For a moment, Donte Jackson was overwhelmed by the emotion of the question while conducting his press conference session in Dayton, Ohio leading up to the biggest stage his program has ever been on.
A year ago, Jackson led Grambling State to the regular-season Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) regular-season title and 24 wins overall. But the Tigers fell by a single possession in the SWAC Tournament championship game and were left out of the NCAA Tournament field once again.
When asked about last season’s disappointments on Tuesday morning, Jackson’s eyes welled for a moment before he composed himself while considering the new opportunity his team has.
On Saturday, Jackson’s troops avenged that loss, posting a 75-66 win over TSU in Birmingham, Alabama to make history. The ninth win in the last 10 games for the Tigers also meant a 20th victory this season. And it also meant that Grambling State is heading to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in school history.
On Wednesday, Jackson and the Tigers will take on Montana State in a First Four contest in Dayton. The winner will earn the No. 16 seed opposite Purdue in the first round of the 64-team NCAA Tournament field.
“Phenomenal opportunity for us to show our brand of basketball,” Jackson said. “I always say when you walk at Grambling, you know you’re at a football school. No ifs or buts. But people understand we play good basketball at Grambling also. Some good basketball that’s going on. And I also want to know we’re trying to change it to being a basketball school also.
“This is three conference championships in seven years. Unfortunately, my first year we won the regular season title, we had APR issues when I inherited the program. We don’t have those issues anymore.
“Last year we’re in a championship game. This year we actually won the championship game. So I want to feel like we’re making our own basketball history now and we’re trying to set the tradition where basketball is going to be great for a long time.”
On the other side of the 16-seed play-in game, Montana State awaits. This is a new position for the Bobcats, but the NCAA Tournament is becoming old hat. Montana State won three games in three days at last week’s Big Sky Conference tournament in Boise, Idaho to secure its third straight NCAA Tournament bid. It’s been since 1980 that a Big Sky team won three straight conference tournaments and went dancing three years in a row.
In 2022, Montana State earned a No. 14 seed and took one on the chin from Texas Tech, losing 97-62 in San Diego. The margin of defeat was the most lopsided in the enter first round of the Big Dance. Last season, Montana State earned a No. 13 seed and was sent across the country to Greensboro, North Carolina to meet Kansas State. Raequan Battle poured in a game-high 27 points but it wasn’t enough as MSU fell 77-65 to the Wildcats, who went on to make a run to the Elite Eight.
This year’s Bobcat squad had to turn it on late to overcome a roller coaster campaign that included several embarrassing losses and a 14-17 record before the conference tournament. Even after winning three in a row in Boise, Montana State finds itself in Dayton as the Big Sky’s first-ever representative in the First Four.
“The whole season, you’re building towards the end of the year. We just want to make sure we’re at our best when it counts,” Montana State senior Brian Goracke said from Dayton on Tuesday. “And especially in a conference that has a single bid — is a single-bid conference like the Big Sky, we just want to give ourselves the best chance to make this run at the end and win those three games in March and make it here.”
The other stark differences for the Bobcats are the roster that comes to Dayton and the man at the helm. After winning 52 games over the last two seasons and making the NCAA Tournament in consecutive years for the first time in program history, former head coach Danny Sprinkle parlayed that success into the head coaching gig at Utah State.
Sprinkle inherited a roster in Logan, Utah that returned no player that scored a point, grabbed a rebound or notched an assist last season in an Aggie uniform. But his departure also led to a mass exodus in Bozeman.
Matt Logie was the last head coach hired in Division I men’s basketball when he took the Montana State job in late April of last year. He inherited a roster that lost Battle (who transferred to West Virginia) along with Darius Brown II and Great Osobor, who followed Sprinkle to Utah State. MSU also had to replace Big Sky MVP Jubrile Belo and versatile wing Caleb Fuller, who each graduated. Even role players like Nick Gazelas left, meaning Logie inherited a roster with just four scholarship players returning.
The highs have been high — like winning at Cal in the non-conference or beating regular-season Big Sky champion Eastern Washington to hand the Eagles their first league loss — but the lows (like losing to Rocky Mountain College of the NAIA Frontier Conference) were also glaring.
Over the last few weeks, partly because of the sudden emergence of senior center John Olmsted, partly because of the mastery of Logie’s systems, partly because of insanely hot 3-point shooting and partly because of the super-human play of senior point guard Robert Ford III, all of a sudden, the Bobcats are dancing again.
“I would point the credit towards our players,” Logie said when asked about the ups and downs of his first campaign at MSU. “I try to be consistent in who I am and what they can expect on a daily basis. I think the biggest underlying message of this team has been their ability to not overly focus on results but focus on the process at hand to achieve the results that we desire.
“And there were definitely some valleys, the four-game losing streak being one, but when you come back from that and you’ve got your second largest home crowd of the year waiting for you to pick you up off the deck, that made a huge, huge impact on our young men and on our program.
“The community support in Bozeman has just been phenomenal. And they have not allowed us to wallow in the disappointment of short-term results and to stay focused on what can be accomplished long term. And this is for all those folks that helped us in those moments.”
Standing in the way of Montana State’s entry into the field of 64 — and the first Big Sky Conference NCAA Tournament win since 2006 — is a hungry group of Tigers that want to prove to the world that Grambling State has more to offer than the “World Famous Tiger Marching Band” or the legend of Eddie Robinson, the legendary football coach who won 408 games and put HBCU football on the map.
When thinking of Grambling State, people also think of a lineage of some of the greatest black athletes to come through HBCUs, a list highlighted by Naismith Basketball Hall of Famer Willis Reed and Super Bowl winning quarterback Doug Williams. Outside of Reed, it’s rarely ever basketball when Grambling State comes to mind, at least until Wednesday.
The Tigers endured a brutal non-conference schedule that included nine losses in a row, including six to teams (Colorado, Iowa State, Dayton, Washington State, Drake, Florida) that are in the NCAA Tournament field. But the stretch run has included nine wins in the last 10 games and an opportunity for Grambling State basketball to make history.
“The history of Grambling and the tradition of Grambling makes it special,” Jackson said. “When you think about the history and tradition, first you start off with Coach Eddie Robinson. Coach Rob was one of the most incredible coaches that ever walked the face of this earth.
“Every time I’m on campus I always feel like I’m walking around greatness from Coach Rob to Doug Williams to Coach Hobdy, who was the basketball coach who has the most wins in the state of Louisiana.
“It’s just a lot of tradition at Grambling. A lot of tradition and it’s exactly what our university slogan is: It’s where everybody is somebody.”
To be a somebody that gets a shot at the top-seeded Boilermakers, the Tigers will have to get through a Bobcat squad that wants to continue affirming there is life after Sprinkle. And if MSU can get through Grambling, the Bobcats will head to Indianapolis to take on Purdue. The winner of that game will play the winner of Sprinkle’s 8th-seeded Aggies against No. 9 seed TCU.
A No. 16 seed has only beaten a No. 1 seed twice. But it happened last season when Farleigh Dickinson won a play-in game then toppled Purdue.
Before history will even have a chance to repeat itself, Montana State will have to harness and carry its momentum from the last several weeks and last several seasons. Logie knows that it will take a little bit of wizardry.
When asked about filming a TV news golf segment when he first got hired at MSU, Logie couldn’t help but put it into the universe that sometimes, you need a little magic to make a run when the calendar turns to March.
“If I remember correctly, we fought a little bit of weather that day on the golf course. I’m not sure if you noticed, but I did stick a water bottle up and catch lightning in a bottle on one of the holes.
“I just tried to tuck that away for March and make sure we could release it here at the right time.”
