Miami, trailing and listless for much of the first 30 minutes of its round-of-8 game against Texas on Sunday, mounted a stunning, compact comeback in the men’s N.C.A.A. tournament to claim the last spot in the Final Four next weekend in Houston.
Miami, which won, 88-81, will play in its first national semifinal on Saturday against Connecticut. San Diego State, which beat Creighton on a late free throw earlier Sunday, and Florida Atlantic round out the field.
The Hurricanes, calm and persistent, got off to a fast start but quickly fell behind the speedy, sharpshooting Longhorns, who were playing before an overwhelmingly pro-Texas crowd in the same arena where they had captured the Big 12 Conference tournament championship earlier this month.
Miami was down 13 points with 13 minutes left, but the Hurricanes began creeping back, setting up a steadying, then game-tying stretch when it strung together a series of defensive stops and a run of free throws. Forward Norchad Omier coolly hit two of them when the game was tied with a minute left.
Miami was plodding, initially too much but eventually with purpose, lacking the same kind of mercilessness it showed during its convincing win over top-seeded Houston in the round of 16 on Friday.
Yet it mounted its late run precisely when it seemed like the Longhorns and their burnt-orange-clad fans were ready to celebrate the clinching of a home-state advantage next weekend. Throughout the game, with their team comfortably ahead and in control of the pace, Longhorn partisans bounced to the team’s fight song and wagged their hands with the school’s signature Hook ‘em Horns gesture.
Miami ignored the crowd and instead drew on the relaxed, confident personalities of its key players and its famously optimistic coach, Jim Larrañaga.
“We called a timeout and I said to them, ‘We just need to calm down and play better. There’s no big secret in this,’” Larrañaga said.
Before cutting down the net of the basket where they sealed their victory, the Hurricanes dumped a modest pile of orange and green victory confetti on themselves from a water cooler.
Both teams featured players who typify the mobility and commercialization of modern college basketball. Texas started four transfers, including its hard-charging graduate point guard Marcus Carr.
Miami was led by Jordan Miller, a 6-foot-7 senior who scored 27 points and had a crucial steal with two minutes left. The team was also paced by two guards, Isaiah Wong and Nijel Pack, who played in Coral Gables, Fla., this season in part because of lavish name, image and likeness arrangements worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. When Miami had the ball on Sunday, it was often controlled by Pack, who scored 15 points by drifting in and out of scoring lanes, soaring to the hoop for delicate finishes and stepping back for short fadeaways.
A Texas victory on Sunday would have declared the re-emergence of the state’s flagship university near the top of the sport, 20 years after its last appearance in the Final Four. The team’s interim head coach, Rodney Terry, led the Longhorns on a deep run after Chris Beard, their first coach this season, was suspended, then fired following a domestic dispute with his fiancée in which charges were dropped.
“I’ll love them for the rest of their lives,” Terry told reporters after the game amid tears. “I’ll be at their weddings. I’ll be talking to those guys when they have their first born.”
Miami, which also beat Indiana and Drake in this tournament, bested Texas inside and shot nearly 60 percent from the field. The Hurricanes initially struggled to rotate on defense and to recover from screens to stop Texas’ 3-point shooting.
“I tell the players all the time, when you’re in games, whether you’re ahead or behind, don’t play the score, play the game,” Larrañaga said.
Outside its games, Miami this season has faced regular questions about the influences of money in its program, with Wong and Pack being two of the sport’s most prominent examples of the sway of new rules and state laws allowing athletes to profit from sponsorships. University boosters have been eager to subsidize winning teams, beyond the athletic department’s budget. Clustered in their small locker room at T-Mobile Center on Saturday afternoon, Miami players and coaches denied — some of them uncomfortably — that the new wealth of some of their teammates had factored into the culture of this year’s team.
Do the more well-compensated players ever buy their teammates dinner? Kotie Kimble, an assistant coach, searched for an answer he seemed to already know. “Hey, Christian, do you get dinner bought from any of your teammates?” he asked, looking at Christian Watson, a freshman guard sitting nearby. Watson said “no,” sheepishly. “No dinners. No dinners,” Kimble said.
The group instead describes its culture this way: calm, together, loose. “We all love each other,” Wong said after Sunday’s game. “And we’re all just here sticking to each other.”
Even while down by 8 points, Pack and Miller strolled onto the court for the second half smiling and chatting. In timeouts down the stretch, even when losing, the Hurricanes looked steely as they listened to Larrañaga, who mostly paced the sideline with his hands in his pockets, rarely yelling or gesticulating like Terry did.
Larrañaga marveled after the game about the ways his players deputize themselves as leaders, pointing out that Omier had taken his coaching seat during a timeout on Sunday to instruct his teammates himself.
Some of the secrets to Sunday’s comeback might also lie with Larrañaga’s ideas about mental health. He has fashioned himself a kind of behavioral guru, relying on Bob Rotella, a close friend and sports psychologist, for advice on keeping himself and his roster calm, players and coaches said this weekend.
Larrañaga, in character, was ruminative in Kansas City. “I tell them this all the time every day, over and over again. You have to go through life with a positive attitude,” he said on Saturday. “Life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it.”
His team’s late-arriving success on Sunday amounted to one of the most important reactions in the program’s history.
San Diego State slipped past a familiar opponent.
Back in November, when Creighton set out for the Maui Invitational, the Bluejays stopped in San Diego and the next day shared a charter jet to Hawaii with the San Diego State team. Memories of Creighton’s overtime win over San Diego State in the first round of the men’s N.C.A.A. tournament the previous March might have led to some awkward moments.
But the two coaches, Greg McDermott of Creighton and Brian Dutcher of San Diego State, sat across the aisle from each other, poring over film on their laptops, trading scouting reports and ruminating about the possibility of playing each other again in the early-season tournament.
They did not, at least then. And when the teams flew back to San Diego, dropping the Aztecs off, the coaches — and their teams — bid each other adieu.
See you down the road.
That meandering road carried both teams to a place they had never been before, a regional championship in which the coaches and players — including two brothers, Creighton’s Arthur Kaluma and San Diego State’s Adam Seiko — marveled at the serendipity of it all.
“I never thought we’d be playing them here or I would have tried to steal a few play calls off his computer,” Dutcher mused.
The next time the two coaches get together, the bounds of fraternity will be tested after San Diego State rallied for a 57-56 victory on Darrion Trammell’s free throw with 1.2 seconds left. The game was so thick with turns and tension that it did not end until well after what turned out to be the final buzzer.
San Diego State, which had only twice before been to the second weekend of the N.C.A.A tournament, will play ninth-seeded Florida Atlantic, the champion of the East Region, on Saturday in Houston with a berth in the national championship game on the line.
The deciding play came as San Diego State ran the clock down for the final shot.
Trammell drove to the lane with Ryan Nembhard on his right hip and let loose a floater that just grazed the rim as the buzzer sounded. But rising above the cacophony, as Trammell lay on the court, was the whistle of the referee Lee Cassell.
Soon, Trammell went to the foul line with the crowd on its feet, four teammates behind him — and the entire Aztecs bench — locking arms. Trammell’s first free throw rolled off the rim, and the crowd’s roar grew even louder.
He took two dribbles, a deep breath and swished the next one.
Baylor Scheierman, who played quarterback in high school, inbounded the ball and threw a long pass toward Kaluma and San Diego State’s Aguek Arop near the other endline. They tipped the ball out of bounds as the buzzer sounded. The officials, though, waved both teams back to their benches and reviewed the play to see who had touched the ball last and whether there was any time left.
After a few minutes, they ruled that time had expired. San Diego State players sprinted onto the court to celebrate.
The final six seconds “felt like an eternity,” Arop, the San Diego State forward who is from Omaha, said on the court after he and his teammates cut down the nets.
McDermott, who shouted at the officials as they left the court, said he did not get an explanation of the ruling that time had expired. The N.C.A.A. said in a statement that the review indicated that the clock started late. McDermott declined to criticize the foul call.
“Two teams played their tails off,” he said. “Officiating is part of the game. We’re not going to go there. We lost a game because we didn’t do enough and San Diego State did.”
Dutcher, noting that he was an assistant at Michigan when it beat Seton Hall for the national championship in 1989 on a controversial foul call, appreciated McDermott holding his tongue. “It’s hard. That’s what we all do is have some grace in losing even though we may not agree with the call,” Dutcher said.
San Diego State guard Lamont Butler had 18 points on 8 of 11 shooting, and was set to take the final shot until Creighton fouled him with six seconds left, forcing the Aztecs to take the ball out of bounds but also turning off the shot clock.
Trammell, a transfer from Seattle University who had scored 21 points to help carry San Diego State to an upset of top-seeded Alabama on Friday, had made only 5 of his 14 shot attempts and had not been to the free-throw line until the final second.
When he stepped to the line after missing the first attempt, Trammell said he reminded himself that he’d shot 1,000 free throws in the last week and that the moment was not too big for him. “I just had to believe in that,” he said. “Just having that confidence that, yeah, I missed the first one, but I definitely wasn’t going to miss the second one.”
San Diego State, which enjoys a raucous home-court advantage, has been an N.C.A.A. tournament regular out of the Mountain West Conference, but it has been cast in the shadow of Gonzaga and the Pac-12 Conference teams of the moment. Nevertheless, this is a moment that the program has long believed would come.
“You picture the belief when you sleep, you picture the belief when you work out, and you hope that the dream comes true,” said Nathan Mensah, San Diego State’s 6-foot-10 senior center, who contributed 8 points, 6 rebounds and 3 blocks. “Finally that dream came true for us.”
The game unfolded as a contrast of styles, Creighton’s artful, free-flowing offense finding its way against San Diego State’s muscular, methodical brand of basketball.
It was played largely at San Diego State’s preferred pace, but Creighton played almost exclusively with the lead, fending off repeated Aztec charges until the final minutes.
After Creighton surged to a 28-20 lead, urged on by a largely blue-clad crowd, San Diego State finally figured out how to keep the Bluejays’ 7-foot-1 center, Ryan Kalkbrenner, from having his way diving to the rim for alley-oops or putting his nifty post moves to use. Mensah did yeoman’s work against Kalkbrenner, who led Creighton with 17 points.
When Trammell sank a jumper near the free-throw line, San Diego State had finally gotten even with less than three minutes left in the half. But Creighton didn’t allow another basket and carried a 33-28 lead into the break.
San Diego State came storming out of the locker room, and when Mensah blocked consecutive shot attempts, sparking a fast-break lay-in by Butler, the Aztecs had their first lead, 35-34.
Again, it did not last long. Kaluma answered with a driving layup and San Diego State went cold, missing its next 10 shots — many of them on drives to the rim. But the Aztecs leaned on their defense and depth, wearing down the Bluejays after halftime. Creighton shot just 28 percent in a second half in which it tied a season-low 23 points for a half. The Bluejays missed all 10 of their 3-point attempts in the half.
The parents of Kaluma and Seiko, along with their two young sisters, sat a few rows up at center court wearing customized white T-shirts with a basketball, both schools’ logos and the names and numbers of the brothers.
When the game was over, their two sons exchanged a hug in the handshake line and Seiko told Kaluma he loved him. In that moment, they also acted as exemplars for their teams, one of which cut down the nets while the other felt like it had its hearts cut out.
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