By CHUCKIE MAGGIO
It’s a rare position for the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team to be in, probably the first time the Bonnies have experienced it since they received notice of their NCAA Tournament inclusion via telephone or fax machine.
The Bonnies are a certainty for March Madness and will play for seeding, rather than their postseason lives, in Dayton on Sunday. Their bags will be packed not only for the conference title game against VCU but for Indianapolis, where they’ll be headed after the game and Selection Show. Tournament teams are heading directly to the site and will continue testing for COVID-19 before next weekend’s opening round.
Compared to 2019, when it was win or go home in Brooklyn; 2018, when the bubble was stronger and SBU was much closer to missing the field than it thought; and 2016, when exactly five years ago tonight Bona lost to Davidson in the quarterfinals and was omitted two days later, the Bonnies can relax on Selection Sunday. That doesn’t mean their focus on the Atlantic 10 Championship Game is compromised, however.
“We’re not really worried about the NCAA Tournament right now, at all,” Jaren Holmes insisted. “We haven’t worried about it since our name was in the conversation that we would be in the tournament. We haven’t focused on the NCAA Tournament. That’s ultimately an end goal and one of our goals that we set at the beginning of the year. But we’re not really worried about that, especially with the A-10 Championship in front of us.
“We’re only focused on VCU and the A-10 Championship.”
A win over VCU would, of course, ensure an automatic bid to the tournament and perhaps land Bona as high as a No. 7 seed in the “Big Dance.” According to college hoops statistician Bart Torvik, for example, the Bonnies have a similar tournament resume to the 2011 Temple Owls squad that earned a No. 7 out of the A-10. SBU is in the 8-9 game on most bracket projections.
The Bonnies are also playing to be the first team to win the A-10’s outright regular season title and the A-10 Tournament in the same season since Saint Louis in 2013; Rhode Island lost to Davidson attempting to do the same in 2018. While some pressure is off their shoulders, the Bonnies know there is much more history to accomplish.
“I wouldn’t use the word ‘loose,’ because we always want to play loose,” Holmes noted. “When you’re loose it’s easier for things to flow, so that’s one of our big emphasis as a team to always play loose and just have fun out there… I feel like when you’re tight, you’re trying not to lose. When you play loose you’re playing to win.”
When the final buzzer sounds at University of Dayton Arena, setting a three-hour countdown clock until the Selection Show, Bona will finally talk tourney. A-10 Coach of the Year Mark Schmidt has fielded questions about his team’s place in the field of 68 (and, specifically the Round of 64) for weeks now. His answers have been consistent.
“Our goal when we started the season, like I would assume most teams in our league, was to win the regular season title and win the Atlantic 10 Tournament,” Schmidt commented. “We’ve accomplished one goal but that second goal is still out there, so our approach is we want to be the best we can be from 1 to 3 on Sunday.
“We’re not worried about the NCAA Tournament. Our mentality is let’s go try to win this thing and put our destiny in our hands, not worry about what happens in that room out in Indianapolis. That’s our goal; when you play games, you play to win.”
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