The past 10 days generated so many shocks that we should have been beyond surprising, but here came another: A No. 11 seed, a card-carrying mid-major, didn’t just become the first qualifier for the 2018 Final Four; Loyola-Chicago won the South Regional via utter domination of a Power 5 opponent.
The Ramblers became the fourth 11th seed to win a regional. The first was LSU over Kentucky in this city in 1986. The second was George Mason over UConn in 2006. The third was Virginia Commonwealth over Kansas in 2011. The margins in those three upsets were two, two and 10 points. Loyola won the South at Philips Arena on Saturday 78-62.
Loyola’s first three victories in this three NCAA tournament had been hairbreadth things, won by an aggregate four points. (Which is, we note, one above the minimum.) There was never a doubt in the Ramblers’ dismissal of Kansas State. A No. 11 seed is headed for San Antonio off something approaching a mandate.
Loyola was the better team from the opening tip, which – just for the record – it controlled. The Ramblers made 10 of their first 12 shots. Of those 10 baskets, six were layups; three were 3-pointers.
Loyola led 15-5, then 19-7, then 36-24 at the half. If not for six turnovers, off which K-State scored exactly half its points, this would have been done and dusted after 20 minutes. Not six minutes after intermission, all doubt had been removed. When Donte Ingram, whose 3-pointer against Miami in Round 1 launched the Ramblers on this amazing journey, spun for a layup with 14:04 remaining, their lead was 19 points.
Two nights after holding SEC-champion Kentucky to 58 points in 40 minutes, K-State yielded 52 points in the first 25 minutes and 56 seconds against the Missouri Valley titlist. But that’s the thing: If you took away the uniforms Saturday – or at any point over the past 10 days – you never would have guessed that the Ramblers aren’t cut from Power 5 cloth.
“Look at this! Look at this!” coach Porter Moser shouted to the crowd after taking ownership of the South Regional championship trophy. “Are you kidding me? This is the way it should be!”
Not to get all gushy here, but the men of Moser play beautiful basketball. They do the pace-and-space thing. They pass and cut, cut and pass. They have no McDonald’s All-Americans on their roster, but no collection of McDonald’s men could have coalesced the way Loyola has. You look at their players and think nobody would be all that tough to defend; then you see the team on the floor, and everybody’s hard to guard.
“They pass the ball,” said Jerry Harkness, the best player on Loyola’s improbable 1963 NCAA championship team. “They rotate so well. They know where the other guys are on the court.”
In 1977, the Portland Trail Blazers’ victory in the NBA finals over the Philadelphia 76ers – who boasted Julius Erving, George McGinnis, World B. Free, Doug Collins and Darryl Dawkins – was hailed as “good for the game.” Loyola’s ascension to the Final Four is reminiscent of that, with this difference: Portland had Bill Walton, at worst the second-best collegiate player ever. How many Ramblers could you have named on Selection Sunday?
Sometimes, though, the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts. Among Ramblers, only Ingram might be even a Round 2 NBA draftee, but what does that matter in the Big Dance? This is the tournament of survive-and-advance, of One Shining Moments. Loyola has crammed four shining moments into 10 days.
Moser has long been considered a deft X-and-O man, though it didn’t prevent him from getting fired by Illinois State in 2007. Here’s a 49-year-old basketball lifer who, apart from two stints as an assistant at Texas A&M in the ’90s under Tony Barone, who was his college coach at Creighton, has never worked at a Power 5 school. From Creighton to Wisconsin-Milwaukee to Arkansas-Little Rock to Illinois State to St. Louis to Loyola-Chicago … and now to the Final Four.
The Ramblers won’t be favored to win a game in San Antonio, which will be fine by them. They weren’t supposed to win any of these, either. They weren’t supposed to beat Cincinnati, which was going for a third consecutive national championship, in 1963, but they rallied from a 45-30 deficit with 14 minutes left to win at the overtime buzzer on Vic Rouse’s putback.
Oh, and you’re wondering about Sister Jean. She was again on hand Saturday, having again offered a pregame blessing. She’s famously a woman of great faith, but even she had the Ramblers losing in the Sweet 16. That’s how good Loyola has been these past 10 days. Even their biggest fan never saw this coming. But but here they are, and off to Texas they go.
As the Ramblers waited to snip the nets, the 77-year-old Harkness stood on the court, a maroon and gold scarf around his neck. It was his pass to Les Hunter that triggered the final sequence against Cincinnati 55 years and one day ago, and now he had something else to celebrate. “I’m so glad,” Harkness said, “that I was on this side of the ground to see this.”
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