Long Beach State lost to Arizona, 85-65, in an NCAA men’s basketball tournament first-round game Thursday in Salt Lake City in what may have been the highest-profile sporting event in the university’s 75-year history.
The Beach advanced to the tournament for the first time since 2012 with three victories in three days — including defeating the top two seeds — in the Big West Conference tournament, days after coach Dan Monson and Executive Director of Athletics Bobby Smitheran met March 11 “and agreed that they would not pursue another contract following the conclusion of this one,” Roger Kirk, associate athletics director, communications and broadcast, told City News Service.
Thanks to the Monson situation, Long Beach State’s unlikely path to the tournament drew far more attention than expected for a team from a one-bid conference that averaged 1,638 fans for its home games and hasn’t won a game in the tournament since 1973.
The team’s tournament run was featured on the “NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt” and in The Wall Street Journal.
The March 11 meeting followed a five-game losing streak that dropped the Beach one spot into a tie for fifth in the 11-team conference and prompted the issuance of a news release headlined, “Beach Athletics And Men’s Basketball Head Coach Dan Monson Mutually Agree To Separation,” with Monson remaining as coach for the rest of the season.
Monson said Wednesday informing his players that his 17th season as Long Beach State’s coach would be his last “was super, super hard obviously.”
“As a parent or as a coach, you’re always disciplining your kids, you’re always holding them accountable, pushing them,” Monson said at a news conference Wednesday.
“You don’t really know how they’re taking it until they tell you they love you or they show you. Those guys showed me they loved me that day. I’ll never forget it.”
Monson told his players the plan for that day was “to watch a little film and shoot,” but “if you don’t want to do that, great.”
Monson said the players asked him to “get a few minutes by ourselves.”
“It took about 30 minutes before they texted back,” the 62-year-old Monson said. “They said, `We’d like to watch a little film.’
“I go in there. Still, we got a couple of them that couldn’t watch film. They went into our other room, couldn’t get their emotions together. You’re watching film, and you hear guys sniffling and everything.
“The first thing I said is, `Just bonding together is not going to be enough. Our defense has got to get better. We have to be a better basketball team this week. Just look at this first defensive clip, guys. We close out short here. The guy is wide open, we don’t get a contest. These are the kind of plays that get a coach fired.’
“The whole room broke up. It started right then. It was like, OK, we’re going to be all right here.”
Monson described that Tuesday’s practice as “terrible.”
“I told them afterwards, `Don’t cry in the locker room and say this bothers you, then come out and not practice well. Something’s got to be different for us to be different,” Monson said.
“That Wednesday we came off the bus at a high school in Las Vegas, I waited for each of them to get off the bus. I said, `Be different today, be different today.’ It was maybe our best practice of the year. That’s when I’m like, `OK, we got a shot here.’ It just kept growing and growing as the week went on.”
The Beach was seeded fourth in the Big West tournament, which was held at The Dollar Loan Center in Henderson, Nevada, about 16 miles southeast of downtown Las Vegas.
UC San Diego, which finished second, was ineligible for the tournament because it was in its fourth and final season of reclassifying from Division II to Division I.
Long Beach State’s 10-10 record in conference play matched UC Riverside’s, with the Beach getting the higher seed and first-round bye because it went 2-0 against the Highlanders in the regular season.
The Beach opened tournament play with an 86-67 victory over UC Riverside last Thursday in a second-round game, then defeated top-seeded UC Irvine 83-79, in a semifinal Friday, and second-seeded UC Davis, 74-70, in the championship game Saturday.
On Thursday, Long Beach State, seeded 15th in the West Region, trailed 17-9 six minutes, 51 seconds into the game, then scored 13 unanswered points to take a 22-17 lead 8:40 before halftime.
The Beach held its last lead, 35-34, after junior forward Aboubacar Taore made a second-chance layup with 2:34 left in the half.
Long Beach State did not score again in the half and the Wildcats went on a 7-0 run for a 41-35 halftime lead.
Arizona scored the first nine points of the second half, completing a 16-0 run, to increase its lead to 50-35 with 17:09 remaining. After senior guard Marcus Tsohonis ended the run by making two free throws, the Wildcats scored the next eight points to take a 58-37 lead with 15:57 to play.
Arizona led by at least 15 for the rest of the game, including holding 24-point leads three times.
Taore and senior forward Amari Stround led five players in double figures for the Beach (21-5) with 14 while sophomore guard AJ George added 12.
Sophomore guard Kylan Boswell scored a game-high 20 for the second-seeded Wildcats (26-8), while senior guard Caleb Love added 18. All five Arizona starters finished in double figures, accounting for 77 of its 85 points.
Oddsmakers made the Beach a 19 1/2-20 1/2-point underdog. ESPN Analytics gave Long Beach State a 2.3% chance of winning.
Entering Thursday’s play, the 15th seeds had an 8-124 record against the second seeds since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985. However, Arizona is the only No. 2 seed to twice lose to 15th seeds, to Santa Clara in 1993 and last year to Princeton.
“My stance this week doesn’t change. I’m the luckiest guy in this tournament in the world to do what I got to do today with these guys,” Monson said.
“They were better than us. They outplayed us, but they didn’t out-tough us, they didn’t out-compete us. I’m really proud of these guys the way we fought today. We weren’t good enough today. You have to be almost perfect in a game like this. The last five minutes of the first half, first five minutes of the second half, we just didn’t play good enough.
“It was emotional in the locker room, but I made ’em look me in the eye because there’s no heads down because I can’t be more proud. This group needs their heads up high. I want to thank them for the ride.”