Welcome to Detroit.
Purdue, Tennessee, Creighton, and Gonzaga got through the first weekend of the 2024 NCAA Tournament unscathed. Now Midwest Region juggernauts collide in the Motor City with a trip to the Final Four up for grabs, and all of them are starving to achieve it. No. 1 seed Purdue hasn’t been to the final weekend since 1980. No. 5 seed Gonzaga played in the national championship game twice over the last eight season but lost both times. No. 2 seed Tennessee and No. 3 seed Creighton have been to an Elite 8 one time each, but no further. Thursday, all four teams went through their final practice sessions and press conferences before gameday. Here are three storylines from Media Day at Little Caesar’s Arena:
1. A Pair of Unlikely Paths to Detroit
The best time of the year for college basketball also coincides with bitter take merchants lamenting the old days when players “toughed it out” in situations where they had little to no agency. The irony among the portal pouters is that they will likely be treated to heck of a show on Sunday night in Detroit. That’s when Creighton’s Baylor Scheierman and Tennessee’s Dalton Knecht will take the floor to try to propel their team one step away from the Final Four.
Scheierman spent his first three years of college hoops at South Dakota State before becoming a unanimous First Team All-Big East and Associated Press Third Team All-American performer in now his second season with Creighton. The team, conference, and stage weren’t the only ways he leveled up either. His career averages in scoring, rebounding, and facilitating as a Bluejay are at or above where they were at SDSU despite playing against the stiffer competition night in and night out. He has even maintained the shooting efficiency that made him a highly coveted recruit when he entered the transfer portal in the spring of 2022 — three years after getting little to no interest from those same schools.
“It just shows that you have to run your race,” Scheierman said. “Everybody is different. Coming out of high school, I only had one Division I offer. I just feel I’m happy with the journey and how it all worked out for me. Going through the transfer portal is one of the best decisions I made, and I’m very happy with how it all played out. I didn’t have the high-level offers coming out of high school right away, but I stayed down and trusted my work and ended up blessed to be in this position now.”
Knecht took an uncertain path as well. Northeastern Junior College in Colorado out of high school, Northern Colorado two years later, and then Tennessee for his “COVID year” where he won SEC Player of the Year and was named a First Team All-American by the Associated Press in his one and only season in Knoxville.
“Some people are not the highest rated players [out of high school],” Knecht said. “It just shows that you can go a different route. You can take multiple ways to get to one of the best programs in the nation.”
A lot of kids growing dreaming about playing in the NCAA Tournament. Few of them get the opportunity make that dream come true right out of high school. On Sunday night in the final game of the Sweet 16 round, Creighton and Tennessee will showcase two shining examples that those aspirations don’t hinge on one decision at the age 18.
“They’re both great stories of perseverance and tremendous work ethic,” Creighton head coach Greg McDermott said. “Two years ago, Dalton was at Northern Colorado and Baylor was at South Dakota State. Now you have a First Team All-American and a Third Team All-American playing against each other in the Sweet 16. It’s an unbelievable story. Their journeys are similar in a lot of ways. To watch their growth and development from where they were as freshmen in college to where they are today is really a testament to their work ethic.”
2. Embracing the Madness
When Creighton’s players broke the huddle and walked out onto the court for a second overtime period against Oregon in Pittsburgh last week, they all looked like as if they knew something that everyone else in the arena did not. They were laughing, smiling, joking, winking to the crowd. You would have never guessed that they knew this could have been the last five minutes they ever play together. Perhaps that’s why it wasn’t.
“It’s meant to be for us to be in this situation,” junior guard Trey Alexander said. “We know that. We always try to find the fun in everything. This is the situation we kind of live for. It’s the fun of the game.”
It’s a difficult task to find joy entering a situation as fragile as an NCAA Tournament game. You have 40 minutes — or 50, in some cases — to move on or your season is over. That reality creates pressure and pressure, in turn, creates tension. This Creighton team playing the game by its own rules. No matter if their season comes to an end in Detroit or Phoenix, they are going to enjoy the ride as long as it lasts.
“It’s the makeup of the team,” McDermott said. “I think as a coach, the longer you’ve been doing this, you have to let guys be who they are. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. We don’t take each other too seriously. We have some fun with the game. Some coaches, especially young coaches — and I was probably guilty of this when I was younger — there’s so much pressure to win and be successful that you coach the joy right out of the game. I don’t ever want to do that to my guys. I want to make sure that — they started playing this game because they fell in love with it, and if I do something to take the joy away from that, then I’m doing them a disservice.
This group really has fun. There are parts of practice, there are drills — we’ve joked about drills they don’t like, which is usually my favorite drill. If they don’t like it, then it’s probably a good drill. But they truly enjoy coming to practice every day and being together. That’s been pretty cool to witness.”
3. An Ex-Bluejay Saves Gonzaga’s Season
The Zags were dead in the water eight weeks ago. Coming off a home loss to conference rival St. Mary’s, they were sitting at 0-for-5 in Quad 1 opportunities and found themselves well out of frame in the at-large picture. The threat of missing the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1998 was as real as it had ever been. Instead of accepting that fate, Gonzaga rallied. They went home and rocked Portland. They traveled to Rupp Arena, took out Kentucky, then blew out St. Mary’s in their own gym a few weeks later in the rematch.
They won nine games in a row to close out the regular season, and since earning a No. 5 seed in the Midwest Region to extend their NCAA Tournament streak they have only kept the freight train rolling. McNeese State was a trendy pick to pull off the always reliable 12/5 first-round upset. The ‘Zags led by as much as 35 in a laugher. Two days later, they ran Kansas off the floor in an 89-68 win to earn a trip to the Sweet 16 for the 13th straight season. In eight weeks, they went from the brink of infamy to the second week of March Madness.
“We just knew at that point in the season — I mean, we heard all the rumors and the outside noise — it was either win or don’t make the tournament,” point guard Ryan Nembhard said. “I don’t think anybody in this room wanted to be the first guy that didn’t make the tournament for the Zags in 25 years. We started figuring it out, man. We’re tough-nit group of guys. We’re super close and we just started figuring it out. We’re playing our best basketball at the right time.”
Nembhard has been the head of the snake during Gonzaga’s late push. The former Bluejay floor general — who helped Creighton reach the Elite Eight for the first time in program history last March — has been playing the best basketball of his career and is one of the primary reasons that the Bulldogs have cruised to Detroit. In helping Gonzaga go 11-1 since that aforementioned home loss to the Gaels back on February 3, Nembhard is shooting 37.8% from 3-point range while averaging 12.7 points, 9.1 assists, 4.7 rebounds, and 1.2 steals per game. The marksmanship from long range is up nearly 10 percent from where it was going into February and his assists have nearly doubled.
“I just figured out the system,” he said. “I played two years obviously at Creighton and it was a different system. When I got here, I had to get familiar with new guys, new coaches, a new system, and once I figured that out, the game really, really slowed down for me. I’m getting older and I think I’m just getting better. I think I’m playing my best basketball.”