This week, national bracket predictors like ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, Jerry Palm for CBS Sports and Brian Bennett with The Athletic all have speculated WSU will be a 16 seed and end up in the First Four, which plays out next Tuesday and Wednesday at the Arena.
The Horizon League’s champion has never been a 16 seed before, but this year the conference’s overall ranking has been pulled down by four teams that have some of the worst NET rankings that the NCAA uses to rate the 358 teams playing Division I basketball.
IUPUI, with a 1-26 record, is ranked dead last at No. 358.
Wisconsin Green Bay (4-25) is No. 344. Wisconsin Milwaukee (9-22) is 333 and Robert Morris (7-20) iss 329. And UIC at (13-16) isn’t far off at No. 284.
Brown doesn’t think the tournament’s selection committee will make the Horizon League champion Raiders a 16 seed, but if it does, he agrees they’ll likely be in the First Four.
And I believe there would be a lot of plusses to that 10-mile trip across town:
»First off, the Raiders have done it many times before and have had good fortune. Over the years they’ve played 21 games at the Arena and won 14 of them. That’s a 67 percent winning percentage.
»It would give WSU a great chance to win its first-ever game in the NCAA Tournament. (That’s at the Division I level because they were D-II tournament regulars and won the national crown in 1983.)
Since becoming D-I in the 1987-88 season, the Raiders have made three trips to the tournament and been roughed up by Indiana in 1993, Pitt in 2007 and Tennessee in 2018.
But Lunardi has them pitted against Bryant, the Northeast Conference champs, in an Arena opener.
»A First Four game brings national attention. It’s the start of the tournament and one of only two games being played that night. This year it’s being televised by truTV. It draws the networks’ top broadcast teams and one year had President Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron in the crowd. All that buzz can be a boost as a recruiting tool.
»It gives you a chance at an extra NCAA Tournament payday. Each game a team plays, it earns a unit share payout from the NCAA. Last year, according to Sportico, that amounted to $337,141. The NCAA recommends the money be shared with the conference, but that’s not always the case.
»Unlike the five times WSU played the Dayton Flyers in the Gem City Jam at the Arena, Brown – a UD grad and former UD player – thinks Flyers fans who make up much of the First Four crowd would support the Raiders whole heartedly:
»That would be far better than the last time the Raiders were a No. 16 seed.
It came on their first-ever trip to the NCAA Tournament when, as Mid-Continent Conference champs, they were matched against No. 1 seed Indiana (28-3) at the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis.
Like this Sunday, WSU had a selection show party then and Brown was sitting next to head coach Ralph Underhill when the Raiders found out they’d play the Hoosiers in Indianapolis, which is just 51 miles from the IU campus
“We were at the Holiday Inn and when it came on the screen that we’ were playing Indiana, the place just went nuts and everybody was cheering,” Brown laughed. “But I remember turning to Ralph and saying, ‘Oh (crap)!’”
His reaction was right on the money.
And that brings us to Knight punctuation mark.
“The day before the game, Indiana practiced in the Hoosier Dome right before us and 38,000 fans showed up to cheer them,” Brown said.
I remember the Hoosiers ended their session with a dunk drill that had the crowd roaring. And when they finished, the IU players suddenly scrambled onto the floor and rearranged themselves to spell out the word “Thanks!”
Knight lay down next to them as the exclamation point and the crowd rocked the dome with high-decibel delight.
Meanwhile, the wide-eyed WSU players stood just off the court waiting to begin their session. And when they did, the Hoosiers fans began to “hoot and holler at us,” said Brown.
The next night was worse.
IU routed the Raiders, 97-54. The 43-point difference went down as the largest victory margin in the NCAA Tournament’s Midwest Regional history.
‘Rocket City’
Although Brown is often thought of as synonymous with WSU basketball – he was an assistant coach there for 26 years, the interim head coach for one season and now is the color commentator for radio broadcasts of Raiders games – he also has long, heartfelt ties to UD basketball.
His dad Floyd, once a coach in southeastern Ohio, was an ardent follower of the Flyers and they’d listen to the radio broadcasts of the games in their Belmont home.
Jim would keep a score sheet each game and he said he once remembers “flying through” his newspaper route one Saturday morning so he could get home in time to listen to Flyers play in the NIT championship game.
After playing at Belmont High, Brown went to UD and was the only player the Flyers kept from a walk-on tryout that drew 95 guys.
He played quite bit on the freshman team, but his impassioned letter to Tom Blackburn to be moved up to the varsity went unanswered as the coach battled cancer.
Brown became a standout in the industrial leagues at the Fairgrounds and he signed up for season tickets when UD Arena was about to open.
But that first season he never got to use them.
He’d been in the ROTC program at UD and when he graduated – and already married to Becky, now his wife of 55 years – he was sent to Vietnam. It was August of 1969 and he was made a graves registration officer at Tay Ninh, an off-targeted base just three miles from the Cambodian border.
“They called it Rocket City,” he said.
Every night it was under fire from rockets and mortars launched in Cambodia. One night he counted 238 of them.
Brown was in dangerous place and had a tough job. He was tasked with cleaning up the bodies of US soldiers killed in action and getting them and their belongings to Saigon so they could be shipped back home.
Surrounded by all that threat and death, he needed a respite and got it during the Flyers basketball season.
That first year the Arena was open, hid dad used his season tickets in the 400 section.
“He had one of those old tape recorders and when he’d go to the games, he’d plug the recorder into his portable radio so I got the broadcast and I’d hear the crowd noise and some of his comments, too,” Brown said.
“It took a week to get the tapes, but to me it was like I was listening to the games live.”
That season he followed the exploits of Flyers standouts like George Janky, George Jackson, Kenny May and the Gottschall twins as they beat the likes of Louisville, Notre Dame and DePaul and made the NCAA Tournament.
He listened to the tapes while hunkered down in his “shack,” as he called it, that was covered by railroad ties and surrounded by sand bags in the hopes it would keep them safe in a rocket hit.
In 1997, when Brown was the interim WSU head coach and about to bring his Raiders into UD Arena for what would be the final Gem City Jam, I asked him if UD basketball still meant anything to him.
He suddenly got very quiet and his eyes began to water.
He finally said Flyers basketball meant “everything” to him.
Once, when he was so alone and frightened in Vietnam, he said those UD tapes had made him feel safe and happy:
“They reminded me what I was trying to get back home to.”
WSU’s embrace of the Arena
In 1972, the Raiders played their first game at UD Arena, losing to Miami 84-59.
Beginning in the 1978-79 season – while their home court was still the 2,800-seat PE Building on the WSU campus – they began playing a few games at UD Arena.
That first year, they beat Central State, Eastern Illinois and Cleveland State there. The next year they topped Armstrong State, Otterbein and Missouri St. Louis, but fell to Central State.
In all, they played Central State 10 times there and in 1988 they played UD there for the first time.
“Coach Donoher told us when we became a Division I program they’d play us and he was true to his word,” Brown said. “It was an afternoon game and they beat us pretty good (89-71).”
Two years later the Raiders returned for the second Gem City Jam with a team that relied heavily on freshman.
“We started Bill Edwards and Sean Hammonds and maybe another freshman and the crowd was unbelievable,” Brown remembered. “We got down 15-2 and Ralph called a time out and the place was going nuts!
“I still remember the huddle. We looked at our kids and they weren’t nervous or intimidated. They were just (ticked) off that this had happened.
“When they went back to the floor, I said to Ralph, ‘If we can just get it back to six or eight points, we got a chance. They’re not nervous.’ And that’s how it turned out. We went up by 16 in the second half and ended up winning by two and that’s with them hitting a three-pointer at the buzzer.”
The Raiders would go 3-5 against UD in the Gem City Jam. They won just that one time at UD Arena and twice at the Nutter Center, including once in a Vitaly Potapenko-led romp, 74-53, in 1994.
Actually, WSU did have one other win at UD Arena.
“One year we were playing there on one night and UD was playing the next,” Brown remembered. “Well, it snowed like 8 or 9 inches before our game and they called Don (Don Mohr, the athletics director) and told him they were going to charge him $800 to snowplow the parking lot.
“And he goes, ‘Hey, wait a second! Aren’t you playing there tomorrow night? Wouldn’t you have to plow it for that game?’
“They said, ‘Well, yeah, we would.’ So they let it go. We didn’t have to pay.”
Proof again that Wright State does have a pretty good winning percentage at UD Arena.
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