Seated on the floor of Akron's JAR Arena Sunday evening, surrounded by his staff and players and watching the NCAA tournament selection show, Akron coach Keith Dambrot touched the right side of his face and briefly closed his eyes.
He didn't need to watch "Akron" flash on the 50-foot screen to his right. He knew it was coming the moment the screen showed VCU.
"When it's been a strange year," Dambrot told the 1,000 or so fans who had gathered to watch the selection show a few minutes later, "I guess you play your best friend in the first round."
Thursday night in Auburn Hills Michigan, Dambrot and Akron play VCU and coach Shaka Smart, an Akron assistant from 2003-06. Their third meeting as head coaches of opposing teams -- all mandated by circumstances, not the coaches themselves -- is the first since Dambrot declared they'd never play again last season and clearly the most important one yet.
No. 12 seed Akron comes to the NCAA tournament after rallying to win two games in the Mid-American Conference tournament last weekend. Akron (26-7) had the nation's longest win streak of the season at 19 games from mid-December to the first weekend of March before losing at Buffalo. Five days later, it lost point guard Alex Abreu after he was arrested on drug trafficking charges.
Dambrot likes to say he doesn't have many hobbies, but watching all sorts of college basketball and following the Ratings Percentage Index are two of them. He knew VCU (26-8) would be "something close" to a No. 5 seed, and he thought his team was more likely to be a No. 11 seed than a No. 13, so when he saw "VCU" flash on the screen and the 12 line just below it waiting to be filled, he almost couldn't believe it was real.
The feeling in Richmond was similar.
"Keith is my best friend in coaching, and I don't have a lot of friends in coaching," Smart said. "He was incredibly good to me in my time working for him. He was incredibly good to people around the program and around the university, too, and that's what I've tried to take with me. He's as good with people as anyone I've ever seen."
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Here's how close the two are: In an effort to make sure Akron's players were in the right place mentally after losing their regular-season finale to neighborhood rival Kent State the day after Abreu's arrest, Dambrot solicited outside help last week before the MAC tournament in the form of video messages from former players and friends of the program.
One of the videos Akron's players watched last week came from Smart. Part of his motivational message was that the Zips still had enough talent "to make an NCAA run."
Thursday night, VCU stands in the way of any potential Akron run.
"This is the biggest irony of all," Dambrot said. "We have exorcized our demons on a lot of different things this year and people have written us off as deadmany times.
"Shaka is a family member, and playing against him in the NCAA tournament is tough. But we have to do it."
Besides its 2011 run to the Final Four, VCU's signature under Smart has been its full-court pressure defense, one good enough to earn the nickname "Havoc". Smart said he learned a lot of on-ball defensive principles from his time with Dambrot, and that Dambrot was the first coach he'd ever seen devote his allotted two hours per week of individual workout time each fall to defense.
Now, it's that Havoc defense against an Akron team forced to start true freshman point guard Carmelo Betancourt and forced to try to break that pressure by committee in Abreu's absence.
While speaking to the gathered fans at Sunday night's selection show celebration, Dambrot joked that his team was going to work on ball-handling as soon as all the fans went home. By late Sunday night, he'd spoken to Smart on the phone about how the two coaches apparently don't share the same sense of humor the NCAA tournament selection committee does.
When they spoke again on Monday night, Dambrot told Smart his team didn't work on breaking the press in its practice that morning. That would be part gamesmanship -- and mostly an outright lie.
"Keith won't give out anything he doesn't want you to know," Smart said. "Sometimes, he'll say stuff to mess with you."
Dambrot's wife, Donna, posted on Twitter Sunday night a picture of her husband in his VCU t-shirt, an ode to the "You don't want to go to war" song and chant the VCU pep band and student section perform at every VCU home game. Especially this week, though, Keith Dambrot is being as careful with his wardrobe as he is with his plan for beating VCU's press.
"Maybe we're ex-best friends," Dambrot joked.
On Smart's first day on the job at Akron in the spring of 2003 -- Dambrot was still an assistant then, too -- Smart found himself in Dambrot's car, headed for a neighborhood and a community gym to which Smart had never been. Once there, he helped Dambrot work out an aspiring NBA draft prospect from the neighborhood.
LeBron James.
Eight springs later, Dambrot was driving on a toll road hundreds of miles from Akron and listening on the radio as Smart and VCU knocked off Kansas to complete an improbable run from the First Four to the Final Four. When that game ended, Dambrot cried.
Smart made an Akron homecoming last season. Akron led VCU by 20 points in that game before VCU, using its pressure defense, rallied to win in overtime, 76-75, in what was a mandated return game as part of the BracketBuster series -- a.k.a another game Smart and Dambrot didn't schedule.
"It's hard because we are such good friends," Dambrot said of Thursday's game. "It's one of those things that no matter which one of us wins, we are going to feel bad for the other guy. But it's a business. We got put up against each other in the BracketBuster, too, so I guess we are just joined at the hip."
