SAN DIEGO — The unrelenting ride toward March has finally reached its first official stage. Utah State’s men’s basketball team arrived in San Diego earlier this week, memories of holding two Mountain West championship trophies fresh in their minds.
Ahead is a new foe. The Villanova Wildcats. It’ll be the first non-MW opponent for the Aggies since December, but also the biggest test of the season. And it will occur on the biggest stage college basketball has to offer.
It’s time for March Madness.
There’s a mix of the familiar and unfamiliar for Utah State in this trip to the first round of the NCAA Tournament. The opponent is one the Aggies knew next to nothing about when they saw their team listed next to eight-seeded Villanova on Selection Sunday. However, the venue is quite familiar. Viejas Arena is a building they’ve played in once this season with multiple players on the team having played twice or even three times surrounded by the red seats.
“Viejas is a great venue,” USU forward Karson Templin said. “San Diego State does a great job when we’re playing here. It’s always fun to come and play. But they’re a fellow Mountain West team. So, hopefully, if they have some fans [at the game], they’ll be rooting for us.”
“It’s nice to have some familiarity,” Aggies guard Mason Falslev said. “Coming here and shooting and being in a place where we’ve been before.”
The Aggies are entering the tournament with both momentum, and a chip on their shoulder. On the one hand, they have four straight victories and two conference titles under their belts. On the other, they were spurned by the NCAA selection committee by being handed a nine seed when the team and coach were hoping for as high as a six or seven.
Utah State head coach Jerrod Calhoun called his team’s seeding “absoultely atrocious” and his players share some of his feelings.
“I feel we got disrespected by our seed. Our resumé was very good,” Templin said. “We won a lot of games this year. So we expect ourselves to win games. We’re prepared very well for this team and will do the best we can to win it.”
Utah State will have to create its own momentum, but that’s exactly what the team did when it rolled through the conference tournament. Multiple players saw resurgences in their play. Mason Falslev is the headliner for the team as the Mountain West Player of the Year, but his backcourt teammates MJ Collins and Drake Allen partly stole the show in Las Vegas.
Collins saw his play dip from mid-January into early March. He was still averaging a quite respectable 14.9 points per game, but it wasn’t the 20-plus he’d averaged in non-conference play. In his four most recent games, though, Collins is averaging 19.8 points, with that scoring leading to him receiving the Mountain West Tournament MVP.
Allen has had an interesting boost in his play, interesting in where the line is drawn between his old and new self. A few weeks ago, Allen became a father, he and his wife welcoming a son to their young family. Before his son came into this world, Allen was averaging 6.6 points, 2.8 rebounds, 4.8 assists and 2.0 steals on 42.4% shooting and 22.0% 3-point shooting. Since becoming a father, Allen has averaged 11.4 points, 3.6 rebounds, 4.1 assists and 2.0 steals while shooting 53.3% overall and 50.0% from three.
“I would just say my ‘why’s’ changed,” Allen said of his new “Daddy Drake” form, as fans have taken to calling it. “I have a different purpose when I get on the floor now. Being a dad, I want my wife to be proud. I want my son to be able to tell his friends when he’s older, ‘My dad was a hooper.’ Just a different change of mind, change of purpose.”
Utah State closed out its Mountain West portion of the season as perfectly as one could expect, but preparation for facing Villanoa requires a shift back to non-conference mode. The Aggies have spent the better part of two months playing teams they were very familiar with. By the time USU went on its redeption tour in the conference tournament, it was facing teams for a third time this season.
Utah State hasn’t played Villanova since 1960, in a first-round matchup in the NIT. There’s a lot to learn, but that’s also the fun part for some.
“I think it’s exciting learning a new system. To me, as a coach, there’s nothing better than game prep,” Calhon said. “How are you gonig to use 45 minutes, an hour, whatever our length of practices are? What’s our film sessions going to look like?”
There’s a minor downside to all of this prep, if you consider copius amounts of coffee intake a downside. Calhoun has consumed quite a bit of it (his first act upon walking into the press conference after cutting down the nets in the MW Tournament was to walk across the room and pour himself a cup), though he may have met his match with Villanova head coach Kevin Willard.
“I may challenge Coach Willard to a coffee, see who can drink the most,” Calhoun said. “I saw something, he said he’s about 13 cups a day. I’m not quite to that level, but probably about half of that.”
There is plenty to prepare for with Villanova. Calhoun said that the Wildcats “can win really pretty, where they’re making threes” and that they can “win ugly,” which holds true depending on your definition of ugly wins. Villanova is 13-0 when scoring at least 80 points, 8-2 when scoring in the 70s and 2-6 when held to under 70 points. But what the Wildcats have been the most is clutch. They’re 4-1 in games decided by one possession or in overtime. That one loss was in overtime at UConn, a top-five team almost the entire season and a two seed in this year’s tournament.
Key to Villanova’s offensive success is a steady diet of effective 3-point shooting and a highly effective pick-and-roll attack. The Wildcats rank 46th nationally in 3-pointer made per game. A lot of that is mostly volume, though, as they only rank 106th in 3-point percentage. Furthermore, the team recently lost its second-best distance shooter, the stretch power forward Matthew Hodge, to an ACL injury.
In the three games without Hodge, Villanova’s 3-point shooting has been spotty. It did make 13 treiple in the regular season finale against Xavier, but shot a combined 28% in games at DePaul and in an upset loss to Georgetown.
Despite the volume of shooting, Villanova is far from a live-and-die-by-the-three kind of team. The Wildcats present one of the toughest pick-and-roll threats in the country, led by freshman point guard Acaden Lewis and and senior forward Duke Brennan. Lewis is the team’s second-leading scorer, averaging 12.3 points, and leads the team in assists with 5.3 per game. Many of those dimes have gone to Brennan, who averages a double-double with 12.4 points and 10.3 rebounds per game.
Brennan has scored nearly all of his points on either the pick-and-roll or on off-ball cuts this season. Calhoun praised the former Grand Canyon center for playing well within his role.
“When I watch him play, he really knows who he is,” Calhoun said. “A lot of guys try to play outside their comfort zone. He’s comfortable in his own skin, and he knows who he is and he’s a winner. And he makes winning plays.”
Villanova as a whole features a balanced offense, led in part by Brennan and Lewis, though it’s junior guard Tyler Perkins who lead the team as a whole in scoring. He’s averaged 13.7 points per game and when he’s hitting from the outside, the Wildcats roll. They’re 9-1 in games where Perkins hits at least three 3-pointers.
Defending these players, and the overall five players that average double figures for Villanova (Lewis, Brennan, Perkins are three of those along with Bryce Lindsay and Devin Askew) is a massive priority. Not just for the obvious reasons of needing to play defense to win games, but because that’s something Falslev identified as missing from last year’s game. Falslev is one of two players on the roster that has seen an Aggie tournament win, but he’s also been part of multiple losses. And defense was at the front of his mind when comparing the difference between those results.
“It all comes down to defense, especially late in the year when everyone’s tired,” Falslev said. “If you want to win games, you have to play defense. That’s what we’ve really bought into, and that’s what we need to do if we want to win.”
