UNC came Rillie, Rillie close to the Big Dance.
But not close enough.
Coach Steve Smiley’s Northern Colorado Bears fell to Montana, 91-83, late Wednesday night in the Big Sky men’s basketball tournament championship in Boise, Idaho.
Thanks to senior wing guard Kai Johnson (23 points), the Grizzlies (25-9) notched the league’s automatic, and likely only, bid to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
The Bears (25-9) and Montana shared the Big Sky regular-season title and split the season series before Wednesday, with each winning on the other team’s home floor.
UNC whittled a 14-point Montana lead in the second half down to two with five minutes to go on the strength of senior guard Jaron Rillie’s 24 points.
It was UNC’s second trip to the league title game in four years — and second defeat. The Bears fell to Montana State in the 2022 Big Sky Championship, 87-66.
The program’s only Big Sky tourney title, garnered with a 66-50 win over Montana in 2011, was later vacated by the NCAA after UNC was sanctioned for improper management of its student-athletes’ academics and impermissible financial benefits.
Montana led by double digits early in the first half, despite Rillie’s hot hand. But the lithe Aussie kept firing, and his layup with 9:08 to go in the contest pulled UNC to within six.
The Bears kept chipping away, and Langston Reynolds’ make with 5:01 to go trimmed Montana’s lead to 71-69. And Isaiah Hawthorne’s two free throws pulled UNC within one at 74-73 with 3:35 left.
The Bears had played smothering defense in the first two rounds of the conference tourney, holding its first two postseason opponents to 52 and 45 points. But they struggled repeatedly to get stops against Montana, continuing a trend from the last meeting between the two league regular-season co-champions in Greeley on Feb. 6. The matchup saw the Grizzlies storm to a 47-34 halftime lead and hang on for an 86-78 win.
The UNC-Montana rubber match Wednesday followed a similar script in the early going. The Grizzlies shot 74% in the first half and closed the opening 20 minutes by nailing nine straight field goal attempts to take a 48-39 cushion into the break.
Rllie’s jumper with 11:28 left until halftime gave UNC a 24-18 lead, capping a 16-5 Bears run. But that was UNC’s largest cushion of the first half, and the Grizzlies countered with a 21-5 run of their own to regain momentum.
UNC had been projected by the sport’s two leading bracketologists as a 14 seed in the NCAA tourney. CBS Sports’ Jerry Palm predicted the Bears would be sent to Providence to face third-seeded St. John’s in the first round, while ESPN’s Joe Lunardi pegged UNC to land in Denver against third-seeded Kentucky.