Shortly before Cincinnati headed off to New York on Monday, coach Mick Cronin gathered his frustrated players for a pep talk. He told them to stop dwelling on their disheartening season and move on.
Up next? A place where the Bearcats have known nothing but heartbreak.
The Bearcats have never won a game in the Big East tournament, going 0-3. It's become a symbol of a program upended since Cincinnati was invited to join the league's basketball heavyweights. Beating Rutgers on Tuesday night would be a notable breakthrough.
``Obviously we need to do that so people quit writing about it,'' said Cronin, who has been under heavy criticism for the team's latest fade. ``You need to win one so people let up. I'd like to win more than one.''
Winning anything has been a problem lately for a program that thought it had turned the corner.
The Bearcats (16-14, 7-11) haven't been to the NCAA tournament since 1995, at the end of what turned out to be coach Bob Huggins' final season. He was ousted shortly before the start of the next season, Cincinnati's first in the Big East, and the program has been digging out since then.
Cronin set the NCAA tournament as a realistic goal for this, his fourth season. The Bearcats appeared to be returning to national relevance when they won eight of their first nine and returned to the Top 25. The optimism was quickly crushed when the Bearcats got into their Big East schedule.
Cincinnati's inability to score consistently and its problems finishing games left players and fans frustrated. Eight of the Bearcats' 11 league losses have been by eight points or fewer. They slid out of NCAA tournament consideration by losing seven of their last nine games.
A 74-47 drubbing at Georgetown on Saturday finished the regular season and left senior guard Deonta Vaughn looking at the possibility he will not play in the NCAA tournament during his career at Cincinnati.
``It would be very disappointing,'' Vaughn said Monday. ``That's what everybody wants. That's why everybody was mad at themselves after the Georgetown game.''
Much of the fans' discontent has been focused on Cronin, who was brought in to rebuild the program and set the standard high for his fourth season. The Bearcats are 0-12 in March during their four seasons under Cronin, including two Big East tournament losses and one in the College Basketball Invitational.
The university has been publicly supportive, noting that the program had to be totally rebuilt when Cronin arrived.
``That being said, I need to deliver,'' Cronin said. ``The only thing I'd like to say to people is just because you hear me say we've lost a close game or this or that - trust me, nobody wants to deliver more than me. And I understand where this program wants to get back to. We've made progress, but we're not over the hill, and we've got to push it over the hill.''
Cronin called a team meeting on Monday to try to diminish the players' stress level heading into the tournament.
``What I don't want them to do is press too much, which I think has been an issue,'' Cronin said. ``As the bad breaks started piling up on us, I think the kids started putting too much pressure on themselves, and the frustration definitely set in for us and it became a new normal almost for us to be in tough situations.''
The Bearcats beat Rutgers 65-58 on Jan. 2, before that stretch of close losses began. They've already been warned that the Scarlet Knights intend for the rematch to be different.
Rutgers center Hamady Ndiaye, the league's top shot blocker, grew up in Senegal with Cincinnati forward Ibrahima Thomas. They remain best friends, and Ndiaye broke the news of their Big East rematch by phone in the middle of the night.
``At 5 o'clock in the morning, when I answered the phone, the first thing he said was, 'We're going to beat you guys,''' Thomas said. ``I was like, 'Are you dreaming or something?' He was like, 'You didn't watch TV? We're playing you guys.' I said, 'OK, let me go back to sleep.'
``He sent me like three messages: 'You have no shot.'''
