D-I coaches recall their worst NCAA tournament upsets

FROM HIS SEAT in the second row on the left side of Purdue‘s coach bus, Matt Painter sat alone on a quiet, 275-mile drive back to West Lafayette, Indiana.

The morning after the No. 1 seed’s NCAA title dreams ended in a shocking, 63-58 first-round loss to 16-seed Fairleigh Dickinson at Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio, Painter’s team was going home. They had just become the second No. 1 seed in NCAA tournament history to lose to a 16-seed.

Frustrated and stunned, Painter grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down everything that had gone wrong that night. For more than four hours, he listed the specific obstacles every player, assistant and staffer on his team would have to overcome to avoid the same fate the next season.

And then it was his turn to write about himself.

“How in the hell can you let your team get beat and not be able to score 60 points?” he scribbled.

It was a sobering admission for Painter, who has never led Purdue to the Final Four. He had few answers.

“Sometimes, you answer your questions with other questions, which is perplexing,” he told ESPN. “You walk away like The Riddler. And then you wonder, ‘Why am I coaching?’ Like, ‘Why am I doing this to myself?'”

Every year, the NCAA tournament highlights heroes and discards disappointments. The single elimination format creates a frenzied, three-week sporting event that captivates the country in March and early April. It also means the success of a powerhouse program can be erased in just 40 minutes. For the teams that enter the NCAA tournament with title aspirations and go home after a major upset, the impact of that loss can linger.

Painter is not alone, though. Some of his coaching colleagues could sit around a campfire and tell similar stories. The good news for Painter? Most of them moved forward after enduring those tough losses and put those games behind them. Eventually.

With the return of Zach Edeylast year’s Wooden Award winner, and a strong supporting cast, the Boilermakers can compete for a national title once again in 2023-24. Painter also knows, however, this group can’t reach that goal until it deals with what happened in March.

“The pressure you face when you are a No. 1 seed, that might be the greatest pressure you face, with that first game,” said Scott Drew, whose Baylor squad was a top seed when it lost to 8-seed North Carolina in the second round of the 2022 NCAA tournament a year after the Bears had won the national title. “Because you don’t want to be a No. 1 that loses that first game. So I know what Coach Painter was feeling there. We lost the second game but still, at the end of the day, anything is possible.”

BEFORE HIS TEAM could begin the 2018-19 season, Tony Bennett placed chairs on the practice court and asked his returning players to sit down.

According to oddsmakers, top seed Virginia had been a 20.5-point favorite to beat 16-seed UMBC in the first round of the 2018 NCAA tournament. The Cavaliers had lost just one game over the previous three months when they met the Retrievers in Charlotte, North Carolina. And then history happened, and UMBC beat Virginia, 74-54, to become the first 16-seed to beat a 1-seed in the opening round.

Sitting in those chairs months later, Bennett encouraged each returning Virginia player to share the lessons they’d learned from that experience. For the team that subsequently won the 2019 national championship, it was an opportunity to purge the past.

“For all those who were part of that team that had gone through our UMBC loss, when it was their time to be in the chair, it was, ‘All right, tell us, in your own words, in your own experiences … What did you learn from the hardship of being the first team to lose as a 1-seed to a 16-seed?'” Bennett said. “So each guy had to say, ‘This is what it taught me, this is what I learned, this is the experience I went through.’ That was part of the process. … We owned what had happened. We didn’t obsess about it.”

Bennett is the only coach who truly knows the sting Painter felt eight months ago. He also knows what’s possible once a team overcomes that pain. But that progress took time, he said.

He says he listened to TED Talks on adversity in the weeks that followed the UMBC loss. And he tried to prepare for the following season without avoiding the questions, doubts and criticisms that came after that game. Confronting the finish helped Virginia, which won 35 games the next season and secured another 1-seed.

Then Gardner-Webba 16-seed, took a 36-30 lead into halftime in the opening round of their first round matchup in the 2019 NCAA tournament, and everything Bennett thought he’d digested began to haunt him again.

“You get to the tournament and you know you’re going to have to answer that and go through it,” Bennett said. “We were down 14 in the first half against Gardner-Webb. That was like, ‘I thought we dealt with all of this. Why is this happening again?'”

Virginia bounced back, though, won the game and advanced.

The coaches who’ve overcome those upset losses, however, all know it can happen again.

In 2010, Bill Self’s 33-win Kansas squad had secured a 1-seed after entering the NCAA tournament with just two losses. The Jayhawks had nearly caught Northern Iowa late in the second half of a 63-62 game when Ali Farokhmanesh hit a crucial 3-pointer to seal the second-round upset for the 9-seed Panthers.

“I haven’t watched [the tape],” Self told ESPN. “They were a 9-seed, I think. It sat with me for a year.”

For current Houston and former Oklahoma coach Kelvin Sampson, one NCAA tournament loss in 2001 made him wonder why the basketball gods seemed to turn on him. The Sooners, who had suffered four consecutive first-round exits in Sampson’s first four seasons, were a 4-seed when they suffered a 70-68 overtime loss to 13-seed Indiana State in the first round that year. On a bizarre play, Oklahoma star Hollis Price inadvertently struck Indiana State’s Kelyn Block with an elbow that knocked out three of the Sycamores star’s teeth. Price cut his tricep on the play and needed medical attention, so he had to leave the game. He returned, but with a heavily bandaged elbow. To Sampson, it was an example of the chaos that can unfold in the NCAA tournament and cost a good team a chance to advance.

“Hollis Price, he gets a tooth bite,” said Sampson, still incredulous about the whole thing. “It was s— like that.”

Every coach knows the NCAA tournament is a measuring stick that can make or break their careers. One upset loss might not put a proven coach in a bad spot, but it can add pressure and prompt questions about a program’s potential.

Jamie Dixon, whose Panthers were top-five seeds in seven of his first eight seasons at Pitt, had been haunted by his team’s struggles in the NCAA tournament. His 1-seed Pittsburgh team’s loss to 8-seed butler in the second round of the 2011 NCAA tournament was not difficult to understand. The Panthers were a 7.5-point favorite, but the Bulldogs had gone to the 2010 national title game and nearly upset Duke Blue Devils. Still, fans were upset.

“If you’re good every year, it builds up,” Dixon said. “Once you start going to the NCAA tournament regularly, you gotta get to the Final Four or bust.”

Tom Izzo may be the lone coach to have never encountered that kind of pressure. In his fifth season, he led Michigan State to the 2000 national championship — the Big Ten’s last national title — and, overall, he’s coached the Spartans to eight Final Fours. His legacy is intact. But his 2-seed team’s upset loss to 15-seed Middle Tennessee in the first round of the 2016 NCAA tournament still hurt, because Denzel Valentine, the Big Ten player of the year that season, and his teammates had to end their careers with that loss.

“The only sad part for me was walking in that locker room,” Izzo said. “I didn’t take anything from it and say, ‘Next time, I’m going to practice harder on Tuesday’ or ‘Next time, I’m going to do more in the pregame talk.’ I took from it that you should cherish every moment that you move on because those things happen. I didn’t beat myself up over it but I cried with the players because that was a special group.”

EDEY AND HIS teammates, too, were quiet on the trip from Columbus back to West Lafayette after that first-round upset in March.

“For me, it was just the silence,” the 7-foot-4 Purdue star said he remembers most from that journey. “Not a lot of words were said on that bus. I don’t think I spoke for the next day. It’s a s—ty feeling for a season to end like that after all the things we did well. There are not a lot of ways to describe it. It sucked.”

Edey said the messy finish influenced his decision to return to school for another run. With four starters back, the Boilermakers entered 2023-24 as the AP preseason No. 3 team.

They also understand the spotlight, and the doubts that will follow them this season.

“They beat us fair and square,” Mason Gilis said. “But we’ve gone to the drawing board. We’ve sat in that feeling. And I think we’re going to be ready for anybody this coming year.”

That’s the attitude Painter cultivated in the wake of the upset loss.

He is also not altering his approach to this season, saying the team won’t “change things that have been great for us.” Even if the thought of the worst moment of his coaching career is an undeniable theme at the start of the 2023-24 season.

But, he also knows the Boilermakers only have two options. They can either find a way to put the loss behind them or allow the loss to weigh them down all season.

“Once you lose, you put your head in the sand for a little bit,” Painter said. “I’m not a good person to talk to about the 2023 NCAA tournament because I didn’t watch any of it. You’re just on a constant spin to try to improve yourself and try to get yourself [to a national championship].”

So, he said he challenged his team to accept “the noise” around it right now, and hopes his players will be resilient when they deal with criticism, on social media or elsewhere.

Including in the aftermath of Saturday’s 81-77 charity exhibition overtime loss at No. 14 Arkansas. The loss does not change Purdue’s ceiling, but the contentious overtime affair was an early example of the tests this team will face in its attempt to write a different ending this season.

Painter doesn’t want his team to pretend as if the Fairleigh Dickinson loss never happened. It just doesn’t have to define their season.

Has he himself moved on? He’s working on it. The note from that bus ride in March is stashed at his house. And yes, sometimes he goes back and reads those thoughts.

“I just put it in a file,” Painter said. “You date it and have it there.”