Ahhh. Now this feels like March. Thursday in Portland, the Memphis Tigers will play Boise State in the first round of the NCAA tournament. The game will take place just shy of eight years since Memphis last played in the Big Dance (a second-round loss to Virginia on March 23, 2014). It’s hard to imagine in these parts, but there are Memphis high-school kids with virtually no memory of the Tigers playing in college basketball’s showcase. After all, it was two American presidents and a pandemic ago.
In this season’s spirit of renewal, a few not-so-random thoughts on the Tigers’ return to Madness:
• Just how long was the Tigers’ seven-year drought without a dance card? You have to go all the way back to 1972 to find such a dry period. Then Memphis State, the Tigers did not qualify for the NCAA tournament for 10 years, from 1963 through 1972. In 1972, though, only 25 teams qualified for the tournament. Without a conference championship, a program had little chance of competing for the big prize. Today, it’s a 68-team field. As many as six or seven teams from hoops-rich conferences like the ACC, SEC, or Big 10 make the field. There was no tournament in 2020 as the pandemic took hold, but the Tigers’ seven-year absence from this event is just about as long as we can take.
• It’s been even longer — 13 years — since the Tigers advanced to the tournament’s second weekend, the Sweet 16. Memphis won at least two tournament games four straight years, from 2006 to 2009, reaching the regional finals (“Elite Eight”) three times (2006-08), and the 2008 championship, where the Tigers lost to Kansas in overtime. The program enjoyed a similar four-year run from 1982-85 (the Keith Lee years), reaching the Sweet 16 each season and the Final Four in ’85, where they lost to Villanova in the national semifinals.
• Penny Hardaway is the ninth coach to lead Memphis to the NCAA tournament. He appeared as a player in the 1992 and ’93 tournaments, helping the Tigers reach the Elite Eight as a sophomore. No Memphis coach made it to the Big Dance in his first season at the helm. It took Penny four.
• Larry Kenon scored 34 points in the first round of the 1973 tournament, setting a single-game Memphis record that stood for 36 years. Roburt Sallie — hardly a name that rolls off the tongue of Tiger fans — found his range in the opening game of the 2009 tournament and scored 35 points to establish a new standard.
• The Tigers will be led by a point guard who grew up in Memphis and wears number 10 on his jersey. For fans with some mileage on their tires, this should look familiar. Andre Turner led the Tigers to the NCAA tournament four consecutive years (1983-86), hit a game-winning shot on their way to the 1985 Final Four, and established a career assists record (763) that will never be broken. If Alex Lomax conjures the Little General this month, their could be a lot to celebrate.
• How unique was freshman Jalen Duren’s 21-point, 20-rebound performance in the quarterfinals of the American Athletic Conference tournament? In four full seasons as a Tiger, the great Keith Lee never had a 20-20 game. Ronnie Robinson had three in three seasons. Larry Kenon remarkably had seven 20-20 games in his only college season, helping the Tigers reach the 1973 Final Four. Enjoy Duren in the Big Dance. He’ll be dunking lobs in the NBA a year from now.
