Most college basketball teams would be thrilled to knock off Syracuse — a 31-win team, the top seed in the Big East tournament and arguably one of the favorites to win the NCAA championship next month in New Orleans.
Not Cincinnati.
The Bearcats’ euphoria over their stunning 71-68 upset of the Orange in Friday night’s Big East semifinals lasted about as long as it took for the team to get from the Madison Square Garden floor to their locker room at end of the tunnel.
To know where Cincinnati’s focus was after the program-defining victory, you only had to locate the white board in the corner of the team’s locker room. Scribbled in large, red letters was a simple message: “One more win.”
“By the time I walked in the locker room, the guys had written (it) on the board,” Cincinnati head coach Mick Cronin said after the game. “I didn’t even have to write it.”
The Bearcats’ triumph over the second-ranked Orange was good, but it wasn’t good enough. They know they’ve got more important games ahead of them, starting Saturday at 9 p.m. ET against Louisville — a primetime showdown with the Big East tournament championship at stake.
“To me, this isn’t satisfying,” said Cincinnati guard Sean Kilpatrick, who had 18 points and five assists in Friday’s win. “It will be best when we do win it. That’s when I’ll start smiling, and that’s when I’ll be happy. I mean, I’m happy that we got the win, but this doesn’t mean anything. To come this far and to lose tomorrow would be shocking.”
Cincinnati shot lights out from 3-point range early Friday, hitting six of their first seven from behind the arc as they ran out to a 34-17 first-half advantage. From there on, it was just a matter of holding on for dear life.
“We were surprised to be up like that at halftime,” senior big man Yancy Gates said of the Bearcats’ 35-23 halftime lead. “We knew it was going to be a hard 40 minutes.”
It definitely was, but the Bearcats held their ground and led from beginning to end Friday — withstanding a late Syracuse rally and never faltering against the perennial conference powerhouse.
The win put Cincinnati one step closer to its most immediate goal — a first conference championship since joining the Big East in 2005. But the Bearcats have bigger ambitions in mind, regardless of what their critics, who pegged them as an 8 or 9 seed in the NCAA tournament before Friday’s upset, have to say.
“Where we come from, we play to win,” Cronin said. “When the tournament starts next week, we’re quietly going to try to win it. We don’t let people outside our locker room define who we are as people . . . or as a team. We try to define that for ourselves and make sure we’re giving our best effort. That’s what true greatness is.”
The confidence emanating from the Cincinnati locker room right now is palpable, and the newfound success is especially rewarding considering the way so many left them for dead before Big East play even got started.
Many wrote off the Bearcats on Dec. 10, when a benches-clearing brawl marred the final seconds of their rivalry game with Xavier.
With just 9.4 seconds left in a contentious 76-53 Xavier win, Musketeers guards Dezmine Wells and Tu Holloway pushed Cincinnati freshman Ge’Lawn Guyn to the Cintas Center floor, right in front of the Bearcats’ bench.
The shove incited a riot, one that will live in YouTube infamy in the form of Gates’ devastating punch on Kenny Frease, one that earned the senior a six-game suspension.
Cincinnati also suspended Cheikh Mbodj and Octavius Ellis six games each after the fight, and Guyn got a one-game ban for his role in the brawl. After the game ended, Cronin tried to make sense of what had just happened while striving to keep his team’s season from unraveling.
“I made everybody take their jersey off, and they will not put it on again until they have a full understanding of where they go to school, and what the university stands for, and how lucky they are to even be there, let alone have a scholarship,” Cronin told reporters after the melee. “They’re all sitting in there with no jersey on. Some of them, I physically took them off.”
Cronin’s team clearly learned its lesson.
“After a brawl like that, most teams would fall under the pressure and just keep crinkling down, but it was a good thing that we took that as a positive,” said Kilpatrick, whom Xavier’s Holloway said laid the groundwork for the brawl with some demeaning comments during a radio interview earlier in the week.
“We all came together,” Kilpatrick continued, “and we showed toughness with everything. If you’re able to show toughness through a brawl like that, you can do anything.”
Cincinnati went 10-1 in its first 11 games after the fight, including wins over Georgetown and UConn, who were both ranked in the top 15 at the time. A three-game slide in the middle of Big East play, including a 60-53 loss to the Syracuse, provided a minor speed bump, but the Bearcats recovered, and Friday’s win marked the ninth victory in their past 11 games.
“We’re getting attention for our play and not the mistakes that we made,” said Gates, who had 18 points and seven rebounds against Syracuse. “It’s a big lift off our shoulders, and we feel good about it. Personally, it’s great. This is my senior year; this is my last year ... I really can’t explain how good it feels.”
Their reputations salvaged, the fourth-seeded Bearcats (24-9) will have one more chance to present their case to the NCAA selection committee against Louisville (25-9). The seventh-seed Cardinals cruised to a 64-50 win over Notre Dame in the other semifinal Friday night, riding 16 points on 8-of-8 shooting from Gorgui Dieng to the victory.
Since joining the Big East seven seasons ago, the Bearcats have reached the Big Dance just once, winning one tournament game. But a win over Louisville on Saturday could pave the way for a long-overdue postseason run for a Cincinnati program that last saw such success in the 1990s under then-coach Bob Huggins, reaching the Final Four in 1992 and the Elite Eight in 1993 and 1996.
“Every other team we play, they know how talented and good we are,” said senior guard Dion Dixon, who had 11 points Friday. “We feel we’ve got enough talent in here to compete with anybody in the country, and that’s our mindset. Coach instilled that in us, and we work hard enough to believe it.”
The Bearcats believe in themselves, and they’ve made believers out of Syracuse. Now comes the hard part.
Follow Sam Gardner on Twitter: @sam_gardner
