What Went Right: Northwestern State
The demons of the Gulf Coast
Sorry for the delay; here’s episode 2 of the What Went Right/Wrong offseason series, which will run through the month of May. A 40% off for a year code is below!
While this episode of What Went Right (inasmuch as these are episodes) is harder to pin down as a team overcoming its underachieving decade, it’s still a fascinating case study of a team that Once Was. The average reader of this site likely knows little-to-nothing about Northwestern State men’s basketball. I, a college basketball obsessive, knew just a slim amount of facts about them myself. They were as follows:
They’re located in Louisiana.
They wear purple.
They beat Iowa in the NCAA Tournament as a 14 seed on one of the more unlikely three-point makes I can remember.
Amazingly, the above is the least bad video that’s readily available. Aside from that, it’s not a program with a ton of notable history. They’ve made three NCAA Tournaments, with the best performance being the one you see above. They won the very first play-in game in 2001. They’ve won their regular season and conference tournament titles three times each, though only once in the same season. Among the main 13 teams that were in the Southland Conference from 2013 to 2022, the Demons ranked 8th in conference wins. They were rarely awful, but let’s put it this way: the last time they won the Southland regular season title, “You’re Beautiful” by James Blunt was the #1 song in America.
For 23 years, the Demons had the same coach on the sideline in Mike McConathy, who racked up 330 wins and the school’s lone NCAA Tournament victories. Rather than continue on, McConathy elected to retire at age 66 after a rough seven years in which the Demons finished above .500 in the Southland just twice. In his stead came Corey Gipson, a longtime assistant and Austin Peay alumni that I frankly knew pretty little about.
For schools like Northwestern State, those that live on the fringes of Division I men’s hoops, most of what happens in the first two months of the season can be taken with huge grains of salt. Many a team in the 300s of KenPom will spend the majority of November and December away from home, in team buses, traversing America, collecting moderate paydays to play teams with Real Money who will likely beat them by 25. Infrequently, these teams will do something that make you pay attention, but only for the final 10 minutes of a game or so.
And then there’s what Northwestern State managed before the New Year.
To the untrained eye, one more used to the results of an SEC or Big 12 team in November/December, this won’t look impressive. To a team Northwestern State, this was success beyond their wildest dreams. Over the previous five seasons, Northwestern State had gone 0-34 against teams in the KenPom top 150. Average margin of loss: 26 points. Only a couple had even finished within single digits.
And yet, there it was: a momentary Upset of the Year in mid-November against a TCU team that was a preseason Top 25 team and would make the Round of 32.
That would be the blip we’d traditionally talk about for most teams, but the Demons kept it rolling. TCU became a road win over Stephen F. Austin, a team they’d lost 16 of 19 to. Then a home win over a Southern Miss team we profiled who’d go on to win 25 games. They couldn’t pull off further shockers over Baylor or Texas A&M, but the Demons were within 8 against both opponents in the final 3 minutes of each game.
This was, and is, deeply unfamiliar territory for a team not used to this level of play. If you isolated just their November and December performance, Northwestern State had a resume nearly equal to Creighton’s. How’d they pull off such a sudden overnight shift?