears return home next weekend to face supposed rival Emory on Friday night and Case Western on Sunday. They’ll enter both games as prohibitive favorites, both impressive feats, considering the general youthfulness of the current roster. They’ll be favored the following weekend as well, when they go on the road to face Carnegie Mellon and Rochester.
And they will likely also be favored the following Saturday, Feb. 23, when they host the University of Chicago in both teams’ season finale and what, if things go as expected, would also mark the league title game.
They’ll be competing in these games-as they have all season-by relying heavily upon the contributions and substantive playing time from key underclassmen. They’ll continue to try and keep notable contributors out of foul trouble.
Now is not the time for drastic changes or new offensive schemes. A pair of tough losses doesn’t generally warrant major reform efforts and this team needn’t change what it’s been doing all season.
After all, it’s worked.
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