During Tuesday’s news conference, Matt Logie had a witty moment where he joked about catching lightning in a bottle on a golf course shortly after he was hired as Montana State’s head men’s basketball coach.
Logie said he had saved that piece of bottled electricity specifically for the postseason.
The quip looked like prophecy when Montana State hit its first seven shots of the game in its First Four game in Dayton, Ohio on Wednesday afternoon.
And it looked like psychic intuition when MSU’s lead swelled to 14 points in the second half against Grambling State with a trip to Indianapolis to play Purdue on the line.
Then the script flipped and all of a sudden, the avalanche basketball the Bobcats had cultivated all season, and then executed over a magical three-day run in the Big Sky Conference tournament, suddenly turned against them.
Instead, Grambling State stole Logie’s lightning in a bottle and used it to shock the Bobcats. Grambling dominated the final 14 minutes of regulation to force overtime before running away with the extra period on the way to an 88-81 victory in the first NCAA Tournament appearance for the Tigers.
The loss means a roller-coaster season for MSU that had reached a profound pinnacle and given the league champions a chance to snap the Big Sky’s ominous NCAA Tournament losing streak instead to end severe and heart-breaking disappointment.
“There were some definite momentum swings,” Logie said following the loss. “…I’ve been doing this long enough and part of the reason this team was able to stick to the process so well was we understand how percentages work, and we shot a lot of bullets last week. The shots just didn’t fall tonight like they did in some of those momentous second half swings that we had last week in Boise, but we put ourselves in position to do it.”
Skeptics and rivals would certainly scoff that a “First Four” win is nothing to brag about. But the Big Sky has the longest losing streak in the Big Dance of any of the 32 Division I men’s basketball conferences in the country.
And the nuance to that statistic comes in the fact that unlike Grambling’s Southwestern Athletic Conference or Wagner’s Northeast Conference or Howard’s MEAC, the Big Sky champion had never played in the play-in games in Dayton.
Montana State entered the contest as the first Big Sky team to win three straight conference tournaments. MSU’s recent March Madness magic has helped the Bobcats double the program’s total NCAA Tournament appearance total.
So conventional wisdom would lean toward MSU being a decided favorite. The Big Sky is by no means a power conference, but it certainly has more power and prestige than the SWAC. The Big Sky had a conference RPI of 21 out of 32 conferences this season. The SWAC was 31st out of 32 conferences. Only the Mid-Eastern conference was lower.
Grambling was making its first tournament appearance. And when Montana State drilled its first seven shots and eight of its first 10, it seemed like the blitz that MSU used to shock Weber State (66 second half points) and Montana (41-9 second half run) at the Big Sky Tournament would continue.
For those paying close enough attention, it must’ve felt ominous though that MSU started the game so efficiently yet never built a double-figure lead. Even with a 42-point first half, the Bobcats still only led by nine at the break.
And the relentless nature of Grambling’s full-court press combined with some wild shot making and a little bit of March wizardry helped the Tigers turn the game in its head the final 14 minutes of regulation and into the overtime period.
MSU led 53-39 with 14:37 left after Brian Goracke drilled a 3-pointer. Grambling responded with an 11-0 run to cut it to 53-50 in less than four minutes. When Jimel Cofer scored with 5:47 left to give Grambling a 60-59 lead, MSU found itself on the other side of what it had done to opponents over the last few weeks.
“I know my guys. They don’t have any quit in them,” Grambling State head coach Donte Jackson said. “There’s a lot of fight in them. And I told them our life has been built off adversity. I’ve got a lot of guys that come from under-privileged situations and things of that nature, and adversity is part of life. It’s about how you bounce back when you get in a bad situation.
“And you’ve got to keep your head up no matter how bad it gets. And you’ve got to keep pushing and pulling and going in the right direction.”
Still, Robert Ford III, Goracke and Eddie Turner III, the Bobcats’ stalwart seniors, would not go down without a fight. When Jourdan Smith banged home a 3-pointer just before the final media time out, Ford answered with a clutch jumper to keep the lead at one point. When Jalen Johnson converted in the lane, Goracke answered with his fourth and final triple of the game to tie the game at 67. And when Cofer converted a 3-point play, Ford answered with a game-tying triple of his own to knot the score at 70 with 99 seconds left.
Montana State led by two after a pair of Turner free throws before Cofer took Ford, who was saddled with four fouls, to the rim for the game tying bucket with 34 seconds left.
“We wanted to try to attack (Ford) because on the other end he was punishing us. So we were trying to make sure we could attack him,” Grambling State head coach Donte Jackson said. “And Jimel did a good job going downhill several times on him. It worked to our advantage.”
With 15 seconds left, Logie took a timeout. MSU got the ball inside to bullish power forward Brandon Walker, who was immediately triple teamed. His ability to even get off a shot is a testament to his power in the paint. But the attempt went awry, as did Tra’Michael Moton’s attempt at the buzzer six seconds later to send the game to overtime.
“We had ran an action a few minutes prior where Brian got a pitch-back 3 from the top of the key coming from the side out of bounds, and we thought we would have an opportunity to use that as a decoy, get Brandon downhill where he’d convert at a high rate, 7-for-10 from the field,” Logie said when asked about the final sequence of regulation. “We just wanted to make sure we did something that was aggressive and didn’t want to do something that was in the middle third of the floor. So we got to a good spot. Didn’t turn out the way that we had hoped.”
In the extra period, Grambling took the first lead and never let up. Montana State had an impossible time getting the ball to Ford, the Big Sky Tournament MVP and the catalyst for the championship run. Instead, forced 3-pointers by Goracke and Tyler Patterson highlighted (or lowlighted) the extra stanza as Montana State watched its lightning completely melt the bottle as what seemed like a sure streak-breaking Big Dance victory went up in flames.
Ford finished with a game-high 26 points, including hitting six of his eight attempts from beyond the arc as MSU went 13-of-30 from deep overall. Ford also had six rebounds and four assists. He finished his transcendent senior season as the fifth player in NCAA Division I since 1979 to record 250 rebounds and 100 steals in a season, joining Clyde Drexler, Ron Harper, James Posey, and Eric Coley. Ford is the first to accomplish the feat since 2000, and at 6-feet, is the only player under 6-foot-5 to do it.
“It means a lot to me,” Ford said of the tournament run. “It’s hard — and I was talking to the guys in the locker room — it’s hard to come back — Coach getting hired late, guys trying to put all the pieces together. But props to our team for getting it together, getting it under their belt right away. For me, I appreciate them letting me come in and lead them. It’s tough. It really is, but I’m just happy and proud of this team. It’s not too many times you see a team with a first-year coach go to the championship.”
Grambling moves on to play No. 1 Purdue in Indianapolis at 7:45 p.m. MT on Friday night. The winner of that game takes on the winner of No. 8 Utah State and No. 9 TCU. The Aggies of USU are led by former Montana State head coach Danny Sprinkle.
Montana State’s season finishes at 17-18.
“What I’ll remember the most about this group is how they never let go of the rope for our culture and our standards,” Logie said. “I came to Montana State to compete in the NCAA Tournament. This place has proven you can do that year in, year out.”
