Denver to semifinals; me to Arkansas?

In the survive-and-advance battle for a first-ever NCAA Tournament bid, it’s 1 down, 2 to go for DU.

The Denver Pioneers are headed to the Sun Belt Conference semifinals — and, as the highest remaining seed after a day of upsets, will now be showing up in people’s projected NCAA brackets — after beating South Alabama 61-50 Sunday night.

If #3-seeded Denver wins Monday night, in a semifinal that tips around 7:30 PM Mountain Time, against #7-seeded Western Kentucky (which upset #2 UALR today), I will be boarding a Southwest Airlines flight bound for Arkansas the next morning — roughly eight hours after the game ends, in fact — to attend the championship game as a member of the credentialed press. On the other hand, the Pioneers lose, I will cancel my plane, rental car and hotel reservations, and remain in Colorado. So I will leave my law firm on Monday afternoon not knowing if I’m coming into work the next day, and I will put my girls to bed Monday night not knowing if I’ll see them the next morning.

I’ve already begun packing for this potential trip, not because I’m overconfident or assuming anything, but because I simply won’t have very much time at all to do so tomorrow night, if necessary.

At this point, I should probably step back and explain to any new readers just who the heck I am. I’m an attorney in Denver, and a married, 30-year-old father of three girls under age 4. I’m not a DU alum — I went to USC for undergrad and Notre Dame for law school — nor do I have any tangible connection to the university, other than geographic proximity. But I’m a longtime mid-major basketball fan, and back in 2010, inspired by Kyle Whelliston’s Mid-Majority, I decided to “adopt” the Pioneers as “my” mid-major team, making an emotional investment in Joe Scott’s squad before the season began.

Moreover, rather than just being a fan, I decided to start up a blog dedicated to covering the team — I’ve been a blogger for almost a decade, and I have a degree in print journalism, though journalism is just a hobby for me nowadays rather than a career — and try to get credentialed as a member of the press at DU. I did that, and reported on the team at a blog called Pioneer Pulse all last season. This season, I switched over to Tumblr and renamed the site “Mile High Mids.” But the bottom line is that I’ve been “covering,” and rooting for, the Pioneers for two seasons now. So while a mid-week trip to Arkansas is mighty inconvenient, I feel almost compelled to go. It would be awfully anticlimactic, after all of that, to miss the program’s potential all-time crowning moment. So if they go, I go. Make it to the title game, and I’m there.

If you’re a Denver fan (particularly if you’re a DU student) and you’re new to the blog, I would point you first to my write-up of the Middle Tennessee State win, complete with tons of photos and some videos.

Next, I would point you to my archive of recaps for the Mid-Majority’s 800 Games Project, a crowdsourced collection of personalized, first-person recaps of games played by teams below the Red Line, i.e., “mid-majors.” A few of my recaps are of Northern Colorado games, but most of them are of Denver. Anyway, here they are.

You can also check out my posts about Denver here, and at my aforementioned old blog.

Last but not least, you may want to read up on the history of this blog’s mascots, a pair of stuffed basketballs (or “ballz”) named DU Bally and Mile High Bally. You’ll be seeing a lot of them if you follow my coverage over the next day or two (or week or two??). Here they are tonight, with my Sun Belt bracket on my Giant Bracket Wall:

The Mid-Majority gloss and primer may also be helpful if you see references you don’t understand to things like #superhoops (3-pointers) or “The Other 24” (the mid-major conferences), among countless other inside references and jokes.

Anyway, I’ll be live-tweeting the DU-WKU game as I watch it Monday night, and if all goes well, the live-tweeting will continue as I travel to Arkansas on Tuesday. If that happens, it promises to be epic. You can follow me on Twitter at @MileHighMids (and also @brendanloy).

So those are the basics. Stay tuned and Go Pios!

P.S. I’ve also created a Twitter List of accounts of DU folks at the tourney in Hot Springs, or otherwise related to DU’s team or the SBC in some way. You can view it here. If you have any suggestions for who I should add, please leave them in comments here, or tweet them at me.

21 down, 3 to go

As you may have noticed, I’ve tweaked the design of this page a little, including by adding to the right sidebar a photo of the blog’s mascots, Mile High Bally and DU Bally, chillin’ with Denver’s unofficial/historical mascot, Denver Boone, at Denver’s win over North Texas on Sunday. Here’s another version of that photo:

IMG_7548.jpg 2

I haven’t written my 800 Games Project recap of the game yet — I’ll do that later in the week — but suffice to say, Denver’s 64-52 win was a huge one for the Pioneers, earning them the #3 seed in the Sun Belt Tournament and capping a 4-game winning streak to close out the regular season. It was also their school-record 21st win.

The Pios will need 3 more consecutive wins — on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday in Hot Springs, Arkansas — to earn another first: Denver’s first-ever trip to the NCAA Tournament.

Such a run promises to be a lot more feasible because of DU’s seeding. The #3 seed places Denver on the opposite side of the bracket from top seed Middle Tennessee, which Denver defeated at Magness Arena by 15 points, but which will be tough to beat at a neutral site. Now, the Pioneers know they won’t have to play MTSU until a possible title-game rematch. Here’s the bracket:

Sun Belt Bracket 2

Gosh, I love looking at brackets. It gets me excited for the big bracket next month!

Anyway, here’s complete information on the Sun Belt tourney. If Denver reaches the title game, I’ll be there — I have a flight from Denver to Little Rock departing next Tuesday at 6:00 AM, a rental car to drive from Little Rock to Hot Springs late Tuesday morning, a media credential and parking pass for the game Tuesday evening, and a spot lined up on @skyvan’s floor for Tuesday night.

All of those plans will be cancelled, however, if Denver doesn’t reach the final. This means that, if Denver wins its quarterfinal game Sunday night, I’ll watch their semifinal at 7:30 PM Monday knowing that the outcome will dictate whether, ~12 hours later, I’m at work in Denver — or on a plane to Arkansas.

Needless to say, I’m hoping for the latter. :)

Return on Investment

My 800 Games Project writeup of Denver’s win over Middle Tennessee State is now online at the Mid-Majority. Unfortunately, in my rush to submit it last night, I failed to catch some errors, and more generally failed to give it a much-needed final edit that would have tightened up the piece and made it better. So I’m going to republish it here, in full, with the edits I wish I could make on the TMM version. Enjoy.

(Reminder for the uninitiated: @800GP writeups are supposed to be written from the writer’s individual perspective; hence all the first-person language and self-referential stuff. And the stuffed basketballs(z).)

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A lot of investments paid off Saturday at Denver’s Magness Arena.

For me, it was the payoff of the Emotional Investment I made starting in 2010, when I was belatedly inspired by Kyle Whelliston’s Season 6 “investments” essay to adopt Denver as “my” mid-major team, start a blog about the Pioneers, and begin attending and covering their games. Through the roller coaster of the last two seasons, the one thing that was consistently missing was a true college basketball atmosphere: DU is a hockey school, and the students simply do not come out in force for hoops. So even when I’ve seen the Pioneers pull off big wins — over North Texas and Arkansas State last year, over Southern Miss and St. Mary’s this year — they’ve been devoid of that emotional oomph that makes Our Game so great. My investment in the Pioneers was still worthwhile, but it had never led to that singular moment where I thought to myself, “Wow, this is amazing.”

Until Saturday night.

With ESPN coming to Magness Arena for the first time ever, and student leaders staging an unprecedented coordinated push to make the game a can’t-miss event at the heart of a big weekend sports party on campus, the student body finally decided that DU basketball was worth supporting in a big way. As you can see in the video above, they came out in force to an extent previously unimaginable for a Denver basketball game.

For the coaches and players, meanwhile, Saturday was the payoff — or at least, *a* payoff, the latest and greatest payoff yet, hopefully foreshadowing more and even greater payoffs to come — of years of hard work, from the recruiting trail to the practice court to the far-flung arenas of the Sun Belt Conference. “That was unbelievable! The student section was unbelievable!” said co-captain Rob Lewis, barely able to contain himself. Lewis, a fifth-year senior who was Joe Scott’s very first recruit to Denver, said emphatically he’s never seen anything like it at DU.

Saturday was even a reward for ex-players whose investments of sweat and tears helped build Denver toward this crescendo. “This is something that we’ve worked hard for for years,” DU alum Kyle Lewis, last year’s point guard and senior captain, told me after the game as he waited near the locker room to congratulate his former coach and teammates. Lewis had watched the game from a few rows behind the Pioneer bench. “It’s just great to see that finally we get the national exposure that this school has deserved, and not only that, but a great win while we’re doing it.”

For administrators and alums, Saturday was the payoff of vision, hard work, and, well, literal investments, i.e., lots of money, that went into turning Denver into a Division I program, building this fantastic arena, and having faith that — like in Field of Dreams — if they built it, success would come. “People dreamed about this,” said a ebullient Peg Bradley-Doppes, DU’s Vice Chancellor for Athletics and Recreation. “You saw Dan Ritchie and Joy Burns come out on the court at the end — they built this facility 12 years ago, and we became Division I in all sports, and for them to see this type of crowd and this energy and the kids singing the fight song and rushing the floor — it was great.”

But now I’m getting ahead of myself, and I’ve spoiled the ending. Let’s take a step back: all the way back to January 11, in fact.

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After roller-coaster Sun Belt start, Denver visits CSU with state pride (and RLU status) at stake

After going 10-2 against its tough non-conference schedule and earning itself an unlikely place on the bubble, Denver has been on soemthing of a roller-coaster ride over the last two weeks as it opened Sun Belt play.

On December 29, the Pioneers beat Troy in a perfectly serviceable 79-62 win that was pretty much exactly what you’d want to see against a lowly opponent.

But then, two days later, whether because of a New Year’s Eve funk or whatever else, Denver was stunned at home by Arkansas-Little Rock, 66-59. It was, quite simply, a horrible loss to a team that came into the game 4-10 and ranked #249 in the nation by Ken Pomeroy.

The rare Magness Arena pratfall dropped Denver to 1-1 in conference play. It also caused their Pomeroy rating to plummet from #78 to #97, and their RPI to take a dive, too (knocking them out of SI’s Bubble Watch). And it raised fears of a greater letdown to come, what with 9 of the next 12 games being on the road.

Those worries became borderline #PANIC as Denver visited Pomeroy’s #225 team, Arkansas State, on January 5, and struggled again. The Pios trailed for almost the entire first half, and fought the Red Wolves nip-and-tuck throughout the second half. At the under-4 timeout, Denver was down, 46-45, and with two minutes left, the Pioneers trailed 48-47. But they pulled out the 53-50 win, a huge relief. (The win was unimpressive enough that Pomeroy’s tempo-free robots penalized Denver, dropping them further to #101. Even so, pulling it out on the road had to be a big confidence boost — and it averted disaster, if nothing else.)

Finally, on January 7, the Pioneers dominated South Alabama 67-50 to sweep their first Sun Belt road weekend of the season. Suddenly Denver is 3-1 in league play, and the awful loss to UALR feels like it’s in the rearview mirror. Said head coach Joe Scott: “After Thursday’s win, I was really happy for our guys. Today, I was really impressed by them.”

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Now comes a brief interruption to the Sun Belt schedule, in the form the season’s final regular-season non-conference game — and Denver’s last regular-season chance for a Red Line Upset — with a visit to Colorado State at 7:00 PM tonight.

Denver and CSU appear to be the best two teams in Colorado: they’re ranked #82 and #94, respectively, by Pomeroy. (The rest are #100 Colorado, #166 Air Force and #187 Northern Colorado.) Moreover, between them, the Pios and Rams own an unbroken chain of distributive-property victories over the state’s other teams (CSU beat Colorado, which beat Air Force; both CSU and Denver beat Northern Colorado). So this is a “state championship” of sorts: winner gets Centennial State bragging rights until further notice.

“Denver’s an outstanding team,” said CSU coach Tim Miles. “It’s Joe Scott’s best team since he’s been at Denver, and it’s probably Denver’s best team since they went Division I. I view that game as like a top three or four Mountain West team coming into Moby Arena. They’re that good.”

If Denver wins, it will be the Pioneers’ fourth Red Line Upset in five tries, which would put the Pioneers in rarefied air. Only Missouri Valley Conference powers Creighton (6 RLUs) and Northern Iowa (5) have pulled more Red Line Upsets this season. Denver would be tied with Harvard, St. Joe’s, Saint Louis, Dayton, Fresno State and Wichita State with 4 RLUs apiece.

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Last but not least (okay, maybe least), if you missed the 2nd annual Bally Drop on New Year’s Eve at midnight, well, here you go:

The latter video is Part 2 of my livestream; here’s Part 1.

Denver has a shot at another signature win tonight as it visits mid-major power Utah State. I haven’t had a chance to blog since just after the St. Mary’s game, but the Pioneers are 5-1 — and literally one vote shy of the Mid-Major Top 25 — after stunning the Gaels at home, then getting routed by Cal on the road. Can they get an enormous road win in Logan tonight? We’ll find out starting in about an hour.
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Denver has a shot at another signature win tonight as it visits mid-major power Utah State. I haven’t had a chance to blog since just after the St. Mary’s game, but the Pioneers are 5-1 — and literally one vote shy of the Mid-Major Top 25 — after stunning the Gaels at home, then getting routed by Cal on the road. Can they get an enormous road win in Logan tonight? We’ll find out starting in about an hour.