It’s a piece of cake, really, which is what makes this weekend a little bittersweet. You head an hour south, then east, to Gary, Ind., turn right, hop on I-65 South for 2 ½ hours and before you know it you’re in Indianapolis, which for the next three weeks will be the undisputed capital of college basketball.
“Such an easy drive,” Steve Watson said, over his car’s Bluetooth, as he was making that precise easy drive, “and that makes this harder for the folks who support us. Under normal circumstances, they’d be flocking there.”
Watson is the athletic director for Loyola Chicago, which Friday will hope to reprise the role it served in 2018, when it became the darling of the NCAA Tournament, winning its first three games by a total of four points before battering Kansas State, earning a most improbable slot in the Final Four.
The Ramblers were an 11 seed then, snuck up on most of America by snaking past Miami, Tennessee, Nevada and K-State before leading Michigan for the first 33 minutes of the national semifinals in San Antonio. The Loyola players seized the sport’s imagination, but it was their No. 1 fan, team chaplain Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, who captured its heart.
“As it should be,” Watson said, laughing.
Loyola is no longer a cute story. They are an 8 seed in the Midwest, finished the regular season No. 17 in the AP poll and will wear the home uniforms against Georgia Tech — and all the Yellow Jackets did was win the ACC Tournament. The Ramblers are 24-4, Tech will be missing its best player, Moses Wright, and Sister Jean will be courtside at Butler’s Hinkle Arena, the first game the 101-year-old nun will see in person all year.
It’s perfect.
Well, almost perfect.
“It’s all a joy,” Watson said. “Except we only had a ticket allotment of 200, and we’re committed to making sure the players and the staff have access, and they go quick. We’ve all had to adjust to the way things are. This is just one more adjustment.”
Watson isn’t complaining. He knows the gift the very existence of this tournament is to all 68 teams, starting with his own. Home games at the Gentile Center were empty all year. Sixteen of the 17 players and all but two staff members were hit with a wave of COVID-19 when an outbreak hit campus in November.
“You play the cards you’re dealt, right?” Watson said. “We all do. It sounds weird, but it meant we were able to get this out of the way early. Thankfully everyone was able to recover quickly.”
Now the Ramblers return, and it’s no accident, even though only two prominent players remain from the 2018 run, seniors Cameron Krutwig and Lucas Williamson. The challenge was sustaining success: Butler was a mid-major of recent vintage that repeated its storybook run, but it hasn’t been quite so easy at VCU and George Mason.
Porter Moser is still the coach, despite a brief dalliance with St. John’s in 2019, despite the fact he has been one of the most appealing coaches on the make for years. But Loyola’s athletic leadership realized the formula wasn’t quite that simple. But a blueprint was obvious and available.
Eighteen hundred miles from Loyola’s campus off Chicago’s West Sheridan road lies another Jesuit school of some basketball renown which exists outside the Power 6: Gonzaga. The Zags, the No. 1 overall seed, have been to every NCAA Tournament since 1999 — that’s 21 straight and counting — but only qualified for one in the 60 years before that.
Clearly, they’ve figured something out in Spokane.
So shortly after San Antonio, Watson led a small group, including school president Jo Ann Rooney, to see how Loyola’s sister school did it.
“And look, we’re by no means Gonzaga,” Watson said. “But we realized we have many of the same principles. Everybody on campus understands the importance of basketball, how it impacts the university overall. The term they used at Gonzaga was ‘alignment’ — people across campus are all aligned with the mission.”
And, of course, Loyola also has an asset even Gonzaga doesn’t.
“Sister Jean always says, ‘We’re a hugging community,’ ” Watson says. “She hasn’t been able to hug anyone for a long time. But she’ll be with us in Indiana. That’s a good first step.”