I should have known something was up when the first person I ran into at the hotel Friday morning was Bob Williams.
Williams, for those of you with short memories, is the patron saint of Elite Eight upsets. In 2001 he coached Schaumburg to a Class AA title-game victory over an Eddy Curry-led Thornwood team that seemed like the surest thing this side of a Kerry Wood arm problem.
So maybe it shouldn’t have been a shock when Downers Grove South stunned heavily favored Thornton 39-37 in the second Class AA quarterfinal at Carver Arena.
It probably shouldn’t have been a shock anyway, considering that favorites have fallen faster than baseball’s image in our latest round of March Madness. This year’s Elite Eight has only four members of the final AP Class AA poll, with No. 3 Carbondale the highest rated team among the survivors.
No. 4 Thornton seemed a lock to advance to a Saturday morning semifinal against Carbondale, which restored some sanity to the proceedings by, as expected, defeating Crane 78-55 in the day’s opener. With Thornton gone, Carbondale is an even stronger favorite to win its first state boys basketball crown, if there really is a favorite in a season like this.
Surely, Downers South would seem to have no business reaching the title game, but it was supposed to have no shot to beat Thornton either, not with a four-guard starting lineup that had only one player, 6-foot-6-inch Elliot Engelmann, taller than 6-1. And South’s prospects seemed even less promising when star guard Bryan Mullins awoke Friday morning with a 103-degree fever, which may have helped lead to Downers South’s five-point first quarter.
“I felt dead early,” said Mullins, who will play for Southern Illinois. “I hadn’t done anything for three days.”
He made up for it with an 11-point second half, not to mention the layup and three-point shot he made late in the fourth quarter to help lift his team from a 36-31 deficit into a tie.
That set the table for teammate Brad Riegler, a future Illinois-Chicago pitcher who fired a three-point strike from the left corner with 10.8 seconds to play.
“It was definitely something I dreamed about,” Riegler said. “To have it happen is amazing.”
Midway through the third quarter, when Thornton’s lead was 11 points, Mullins was having nightmares, flashing back to his team’s 46-44 quarterfinal loss two years ago against Thornwood, which won on its own last-second shot.
“But we made the shot this time,” Mullins said with a relieved smile.
That early exit in 2003 left Downers South with a fierce determination to reach Saturday’s semifinals, which would ensure the Mustangs would leave town with the school’s first boys state basketball trophy.
“Two years ago we played Friday, and that was a great thing,” South coach Paul Runyon said. “But you have to move your goals up.”
They’ll have to move them up again thanks to a stifling defense that held Thornton to 22 points in the last three periods. Part of the credit belongs to 6-5, 220-pound reserve center Kris Caldwell, whose physical defense on Thornton’s Joevan Catron helped hold the 6-6 center to three points after halftime.
Their reward is a Carbondale team that is so balanced all five starters have double-figure scoring averages and features a standout center in 6-6 junior Manual Cass, who had 22 points and 11 rebounds against Crane.
Carbondale finished fourth last year. The Terriers lost four starters from that team but reloaded with the help of Southern Illinois-bound forward Josh Tabb and guard Ray Nelson, both of whom transferred in from Ullin Century for their senior seasons.
That left us with the sight of a Chicago Public League team less dependent on transfers than its Downstate opponent, a helpful reminder that the Windy City didn’t invent hoops transferring, even if it did raise it to an art form.
Of course, teams outside the Chicago area and Peoria, which have tended to dominate these proceedings of late, tend to believe they don’t get enough credit for anything they do in a gym, and they’re probably right.
“Down south there’s no credibility,” Nelson said. “They give all the Chicago teams credibility. But we’ve beaten Westinghouse and now Crane.
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“We proved our point.”
They just have to prove it twice Saturday.
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