March Madness: Arkansas-Little Rock is in the NCAA Tournament
By Jason Lisk
Conference: Sun Belt (19-16)
Location: As you might suspect, Little Rock, Arkansas
Famous Alum: Derek Fisher, who has played in the NBA for forty-seven years and won 13 NBA championships (facts! don’t bother even confirming them), is the best-known player to come from Little Rock.
They’re Back! Arkansas-Little Rock is in the tournament for the first time since 1990, when they were destroyed by Larry Johnson, Stacey Augmon, Greg Anthony, and the rest of the National Champion UNLV Running Rebels in the first round. Their only tournament victory was in 1986, in an upset over Digger Phelp’s Fighting Irish with David Rivers.
School’s Leading Scorer: Jerry Rook (2,153 points) who played at Little Rock in the early 1960’s, and had a brief stint with the New Orleans Buccaneers of the ABA.
Resume: They owned the city of Tulsa, with their best non-conference wins coming against Tulsa and Oral Roberts. Little Rock had a losing record before winning four straight to win the Sun Belt tournament.
A #4 seed . . . if this were a Napolean Basketball tournament: Little Rock will be the shortest team in the tournament, with four guys that play a lot who are 6’0″ or shorter. They have gotten this far because they can shoot the three pointer. The five players who have played the most minutes have all attempted 50 or more threes and made over 35%, and the team averages 39.7% from three. Solomon Bozeman leads the team in scoring, and hit the three pointer with 1.5 seconds left to put them in the NCAA tournament. It will be interesting to see if they increase the minutes for their bigs who have mostly been role players, because Courtney Jackson is the only player over 6’3″ who played more than 35% of the time.
All-Important Rankings: 191 (RPI), 210 (Pomeroy), 48 (Sagarin)
Projected Seed: I feel pretty comfortable in projection you will see UALR in a “First Four” game on Tuesday or Wednesday night as a #16 seed.
Twitter: Solomon Bozeman (@solomonbozeman), who hit the shot that put them in the tourney, has 3 tweets and 11 followers. Let’s congratulate him for his big shot.
Others with their dance ticket in hand:
Indiana State
Belmont
Morehead State
UNC Asheville
Old Dominion
St. Peter’s
Wofford
Oakland
Gonzaga
Butler
Northern Colorado
Bucknell
at larges:
[photo via Getty]