March Madness: Can Hofstra return to Long Island as Sweet 16 team?
Joshua DeCady departs Hofstra on Wednesday morning as the team heads to Tampa, Fla., for the NCAA Tournament. Credit: Thomas Hengge
As the buses pulled away from the Hofstra campus on a chilly Wednesday morning carrying the men’s basketball team toward its NCAA Tournament fate with little fanfare, it was hard not to think about what their return to that exact spot will look like in a few days’ time.
Perhaps they will slink back to the rear doors of the arena on Saturday with another one-and-done effort for the school that has never won a game in four previous visits to this stage. That’s most people's expectation. Or maybe they will return with the satisfaction of a first tourney win mixed with the disappointment of a season that ended with a loss on Sunday. That would be pretty neat.
Then again, they might be back as something bigger than anyone can imagine, the kind of Sweet 16 national phenomenon that people talk about for years, feted with parades and streamers and more fans than the bandwagons can hold . . . and at least one more trip ahead of them to the Midwest Regional in Chicago next week.
It’s not as absurd as it sounds. UMBC in 2018, St. Peter’s in 2022, FDU in 2023, they all got on their buses the same way Hofstra did, stowing their gear and their dreams in the bins under the cabin. So too did George Mason in 2006 and VCU in 2011 and they took their rides all the way to the Final Four. Unlike the weather this month there is always a team that comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion.
That’s the magic. That’s the madness.
Hofstra, seeded 13th and facing No. 4 Alabama in Tampa on Friday afternoon, could very well be the next school to become an agent of chaos against all those daring little brackets and etch its name into the annual memory jog of upstart upsetters. At least one No. 13 seed has beaten a No. 4 seed in 28 of the 39 tournaments played since the field was expanded to 64 teams in 1985.
So why not Hofstra?
“This is our moment right here,” said Speedy Claxton, the coach of the Pride, before the team left. “Anything is possible.”
The odds are certainly stacked against Hofstra. It is facing a rising SEC power that reached the Final Four just two years ago (using one of Hofstra’s former players it poached through the transfer portal, Aaron Estrada, to help it get there). It is going against a team that averages 91.7 points per game while Hofstra has topped that amount just once against a Division I opponent this season when it scored 92 against William & Mary in the CAA quarterfinals (Hofstra did put up 95 on Division II Molloy and 92 on Division III Old Westbury back in the fall). And it is unlikely to have the benefit of a sneak attack. As Claxton pointed out earlier this week, Alabama coach Nate Oats “grew up in the mid-major ranks” as coach of a Buffalo team that upset Arizona in 2018. That was one of those times a 13 beat a 4 seed. “He’s been on the other side of this thing,” Claxton said.
“We’re the underdog, and that’s to be expected,” Claxton said of his team’s undeniable status. “But we’re not going to go out there and play like underdogs. We fully expect to go out there and win this game.”
So maybe if Alabama loses its shooting touch and Hofstra can control the pace a bit and the Pride’s star guards Cruz Davis and Preston Edmead get hot and two or three dozen other little things happen in the Long Island team’s favor — as they have been doing all season, by the way, and may continue to with Alabama’s second-leading scorer Aden Holloway potentially sidelined due to an arrest for felony marijuana possession earlier this week — well, who knows?
And the winner of the Hofstra-Alabama game will face either No. 12 Akron or No. 5 Texas Tech on Sunday. One of them is a fellow mid-major and the other has been a major mid since losing its best player, JT Toppin, to a torn ACL a month ago. This little cul-de-sac in the bottom right corner of the bracket isn’t exactly Death Valley. Hofstra is a 13 seed in the Midwest but it might have gotten a better draw than No. 5 St. John’s did in the East!
Another good omen for Hofstra? Like when the top two seeds in the CAA Tournament, Charleston and UNC Wilmington, unexpectedly crumbled in the quarterfinals and opened the path for the Pride to step right through and onto the dance floor? The thing about omens is that they only make sense afterward.
First, they have to beat Alabama.
“I know we are all really excited for this opportunity,” Davis said. “We’re just going to have fun playing. And we’re going to win this game.”
If they do, then they’ll return to Long Island as the new standard for the program.
If they win two, they’ll come back as something even bigger, something they said they have been striving to become all season long:
Legends.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
