Cinderella: Inside the Rise of Mid-Major College Basketball

play.

Prologue

Thus in the beginning the world was so made that certain signs come

before certain events. -Cicero

By now you know what happened. The George Mason Patriots of the Colonial Athletic Association redefined the way in which sports fans, particularly college basketball fans, view mid-major college basketball. After season upon season using the Cinderella metaphor for a win or two by a small-conference school in the NCAA basketball tournament, CBS and the NCAA found a school—and a conference—on which the glass slipper truly fit.

George Mason, a controversial choice to even make the field and the first CAA at-large participant since 1986, defeated Michigan State, defending champion North Carolina, Wichita State, and #1 seed Connecticut to reach college basketball's summit, the Final Four. Along the way the Patriots found themselves media darlings, making the cover of Sports Illustrated and breaking office pool brackets. Throughout March Madness they were the story.

But the story is so much more than four improbable victories and three weeks. Old Dominion would play in New York in the NIT semifinals. Hofstra, led by its personable and quotable head coach, burst onto the national scene. The 2005-2006 college basketball season would alter the course of mid-major college basketball. It was defined by this school and this conference.

We were the only league who had a team in the semifinals of the preseason NIT, post season NIT, and NCAA, said Tom Yeager, commissioner of the CAA. It's significant because the next close call in a similar situation, it's now known [that a mid major] is every bit as good.

Standing in the lobby of the Westin Hotel in Indianapolis, Tom O'Connor, director of athletics at George Mason, worked the crowd. Fans and alumni from the Fairfax school had traveled a long way, and he wanted to make sure they knew he appreciated the effort.

It had been an exhausting three weeks for O'Connor. He survived the aftermath of one of his players punching a rival in a CAA tournament semifinal loss, agreeing with his coach's decision to suspend that player. He had weathered the controversy of his team being selected for an at-large berth because, in the eyes of conspiracy theorists, he was on the NCAA selection committee. O'Connor traveled where he was needed and he conducted every requested interview. He was clearly running on fumes.

I had been alongside O'Connor for much of the ride, and after yet another round of handshakes I asked him bluntly if he was having any fun.

A little, he said, giving me a smile and nod that said it all: his team, from the league Billy Packer said should not have been in the tournament in the first place, would challenge the Florida Gators in twenty-four hours for the right to play for the national championship.

Looking back, the magic for George Mason and the CAA may have begun on Saturday, February 18, 2006, when CAA commissioner Tom Yeager's bags did not arrive in Wichita for George Mason's game against the Wichita State Shockers in ESPNs Bracket Busters matchup.

Yeager had been attending NCAA meetings in San Antonio, and heavy storms wreaked havoc with flight schedules. So, while it wasn't surprising that Yeager had arrived at the Hilton hotel ahead of his luggage, there was still the issue of his wardrobe.

Yeager had made himself comfortable on the flight by wearing a pair of clog-like shoes, carrying his jacket, and opting out of a tie. As you can imagine, the commissioner of a conference cannot attend important basketball games on national television in such casual dress. Most of the national media were dubbing this game an at-large bid qualifier—the team that won would likely lock up an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament should it lose in its conference tournament. The loser was likely on the outside looking in, given the same scenario.

Yeager was stuck. His only option for a tie was displayed in the hotel lobby gift shop—not exactly renowned for sartorial splendor. Running late, Yeager purchased the best quick option—a truly hideous burnt orange number, with slanting tan and green stripes, exactly the kind of tie you'd expect to find in a hotel gift shop—or a yard sale.

Three hours later George Mason senior guard Tony Skinn would hit a three-pointer with twelve seconds to play to give the Patriots the key road victory that day. Yeager jokingly told Mason coach Jim Larranaga that surely his lucky tie had something to do with it.

As further evidence, that same February day Michigan, a bubble team, was losing to Michigan State. Colorado, another bubble team, was losing to 110+ RPI Kansas State. The legend began to grow.

By the time George Mason had rallied from a 16-2 deficit against defending champion North Carolina—after dominating Final Four participant Michigan State—the lucky tie had morphed into the Magic Tie, and Larranaga's players began rubbing it prior to games. The tie faithfully remained around Yeager's neck through the Washington, D.C., regional finals, where Mason defeated Wichita State (again) and Connecticut.

It went with him all the way to Indianapolis.

As teams advance in the NCAA tournament, every game becomes bigger and bigger, and not in the basketball sense. The event becomes more of a television show and less of a basketball contest. The arenas are bigger; there are more fans, more media, and more distractions. Everything is just bigger. The game, though, never changes: forty minutes on a 94-foot court with baskets ten feet off the floor.

And that was the brilliance of Jim Larranaga's strategy on how to prepare his team to attack the monster known as the NCAA tournament. He implored his team to have fun. He smiled everywhere he went. In interviews, he would quote Confucius and William Jennings Bryan. He became the guy everybody wanted to talk to because he actually walked about two feet off the floor. Jim Larranaga became the cheesy coach figure and he didn't mind a bit—he was going to enjoy every moment, and he wanted his team to do so also.

One of the things about being in an environment like this, there's so much around us, he said. Even though we know it, we're not distracted by it. We're having so much fun, it's not like we're in a situation where we're nervous and have no fear. As long as we can continue to do that, anything is possible.

If his guys were having fun, Larranaga reasoned, they may not notice how big everything had become. They enjoyed it, embraced it, basked in it, and ultimately succeeded in it.

They played baseball at practice. Larranaga coined corny slogans such as We are the color of kryptonite to North Carolina's Supermen. He danced. He altered his conference's name to the Connecticut Assassins Association prior to his team's Elite Eight matchup against the #1 Huskies. Every single one of them cracked up his players.

Their run was about more than basketball victories. The smiles were genuine. It showed what senior leadership, great coaching, and an unwillingness to accept norms can do in any situation. It turned the basketball world on its ear.

It was also the culmination of a season's worth of building. This team was no flash in the pan. George Mason had lost three games since the first of the year entering the NCAA tournament. It had played a full season prior to the events that shaped the run.

The fairy tale would not be complete without turmoil. Skinn, the team's floor leader, punched Hofstra's Loren Stokes below the belt late in Mason's semifinal loss to the Pride. After seeing tape of the incident, Larranaga knew he had no choice but to suspend the senior guard for the team's next game. Considering that game could be an NCAA tournament game or an NIT game, the unwavering and quick decision drew raves from around the country.

Here was a dark irony, for Hofstra had beaten George Mason twice in the two weeks leading up to the NCAA selections. While Skinn had hit the shot to defeat Wichita State, it was also Skinn who hit Stokes and potentially put the Patriots out. It was Hofstra who was inexplicably left out of the field of sixty-four. And it was Jim Calhoun and Connecticut who, at the beginning of the season, suspended point guard Marcus Williams for only one semester for stealing a laptop computer, that George Mason defeated to get to Indianapolis. The disparity in punishments of Williams and Skinn was notable, if not for how the country viewed the coaches and the programs.

Larranaga, however, would not say that the CAA season was fun. Those twenty conference games—among them, a heartbreaking buzzer-beating loss at Old Dominion, a massive comeback victory at VCU, and a controversial CAA tournament semifinal loss to Hofstra— would prepare them for the rigor of the NCAA tournament.

Nobody on the outside knew how good this league was, though they had an inkling.

In early December the Drexel Dragons were tied late in their game with Duke in the preseason NIT. Duke had just beaten Seton Hall by 53 points and had its way with Davidson. They had looked invincible until that night. ESPN's Dick Vitale, as the game waned and the score remained close, openly wondered how the media could've forecast Drexel as the seventh-place team in the CAA. Vitale wanted to see the other six.

Vitale was right. Drexel didn't finish seventh. The Dragons finished eighth.

There were signs.

Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Nobody, including myself (having seen nearly fifty games in fourteen cities in person, plus television and the conference tournament), could have predicted what would come next for the CAA. What began, ironically, with George Mason beating Cal-Irvine and then losing to Wake Forest in overtime—and proceeded through a controversial CAA tournament semifinal loss—turned into the country's biggest sports story For once, it was a good story.

But the magical, unprecedented, Cinderella run to the Final Four meant far more than basketball success, and it was notable for more than that team and that conference.

The 2005-2006 season in the CAA stands as the hallmark for mid-major college basketball and what the teams, schools, and conferences fight for every day. The hardships and heartbreaks of this season define that existence, as do the watershed victories and inevitable fallout that occurred in the weeks following the season.

Some would argue that George Mason's run to the Final Four and the Missouri Valley Conference placing two teams in the Sweet 16 was an anomaly; a freak occurrence. However, many would argue the opposite, saying the 2005-2006 college basketball season served as the start of a revolution. Mid-majors had arrived. George Mason's purpose was much like the man after whom the school is named.

This book is not a story about a player, a coach, a team, or even a conference.

This is a college basketball story.

Introduction

"I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names,

to large societies and dead institutions." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Iremember the very moment I knew this book would become a reality. In the spring of 2004, I was relaxing on a sailboat in the Caribbean Sea. I had left all my worries back home in Virginia for this specific vacation, including a demanding corporate job and the everyday stress that dominate the events of my life.

I left them all at home, save one.

You see, when this trip was planned, I had no hand in the details. A friend's brother who was an experienced sailor cooked up this trip, and I immediately signed on as a passenger. All I knew is that I would board a 42-foot catamaran and sail the southern Caribbean islands with three others, and our only decisions would be when to eat and on what island we'd next moor. That was good enough to get my check. Everything else was mere window dressing.

It was when I realized that the week of this long-awaited, much-anticipated vacation would coincide with the Colonial Athletic Association basketball tournament that my jaw dropped. As an avid college basketball fan, especially a fan of mid-majors and my local team, the VCU Rams, this was disastrous.

VCU had earned the CAA regular season title with a 14-4 record and I had had a blast following the Rams. The sense of community in following a mid major is very real. The success of the team you follow is tighter, if only because its true fans and die-hards travel with a mid major.

Still, the success meant little in the grand scheme of college basketball. The CAA was, and still is, a mid-major conference. Mid-majors don't have the luxury of playing their conference tournaments for better seeding in the NCAA Tournament. No, the Rams, led by second-year coach Jeff Capel and CAA player of the year Domonic Jones, would have to win the CAA postseason tournament in order to hear Greg Gumball call their name, signifying they had made the NCAA field of sixty-four. An entire season of success would ride on those four days in early March.

So when George Mason University center Jai Lewis fired up an air ball at the horn—which followed Jesse Pellot-Rosa, a freshman walk-on for VCU, making the second of two free throws to give VCU a 55-54 lead—Rams fans everywhere celebrated. There was a simultaneous and collective cheer, and exhale.

That is, everyone except me. I was floating at the foot of the Pitons off the coast of St. Lucia. I had no idea. I wouldn't for three more days until we hit an Internet café in Bequia.

The more I agonized about what I did not know, the more I thought about what I did know. There is luxury to following BCS conference schools. VCU had finished the regular season in first place in the CAA but were guaranteed nothing. If they were Duke, who had won the ACC regular season that year with a similar 13-3 record, then the conference tournament would be more of a coronation than a four-day grind-a-thon that would make or break a successful season.

In the CAA, whose last at-large bid came in 1986, it meant everything.

Further, I realized VCU faced issue after issue for a mid-major program. VCU had a young, successful coach in Jeff Capel, whom everyone knew would eventually be snapped up by a larger program that could offer him much more money. I knew the administration at VCU and their struggles with revenue generation and managing the balance of successful yet underfunded nonrevenue sports like tennis and baseball. I understood that exposure on television and other media outlets hampered everything from recruiting to ticket sales.

That's when I realized the VCU basketball program was the poster child for the struggles of any mid-major basketball program. Right then, I knew the idea for the book was born, in part because I knew I wasn't alone.

The topic of mid-majors and their place in the NCAA landscape is discussed, passionately, daily on sports radio and nightly on ESPN. Coaches are asked about it and talk about it. Administrators openly lament the hurdles. Everyone has an opinion, yet nobody has a solution or relevant data to support any position. During football season it is the dreaded BCS; in basketball season it is the teams that make the Big Dance and the dreaded bubble. There are newspaper articles and talk show guests, yet there has never been a definitive work on a very real issue.

So five weeks after Pellot-Rosa made that clinching free throw, I found myself sitting in the office of Dr. Richard Sander, Director of Athletics for Virginia Commonwealth University. I would bounce off of him my initial ideas for the project that eventually became Cinderella, and I requested (and received) access to his staff and to the basketball team so I could write a book about the struggles of mid-major athletic programs.

The makeup of the book from that first meeting with Dr. Sander took many twists and turns as I processed the best way to illustrate the story. However, the issues eventually presented themselves clearly. I noticed that while football and the BCS pop up often when discussing the issues in collegiate athletics, nowhere is the plight of the mid-major collegiate sports program more apparent and more hotly debated than in the selection of teams to the NCAA's annual postseason basketball tournament. When you consider CBS is paying the NCAA $6 billion over eleven years for television programming rights to March Madness, the importance of winning a conference tournament and thus earning an automatic berth into The Big Dance becomes staggering.

For mid-major college basketball programs, the stakes of an NCAA Tournament bid are far greater than on-court wins and losses. In addition to the duress of winning basketball games, these programs daily battle revenue, exposure, recruiting, and future growth pressures.

This would be the story.

Cinderella documents the wins and losses—on and off the court— of the 2005-2006 Colonial Athletic Association basketball season, buffeted by information surrounding the Missouri Valley and other mid-major conferences.

The year-in-the-life approach is replete with compelling storylines and serves as a springboard for a national, in-depth look at the issues surrounding mid-major NCAA sports programs.

The dichotomy of the action on the floor and the ramifications off of it truly embodies March Madness.

With the events of the 2005-2006 season concluded, I can safely say this: While I knew going into the project this could be a special season for the CAA, I had no idea. Actually, I feel better knowing that nobody did.

The first time I sat down with Old Dominion Coach Blaine Taylor, we were talking about the issue of scheduling as a mid major and he summed up the frustration with a terse and accurate statement:

Some of these middle-of-the-pack teams from the big conferences are phonies. All we want is the opportunity.

Foreshadowing indeed.

CINDERELLA

CHAPTER ONE

MADNESS

"Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is

potential liberation and renewal." -R.D. Laing

Standing on the floor of the Richmond Coliseum, nearing midnight and well after his team's hard fought victory over UNC-Wilmington in the 2005 CAA semifinals, Virginia Commonwealth University Head Coach Jeff Capel's mind was amazingly clear.

Tomorrow is the longest day, he said, shaking his head with a half smile. Soooooo long.

On a good day, the Richmond Coliseum appears its age. The venerable building was built in 1971 and stands as an homage to the circular, multipurpose venues that became popular during that era of sports stadium construction. What makes it worse is the entire building, inside and out, was painted brown. It annually hosts concerts and graduations, minor league hockey, and the circus. The CAA does everything it can to spruce up the place, adding colorful sponsorship signage and bright banners championing the history of the league.

At this moment, however, the building was showing its age. It was almost empty, save players, their families, and media members who chose to hang around and finish up the night's work on press row. There was an odd feeling—a chilly warmth tempered with the smell of age and basketball—that seemed to hang in the air.

Three days of basketball action had filled its walls. There had been stories, but it was the thought of the final chapter that bounced around the staleness.

Jeff Capel, on the other hand, is among the best-dressed coaches in the college game—his sideline sartorial choice is always a sharp suit well put together. In fact, VCU fans came to know the signal for an upset Capel—it was only then that the jacket came off.

Now, nearly an hour after a big victory, Capel's tie was loosened, his jacket folded across his left arm. Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead and shone through the armpits of his shirt. Even after such a rigorous day, one he knew would be only his second longest, Capel held a together look. As he took in the scene, the obviously tired coach seemed buoyed by the thoughts of what his team had accomplished.

The previous year, in only his second season as head coach at VCU, Capel had guided the Rams to the regular season championship and a CAA Tournament title, garnering the school's first trip to the NCAA Tournament since 1996, their first season in the CAA. He vividly remembered the agonizing wait for the 7:00 p.m. ESPN tip-off as he considered his schedule for this season's final game day.

I'll get some breakfast, we'll shoot, and then…

And then his voice trailed off as he looked over to his players, who were milling about, talking with friends and family members. Capel saw nothing though. His mind's eye was walking through the following day—the whole gut-wrenching twelve hours, if he slept, leading to the CAA championship game against rival and regular season champ Old Dominion. All the work of the past year had brought Capel back to this precipice. One more win and the Rams would return to the NCAA Tournament.

For VCU and the other nine members of the Colonial Athletic Association in 2005, winning the conference championship and securing its automatic bid was the only path into the lucrative NCAA field. The exposure, and quite frankly the money, is a boon to mid-major basketball programs which often struggle to compete in a changing NCAA sports landscape. The automatic berth that is on the line at the CAA Tournament is a Holy Grail for its members. It's unlike the ACC, the conference in which Capel starred at Duke during his playing days, where a tournament berth is more a reward for a well-played season.

Capel understood this, and you could see that fact as he pondered his tasks at hand.

In an instant, the half smile overtook his entire face.

I'm going to eat pancakes, he blurted spontaneously, thus returning to the conversation. We haven't lost when my wife makes me pancakes.

For just one moment, after all the preseason practices, film sessions and academics, twenty-eight regular season games, radio and television shows, interviews and public appearances, mentoring of the young men in his charge, and two postseason tournament victories in two nights—not to mention being less than twenty hours to the tip-off of the championship game—Jeff Capel permitted himself the joy of his wife Kanika's homemade pancakes.

That day was now nearly a year in the past. The 2006 CAA Tournament would be different. It would showcase how far this conference had come in just one season. For once, for the first time in twenty years, more than an automatic bid was on the line. Though it was one season removed from Capel's stress, it was an eternity.

In many ways, the 2006 CAA Tournament had set itself up to be the absolute ideal of what a conference postseason tournament should be. Its members were good teams, recognized nationally. It would be played at one site, and six teams could make a legitimate argument that they had the ability to win. It would be highly competitive. Five of the teams were located less than a two hours' drive from the venue. A sixth, UNCW, always traveled well.

The top four teams—UNCW, George Mason, Hofstra, and Old Dominion—could all claim victory based on their talent and regular season success. The top three dominated at some point, and Old Dominion was still Old Dominion. The Monarchs faced some difficulty throughout the season, but in the end this was essentially the same ODU team that had won twenty-eight games the previous season, the one in which they defeated VCU in that championship game Capel awaited so eagerly.

VCU, playing about twenty-five blocks from its home floor, could also win. The Rams were 8-3 in the tournament the past four years, playing in three finals. Though it was not an official home game, everybody knew differently. They were dangerous.

Most importantly, the tournament meant something. The CAA most likely had risen itself above one-bid league status, which meant that more than just the championship game mattered. Then again, who really knew?

Attendance at early-round games would be more than the usual diehards. Early-round play could spell doom for the NCAA hopes of at least Hofstra and UNCW. Old Dominion and VCU certainly had the talent to win: VCU drilled Hofstra and ODU beat UNCW earlier in the regular season.

There would be intensity, but what made things incredibly compelling was that the teams would be fighting for up to three NCAA bids. If things went horribly wrong, the CAA would get only its tournament champion into the NCAA Tournament. If things went incredibly right, the CAA could get three teams into the Big Dance.

Every possession of every game mattered.

What's more, the teams were not playing for seeds, which occurs at the ACC or Big East Tournament. At those events, the basketball game and the basketball atmosphere is more of a so-called event. They lack the sheer intensity that would descend upon the Richmond Coliseum.

So on one hand, you had the one-bid leagues where a championship game was all that mattered. On the other hand, you had the major conferences where, really, none of the games mattered. In the middle, along with the Missouri Valley, sat the CAA.

Drama.

Our teams are not household names, CAA Commissioner Tom Yeager said, but that's the neighborhood we're living in. It's good to have the Valley having the year that they've had. The two of us are part and parcel in the same argument.

That argument was more than just the winner of this conference tournament making the Big Dance.

Interestingly, Yeager, who is the only commissioner to ever preside over the conference, announced two days prior to the start of the tournament that it would be staying in Richmond through the 2012 season. Richmond is where the conference offices are located, but that reason was always overplayed in the media. It came down to the fact that only two cities—Richmond and Norfolk—offered bids, and Richmond's was far better.

The CAA has conducted its tournament at the Richmond Coliseum since 1990, which ranks as the second longest tenure in the nation among Division I conferences, behind only the Big East Conference at Madison Square Garden, New York City.

Fans and administrators could debate the merits of financial packages, economic impacts, central locations, entertainment, and hotels surrounding the venue; but it often came down to one thing: It seemed natural.

The drama, of course, also meant issues. They are only natural when staging an event of this magnitude. Patrons of the conference's annual Thursday night banquet, a dinner in which legends from each school were honored and the current season was celebrated—complete with the announcement of the All CAA teams and players of the year—were greeted upon arrival by a throng of guests of the downtown Marriott and four fire trucks.

Instead of the usual banter and small talk that dominates the minutes before a typical banquet, about fifteen minutes before the scheduled start of the CAA awards banquet at the Richmond Marriott, the fire alarm sounded. It required not only banquet rooms but also the entire hotel to be evacuated. About 500 players, administrators, and guests were ushered outside, standing on the downtown sidewalks waiting for the fire department to arrive, which of course they did with lights and sirens blaring.

Winters in Richmond are a mixed bag, a Forrest Gump-esque box of chocolates: You never know what you're going to get. Luckily for the guests, that evening was fairly mild, so the twenty minutes spent outside waiting for the fire department to clear the building was bearable. Even so, the situation disrupted the evening's program and was a harbinger.

The typical milling about occurred on a sidewalk.

This was only half of the story, though the inconvenience was the only story the patrons knew at the time. The alarm, perhaps, was not coincidence.

When Yeager returned to start the banquet, the general manager of the Richmond Coliseum approached and informed him of an FBI alert about a possible terrorist threat at a televised sporting event on the East Coast that weekend. The CAA qualified on all three counts, and Yeager had already received a phone call.

On Thursday afternoon, a few hours before the banquet and as teams were practicing in the frigid Richmond Coliseum, Yeager was walking the halls and heard a loud crash around the corner.

Of course you know what the first thing was that went through my mind, he said. It's odd to say that I was relieved it was ‘just’ a sign, but your heart gets racing in a situation like that.

Before Yeager had taken a bite of his chicken dinner and eighteen hours before the CAA Tournament would actually begin, he'd spoken to the FBI, ducked a falling sign, and weathered a fire drill.

March Madness, indeed.

The nooner between David Henderson's Delaware Fighting Blue Hens and Bruiser Flint's Drexel Dragons began as chilly as the air inside the Richmond Coliseum. Shots were not falling for either team. It was your typical first-day noon game in any conference tournament. Everybody would have to get a feel for things. Neither team would lead by more than four points in the hotly contested eight-seed versus nine-seed game. With thirty-four seconds to play Delaware's Sam McMahon, a little-used sophomore guard pressed into action because of foul trouble, drilled a baseline jumper, and Delaware took the lead