The Daily Cinderella, Day 3

March Madness Minutiae about McNeese, Montana-Montana State, and military academies.

Champ week has made it to Quarterfinal Thursday, and the big boys are getting involved. If you turn on your TV right now, you will see Duke, the No. 1 men’s basketball team in the country!

Don’t worry. I’m still going to use this newsletter to mainly write about schools you’ve never heard of. Subscribe if you want a daily newsletter about under-the-radar college basketball stories in your inbox every day throughout the month of March.

Your Daily Cinderella: Will Wade and McNeese

Looking for a smaller-league team that can actually go out and win some games in March Madness? It’s time to ride with the McNeese Cowboys, who sealed the Southland Wednesday with a win over Lamar.

(Incredible midcourt logo by the Southland Conference, btw. I never knew what the Southland Conference tournament championship trophy looked like and now I think winning the Southland Conference Tournament is one of the most prestigious accomplishments in sports just because of that court design. The Big 12 could learn from them.)

In 2023, McNeese hired Will Wade, the former LSU coach demonized by the college basketball world for getting caught on an FBI wiretap trying to pay players exactly 27 seconds before everybody stopped caring about that. His “crimes” are now totally legal, but he was still persona non grata, out of the game for a year before taking a job at one of the least prestigious programs in the game. (If he got arrested after choking his fiancée or stalking female students—JUST TO USE RANDOM EXAMPLES, SURELY THESE ARE NOT THINGS THAT ACTIVE SEC HEAD COACHES HAVE DONE–everybody would’ve gotten over it much more quickly.)

McNeese instantly rocketed from college basketball oblivion to mid-major powerhouse status. In the last season pre-Wade, the Cowboys went 11-23. In Year 1 with Wade, they went 30-4 and made the NCAA Tournament for the first time in Lake Charles.

The vibes are high in Lake Charles. The school leaned into Wade’s run-in with the law, starting to adopting the nickname “Bayou Bandits” and proudly calling Wade “Willy the Kid” and “American Gangster.” They even have a viral student-manager who calls himself the Wilt Chamberlain of wiping up wet spots and is elite at self-censoring his rapalongs:

But more importantly, the ball is good. The Cowboys went 27-6 and are ranked 60th by Ken Pomeroy. My big problem is that they’ll probably be too high to go in this year’s Upset Video, because I only pick 13/14/15 seeds and McNeese is likely a 12. The Cowboys had a late lead against Mississippi State before losing by three… so they’re right there against strong SEC teams.

And again: They need to do it this year. Wade is almost certainly leaving McNeese after this year, and says he’s talking to his players about that possibilitty. He’s reportedly removed his name from the NC State coaching search… not because he’s staying at McNeese, but because he’s “holding out for a bigger job.” (And it’s not like NC State is a tiny job!) Wade’s going to win a lot wherever he ends up. But how could McNeese ever be this good again?

It’s the last ride for the Bayou Bandits. Mount up.

Buzzer-Beater of the Day: BasketBrawl of the Wild, for the Starch Madness Championship

There are exactly two Division I schools in the big, beautiful state of Montana. You’d think they’d get along and share their gorgeous, mountainous expanse like brothers and sisters, but the fewer people you have around, the more you want to take the people you have to share paradise with and bash them in the skull with a rock. (Abel learned this the hard way.)

Montana got a pretty sick skull bash on their bitter rivals in the closing moments of the Big Sky women’s championship game, the first Lady Cat-Lady Griz championship matchup since 1997. (Since the women’s teams are officially the Lady Cats and Lady Griz… do they chant FTLC and FTLG instead?) But Montana State answered back with a fatal blow to earn a trip to the NCAA Tournament.

I’ve been to Missoula for a Cat-Griz game, so my allegiances are with the Griz… but I’ve gotta admit, I felt bad when Montana’s Dani Bartsch hit a go-ahead three with nine seconds left. The Lady Griz have won this conference 21 times. The Lady Cats… just three. But the tables have turned in recent years. This year, MSU went 30-3 (19-1 in Big Sky play) while Montana went 14-17. When the Lady Griz took a late lead, it felt cruel. The traditional powerhouse had found a way to spoil things for the rival that had watched them win so many times before, even though the upstart was clearly better.

Luckily, in women’s hoops, teams can advance the ball late in games with a timeout, making it possible for Montana State to play a game-winning Reverse Uno card. (In the men’s game, if a team goes behind late, they have to go the whole length of the court, resulting in about 3 iconic buzzer-beaters that have gone down in college hoops history and about 700,000 hopeless heaves that miss the entire basket stanchion.)

Montana State’s Marah Dykstra got the ball, whipped a wayward shot off the wrong side of the backboard, grabbed her own rebound, and popped in a putback as the clock expired for the championship. I’m calling it the Tater Tip, since it won the Starch Madness championship:

Ranked 63rd in Bart Torvik’s rankings, the Lady Cats have a real chance to pull an NCAA Tournament upset. Meanwhile, the Lady Griz got caught in their rivals’ confetti.

Don’t feel too bad for Montana–the men’s team won their championship game against Northern Colorado later.

Bummer Beater of the Day: A 3 OT conference title game

Sticking with absurdly dramatic mid-major conference championship games featuring teams from the upper-left quadrant of the United States, the Mountain West championship game between Wyoming and San Diego State went to triple OT. It’s the first 3 OT championship game, men’s or women’s, in 12 years, since the 2013 SWAC title game. The game started at 10:30 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday and ended sometime Thursday with SDSU’s first tournament bid since 2012. Here’s a video, so you can watch the clutch shot which sent the game to overtime, the clutch shot which sent the game to double-overtime, and the clutch shot which won the game in triple OT.

Oh wait, my bad—there were no clutch shots. Just 15 extra minutes of season-on-the-line misery from teams running on empty. (Sorry if you watched the video. That was mean of me.)

A triple overtime conference championship game is a special type of hell. These teams had already played three games in three days at the end of a long season. Wyoming had the Mountain West MVP, Allyson Fertig, and the Mountain West Defensive Player of the Year, Emily Melemma. Fertig had played 36 and 37 minutes in their two previous games; Melemma, had played 38 minutes in both. Now they were asked to play an extra 15 minutes.

It was brutal. Wyoming ranked 33rd in the nation in field goal percentage this year, but with the opportunity to win a conference tournament for just the second time in school history, they shot a brutal 24-for-65 from the field.

Maybe the Cowgirls were felled by their failing legs at the end of a long run, maybe their shaky nerves in the biggest moment of the season. Either way, you need both in March.

Onions! A Naval Nutshot

The service academies struggle in hoops. Army has famously never made the men’s NCAA tournament. Air Force, which has to recruit players small enough to fit in a cockpit, just wrapped up a 4-28 season. But Navy went on a surprise run through the Patriot League tournament, reaching the conference championship game for the first time since 2001… aaaaaaaaaand lost to American by 22 after their second-leading scorer, Jordan Pennick, got ejected for a tactical strike on his opponent’s testicles before Navy could even get on the board.

Athletes at the service academies are supposed to be more disciplined than other college athletes… and pretty much all college students in general. They have regimented daily schedules, rigorous academic standards, and honor codes. But maybe when your daily life is drills and duty, and your 40 minutes on the court are your one time to let loose, the urge to punch a penis is simply irresistible.

It also may have been a misguided retaliatory strike after a Bucknell player nutshotted Navy in the semifinals.

Surely, the only time the United States military has been attacked by one group and launched a military operation against another, completely unrelated group as attempted retaliation. Wait—