The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament — better known as March Madness — is, in my opinion, the greatest sporting event in the world. It is the World Cup if, instead of group play, the entire tournament was just the top 68 qualifying countries playing single elimination games all the way until you had a champion. It is relentlessly exciting, and while there can be only one winner, many of its most indelible moments have come from early round upsets, during which many of us learn of schools like Valparaiso, or Weber State, or FGCU, or UMBC for the very first time.
At my high school, some teachers would sneak their TVs on mute for the first-round Thursday/Friday games (god bless), while I basically cleared my college schedule to mainline 12 hours of basketball for consecutive four-day weekends. In one of my former jobs, a large number of us would take the Friday of the opening weekend of the tournament — today — off work, post up at a bar in Cleveland Park, and soak it all in. It was a great tradition. If you have the ability to take today (or at least the afternoon) off and go watch basketball with a group of friends or strangers, I can’t recommend it enough.
Even though my wife was not much of a college hoops fan before we met, she’s gotten more into it over the years, and as her own school’s team has become a perennial powerhouse. We’ve carved time out, whenever we’ve been able, to watch games together. Last year, we were in Houston for a wedding and found a great outdoor patio to settle in and watch.
This year, our household gets to experience the joy of both of our alma maters making the field. That, of course, adds to the logistical issue, as we watched the brackets being announced last Sunday night. We both were hoping our teams would end up in Friday games, to make it easier to watch each while navigating work demands.
The last time my alma mater, UC Santa Barbara, made the field, they were a dangerous 12 seed, one that came within a rimmed-out four-footer at the buzzer from advancing. That was two years ago when Baylor, my wife’s alma mater, was a 1 seed that would go on to win the national title. Given Baylor’s midseason surge and the recent quality of the Big West’s automatic qualifier, the prospect of their seeding lining up to create any matchup — much less a first-round tilt — seemed extremely unlikely. Even as I (correctly) predicted Marquette’s Big East Tournament win last Saturday night would propel them up to the 2 line, bumping Baylor to a 3 seed, it wasn’t until I saw the quality of the other mid-major automatic qualifiers that I realized UCSB might come in as low as a 14 seed, albeit a strong one.
Even then, there was only a 1-in-4 chance that they’d end up in the same region, on the same floor, squaring off for the right to extend their season.
I suppose March is nothing if not the time for defying the odds and busting your expectations.
Well, I guess that makes planning easier.
My Gauchos are clearly not as talented as that team two years ago, which featured senior point guard JaQuori McLaughlin, who now plays for the Santa Cruz Warriors of the NBA G League. That team also had a dominant, senior power forward in Amadou Sow, the one whose shot at the buzzer was an inch from writing a very different story for UCSB that year. This team is a scrappier group, one with a couple Pac-12 transfers and another ball dominant guard, Big West Player of the Year Ajay Mitchell. Still, they’re not as good.
Then again, neither is Baylor. The Bears have the most guard depth in the country, with Adam Flagler, LJ Cryer, likely one-and-done Keyonte George, and even Dale Bonner off the bench. Though they lack the dominant interior game that most major conference teams feature. That has hurt them through the gauntlet of the Big XII season, and may prove to be a major part of this matchup with UCSB. Baylor shoots a lot of threes and makes them at a 37.2% rate, good for 33rd in the country, also generating lots of offensive rebounds (18th-best ORB%). The Bears are also 299th in giving up offensive rebounds, and 314th at defending two-point shots, easily the worst of any non-16 seed in the tournament.
I’ve watched more Baylor games than I have any other team over the last couple years. They’re frequently on the ESPN networks, especially during Big XII play. I can tell you confidently that, in spite of their defensive holes, the Bears have many of the ingredients necessary to make another deep March run. They have senior guards. They can beat you several different ways. They (mostly) make their free throws. And they have a coach with deep March experience and one national title already under his belt.
I’ve also watched more UCSB in recent years, thanks to ESPN+ coverage of the Big West. I watched them scuffle through a bad loss at Cal State Northridge, and a home defeat against UC Irvine in which the Gauchos looked flat-out overmatched. But I also watched them get it together in time for the conference tournament, and watched all 120 minutes over three solid victories. They did that without senior guard Ajare Sanni, though it sure would be nice to get him back in time for Friday.
All of this is to say that I know these teams pretty well, and that one of those aforementioned transfers may be the most important player in this game. His name is Andre Kelly. I have had many, many thoughts and feelings about him over the past few years. Don’t take my word for it — let’s go to the tape (aka my texts):
As you may have figured out, Kelly has only been at UCSB for one season. He is one of the two Pac-12 transfers, along with former Oregon not-really-a-stretch-four-but-actually-an-oversized-guard Miles Norris. Kelly started his career and spent four years at Cal.
College basketball comes only second to baseball in my sports hierarchy. And, as those of you who know me personally (and/or follow me on Twitter) already know, my primary college rooting interest is Cal, the school in my hometown backyard, where my grandfather taught for a half century and from which a number of my family members graduated. I grew up watching Jason Kidd, Lamond Murray, Shareef Abdur-Rahim, Ed Gray, and (my favorite) Randy Duck at Harmon Gym. I can tell you where I was when Richard Midgley beat N.C. State in the opening round in 2003 (my fraternity house room) or when the injury/sickness/scandal-doomed 2016 Bears bowed out gracelessly to 13 seed Hawaii (that aforementioned bar in Woodley Park).
There are former Golden Bears strewn all over this year’s tournament. Matt Bradley is San Diego State’s leading scorer. 7-foot-5 Connor Vanover will (along with Max Abmus) determine much of Oral Roberts’ success or failure. Even former Cal guard Dennis Gates is dancing as head coach of Missouri.
Still. In the pre-pandemic world of 2019, if you suggested to me that Andre Kelly would transfer from Cal to UCSB in order to have a better chance to make the NCAA Tournament, I’d have dismissed you out of hand. Even after consecutive eight-win seasons, Cal was only three years removed from being that dangerous 4 seed headlined by future NBA star Jaylen Brown. And yet, here we are, with Cal lost in the absolute wilderness following a 3-29 campaign and UCSB headed to the dance for the second time in three seasons, where they will start Andre Kelly at center on Friday.
In an increasingly positionless era of basketball — in which it is tremendously valuable to have big men who are crisp passers and capable of shooting from the outside, allowing your offense to stretching and slice the defense like bread dough — Kelly is a throwback. He’s now got the full complement of post moves, but is a stodgy-footed, 15-foot range-limited, back-to-the-basket power forward. Listed at 6-foot-9, 255 pounds, he’s built like a tree trunk. He occupies space, is tough to back down, but also lacks the springy athleticism of the Baylor bigs, Flo Thamba and the existential crisis-causingly emphasized Jonathan Tchamwa Tchatchoua.
In spite of this skillset, Kelly has often frustrated me with his inability to do the basic things you’d expect of such a big man, like rebounding the basketball. His decision-making has sent me cursing at the television more times than I’d like to admit. Having had the pleasure of watching and rooting for the free-flowing, switch-easy Golden State Warriors with undersized big man Draymond Green driving the engine of their Death Lineup, it was so painful to switch back on Thursdays and Saturdays and watch Kelly lumber around the paint, clogging up passing lanes, sucking the life out of motion offense with isolation play, seeming to require most of his own and his team’s efforts to squeeze 12 points and six rebounds out of each game.
Last Saturday night, despite battling foul trouble most of the evening, Kelly logged 31 minutes in which he was anything but the center of the offense. He set screens and floated around, picking up nine points and a game-high 10 rebounds, along with UCSB’s lone block, in the Big West title game win over Cal State Fullerton. On a night where Norris struggled, Kelly was quietly efficient (just six field goal attempts). While his usage percentage is lower than any time since his freshman year at Cal, he’s produced easily the highest defensive win share total of his college career this season.
Usually when a player transfers from a larger college basketball program to a smaller one, it’s to take on a bigger role, becoming a more focal point in the offense. Kelly has done the opposite, and it’s finally gotten him a ticket to the big dance.
UCSB has only won a single tournament game in its history, way back in 1990. To pull off the upset, they’ll need a number of things to go right. But perhaps more than anything, they’ll probably need a career game from the dreaded Laramie of my garbage sons, the one I’ve cursed over every piece of sloppy footwork and ill-advised hook shot and failed box out and off-balance brick. And if he pulls it off, Andre Kelly might just become my favorite large adult son, the guy I get to remember years from now for delivering March magic.
And the guy who haunts my wife’s nightmares instead.