Great insight and capsulation of the game from -- who else? -- The Athletic.
SAN DIEGO — Most of the night, Texas Tech’s players sauntered into timeouts. They trudged. There was a hesitancy to their body language, an air of nervous frustration. Play would stop, and players would walk over to the huddle, and they’d look up at the scoreboard. Their faces wouldn’t betray anxiety, their shoulders wouldn’t slump, but anyone with eyes could see something was just a little bit off. They weren’t playing well. They knew it. Heads up, arrange your face, show no fear, all of that, but still: Things were starting to get scary.
In the timeouts, in the safety of the huddle, that’s where Tech’s players could be more honest. The Red Raiders talked about brotherhood a lot here this weekend — Kevin Obanor’s phrase for it is “familyhood,” which he repeated in interviews more than a few times — and any time spent around them is confirmation that they really are that tight. They can say stuff to each other and have it be fine. And as the game against No. 11 seed Notre Dame ticked away, and the Irish refused to go away, and worse yet seemed to be finding open 3s, and now Texas Tech was actually trailing here, and these Notre Dame 3s were starting to go in at a slightly frightening clip, and oh man, oh no, this is really happening, the trust circles in the timeout huddles became interventions at regular intervals.
“You get hostile in the timeouts,” Kevin McCullar said.
“Are you trying to go home?” Obanor said. “No way to sugarcoat it. You trying to go home?”
Not long after Obanor asked his teammates, in less polite terms, whether they really wanted to keep playing in this tournament, he made perhaps the most important play of Sunday’s tight and immensely nervewracking game: a rapid-fire offensive rebound off his own miss that looked like it was going to end up giving the ball back to Notre Dame. Instead, with 1:10 left to play, Obanor went to the line, made two free throws drenched in pressure, and gave Texas Tech the lead for the first time in six minutes. It was enough to secure the ugliest and most nerve-fraying of NCAA Tournament victories, 59-53, against a Notre Dame team that knew what it had to do to beat No. 3 seed Texas Tech — and simply didn’t pull it off.
Indeed, perhaps the most remarkable thing about the game was how closely it hewed to the pregame narrative both coaches basically agreed on coming in. Texas Tech coach Mark Adams — not one for exaggeration generally — said his first statistical category in a scout was an opposing team’s 3-point shooting. He said he was actively losing sleep about Notre Dame’s offense, particularly its ability to drive and kick to open 3-point shooters, and its ability to have lots of players on the floor able to make those shots. Notre Dame arrived having gone 15-1 in games in which it made double-digit 3s, and Brey arrived feeling fairly confident in his team’s ability to meet or exceed that mark, even against the best defensive team in the country.
Not unlike ACC foe Virginia, which plays a different style of defense but one similarly obsessed with preventing offensive players from reaching the middle of the floor, Brey reckoned the best way to beat Tech’s no-middle defense was to shoot over the top of it. It sounds simple, but few teams manage it. Brey thought his guys might. (In general, he was happy to argue that the chances of winning being given to Notre Dame by predictive metrics systems — particularly BPI, which he had clearly seen earlier Saturday on “College Gameday,” or whatever — were way too low, that they were systemically underrating his team. “BPI doesn’t give us much of a chance,” Brey said Saturday. “So I’m really worried. If you would look back at the BPI on us this year, it was always Notre Dame, 30 percent chance of winning, 20 percent chance of winning. It’s been unbelievable. Who does that damn thing?”)
So: Notre Dame would try to beat Texas Tech with 3s. Texas Tech knew it. Notre Dame knew it. And, in a roundabout way, it basically worked.
Notre Dame did not shoot the ball well Sunday night. Not close to it: The Irish were 17-of-52 from the field; they made just eight 2-point field goals and shot 32.1 percent from 3-point range. But what they lacked in shooting efficiency, they made up for in volume. No matter what, no matter how many they missed — and they were 5-of-16 in the first half — the Irish kept firing them up.
Eventually, gradually, the math started to tilt in their favor. Not a lot; this was never anything but a close grinder of a game. But with Texas Tech’s offense sputtering out on the other end — the usually rough-and-tumble team that scored 97 points in 68 possessions against Montana State in the first round came fully back to Earth against an Irish defense that mostly just focused on keeping them in front — Notre Dame’s makes gradually climbed toward that double-digit marker. With 13 minutes remaining, Texas Tech took a four-point lead, at which point Dane Goodwin and Cormac Ryan hit one 3 apiece, Notre Dame’s sixth and seventh makes of the night. At the 9:34 mark, a scramble for the ball under the rim left ND guard Trey Wertz with the rarest of gifts from the Texas Tech defense — an open look. By this point, Notre Dame had actually basically stopped running its typical offense. “You can’t run any offense against them,” Brey said. Instead, he spaced the floor, told Prentiss Hubb and Blake Wesley to try to beat their man off the dribble, and to kick to open shooters when Texas Tech’s defense scrambled to rotate. It was a totally single-minded strategy.
With 5:17 to play, Goodwin made Notre Dame’s ninth 3 of the night. The Irish took 48-47 lead. Texas Tech looked … freaked out.
This was right around the time that Obanor and his teammates started dealing in radical honesty during timeouts. Obanor, in particular, was not about to meekly slide out of the tournament. “We don’t want to go home,” McCullar said. “We all lock in and listen to each other. That’s one thing that’s great about us, we’re so close. There’s no hard feelings in there. And it gets competitive.” Part of a Sweet 16 surprise at Oral Roberts last season, Obanor came to Texas Tech to be on a team that could win it all, and it hadn’t always been easy — adjusting to the Adams defensive lifestyle, and the nightly level of play in the Big 12, had been a steep climb. But he had gotten through, built a tight bond with this team of former transfers, and he wasn’t remotely ready for it to end. “He’s a dog,” McCullar said — the highest of Tech-ian compliments.
So, too, is Marcos Santos-Silva, who made either the second-biggest or maybe just the biggest play of the night one possession after Obanor’s free throws. Notre Dame isolated Wesley on Santos-Silva, who defended the Irish forward’s drive perfectly, blocked the shot, retained possession, and drew a foul under the rim. Santos-Silva, a left-hander, would take two free throws with his right hand, a tactic he started trying a month ago. “How about that?” Adams said. “Here’s a guy who changes his shot. He looks a whole lot better, but quite honestly it still hadn’t been going in in practice. We were crossing our fingers.” He made both.
When Wesley turned the ball over a few seconds later, Texas Tech roared, the first time the players’ “we got this” facade broke all night. Playing it cool was over. Indeed, all of the relief came pouring out maybe a little bit too much; they were still just up three with 46 seconds left. Adams and McCullar were the only two not quite celebrating just yet. McCullar was motioning for his teammates to calm down, and rightly so. Notre Dame was just one made 3 away from its double-digit mark, after all. The game wasn’t actually over, but Tech almost couldn’t resist. It had been waiting for this, and sweating it out, all night.
But when McCullar’s made free throws stretched the lead to 57-52, and then after another Santos-Silva block led to a McCullar dunk to make it 59-52 in the final seconds, well, then it was time to celebrate. Notre Dame ended with nine made 3s. (“We needed two more,” Brey said. He had been right.) Tech hadn’t played well. It hadn’t impressed itself or anyone else. And frankly, it had looked a little bit terrified at times, had to get itself together in timeouts, to convince each other things were really going to be OK. But it had won. This team’s journey together would continue. Isn’t there a saying about that this time of year? “We just love each other,” Obanor said. “And this is what March is all about.”
SAN DIEGO — Most of the night, Texas Tech’s players sauntered into timeouts. They trudged. There was a hesitancy to their body language, an air of nervous frustration. Play would stop, and players would walk over to the huddle, and they’d look up at the scoreboard. Their faces wouldn’t betray anxiety, their shoulders wouldn’t slump, but anyone with eyes could see something was just a little bit off. They weren’t playing well. They knew it. Heads up, arrange your face, show no fear, all of that, but still: Things were starting to get scary.
In the timeouts, in the safety of the huddle, that’s where Tech’s players could be more honest. The Red Raiders talked about brotherhood a lot here this weekend — Kevin Obanor’s phrase for it is “familyhood,” which he repeated in interviews more than a few times — and any time spent around them is confirmation that they really are that tight. They can say stuff to each other and have it be fine. And as the game against No. 11 seed Notre Dame ticked away, and the Irish refused to go away, and worse yet seemed to be finding open 3s, and now Texas Tech was actually trailing here, and these Notre Dame 3s were starting to go in at a slightly frightening clip, and oh man, oh no, this is really happening, the trust circles in the timeout huddles became interventions at regular intervals.
“You get hostile in the timeouts,” Kevin McCullar said.
“Are you trying to go home?” Obanor said. “No way to sugarcoat it. You trying to go home?”
Not long after Obanor asked his teammates, in less polite terms, whether they really wanted to keep playing in this tournament, he made perhaps the most important play of Sunday’s tight and immensely nervewracking game: a rapid-fire offensive rebound off his own miss that looked like it was going to end up giving the ball back to Notre Dame. Instead, with 1:10 left to play, Obanor went to the line, made two free throws drenched in pressure, and gave Texas Tech the lead for the first time in six minutes. It was enough to secure the ugliest and most nerve-fraying of NCAA Tournament victories, 59-53, against a Notre Dame team that knew what it had to do to beat No. 3 seed Texas Tech — and simply didn’t pull it off.
Indeed, perhaps the most remarkable thing about the game was how closely it hewed to the pregame narrative both coaches basically agreed on coming in. Texas Tech coach Mark Adams — not one for exaggeration generally — said his first statistical category in a scout was an opposing team’s 3-point shooting. He said he was actively losing sleep about Notre Dame’s offense, particularly its ability to drive and kick to open 3-point shooters, and its ability to have lots of players on the floor able to make those shots. Notre Dame arrived having gone 15-1 in games in which it made double-digit 3s, and Brey arrived feeling fairly confident in his team’s ability to meet or exceed that mark, even against the best defensive team in the country.
Not unlike ACC foe Virginia, which plays a different style of defense but one similarly obsessed with preventing offensive players from reaching the middle of the floor, Brey reckoned the best way to beat Tech’s no-middle defense was to shoot over the top of it. It sounds simple, but few teams manage it. Brey thought his guys might. (In general, he was happy to argue that the chances of winning being given to Notre Dame by predictive metrics systems — particularly BPI, which he had clearly seen earlier Saturday on “College Gameday,” or whatever — were way too low, that they were systemically underrating his team. “BPI doesn’t give us much of a chance,” Brey said Saturday. “So I’m really worried. If you would look back at the BPI on us this year, it was always Notre Dame, 30 percent chance of winning, 20 percent chance of winning. It’s been unbelievable. Who does that damn thing?”)
So: Notre Dame would try to beat Texas Tech with 3s. Texas Tech knew it. Notre Dame knew it. And, in a roundabout way, it basically worked.
Notre Dame did not shoot the ball well Sunday night. Not close to it: The Irish were 17-of-52 from the field; they made just eight 2-point field goals and shot 32.1 percent from 3-point range. But what they lacked in shooting efficiency, they made up for in volume. No matter what, no matter how many they missed — and they were 5-of-16 in the first half — the Irish kept firing them up.
Eventually, gradually, the math started to tilt in their favor. Not a lot; this was never anything but a close grinder of a game. But with Texas Tech’s offense sputtering out on the other end — the usually rough-and-tumble team that scored 97 points in 68 possessions against Montana State in the first round came fully back to Earth against an Irish defense that mostly just focused on keeping them in front — Notre Dame’s makes gradually climbed toward that double-digit marker. With 13 minutes remaining, Texas Tech took a four-point lead, at which point Dane Goodwin and Cormac Ryan hit one 3 apiece, Notre Dame’s sixth and seventh makes of the night. At the 9:34 mark, a scramble for the ball under the rim left ND guard Trey Wertz with the rarest of gifts from the Texas Tech defense — an open look. By this point, Notre Dame had actually basically stopped running its typical offense. “You can’t run any offense against them,” Brey said. Instead, he spaced the floor, told Prentiss Hubb and Blake Wesley to try to beat their man off the dribble, and to kick to open shooters when Texas Tech’s defense scrambled to rotate. It was a totally single-minded strategy.
With 5:17 to play, Goodwin made Notre Dame’s ninth 3 of the night. The Irish took 48-47 lead. Texas Tech looked … freaked out.
This was right around the time that Obanor and his teammates started dealing in radical honesty during timeouts. Obanor, in particular, was not about to meekly slide out of the tournament. “We don’t want to go home,” McCullar said. “We all lock in and listen to each other. That’s one thing that’s great about us, we’re so close. There’s no hard feelings in there. And it gets competitive.” Part of a Sweet 16 surprise at Oral Roberts last season, Obanor came to Texas Tech to be on a team that could win it all, and it hadn’t always been easy — adjusting to the Adams defensive lifestyle, and the nightly level of play in the Big 12, had been a steep climb. But he had gotten through, built a tight bond with this team of former transfers, and he wasn’t remotely ready for it to end. “He’s a dog,” McCullar said — the highest of Tech-ian compliments.
So, too, is Marcos Santos-Silva, who made either the second-biggest or maybe just the biggest play of the night one possession after Obanor’s free throws. Notre Dame isolated Wesley on Santos-Silva, who defended the Irish forward’s drive perfectly, blocked the shot, retained possession, and drew a foul under the rim. Santos-Silva, a left-hander, would take two free throws with his right hand, a tactic he started trying a month ago. “How about that?” Adams said. “Here’s a guy who changes his shot. He looks a whole lot better, but quite honestly it still hadn’t been going in in practice. We were crossing our fingers.” He made both.
When Wesley turned the ball over a few seconds later, Texas Tech roared, the first time the players’ “we got this” facade broke all night. Playing it cool was over. Indeed, all of the relief came pouring out maybe a little bit too much; they were still just up three with 46 seconds left. Adams and McCullar were the only two not quite celebrating just yet. McCullar was motioning for his teammates to calm down, and rightly so. Notre Dame was just one made 3 away from its double-digit mark, after all. The game wasn’t actually over, but Tech almost couldn’t resist. It had been waiting for this, and sweating it out, all night.
But when McCullar’s made free throws stretched the lead to 57-52, and then after another Santos-Silva block led to a McCullar dunk to make it 59-52 in the final seconds, well, then it was time to celebrate. Notre Dame ended with nine made 3s. (“We needed two more,” Brey said. He had been right.) Tech hadn’t played well. It hadn’t impressed itself or anyone else. And frankly, it had looked a little bit terrified at times, had to get itself together in timeouts, to convince each other things were really going to be OK. But it had won. This team’s journey together would continue. Isn’t there a saying about that this time of year? “We just love each other,” Obanor said. “And this is what March is all about.”
