ST. LOUIS – Another day, another opponent who was a lot better last season than the Miami Hurricanes.
But then, who wasn’t?
Another day, another crowd that will not be on their side. They don’t mind.
Another day, another chance to make waves, in a revival nobody saw coming.
The greatest turnaround story in college basketball gets its moment on the big stage Sunday. Miami's record went from 7-24 to 26-8 in one Earth lap around the sun, matching the sharpest U-turn in victory total that Division I has ever seen. How did this not get more attention? Maybe partly because of what was going on at the other Miami.
No matter. The Hurricanes are ready for their closeup now, going against surging Purdue Sunday. Upset the Boilermakers, advance to the Sweet 16, and nobody will miss what has been going on in Coral Gables.
Come to think of it, what has been going on?
“It all kind of starts with the chip that we had, us against everybody mentality,” Jai Lucas was saying Saturday. Jai Lucas, age 37, son of John Lucas and most recently assistant at Duke. He had never been a head coach one day in his life until Miami hired him this season, but apparently required no breaking-in period. Anyway, let him continue, “It started early on with where we were picked in the league, towards the bottom (eighth), not having any Big Monday games and kind of just being, oh, it’s Miami.”
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There's a new roster, heavy on the transfers. But not this has not been any random rebuild of vagabonds. True, the core of the team includes Malik Reneau from Indiana, Tre Donaldson from Michigan and Ernest Udeh Jr. from TCU. That’s hither and yon. But note that Reneau is from Miami, Donaldson is from Tallahassee and Udeh is from Orlando. Lucas wanted native sons of the Sunshine State if he could find them. He also found starting freshman forward Shelton Henderson at his old high school back in Houston, while starting freshman guard Dante Allen is another Miami native.
The transformation from ugly duckling record to 26 wins, Lucas said, “just shows that we had the right people in the building.”
As important as anything, there's a new purpose, from the young coach trying to establish himself to a batch of new faces eager to do the same thing.
You could hear that from Reneau when he said, “The main thing is, just we're fighting for our lives.”
And from Donaldson when he listed an important component of his coach as “just his want to prove he belongs here. That chip on his shoulder would be the biggest thing. Him keeping that chip on his shoulder and pushing us to whatever that chip may be to us each individually to keep that chip on our shoulder as well, and have that push us and drive us to play hard, do the things that other teams don't want to do.”
You can hear it from Allen when he says of Purdue, “We'll play against anybody, no matter the conference, wherever they're from. So I think to kind of carry over that chip, knowing that it's games like this that we wanted with the team, with the name, with the players that they have.
"It's going to be a fight, but it's nothing that we'll ever shy away from.”
So it would seem. “We want to win," Udeh said before the tournament began. "We are not here for an experience or here to lollygag.”
There can be no lollygagging Sunday when Miami faces a Purdue team that just tore through the Big Ten tournament and has trailed for only nine minutes in the past five games. Since the state of Indiana is not that far away, the Boilermakers will have a friendly crowd as well.
No big deal to the Hurricanes, who faced down a Missouri crowd here Friday night. Here is what they heard as they took the floor Friday night, BOOOOOO! “Just added fuel to the fire,” Reneau said. Probably be the same thing Sunday. “I embrace the villain role. I like it. I like playing on the road,” Donaldson said. “It kind of gives you a little motivation, got everybody going against you. Proving 17,000 people wrong is really fun. I enjoy it. And I feel like our team takes on that role, as well.”
That’s a big part of the Miami story, how a program once so beatable is now so hard-minded. The Hurricanes also shoot 49.9 percent from the field and out-rebound their foes by eight a game, which doesn’t hurt.
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“I wanted to make sure we had a clear identity of who we needed to be and how we were going to win and why the team was built the way it was built,” Lucas said of Saturday about Job 1 when he took over. “So one of the first meetings it was, all right, everybody, Malik is going to be our leading scorer. It's just the way we're going to play, how we're going to operate. Is everybody good with that? Everybody was like, yeah, we're good with that.
“So just trying to give them as many answers before we got started I felt helped us, because it kind of took that pressure off everybody. This is what we're doing, this is why we are going to be good, this is how we're going to be good and this is how we're going to execute it. Just try to do that as simple as possible.”
Now here they are with their chips locked and loaded, especially Donaldson and Reneau, who as former Big Tenners have been around the block a few times with Purdue.
“I would be naive to think that it's not going to be some type of emotion that comes with it,” Lucas said. “So for me, it's try to get them to stay as level-headed as possible, but also letting them live in the moment a little bit and just go out and attack it.”
Perhaps the schedule had something to do with the Lucas miracle cure not getting more national juice. The Hurricanes didn't beat a ranked opponent until North Carolina in February. Because not every ACC team plays one another, they never saw Duke. Lucas and his renaissance against his old employer? Yeah, that would have been noticed.
And so will Sunday if they win.
