If you watch a lot of one team in any sport, you get familiar with the anecdotes the announcers like to spin during lulls in the action. They get to be like reruns of your favorite sitcoms.
I think during every single Akron game I watched this year, the commentators told of how junior guard Cedrick Middleton goes to the gym every morning at 6:30 to work on his game.
Big deal, gym rat stories are a dime a dozen. The extra footnote the announcers put on Middleton's story is that he started his morning ritual after last year's MAC semifinal loss to Toledo because, "He didn't want to experience that kind of pain again." They always emphasized the word pain: "that pain again."
Middleton has been my favorite player for some time (no, really. I can prove it). He's one of those one-man momentum turners, like Reggie Miller: liable to dunk, steal the inbounds and lay it in, get the rebound on the other end, bring it up himself and drain a three; one of those guys who can just do things that makes the home crowd go berserk.
Unlike other players with similar qualities, he's pretty reliable and consistent, even when he's not bringing the game to his knees. He was Akron's leading scorer for much of the year in conference play, and did I mention he comes off the bench to do all this? Naturally, he took home the MAC Sixth Man of the Year award.
There's a lot of interesting and talented players on the Akron basketball team, but I only have one favorite, and this just seemed like an enchanted year for the Zips. They entered the MAC Championship Game 26-6, with the six losses by a combined 20 points and no loss by more than six. Sometimes you can just feel the championship vibe a team gives off, and this year Akron gave off that vibe.
I don't care to relive the horror of the dying seconds of the MAC Championship Game, and I'm sure most have you seen the highlights of Doug Penno (a name that will live in infamy as far as I'm concerned) banking home the buzzer-beating three-pointer as time expired to give his team a one-point victory.
What you might not know about is the sequence of events that led to the buzzer beater. Akron led by as many as nine with less than 10 minutes to go, and decided to try to utilize the clock to guide them to victory, using up the shot clock on every possession and trying to make stops at the other end.
I call it "playing not to lose" and I normally cannot stand it when teams play this way. It's an attempt to back your way into victory rather than going for the jugular and doing the things that got you that big lead to protect in the first place.
But, I didn't really mind Akron doing it. I mind when underdogs do it, but for Akron, a team I considered superior to Miami (though they had split the season series), it seemed like a sensible thing to do: they're just a few minutes away from ending a 21-year NCAA drought and fulfilling what feels like a destiny — let's just get this scoreboard clock down to all zeroes.
Of course, Akron's shot clock-beating attempts were forced, heavily defended, and would not go down, and Miami was able to quickly capitalize on the other end until they had tied the game.
Akron finally got a field goal to drop with about 30 seconds left, and a Miami shot with eight seconds came off the rim and into the hands of an Akron player, who was fouled with 6.6 seconds to go. A player who had made 70% of his free throws on the year.
Cedrick Middleton.
I won't soon forget the look on Middleton's face when he took to the line. I won't claim to know what was going on in his head. I won't claim I gained some sort of unassailable insight from the pixels of my television.
But it wasn't what I would call a look of confidence. I said out loud to myself, "Uh-oh. He's dreading this. He feels the weight of all this." An ignorable school with image problems and budget shortfalls needed this win. I, and an awful lot of other people, were firmly latched on to Cedrick Middleton back as he stepped to free throw line, and it's hard to shoot free throws that way.
It was a one-and-one. The first and only free throw kissed the front of the rim so lightly that it didn't even bound into the lane, but fell easily to one of the Miami forwards stationed under the basket. You know what happened next.
It was the most painful loss I've ever experienced as a fan. It's hard to describe. It was just so cruel, and personal.
The pain of the loss was aggravated in the most severe, surreal way the following day, when ESPN2 led off their NIT selection show by featuring Akron, and then moved on to Clemson and a couple other teams. Host Mike Hall then said, "So those teams are in, let's go to the brackets and see who else is." Except Akron was not in. In the modern NCAA/NIT structure, Akron is the first team to win 26 games and be passed over by both tournaments.
In fact, they are only the third team to win 26 games and not make the NCAAs, but no Akron fan was expecting an at-large bid to the Big Dance with our RPI (61) anyway. To be passed over by the NIT, though ... well, Akron has the highest RPI over any team not invited to a postseason tournament, and the 11 teams following Akron are also all dancing, including some that snagged NIT at-large bids. Hofstra is one. Akron's only real achilles heel is a weak schedule and a pedestrian conference. Hofstra's strength of schedule was only slightly higher than Akron's, and although they play in a stronger conference and beat a couple big dance teams (in conference, at home), the RPI accounts for that sort of thing and still put Akron in front of them.
It was nice that even the mainstream media took note of the gyp. Yahoo!'s Dan Wetzel spent a couple paragraphs on Akron's plight, suggesting the NIT should just disban if they don't think Akron merited inclusion. ESPN's Joe Lunardi called it the biggest snub of either tournament.
So be thankful this isn't your team. If you're good, you're dancing, and being terrible is less painful than this.
But as much as this hurts for me, as shell-shocked as I felt in the 24 hours that started with the buzzer-beating bank shot and ended with the NIT snub, I can't imagine how those directly involved with the Akron basketball program must feel. I feel especially awful for the seniors.
Of course, the lion's share of my sympathy goes to a player that will be back for one more year ... a guy who, one year ago, started busting his ass in they gym because he couldn't stand the pain of a season-ending loss that did not come down to the wire and that he was not in a direct position to prevent.
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