It’s hard to imagine a much more gratifying way to fulfill a plan than the way it happened for Bradley.
When Brian Wardle took over a tradition-rich but struggling program in March 2015, he insisted that there would be no quick fixes and he would essentially start from scratch. Rather than chasing junior college transfers or graduate transfers, he built with freshmen with the goal of progress rather than an instant turnaround.
Bradley went 5-27 in Wardle’s first season with a roster dominated by freshmen. From there, the Braves made steady progress. Bradley won 13 games in Wardle’s second year-a year when we noted that this was a program that looked to be on the rise-and won a first round game at Arch Madness. Last year saw 20 wins and a trip to the MVC semifinals. This year: the NCAA Tournament, after the Braves rallied from an 18-point second half deficit to edge Northern Iowa 57-54 to win the Missouri Valley Conference Tournament final.
The win was Bradley’s first MVC tourney title since none other than the great Hersey Hawkins led the 1987-88 team to the crown, three years before the event moved to St. Louis. The Braves also will make their first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2006, when they advanced all the way to the Sweet 16.
After the game, team members couldn’t use words like “journey” and “process” enough in describing how they got to this point, and one could hardly blame them.
“It’s been a journey,” said Wardle. “And (senior) Luuk van Bree just said to me, there’s no shortcuts. We got no shortcuts. We went through it all as a group, and we earned this. That’s why I think we’re so emotional and happy.
“It’s been a journey for us. As a program, but as a group this year, and that’s when the process, the journey, that’s when it’s really satisfying. It’s not one game. It’s from the start to the finish. We couldn’t be prouder of this group and their perseverance and their unselfishness.”
Not always do step-by-step plans follow a logical progression, something Bradley found out this season.
With four starters back, the Braves were expected to be a solid top-four team in the MVC this year, and maybe better. They started off looking like that, too, winning six of their first seven games, including the Cancun Challenge with victories over SMU and Penn State.
Suddenly, Bradley seemed to be a team that forgot itself. The Braves went 2-9 over their next 11 games, including a 0-5 start in the Valley. A stout defense started to lag, and then the offense did too.
Bradley turned it around from there, though, and won nine of its last 13 to close the regular season. Then came Arch Madness, with three victories by a combined eight points to become just the second five seed in the tourney’s history to win it, joining Indiana State in 2001.
Now the Braves will look to extend the MVC’s recent history of success in the NCAA Tournament. Valley teams have won their last ten first round games in the Big Dance.
“This has been a really exciting journey, starting from the bottom,” said Bradley junior sharpshooter Nate Kennell. “Guys like D-Lo (Dwayne Lautier-Ogunleye) and Luuk and Pete (Peter Hanley) and all those seniors. It just really means a lot for them and for me just to do it for our seniors.
“Just the journey has been honestly a lot of fun. That’s what it’s about, the process. Just kind of growing with each other, and the results are always often, but really it is the journey that makes it so sweet.”
“You can’t make this up,” said Lautier-Ogunleye. “The first year was crazy. We had ups and downs. We were naive freshmen, thinking we could make a massive impact, and we won five games. We said we were going to change the program, and it sounded ridiculous, it sounded outrageous. No one really believed it other than the guys that were here.
“Each year we had the pieces to the puzzle, we stayed together, we grinded, we worked, we rode the wave, and did the course. We said we wanted to turn the program 360, change it completely and take it back to the rich tradition it had. Knowing that I’m able to do it with the rest of my guys today as a senior is a dream come true.”
The MVC final featured the No. 5 and 6 seeds for the first time in league tournament history. In a league that lacked anything remotely close to a dominant team, some might say that was certainly appropriate for this year’s Valley season.
All credit has to go to Bradley for earning the conference title, as well as to Northern Iowa for the improvement it showed in conference play. The Panthers were a mighty young team this year and grew up a lot after playing a nasty non-conference schedule.
All that aside, there’s no way to avoid it: this has been an overall disappointing season for the Valley. And it’s a campaign that has been marked by two things: inconsistency and injuries.
A number of conference teams coming off solid seasons last year brought back most-if not all-of their starters, and the expectation was that at least one or two of them would be an NCAA at-large contender. None showed improvement. Loyola brought back three starters from its Final Four team but never found the same mojo while mixing in some new talent. Illinois State had a year even it would acknowledge was a disappointment. Southern Illinois regressed slightly, and the same would’ve been said of Bradley before its Arch Madness run.
All showed glimpses, but it seemed no one could handle prosperity. Loyola flashed at times and was probably the closest thing to consistent, but the Ramblers still had occasions struggling mightily. Illinois State won seven of nine to move into a tie for first place, then promptly lost five in a row. Southern Illinois lost four in a row in conference. All three missed out on a number of chances for name-brand wins, too.
Bradley got off to a terrific start out of conference, then went into a funk where it lost nine of 11 including to the likes of Eastern Illinois and New Mexico at home. Indiana State defeated Colorado, UNLV, Western Kentucky and Wright State out of conference but then couldn’t find its footing in league. Valparaiso had its moments and was the surprise of the early part of conference play, but then faded down the stretch. Missouri State and Northern Iowa were expected to be rebuilding so little was expected of them, though both came on in conference play.
It was even hard to sell the idea that these were just teams beating up on each other when so relatively few could hold serve at home on a consistent basis. Other than Loyola (8-1), Drake and Illinois State (7-2 each), everyone else lost at least three times in MVC play at home. The collective record of home teams in conference play was 55-34.
It wouldn’t be fair to mention all of this, though, without noting just how much Valley teams were hammered by injuries this year.
Drake was the most notable instance, losing its starting point guard midway through and two others for or in the postseason. Who knows-maybe if they had stayed healthy, the Bulldogs just might’ve dominated the league and nosed into the national rankings?
Illinois State lost considerable depth from its bench, including its top perimeter shooter, and at times played with just six or seven healthy scholarship players. Loyola missed expected key piece Lucas Williamson for more than half the season. Valparaiso was banged up the entire year. Northern Iowa also was affected.
Injuries are a part of the sport, and increasingly so these days in the era of never-ending weight training resulting in so much contact. Still, it seems like some Valley schools have had more than their share of bad luck with them the past couple years.
Drake’s MVC tourney ended in the semifinals, but this year’s Bulldogs should not be forgotten soon. This was a team picked ninth in the Valley preseason poll coming off a 17-17 record and with a new coach, four starters gone and six of its top seven scorers not returning. First-year coach Darian DeVries somehow turned that into a 24-9 record and a share of the MVC regular season title.
That alone would’ve been enough to make DeVries the runaway choice as coach of the year that he was. Drake’s season turned from terrific to almost inspirational with how it weathered injuries. Point guard Nick Norton may well have been on his way to MVC player of the year honors if he hadn’t torn an ACL at the start of conference play, and the team lost another starter when D.J. Wilkins went down just before Arch Madness. Then, center Nick McGlynn-a first team all-league performer and a player of the year contender himself-was injured early in the MVC quarterfinal game against Illinois State.
It was incredible to watch the Bulldogs with six scholarship players somehow still piece it together to handle the Redbirds with twin brothers Tremell and Anthony Murphy starring. By that point, one started to wonder if anything could keep Drake from its first NCAA Tournament bid since 2008, but it ran out of gas and lost in heartbreaking fashion just before the buzzer to Northern Iowa in the semis.
Incidentally, count Drake as a team that will likely be badly hurt by the move from the RPI to the NET this year. The Bulldogs per Warrennolan.com have an RPI of 73 as of the day after the MVC tourney concluded, and that plus their 3-3 mark against the top two quadrants would certainly have them heavy in the mix for an NIT bid. The NET is a completely different story: a rank of 125 and just a single Quadrant 2 win mean an NIT spot is a real longshot, a shame for a team that had a terrific season.
If one thought scoring seemed low in the games in St. Louis, they were right. The scoring average per teams over nine games was just 60.5 points per game. Only twice did a team break 70 (Valparaiso scored 77 against Indiana State in the first round and Drake hit 78 in its win over Illinois State in the quarterfinals). Valpo and Drake’s outputs also were the only times teams hit the conference’s collective season average of just under 69 points per game that ranked 29th of 32 NCAA Division I conferences this year.
Nine times teams scored in the 50s, and 14 of the 18 teams playing scored 62 points or less. Watching in person, there was little secret why the games were so low in scores. The physicality allowed was much more reminiscent of the sport several years ago, before officials finally got serious about freedom of movement. When officials don’t blow the whistles, this is what you get.
It’s frustrating to watch when the style of officiating so obviously slants toward a certain way of play. Loyola coach Porter Moser, whose team notably runs a lot of motion offensively, was one who seemed quite frustrated by the physicality allowed, essentially passing on commenting on it after the game.
Numbers like these also show why the NCAA’s continued meddling with the NIT and making it little more than an exhibition and a guinea pig for rules experimentation should be considered fruitless. Anyone who has watched the NCAA Tournament knows officials typically call fewer fouls in the postseason, and the same happens in conference tournaments. Thus, any time the NCAA is testing out different rules that supposedly “improve game flow,” they’re getting skewed data.
Attendance for the tournament’s nine games and five sessions was 35,706, actually a slight uptick from the previous year’s 34,810. It’s no secret attendance has slipped the last three years after a stretch of 13 straight years from 2004-16 where it topped 50,000. The last two years mark the lowest numbers in the 23 years that the tourney has been a 10-team format.
The exits of Creighton and Wichita State from the league in recent years undoubtedly have taken a toll, with two big fan bases that regularly traveled well no longer on hand. The bigger issue for the Valley, though, continues to be a lack of standout programs.
The last two years have been filled with teams posting overall records hovering around .500. Though there have been few bad teams (Evansville this year was the only one over the last two seasons to lose more than 18 games), there also have been few very good ones. Loyola last year and Drake this year were the only teams to win more than 20 games with less than ten losses, and neither team has had any kind of recent historical success to build up a fan base that travels regularly.
It’s a fact of life: at the Valley’s level-frankly at almost any level-it’s going to be hard to draw big for seasons grading out as little more than mediocre to the average fan.
Other schools are capable of bringing big gatherings. The 2015 title game featured Northern Iowa and Illinois State and had 13,552 on hand. Of course, UNI was a top-15 team nationally that year, and Illinois State-which has drawn better than most in recent years-had just knocked off Wichita State the day before in the semifinals and also is less than three hours from St. Louis. But that’s just it-it’s going to take excellence-teams at least on the fringe of NCAA at-large consideration-to bring the crowds back up on a more consistent basis. Many MVC schools have proven they are very capable of it in the not-too-distant past. At least a couple of them need to get back to it.
Twitter: @HoopvilleAdam
