Austin Peay Returns to the Big Dance With a Surprise Run
Posted by David Changas on March 7th, 2016After finishing the 2012-13 season with a record of 8-23, Austin Peay head coach Dave Loos decided it was time to relinquish his duties as the school’s athletic director and refocus on his first love: coaching basketball. Loos had been at the school since 1990 and had led the Governors to three NCAA Tournament bids in his first 18 seasons, but in 1997, he added the role of AD to his title. Things steadily slipped over time, and even after Loos returned solely to the sideline, many wondered if the longtime coach would again compete for OVC championships. Austin Peay won only 20 games over the two seasons that followed Loos’ resignation before suffering through a middling 14-17 campaign entering last week’s OVC Tournament. The #8 seed in the event exhibited nothing on its resume to suggest that anything special would happen in Nashville.
Dave Loos’ fourth trip to the Big Dance is his most improbable one. (AP Photo/Stephen Lance Dennee)
But therein lies the beauty of college basketball. After easily dispatching #5 seed Tennessee Tech in the first round, the Governors overcame a 10-point deficit with just over five minutes remaining to beat #4 seed Tennessee State. In a subsequent semifinal game that may have been the best of Championship Week thus far, Austin Peay then stunned regular season champion Belmont by a single point in overtime after the Bruins’ go-ahead putback was waved off. That led to Saturday night against #2 seed Tennessee-Martin, where the Governors trailed by nine early before charging back and ultimately coasting to their fourth victory in four days, an 83-73 win that came with an automatic bid to the Big Dance.
In four short days and one remarkable run, Loos put any lingering criticisms about his program to rest. On his 69th birthday and while his five-year-old granddaughter, Rhyan (whose father Brad is an assistant at Missouri), fought kidney cancer in New York, the coach earned his fourth trip to the NCAA Tournament and first since 2008. He admitted after the game that he had never received a better birthday present. Loos has used basketball as a distraction from his family’s personal matter, but he noted that there were some trying times en route to the league’s automatic bid. “We had our ups and downs during the season. We’re like most families. We bicker and fight, argue, but in the end, these guys really had each other’s back,” he said. He also deflected any praise placed upon his shoulders. “Once we got here, [the players] took over. And I mean that as sincerely as I can. The light went on. They had that belief. They expected to win. I’ll be honest with you, I wasn’t real sure about it.”
What should not get lost in the Governors’ Cinderella run to March Madness is the remarkable play of all-OVC forward Chris Horton, one of the nation’s best offensive rebounders. He started things off with a 37-point, 21-rebound performance against Tennessee Tech, and followed that up with 30 points and 16 boards against Belmont. He was less of a factor in the title game because of an injury scare, but freshman Jared Savage, who averaged 6.0 points per game coming into the contest, picked up his slack by going 8-of-14 from three-point range. Austin Peay averages fewer than six three-pointers per game on the season, but Loos’ team nailed 16-of-31 from deep on Saturday night, possessing a long-range answer for any purported Tennessee-Martin run.
Given an RPI rating in the high 100s, it is a near certainty that the 18-17 Governors will be ticketed for a First Four game in Dayton early next week. Rest assured that they won’t mind. “That’s out of our control. We’re excited about being in the Tournament,” Loos said. It is not likely that the Governors will make any noise when they get there, but then again, nobody saw last week’s run coming either. For Loos, the chance to return to the Big Dance after an eight-year absence is especially sweet. More important to him, however, is getting the program back on the right track.
