The NCAA Basketball Selection Committee has been accused of a lot of things. This week Oklahoma State fans have accused the committee of slighting their team in seeding, making up for the fact the Cowboys are in the tournament because of an appeal of their penalties in the Lamont Evans case that included a one-year tournament ban. Some simply feel the NCAA is out to get Oklahoma State. None of that is true and the committee probably did make a one-line seeding mistake on the Cowboys. However, when Oklahoma State head coach Mike Boynton observed that with only a few African-American head coaches in the tournament and several were having to play each other in round one, including his Cowboys playing Ritchie McKay’s Liberty Flames that seems extreme. If the committee had that agenda then they would be fighting the wave this country is experiencing and I just can’t see it.
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Boynton is careful but he is showing some frustration with the NCAA Selection Committee.
No, I’m one that believes that the committee went through the process and here is the game. Oklahoma State and Liberty. The Cowboys are one of the best teams in the country and played that way down the stretch with six of their nine top 20 wins coming in the final two weeks of the regular season and conference tournament.
McKay knows a good team when he sees it. He got his doctorate in basketball coaching by splitting his two tenures as Liberty head coach with a six-year stint at Virginia serving as associate head coach for one of his mentors in Cavaliers head coach Tony Bennett. He knows good coaching and sees that with Boynton.
“I think he is one of the bright young coaches in the country, black or white. He is really good.” McKay said of Boynton with reference to the suggestion of the coaching match-ups. “I think anytime you have a coach that knows the game and is relationship oriented then you have a formula for success. Another under valued thing about Oklahoma State basketball is the assistant coaching staff that he has assembled. I root for Mike whenever I can, I won’t root for him Friday, but neither will he be rooting for me. I think it is really a tribute to him and his staff where they have Oklahoma State. They are legitimately one of the best teams in the country.”
Boynton and McKay both spoke of phone conversations the two coaches had last summer. They have never worked together, but they are a part of coaching lineage that has crossed paths.
Liberty University
Darius McGhee is a sharpshooter from three-point range and A-Sun Player of the Year.
“I’ve always had a lot of respect for the way he runs his program. He gets good players that usually stick around for four-years,” Boynton said of McKay. “I’m sure he has had a really good impact on their lives. He also knows a lot about basketball, and he has been around some pretty good (basketball) minds, Tony Bennett is probably the first one that people reference. He knows a little bit about players. Before Seth Curry showed up on Duke’s campus, he spent a year with Coach McKay at Liberty first. He recruits well and he’s got a team that we are going to have to work really hard to beat.”
McKay has the Atlantic Sun Player of the Year in Darius McGhee, who averages nearly 16-points a game and shoot almost 42 percent from beyond the three-point line. The Flames are one of the top three-point shooting teams in the country, the third-best defensive scoring team in the country, and they turn the ball over an average of less than 10 times a game. They beat South Carolina and Mississippi State in the non conference.
“I don’t think our guys will be afraid of the moment or whatever name would have been on the jersey on the line against us,” McKay said. “I think we just have to concentrate on how difficult of a task it is to defend against Oklahoma State, and then try to get a good shot on the other end. It’s the NCAA Tournament and you are going to play somebody good.”
“They are all hard, every team that is in this tournament had to do something really good at some point during the season, right, to get here? The three (seed) looks better next to your name and maybe you get a team that has a smaller chance to beat you,” Boynton said of the Oklahoma State situation. “I have a lot of respect for Liberty and all I do right now is get our team ready for a team that has experience winning in this event. That’s a big deal to me that A, they are used to playing against high level competition. We’re not going to show up and like they won’t be used to seeing long, athletic guys, and they’ve won in this deal before.”
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Liberty won’t be intimidated by Boynton’s star and Big 12 Player of the Year Cade Cunningham.
No, I think the intimidation factor of power five school playing mid-major is out the window. Nobody in Liberty’s red, white, and blue will be lining up for autographs from the A.P. All-American and potential first-pick in the NBA Draft in Cade Cunningham.
Liberty is proud of who they are and how they do it. McGhee said it on Sunday after the selections show that he and his teammates are humble guys that work hard to get the job done on both ends of the floor. That is what his coach is proud of.
“I think what people should know about us is that we are a sum of our parts and that we try to play equally on both ends of the floor,” McKay said of his Flames. “We spend a ton of time and attention on being good defensively and then on taking care of the ball. Big stars or household names, that doesn’t happen at the mid-level unless you do something special on a really large stage and we’ll see if this is our year.”
If it is, there will be a lot of long faces in Stillwater, Okla. Like Boynton, I respect Liberty, but I also believe that the Cowboys are far from the young and sometimes mistake prone team they were at the start of the season. They’ve grown up. There are still some mistakes, but in between there if explosive offense and some rugged defense that on any given night can add up to beating any team in the country.
