Five Against One: RMU Looks to Join Select Group Friday Night
By Paul Meyer
www.rmucolonials.com
March 17, 2009
Meyer On Morris Link
Moon Township, Pa. - March 17, 2009 - Almost everybody - especially those Michigan State diehards in East Lansing -- presumes the Robert Morris Colonials' NCAA tournament sprint will begin and end Friday night in Minneapolis.
However, the Colonials have other ideas.
Those thoughts center on -- by late Friday night -- being mentioned in the same sentence as Richmond, Santa Clara, Coppin State and Hampton.
"What better year than to make history again?'' RMU sophomore guard Gary Wallace said.
Should Robert Morris pull off what would be a rather sizeable upset against the second-seeded Spartans, it would join those four schools listed above as the only 15th seeds to knock off a No. 2.
History indicates it almost surely won't happen. No. 15 seeds are 4-92 against No. 2's since the NCAA expanded its field to 64 teams in 1985.
But there ARE those four common sense-defying wins.
All happened within an 11-season span, beginning with Richmond upsetting Syracuse 73-69 in 1991 and continuing with Santa Clara over Arizona (64-61, 1993), Coppin State over South Carolina (78-65, 1997, in Pittsburgh) and Hampton over Iowa State (58-57, 2001).
And now, Robert Morris over Michigan State (57-55, 2009)?
"I like our odds - definitely,'' junior guard Jimmy Langhurst said.
"You always have a shot,'' RMU coach Mike Rice said. "Does our style match up perfectly with Michigan State? Nobody's style matches up perfectly with Michigan State. We don't slow the ball down. We attack and we try to keep people on their heels. It's going to be hard to do that with Michigan State, but we have been successful against bigger non-conference teams.''
Case in point?
The Colonials' 57-51 upset at Boston College last season.
Or how about RMU's near-miss at Syracuse in last season's National Invitation Tournament?
The Colonials, who unleashed a program-record 41 attempts from beyond the arc and made 16, led the Orange by a point with 6:52 left and trailed by only two points with 58 seconds left before falling, 87-81.
Langhurst was 5-of-9 from deep in that game and finished with 15 points. Jeremy Chappell, although just 1-for-12 from three-point range, also scored 15 points and had five assists.
So there's some kind of a track record for the Colonials (24-10) to draw on as they prepare for the challenge of facing Michigan State (26-6) in a game scheduled to tip at 9:50 Friday night.
"We're going (there) to win a game,'' Chappell said. "We know they're tough. They won the Big Ten regular-season championship, but we won the NEC regular-season championship. We're going with the mindset that we can win a game as long as we play the way we know how - with defensive intensity and defensive pressure. We just have to worry about the defensive side.''
Each team won its regular-season championship comfortably.
The Spartans were 15-3 in the Big Ten and won by four games. Robert Morris was 15-3 in the Northeast Conference and won by three games.
Each team also won plenty of league awards.
Michigan State's Tom Izzo was the Big Ten Coach of the Year. Spartan point guard Kalin Lucas was the league's Player of the Year. And guard Travis Walton won the league's Defensive Player of the Year award.
The Colonials matched that.
Rice was voted NEC Coach of the Year for the second consecutive season. Chappell gave the Colonials' back-to-back Player of the Year awards, following Tony Lee's win in 2007-08. And Bateko Francisco was voted the NEC Defensive Player of the Year.
The similarities, though, pretty much end there.
"They're bigger, stronger and athletic at every single position,'' Rice said. "And (Izzo's) won more games than I could ever possibly imagine winning.''
Izzo, 331-136 in 14 seasons as head coach at Michigan State, is taking his Spartans to the NCAA for the 12th consecutive season.
"That is a great, great thing for the program,'' Izzo told the media after the Spartans' selection Sunday. "One thing we never did was fall off the map. We have dangled on the edge a couple times, but we never fell off.''
Rice, 50-18 in two seasons at RMU, is going to the NCAA as a head coach for the first time and leading the Colonials to their first dance since 1992.
Izzo primarily uses a seven-player rotation that can stretch to nine on occasion.
Lucas, a sophomore, is MSU's leading scorer (14.8 points per game) and is on the court the most (31.9 minutes per game). Raymar Morgan, a 6-8 junior, averages 10.8 points and 5.7 assists per game.
Morgan, from Ohio's storied Canton McKinley High School, missed three games in early February and played sparingly in two games before that because of a bout with walking pneumonia and a mild case of mononucleosis. In his past eight games, he's scored only 55 points.
Lucas, however, has taken up some of that slack by averaging 16.6 points over his past five games and has scored in double figures in 22 of his past 23 games.
Senior Goran Suton, 6-10, 245 pounds, is the Spartans' main inside presence. He averages 9.8 points and 7.9 rebounds per game.
The Colonials in the heady days following their 48-46 win over Mount St. Mary's in the NEC championship game on Dallas Green's field goal with 2.5 seconds left spent some time reflecting on and celebrating that victory.
The following day, Rice didn't have a real practice.
"We met and just talked about the experience of winning an NEC championship,'' Rice said. "I talked about it and talked about our schedule and then they literally just went on for an hour about different experiences, (including) Dallas throwing his jersey out and losing it. They talked about all the different things that happened that night.''
And the next day. And the next.
"It was fun,'' Chappell said. "I went out and people said 'Congratulations.' People actually know who Robert Morris is now because of what we did. It's been real big. It's been a lot of fun for the whole university.''
"I got a lot of text messages,'' Wallace said. "You say thank you, but you have to realize we still have another game to play. As big as that game was against Mount St. Mary's, we have an even bigger game and an even greater chance to make history. You say your thank you's and live in that moment, but that moment's over. Now we're here, and we have to move forward and get ready for Friday. You know coach Rice is going to get us ready.''
Rice began doing that at last Sunday's practice.
"He was getting on guys hard - yelling at us,'' Langhurst said. "I think he was trying to bring us back to reality. We needed that reality check.''
Interesting, that.
One would think that because of the circumstances - a 15th seed that went through the real grind of having to win its conference championship simply to get to the NCAA tournament - the pressure would be off the Colonials now.
After all, hardly anybody expects their season to continue beyond Friday night.
"There's less pressure,'' Rice said, "but you don't want to go out and get embarrassed in the NCAA tournament in front of all those fans. So that is another set of pressure.''
NCAA NUGGETS
Michigan State's streak of 12 consecutive NCAA appearances is the fourth longest in the country behind Arizona (25), Kansas (20) and Duke (14) ... The Spartans are 26-10 in the NCAA tournament over the past 11 seasons ... MSU's No. 2 seeding is its highest since it earned three consecutive No. 1 seeds from 1999 through 2001. The Spartans went to the Final Four each of those seasons, winning the national championship in 2000 ... Michigan State averages 71.9 points per game and allows 62.9 points per game ... The Spartans shoot 45.5 percent from the field, including 35.3 percent from deep. They're shooting 68.6 percent from the free throw line ... Sophomore Chris Allen is MSU's most prolific three-point shooter. He's 47-for-143 (32.9 percent) ... In their 82-70 loss to Ohio State in the semifinals of the Big Ten tournament last Saturday, the Spartans were just 3-of-21 from beyond the arc ... Since 1985, NEC teams have lost in the NCAA tournament's round of 64 by an average of 22.7 points per game. In only five seasons did the NEC representative lose by 10 or fewer points, including RMU's 79-71 loss to No. 2 seed Kansas in Atlanta.
