SALT LAKE CITY — Don’t be upset there wasn’t an upset; smile because there was even a chance one could happen.
That’s how this No. 15-seeded Long Beach State team went out Thursday against the No. 2 Arizona Wildcats, losing 85-65 but fighting with vigor till the end Thursday in a first-round NCAA Tournament game at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City.
The Beach boys couldn’t do more than put some first-half stress on the higher seed – and, since we’re all inundated with gambling news of late, to cover the 20.5-point spread.
“You can lose, and that’s unacceptable (but) there’s no losers up here, we got beat tonight,” LBSU coach Dan Monson said. “They outplayed us, but they didn’t out-tough us, they didn’t out-compete us.”
That will be what sticks with this team for a long Beach minute, not the unfortunate details of Arizona outscoring Long Beach State 44-30 in the second half.
Long Beach State guard Marcus Tsohonis, left, and forward Amari Stroud, right, react on the bench near the end of the Beach’s first-round loss to Arizona in the NCAA Tournament on Thursday, March 21, 2024, in Salt Lake City. (AP Photo/Isaac Hale)
What Monson and the men on his roster will remember will be punching a hard-to-get ticket to the Big Dance for the first time since 2012 and the second time in their coach’s 17-year tenure.
They’ll think, surely, of their irreverent, storybook surge with a coach who was, as he put it, working for free. Pulling, he said, a George Costanza, though he did the “Seinfeld” character one better: Monson wasn’t trying to get fired – he already accomplished that part.
What he was doing was making a point to his team, finishing his tenure on his own time, if not his own terms, after he was excused from his position March 11, before the Big West Conference Tournament.
But wait. Give credit where it’s due now. Show some love to the unsung hero of this story.
Long Beach State’s Jadon Jones reacts during the first half against the Arizona Wildcats in the first round of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament on Thursday, March 21, 2024, at Delta Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. (Photo by Chris Gardner/Getty Images)
Here, give Jadon Jones a crack at it: “We love each other. We love this game. We love Coach,” the junior guard said. “We love the media team. We love the janitors, we love the staff. We love the families. Mama Darci, Maddox, MicGuire, Mollie, McKenna. We love everyone. All the wives…”
But what about the architect – self-proclaimed – of the whole rousing exercise?
The university’s first-year athletic director Bobby Smitheran, who made the brilliant move of firing – or something – Monson?
“My belief and hope is that by doing what I did and the timing of it, they would play inspired, and that’s what they did,” Smitheran told The Associated Press a few hours before the Beach tipped off. “I’m not trying to pat myself on the back, but it worked.”
In that case, put the Monson Case in a museum of fortuitous accidents. Like that airball you shot that fell into a teammate’s mitts that was totally 100% meant to be a pass, yeah, sure. Hang it beside Play-Doh and Cornflakes and Superglue of experiments gone wrong in the best ways.
Because clearly this was an inspired decision, yeah, sure.
Too bad Smitheran couldn’t figure a way to give one of the Beach players chicken pox right before tipoff to inspire another surprising result. Maybe a flat tire on the way to the game would’ve helped? A wardrobe mixup?
The brand-new nets at Delta Center were a little stiff, which had to make retrieving some of Arizona’s school-record 13 zone-busting 3-pointers more annoying.
Actually, it’s hard to gauge just how smart Smitheran’s decision really was, considering he said he doesn’t want credit for outright firing the coach who – with that key motivational assist from his now-former AD – pulled his team out of an inopportune five-game nosedive before plowing as a No. 4 seed through the conference tournament with victories over fifth-seeded UC Riverside, top-seeded UC Irvine and second-seeded UC Davis.
“I think this is really getting lost on people, that we agreed that a change in leadership was necessary,” Smitheran complained in his conversation with the AP. “This was something Coach Monson brought to me.”
Wait, so this was Monson’s doing?
Long Beach State head coach Dan Monson cuts down the net after his team defeated UC Davis in the championship of the Big West Conference men’s tournament Saturday, March 16, 2024, in Henderson, Nevada. (AP Photo/Ronda Churchill)
Monson, for the record, would like to be doing this again. He hasn’t sounded like a man who’s happy to be going, and made it clear Thursday there’s nothing else he’d rather be doing: “I’m the luckiest guy in this tournament and in the world to get to do what I got to do today with these guys.”
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As for whether Smitheran should get credit for Monson’s last-gasp success with the Beach?
“If it helped, I’m really happy we did it because I wouldn’t trade it for the job or any other job,” Monson said. “If that’s what spurred it, that’s great. But we’ll never know ’cause that’s how it played out. We’ll never know if it did or not.
“It’s not really worth talking about.”
What is worth talking about?
The show the Beach put on. Monson’s group of quotable guys with a collective 3.2 grade-point average and another gear they found, when they wanted to show their coach how much they love him.
In his last game as Long Beach State head coach, Dan Monson hugs Arizona head coach Tommy Lloyd after the Wildcats defeated the Beach 85-65 in the first round of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament on Thursday, March 21, 2024, at Delta Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)