DULUTH — Basketball junkies across the country were parked in front of the television Thursday afternoon for the first day of NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament games.
Just not the 20 or so Minnesota Duluth players, coaches and staff who had a practice to run. They'll catch up with that tournament later, they have more important matters to attend to.
UMD head coach Justin Wieck said there was no filling out of brackets in his household this year. “I said (to his family), this is a year we’re not gonna do it, we’ve got our own bracket going on live.”
The Bulldogs have their own shining moments from this March, including the first three NCAA tournament wins in program history, which earned them a Central Region championship and a berth in the Division II Elite Eight, which begins on Tuesday at noon in Evansville, Indiana.
“I like to think that I prepared my whole life for this, so everything I’ve done up until this point, all the work I’ve put in, just trusting that and sticking with it, and I know that these are the moments we live for. I wouldn’t say it’s pressure, but it’s a little bit of pressure which actually kind of helps us because I feel like we do better under pressure,” junior guard Joshua Brown said.
Tuesday night's regional championship victory over Southern Nazarene in Maryville, Missouri was not exactly the stuff of highlight videos. The Bulldogs pressured Crimson Storm into a terrible 33.8% shooting night. They didn't exactly light it up on their own, but they found the right player. In that case, it was Drew Blair, who scored nearly half (28) of the Bulldogs' 62 points and had nine field goals (the rest of the team combined for eight). But in the tournament quarterfinals, Blair sat out the last 10 minutes, banged up but cheering, as UMD finished a comeback win over third-seeded Central Oklahoma.
“Different nights, different guys are gonna have it going and so with having so many guys like that, it’s inevitable that somebody’s gonna have it going on a certain night,” Brown said.
UMD was seeded sixth in the Central Region and, after the eight regional champions were re-seeded, is seeded sixth again. The Bulldogs will face No. 3 seed Black Hills (South Dakota) State in Tuesday's leadoff game.
“They’re really good, but I think we’re playing really well as well, and what history has shown a little bit is if you can make it out of the Central Region you have a really good chance to be successful,” Wieck said.
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Wieck knows his history. Each of the last six Division II national championship games has included the Central Region champion: Northwest Missouri State won four times, Augustana won once and Northern State was runner-up.
UMD's history has been more modest. They're only six years removed from a 4-25 season, which meant that some of the players making up this very team had to buy into a vision well before any track record was there.
“It really is the culmination from where this program started five years ago to celebrate on the court and watch our guys cut the nets down. … It’s really hard to win a regional tournament, obviously, and to be able to do it with this group of guys is a great feeling,” Wieck, who has won more than 60% of his games since taking over at UMD in 2018, said.
These are unprecedented times both for the UMD men's program and the whole athletic department, as the women's team makes its own Elite Eight run and the university hosts the women's hockey Frozen Four. Both Wieck and Blair referred to UMD not as a "basketball school" or a "hockey school" but an "everything school."
“We know in two weeks or three weeks or whatever, we’ll have plenty of time to really enjoy and look back on what happened but we’re going to try and take this thing as far as we can right now,” Blair said.
Scouting the Yellow Jackets
Somewhat surprisingly, two teams from bordering states were paired together in a regionalized Division II national tournament. Here's five things to know:
1. The Bulldogs and Yellow Jackets have common opponents. BHSU played both Minnesota State Moorhead and Augustana of the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference in the East/West Challenge at Sanford Pentagon in Sioux Falls, South Dakota on Nov. 18-19, beating Moorhead 78-77 and Augie 82-73. UMD split two games with Moorhead in the regular season before losing to the Dragons in the NSIC tournament final, and lost at home to the Vikings in their only meeting.
2. The Yellow Jackets were also seeded sixth in their regional, curiously named the South, and knocked off the top three seeds in order to earn a return trip to the Elite Eight. In the final against host West Texas A&M, the Buffs made a shot at the buzzer that was waved off, handing BHSU a 68-67 victory. In 2022, BHSU eliminated the tournament's No. 1 seed (Nova Southeastern) in the quarterfinals before losing a national semifinal to eventual national champions Northwest Missouri State.
3. Joel Scott is the key player for the Yellowjackets. The 6-foot-7 senior forward is the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference's leading rebounder and is 26 points away from breaking his own school record for single-season scoring, averaging 22.8 points per game.
4. Three of BHSU's four losses are to the same team: Fort Lewis, twice in the regular season and in the semifinals of the RMAC tournament. However, the Yellow Jackets finally got past them in the South Region semifinals.
5. The winner of Tuesday's game will play vs. 2 seed West Liberty or 7 seed New Haven in Thursday's semifinals.
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