CLEVELAND — The tiny Bay Area school that doesn’t even have a football team has already taken down one team from the conference renowned for its gridiron success. Next up for St. Mary’s is another, much better, team from that same conference.
Don’t expect the Gaels to be overly intimidated, however.
“Alabama is — we all know Alabama,” St. Mary’s coach Randy Bennett said after his team’s 59-56 NCAA Tournament first-round win over Vanderbilt Friday inside Rocket Arena. “They were in the Final Four last year. … The SEC is good. It’s fun to play these guys. Yeah, a good opportunity for Saint Mary’s, a good opportunity for the WCC (West Coast Conference).”
No. 7-seeded St. Mary’s will face No. 2-seeded Alabama on Sunday in the second round of the NCAA tournament. The time of the game will be announced late Friday night or early Saturday morning.
It’ll be an opportunity for the Gaels to get to their third Sweet 16 in program history, and first since 2010. It’s also going to be another opportunity to show that the tiny school from the tiny conference out west isn’t afraid to take the physicality to a team from the big, bad football conference.
That is, after all, exactly how St. Mary’s got past Vanderbilt on Friday afternoon.
“Yeah, it is the size,” Vanderbilt coach Mark Byington said. “A lot of international players, and they play a physical brand of basketball, and we’re used to a physical league, and they just have different ways to kind of take advantage. It’s angles. It’s wedging a guy under the rim for a rebound. It’s screening hard.
“It’s the body blows throughout it. … At certain points, I think we wore down on it, and it is one thing when those guys are that size, they’re not losing any weight or getting any shorter throughout the game.”
The Gaels run a front line that’s more closely resembles the kind of lines blocking for SEC quarterbacks than it does many of the front lines teams like the Commodores or Crimson Tide see on the hardwood. Mitchell Saxen goes 6-foot-10, Paulius Murauskas stands 6-8 and wing Luke Barrett is 6-6, while Harry Wessel brings 7-1 off the bench for them.
The Commodores couldn’t match that size, with 6-8 Jaylen Carey off the bench their tallest player. It also couldn’t handle the pounding that size provides over the course of 40 minutes.
Vanderbilt was flying high for the first 33 minutes, leading by as many as 12. However, once Augustas Marciulionis’ 3-point basket gave the Gaels a 46-45 lead with 6:54 remaining, the Commodores would only once manage to tie the game — at 50-50 — and never again hold the lead.
“It wears those guards out,” Bennett said. “They’ve got to constantly run into those screens and they go over and even their fives got to extend and show and stay until we give up the ball. It’s hard to do for a five-man, just a hard show, basically trap for 40 minutes.
“I did feel that. I thought we were getting what we wanted towards the end, the last 10 minutes maybe. Like we were going to get downhill on them. Then they got to rotate and going off on the boards and then the payoff happens because we don’t make it — you get fouls, and if you don’t make it, you can get that offensive rebound a lot of times, and that’s exactly what happened in that game.”
Chris Easterling can be reached at ceasterling@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow him on X at @ceasterlingABJ
