The Temple of Titles has become the House of Horrors for South Dakota State’s men’s basketball team.
The Jackrabbits won five of seven Summit League Tournaments to earn NCAA Tournament berths from 2012-18 — two in Sioux Falls Arena and three in the sparkling Denny Sanford Premier Center — sparked by an electric home court advantage an hour south of campus, a sea of blue-clad fans who have gobbled up the best seats since the event moved here in 2009 and created tidal waves of noise that swallowed overwhelmed opponents in both blowouts and legendary comebacks.
But for the second consecutive year in the tourney quarterfinals, the Sea of Blue was silenced and the regular season champ Jacks were upset by a bottom-two seed in Frost Arena South — both times by three points — turning a Saturday night Jackrabbit Jamboree into a nervous and depressing funeral of a promising season, with dreams of the Big Dance dashed.
This time, Summit League lame duck Fort Wayne, playing in its final conference tourney before it can’t join fellow former Summit rivals Oakland and IUPUI in the more geographically sensical Horizon League fast enough, played the party pooper.
I sat in the stands, just on the edge of the swath of seats SDSU fans fill and where University of South Dakota fans decked in red occupy throughout the tournament, even on a night when there team didn’t play and they just wanted to watch and root against their in-state rival.
The trepidation and desperation from those in blue for most of the game was as palpable as the pandemonium when the Jacks strike. The growing sense of glee from those in red throughout the game, and especially after the buzzer sounded, could be felt, as well.
If ever there was a year for seasoned No. 3 seed USD men — who play their quarterfinal game tonight at 8:30 against North Dakota — and its chunks of fans in the corners and behind the baskets of the Denny, to finally hoist the trophy, this is it. More on that later.
Has being the benefactor of the “home team” of the tourney backfired for SDSU? We are left to ponder if last year’s crop of experienced stallions and this season’s surprise bunch of underclassmen alike were affected by possibly their own sense of pressure to please their dedicated and engaged fans, and by the the crowd’s spells of quiet nervousness throughout the game, the same way the lightning bolts have rattled their opponents.
Perhaps, but once again, SDSU was a victim of its own lackluster play — possibly from overconfidence they’d never admit — and the poise and gallance of an underdog with nothing to lose, which fed off the charged-up atmosphere to its own advantage.
The Saturday nightmares happened for two differently-constructed SDSU teams, but the way the Jacks lost to a team it was favored to beat was almost eerily similar. And in both cases, the Jackrabbits failed almost fantastically in their attempts to tie or win the game before the buzzer.
Last year, the Jacks were, as expected, back-to-back regular season outright conference champions, the No. 1 seed, and led by Coach of the Year T.J. Otzelberger, 3-time league player of the year Mike Daum, the NCAA’s No. 7 all-time scorer in his senior season, along with two-time All-Summit Leage first team point guard David Jenkins.
So much experience, so much steam, and yet somehow SDSU played sluggishly, shot poorly and lost to a 9-20 Western Illinois team the Jacks beat by a combined 62 points in their two regular season matchups, including by 20 just a week before the tourney.
Last night, SDSU came in with first-year head coach Eric Henderson leading mostly freshmen and sophomores in their first season as starters, yet the Jacks had exceeded the expectations of a middle-of-pack Summit finish to share the regular season title and gain the No. 2 seed.
Henderson, who was Otzelberger’s associate head coach for three years, acknowledged in an interview with KWSN before the game that the new crop of Jacks were hoping to learn from last year’s Saturday night mistakes, although he didn’t mention it to them much.
The Mastadons, who SDSU beat twice in competitive games, splashed home three-pointers — some no-doubt swishes and a couple via how-did-that-go-in friendly bounces at key points in the second half to take or extend leads and hush the rising crowd. This opened up lanes for Fort Wayne to bolt to the basket for fearless half-court layups all night.
Meanwhile, for most of the night, like last year, SDSU looked out of sorts, with the exception of freshman Noah Freidel giving a glimpse of a potentially Daum-like career to come, scoring 35 points and draining 7 of the team’s nine 3-pointers, including one with 14.4 seconds left to cut the lead to 75-74.
But all but two of the Jacks scored six or fewer points. Daum, nor Jenkins, nor athletic sharpshooter Sklyar Flatten were there to rescue the night. Neither was the Summit League’s Newcomer of the Year and Player of the Year Douglas Wilson, the Jacks’ leading scorer and best defender.
The junior transfer from Iowa’s Kirkwood Community College — last year’s national juco player of the year — sat out the game with a stress fracture in his right foot suffered late in a win over South Dakota two weeks ago, an injury that kept him out of the next game, the Jacks’ 71-69 overtime loss at North Dakota State that clinched a share of the regular season title and the No. 1 seed for the Bison.
Wilson was kept off the foot and in a protective boot in the 12 days leading to the tourney in hopes of perhaps being ready to go, or at least make a tender-walking Willis Reed go at it, in Monday night’s semifinal game, potentially against a USD team that scorched SDSU 99-84 on Jan. 15 in a game in which Wilson sat out due to a different injury.
Now, Wilson won’t get that chance and Jackrabbit fans will be left to wonder again what could have been.
Would Wilson’s presence have prevented another Saturday night horror movie for the Jacks and their fans? Probably.
The Sea of Blue will still swell and bellow for the SDSU women in Monday afternoon’s semfinals and potentially on Championship Tuesday, when the Jackrabbits and Coyotes could meet for the title for the fifth time in six years.
SDSU won each of those previous four finals, and three of those times USD was the No. 1 seed. But with USD having blitzed to a 16-0 Summit slate in the regular season by an average of 32 points and two double-digit wins over SDSU, it will take the most titanic of tidal waves from the stands to propel the Jacks to 10th tourney title in 12 years.
But on Monday and Tuesday nights, the raging waters from the seats closest to the court will be eerily calm — if not empty — for the rest of the Summit League men’s basketball tournament.
Surely, some SDSU fans who occupy those seats will still show up just to watch as basketball enthusiasts, if not root against USD and NDSU, who avoided its own disaster against No. 8 Denver Saturday before the Jacks’ game.
But some will also try to sell those tickets they thought were going to be for Jackrabbit games. And perhaps, some USD fans will buy the seats they can’t occupy as a penalty for the Coyotes not joining the Summit and participating in the tourney a few years after it came to Sioux Falls and SDSU fans already started owning the event.
If the USD men get by a UND team it beat twice this season — no easy task — it would play a Fort Wayne team that is undoubtedly dangerous, but the Yotes smoked by 23 in their most recent meeting on Jan. 23 in Vermillion.
Win that, and it will still be tough duty to earn the school’s first NCAA berth. The Coyotes would play NDSU or Oral Roberts — two teams that have beaten USD this season — or Omaha, who USD barely beat in two nail-biters.
But with a healthy point guard Triston Simpson and healthier All-Summit forward Tyler Hagedorn — both seniors whose injuries played parts in a disappointing 10-6 conference slate — the Coyotes are ripe to seize the moment.
Those two been a part of a Summit League regular season championship in 2017 and two crushing Summit tourney losses to the Jacks in ’17 and ’18, and a losing season which ended in a first-round exit last year, when Hagedorn was sidelined a full season with a foot injury.
The combination of past heartbreaks, dynamic junior Stanley Umude’s return to USD after flirting with bigger schools in the transfer portal last spring, and Simpson’s snub from even an honorable mention on the All-Summit League team, is all rocket fuel for these Coyotes, Hagedorn told KWSN in a Friday interview.
They would have liked to have taken another shot at the Jackrabbits, Hagedorn admitted before knowing SDSU would lose on Saturday. That would have come in Monday’s semifinal.
But not beating, or having to beat SDSU, won’t make a title any less sweet.
Will the Sea of Blue become the Sea of Red, and Frost Arena South turn into Sanford Coyote Sports Center North, with the Yotes finally going dancing?
It is more likely to happen now that the tides have turned on SDSU again.
