EVANSVILLE, Ind. – March can be exciting. March can be wondrous. March can also be merciless and cruel. Or maybe you didn’t notice what happened Tuesday to the college basketball team that has just executed the greatest U-turn in the history of the sport.
The Gannon Golden Knights were here to play in the quarterfinals of the Division II Elite Eight. Using the Ford Center in downtown Evansville here as the reference point, this time last year the Golden Knights were, where, on Mars?
How Gannon closed the 2022-23 season: Losing 105-70 to Mercyhurst to finish 3-23 on the season, averaging 65.7 points a game and breaking 80 twice.
How Gannon was closing the 2023-24 season: No. 3 seed in the Elite Eight, coming into Tuesday 32-2 while averaging more than 101 points. This time they had been under 80 twice.
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From 3-23 to 32-2. From struggling offense to exploding scoreboards. It is the greatest one-year turnaround in NCAA basketball history, no matter the division or the gender. All that was needed to complete the epic was one last golden week, which was to start Tuesday in the quarterfinal against No. 6 Cal State San Bernardino. The Golden Knights starting lineup — the one with three graduate student transfers pursuing their MBAs — lined up around the center circle for the opening tip, ready to have another great day. The ball went up and . . .
Two hours later coach All-American guard Josh Omojafo — the only player in the rotation who was actually at Gannon last season — tried to explain a day that had gone so terribly wrong. The roof had caved in on the magic carpet ride. They had shot 28 percent, been outrebounded by 29, missed 12 layups and the only dunk they tried. It ended 99-65. A spectacular renaissance for four months and then . . . thud.
Omojafo had been the one who stayed, to be a part of this with a locker room of new teammates and coach he didn’t know. “That’s just a lot of trust. That’s the trust that I had all year in every one of these guys,” the sophomore said. “We’ve made history at our school, we set a bunch of records. But all stories can’t have good endings.”
Nearly every other page in the tale had been miraculous. Go back to September when Jordan Fee, an assistant at Division II power Nova Southeastern in Florida since 2015, was working into his first season as the head coach at Gannon, 60 miles north of where he grew up in Grove City, Pa. It was a frantic time, trying to restock a roster and jumpstart a battered program. Plus, there was no place yet to live. Fee and his staff moved into an apartment together near campus.
“We put the snorer in the living room and the other two got the bedrooms,” he said. “We were just scrambling. We didn’t sleep. We worked pretty hard and signed some pretty good players in there. It’s something I’ll never forget.
“It’s fun to do hard stuff with good people.”
Nine new players came aboard, including four graduate transfers, mostly from small schools but also Zachary Hobbs from Indiana State. Nathan Schneider, a key player off the bench, had been a biology major. Guard Nigel Haughton — who hit the last-second shot to send Gannon to the Elite Eight — had majored in accounting, guard Lyle Tipton in business.
“What they signed up for is incredible,” Fee said. “For those four guys to say we’re going to exhaust our last year of eligibility and come over to you guys, who we don’t know . . . what they’ve done in a year together is remarkable. I wish we had more time together. I don’t feel like we’re going to reach our ceiling together. We ran out of time.”
By November 15, they were 3-0, matching the win total of the entire previous season. That was the night they scored 146 points against Penn State DuBois. They were 10-0 before their first defeat. They had won 21 in a row coming into Tuesday. It had been, in every way, an astonishing rags-to-riches saga. “If you would have told me in October we were going to have a chance to be a 3 seed in the Elite Eight,” Hobbs said, “I would have said you were crazy.”
The good times ended Tuesday, but only for a day. One blowout could never take away from the extraordinary road out of darkness they had just traveled.
“I’m so proud of the guys the way the conducted themselves, the amount of pride they’ve brought to their families, to me, to our university and to the city of Erie, Pennsylvania. Nobody can ever take that away from them,” Fee said.
Fee is not accustomed to being around losing locker rooms. His past two seasons as a Nova Southeastern assistant, the record had been 67-1, so he came to the arena Thursday with his teams 99-3 across the past three years. But he is the man in charge now, so what did this year’s unprecedented feat mean to him?
“I think I’ll be better prepared to answer that question in a week. Right now I’m just feeling a little bit like a sore loser. I just wanted it so badly for this group. It felt a little bit like destiny. It kind of felt like these guys could do anything. That’s a hard pill to swallow,” he said. And of the past four dizzying months: “That’s them doing what they did. If I’m a good coach it’s only because I know what players do and coaches don’t.”
He wanted to make sure a group of athletes who had come so far so quickly understood that on Black Tuesday, and one other thing.
“I told them in the locker room they’ll never be forgotten.”
