Editor’s Note: what follows is the second installment of a five-part series that provides a first-hand account of a trip to Indianapolis for the 2021 NCAA men’s basketball tournament by Colter Nuanez and Riley Corcoran. The co-founder of Skyline Sports and the head of ESPN Missoula was accompanied by the Voice of the Griz to America’s heartland for the most unorthodox Big Dance of all time.
Day 1 — Tinkle the Cinderella Man
Our first full day of action at the NCAA Tournament began at Bankers Life Fieldhouse, a sparkling gem of an arena built at the turn of the 21st century that just received a $360 million renovation less than two years ago. The scoreboard, which is estimated to have cost $10 million alone, is a spectacle to behold, a 50-foot by 21-foot marvel of modern technology that has a clearer broadcast picture than any television on the market.
Colgate, a private school from the Patriot League that plays in the FCS during normal autumns, entered this tournament with the best net rating in the country. The Raiders did not play an out of conference basketball game, yet drew a 14-seed and a chance to play Arkansas.
Eric Musselman, a former NBA head coach who helped Nevada to the Sweet 16 in 2018, led the Razorbacks. After an early scare, Arkansas’s depth proved to be too much as the third-seeded Razors move into the second round with an 85-68 decision.
When Musselman first took over at Arkansas, Montana head coach Travis DeCuire was a rumored potential candidate to lead the Wolfpack, a program that played in the Big Sky from 1980 until 1992, representing the league in the Big Dance in 1984 and 1985.
Those two seasons, Larry Krystkowiak was in the midst of one of the greatest careers in Montana and Big Sky Conference history. The UM big man won the MVP during both the 1983-1984 season and the 1984-85 campaign (he also won it as a senior in 1985-86).
But Sonny Allen, the Big Sky Coach of the Year in both seasons, led the Wolf Pack to a 71-69 win over Krystkowiak and the Griz in the 1984 Big Sky Tournament championship game in Ogden, Utah after upsetting host Weber State in the semis.
The following year, Nevada bounced host Boise State in the semis before knocking off Idaho State in the championship game to win a tournament Montana did not qualify for despite Krystkowiak’s exceptional individual performance.
Krystkowiak would get his postseason revenge decades later. Krystkowiak led his alma mater to consecutive NCAA Tournaments in 2005 and 2006, including to a fabled win over, of all teams, Nevada. That victory marks the last time a team from the Big Sky Conference advanced to the Big Dance meaning the league has the longest drought of any conference in the country.
The coaching tree connections to the lineage of former Griz big men who have gone on to great success following their playing careers continued. In our second live game, we watched SEC powerhouse Tennessee, a No. 5 seed led by former Texas head coach Rick Barnes, and upstart Oregon State, a No. 12 seed that needed to upset UCLA, Oregon and Colorado in the Pac 12 tournament to slide into the tournament field, gave us our first underdog special of the weekend.
The Beavers are led by Wayne Tinkle, one of 44 players to score at least 1,500 points in Big Sky Conference history during his career at Montana. Tinkle was a two-time All-Big Sky center at UM between 1985 and 1989, spending the first part of his Griz career in Krystkowiak’s shadow only to emerge as a player who also still ranks 16th in league history and fourth in Montana history with 836 career rebounds.
The 6-foot-10 gentle, silver-haired giant played professionally all around the world from 1989 until 2001 before joining Don Holst’s staff at UM as an assistant coach. Tinkle served on coaching staffs for Holst, Pat Kennedy and Krystkowiak, earning his degree along the way before taking over as Montana’s head coach in 2006 when Krystkowiak left for the head coaching job at Utah.
Tinkle led his alma mater for eight seasons, guiding UM to three NCAA Tournaments in four seasons between 2009 and 2013, winning Big Sky Coach of the Year twice.
In his second trip to the Big Dance as the head coach at OSU, Tinkle helped the Beavers pull off one of the first upsets of March in a weekend that would be jam-packed with lower seeds toppling the perennially prestigious programs. Oregon State looked calm, confident and like the better team in soundly beating a Tennessee squad led by two future NBA Lottery picks, 70-56.
We broadcast our first “Nuanez Now” show of the trip live while Tinkle’s Beavers earned one of the signature wins in program history, sending the good news of one of the Treasure State’s favorite sons back home.
Several national college basketball writers tweeted after Oregon State’s win that Tinkle received more than 450 text messages congratulating him on his first career NCAA Tournament victory. And each reported that the 55-year-old responded to every single message.
It’s easy to believe because a few days before the tournament began, Tinkle joined Nuanez Now on 102.9 FM ESPN Missoula to talk about the postseason bid and reminisce about his charmed days in the Garden City.
After all, Tinkle’s three children went to most of their schooling in Missoula. His oldest daughter Joslyn grew up with the co-founders of Skyline Sports before helping Stanford advance to three consecutive women’s Final Fours between 2008 and 2012.
Middle daughter Elle was also a standout at Missoula Big Sky (my alma mater), helping the Eagles claim consecutive Class AA championships, the first at MBS since 1986 and 1987 when Ben DeMers, a former standout player from Heathcote, was the head coach for the Eagles.
Elle went on to have a standout career at Gonzaga, playing alongside Laura Stockton, the daughter of NBA Hall of Fame point guard John Stockton, perhaps the most accomplished player to ever play for the Zags’ men’s team. Houston Stockton, John’s oldest son, was a safety for the Grizzlies a decade ago while Lindsay, John’s oldest daughter, was a standout point guard for Montana State’s 2016 Big Sky Conference championship season. John Stockton, the NBA’s all-time leader in assists and steals, was an assistant coach on Tricia Binford’s staff during Lindsay’s senior year at MSU.
And Wayne’s son, Tres, led Hellgate to two state title games and the 2013 Class AA state championship before starring for his dad at Oregon State. Tres finished his college career as the all-time leading scorer in the history of Oregon State, breaking Gary Payton’s record and finishing sixth in Pac 12 history with 2,233 points.
All of the Tinkle kids, along with Wayne’s wife, Lisa — herself a Montana legend hailing from Fairfield who earned first-team all-conference honors three times and Big Sky MVP honors as a senior in 1989 for the Lady Griz — were in attendance to watch the Beavers stay hot and move into the second round of the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1986.
We had a few hours before our first nightcap: a game featuring fifth-seeded Villanova and12th-seeded Winthrop about 20 minutes north of downtown at Indiana Farmers Coliseum, the arena that first hosted the Indiana Pacers back in their ABA days beginning in 1963.
Carson Wentz — the former North Dakota State quarterback whose first half injury in NDSU’s 38-35 loss in Missoula in August of 2015 — had just arrived in Indianapolis the same day we had. So we decided to head up to Lucas Oil Stadium, the home of the former No. 2 overall draft pick and his new team, the Indianapolis Colts.
At the towering, expansive 68,000-seat arena, there are two courts during the first round so the sight lines for shooters are funky at best. We watch the first 20 minutes of top-seeded and eventual national champion Baylor against No. 16 Hartford. That first half, the upstart Hawks went toe to toe with the tournament’s No. 2 overall seed.
But we didn’t stay to watch Baylor turn on the jets and cruise to a 79-55 victory. We had to go catch up on the tournament and get a bite to eat before admiring Villanova head coach Jay Wright live and in person not wearing a suit.
As we walked out of Lucas Oil Stadium, we first started noticing the prevalence of white shoes, a slice of Americana and at the same time a symbol that no matter where many of us come from, we are often more the same than we’d like to admit.
We also noticed a great many people wearing shirts or team gear showing allegiance for Illinois and Purdue, a pair of the best from the Big Ten, a league considered the strongest in Division I during the regular season of one of the strangest campaigns in college hoops history.
The Illini faithful mostly came from the Urbana-Champaign area, a two-hour drive to the West; or Chicago, a three-hour drive from the north. West Lafayette, home to the Boilermakers, is 65 miles northeast of Indy.
Many locals around Indiana’s capital root for the Hoosiers. But UI men’s hoop endured a different sort of headlines while the Big Dance carried on.
In a tournament dominated by the storyline of Gonzaga becoming potentially the first team to go undefeated since Bob Knight’s Hoosiers back in 1976, instead, UI sat home after finishing the season on a six-game losing streak. Head coach Archie Miller, who took Dayton to four consecutive NCAA Tournaments, including a run to the Elite Eight in 2014, had been fired by Indiana after failing to make the Big Dance in any of his four seasons leading the Hoosiers.
Bloomington was home to a few first-round tournament games, including a contest that saw sixth-seeded Texas Tech take down 11th-seeded Utah State, 65-53. Missoula Hellgate product Rollie Worster, the runner-up this season for Mountain West Freshman of the Year, played 23 minutes and scored six points. He finished 2-of-7 from the floor, including 2-of-5 from beyond the arc. It turned out to be Worster’s only NCAA Tournament game for the Aggies.
A postseason in itself was a piece of redemption for Worster. The two-time Montana Gatorade Player of the Year had his Knights on a collision course with an undefeated run to the Montana Class AA state title. But the state championship games across the Treasure State were called off in 2020. So Worster and Hellgate had to share the state title with Billings Skyview rather than solidifying a place among Montana’s best state championship squads.
Later in March, Utah fired Krystkowiak after 10 seasons at the helm. The school had to give the former Griz player and head coach a $6.8 million buyout after he missed the Big Dance for the fifth year in a row.
That led to Utah State head coach Craig Smith taking over for the Utes. It also likely lead to Worster entering the NCAA Transfer Portal. And it ultimately led to Worster transferring to Utah to reunite with Smith. Worster becomes the first Missoula product to play in the Pac 12 since former Hellgate star Jack McGillis spent two years in Corvallis before transferring back to Montana.
Other Indy natives are fans of Butler. The Bulldogs make their home at iconic Hinkle Fieldhouse, a gem of a hoops cathedral about seven miles from Lucas Oil Stadium. And many root for Notre Dame, a tradition-laden institution that makes its home two hours north of Indianapolis. But neither Butler nor ND qualified for this year’s tournament field.
All of that is to say that after the top-seeded Illini got bounced by No. 8 Loyola-Chicago in the second round and fourth-seeded Purdue got bounced by No. 13 North Texas in OT in the first round, there were plenty of fans clad in Illinois orange or Boilermaker black carrying two beers at once during the first games of Saturday in search of new squads to to root for.
The Big Ten and the other regional qualifiers experienced a nightmarish first weekend. Second-seeded Ohio State became just the ninth No. 2 seed to lose to a No. 15 seed as the Buckeyes fell 75-72 in overtime to a team that finished fourth in the Summit League regular-season standings. Oral Roberts was one of the top underdogs of this tournament.
Following Norfolk State’s win in the First Four, we wondered what was holding Big Sky champions from breaking through in the Big Dance. After Oral Roberts toppled the Buckeyes, we again wondered, if a private, religious school of 4,000 students in Tulsa, Oklahoma can make it to the Sweet 16 (the Golden Eagles bounced No. 7 Florida in the second round before the first weekend was over), why has it been such an arduous battle for the Big Sky?
Surely, Damian Lillard and Rodney Stuckey and Will Cherry, Ahmaad Rorie, Michael Oguine, Tyler Hall, Jeremy Senglin and many other Big Sky standouts were at least comparable talents to most of what Oral Roberts has on its roster. Or maybe not? What’s missing?
After we learned about just how many big time colleges are so close by — Louisville, Kentucky is only two hours south of Indy as well — we started to catch up on the first day’s action, including No. 9 Wisconsin blasting No. 8 North Carolina 85-62 in what turned out to be the last game of Hall of Fame UNC head coach Roy Williams’s career. The Badger victory also brought great glee to our owner and resident sports mother at Missoula Broadcasting and ESPN Missoula; she’s a native of Madison who’s late father was an All-American for the Badger football decades ago.
Houston, a revived city school trying to recapture its Phi Slama Jamma glory days, posted a convincing win over Cleveland State, a 15-seed led by former Cal standout head coach Dennis Gates. The 41-year-old led the Vikings to the Horizon League in his second season at the helm. Gates played collegiately in Berkley, where he was teammates with Shantay Legans, Eastern Washington’s dynamic young head coach and one of the central figures that brought us to Indy to cover the action.
Gates, who missed playing for former Griz head coach Mike Montgomery by about a decade in Berkeley, and Cleveland State lost 87-54. The UH victory was the first of four straight tourney wins by the Cougars under the direction of legendary head coach Kelvin Sampson. By the Sweet 16, Sampson would coach in his 1,000 game and would win for the 667th time.
Of those victories, 73 of them came at Montana Tech in Butte between 1981 and 1985. Sampson, one of the most prominent American Indian head coaches in all of college sports, got his coaching start as a graduate assistant on Heathcoate’s staff at Michigan State in 1979 and 1980.
Following Houston’s statement win that foreshadowed a Final Four run, we could only hope that Legans and the Big Sky champion Eagles of EWU would fare better than Legans’ former teammate the following day against third-seeded Kansas.
Little did we know, we were in for a Will Ferrell-inspired treat for our first game of Saturday’s action. But not before we saw for the first time Indiana Farmers Coliseum; a quaint, antiquated yet intimate venue that could only be described as a mesh between the Billings Metra and a picture your mind’s eye might paint of a gym Larry Bird grew up shredding in French Lick, Indiana, more than 40 years ago.
There’s hardly a Montana connection to our Friday nightcap other than Tinkle texted back while we sat five rows behind Wright, a two-time Naismith Award winner as the national coach of the year and a two-time national champion. The 59-year-old has led Villanova for 20 years.
Wright, who is not nearly as regal or intimidating without his trademark pinstripe suit on, still has a decade to go if he wants to catch Andy Talley in terms of tenure at the Philadelphia private school. Talley, ‘Nova’s head football coach from 1985 until 2016, led the Wildcats to 14 playoff appearances and a run to the 2009 national title which culminated with a 23-21 upset of Marc Mariani and the No. 1 Montana Grizzlies.
That game came a few weeks after the Grizzlies’ semifinal triumph over Armanti Edwards and Appalachian State in one of the famed games in UM and FCS history. The national title game loss to ‘Nova would mark the last game Bobby Hauck coached at Montana before his illustrious yet controversial return to lead the Griz before the 2018 season.
Winthrop, a 6,000-student public school in Rock Hill, South Carolina, has been to the tournament 11 times just since 1999. Gregg Marshall, who went on to have unprecedented success at Wichita State, led the Eagles to seven of those tourney bids, culminating in 2007’s first-round 74-64 win over sixth-seeded Notre Dame. That victory marks the lone NCAA Tournament win in program history.
The Eagles seem to always have a shot. The recruiting ground is fertile. Marshall was a rising star at the time before getting into hot water more than a decade later with the Shockers.
Yet it seems Big Sky programs with tradition like Montana and Weber State should be able to at least attain a level of national prowess held by perennial mid-major contenders like Winthrop or UC Santa Barbara. Or even just catch lightning in a bottle like Oral Roberts or 14th-seeded Abilene Christian (we’ll get to them and the quarterback club suite shortly) seem to every year.
Wright and the Wildcats moved on with a hard-fought 73-63 victory. As we rode back to our vacation rental, we learned that Jim Boeheim, Syracuse’s 76-year-old head coach, led the 11th-seeded Orange past San Diego State, a popular non-Power 5 pick in many brackets and the former employer of both former Griz men’s basketball coach Jim Brandenburgh (1976-78 at UM) and Hauck.
Boeheim’s daughter, Elizabeth, lives in Missoula and earned her master’s degree from the University of Montana. In 2013, Syracuse mounted their fourth run to the Final Four. That year, Cherry helped deny Lillard an NCAA Tournament berth once again as the highlight of his swan song season with the Grizzlies.
Cherry and the Grizzlies’ run came to an abrupt end later that month as UM suffered an 81-34 loss to the Orange in one of the most lopsided losses by a Big Sky champion in recent years.
That loss ended one of the best four-year stretches in the history of the University of Montana men’s basketball program. That NCAA Tourney berth was the third in four seasons, the first time UM had ever accomplished that feat.
The Griz won 93 games in four years, including going 25-6 in consecutive seasons, losing just two out of 36 Big Sky games over those last two years. Tinkle would stay for an eighth season after the graduation of Cherry and his decorated senior class before Tinkle took over at Oregon State.
We also learned that Tinkle’s next opponent would be Oklahoma State, a No. 4 seed many felt was under-seeded coming out of a competitive Big XII. Cade Cunningham, a freshman phenom who is considered the top prospect in the upcoming NBA Draft, lead the Cowboys past Liberty and into the second round, 69-60.
And we learned that the most pertinent thing (to us at least) in West Virginia’s 84-67 win over 14th-seeded Morehead State is that the MSU Eagles feature junior Jaden Stanley-Williams, a 6-foot-7 forward who grew up on the Rocky Boy Indian reservation in Montana and went to his early high school years at Great Falls High.
