Loyola had little fanfare on Nov. 9, 2016, when coach Porter Moser announced the signings of two local high school big men, Cameron Krutwig of Jacobs and Christian Negron of Larkin.
“This is a huge day for Loyola men’s basketball,” Moser said. “To get two players of combined character and talent from our home state is a watershed moment for our program.”
All coaches tend to embellish on signing day, so Moser’s statement was taken with a grain of salt.
But nearly 41/2 years later, his words seem prophetic.
While Negron played only two seasons before transferring to Grand Valley State, Krutwig helped take the Ramblers to the Final Four his freshman year and returns to the NCAA Tournament on Friday against Georgia Tech in Indianapolis as the undisputed leader of an underrated team hoping to repeat history.
Krutwig has developed into one of the best passing big men in college basketball while leading the team in scoring and rebounding.
Moser knows this team’s fate rests squarely on Krutwig’s big shoulders, unlike three years ago when he was just another piece of the puzzle.
“He was a freshman, a big part of what we did, but you can just see how much he has embraced the leadership role,” Moser said Wednesday on a teleconference. “Bringing guys along, like a Jacob Hutson or Tommy Welch. He’s the loudest guy in the gym, but he’s really embraced that this is his team.”
Krutwig and senior guard Lucas Williamson of Young are the two Loyola stars who played key roles in the Cinderella run to the Final Four in 2018. This time the Ramblers won’t be able to sneak up on anyone, and their path is more difficult thanks to some strange seeding.
But no matter what happens this weekend in Indiana, the ascension of the Ramblers program is a tribute to the work ethic and leadership skills of Krutwig, their 6-9 center.
“You always want to leave a place better than you found it,” Krutwig said Wednesday. “No one really knew about Loyola (before the 2018 run), not just because of me and Lucas. There have been guys that have played with us, and we’ve played with great players all four years here, and great coaches.
“You always want to try your best and strive to do what you can. The last four years we’ve been really successful and we’ve all really believed in the message Coach has been telling us.”
That message can be summed up in two short sentences: Play hard. Play defense.
The eighth-seeded Ramblers did both while going 24-4 and winning the Missouri Valley regular-season title and conference tournament. But they face a decidedly uphill challenge in their first-round game against ninth-seeded Georgia Tech
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at Hinkle Fieldhouse.The winner likely will take on No. 1 seed Illinois in the second round Sunday. Even Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, Loyola’s 101-year-old team chaplain, was puzzled by the seeding.
“I’m surprised at the way the brackets have been arranged this year,” she said. “And I think other people are surprised too.”
That would include Moser, who said the NCAA committee’s evaluation tools “didn’t align with the metrics.”
While Moser prefaced his thoughts by saying he needed to be “political” and knows the committee has a “hard job” in the seeding process, he then added: “I felt we did what we could control. In terms of the seeding, it’s out of my control. But what was in our control was they used the NCAA evaluation tool, the NET, and according to that we were nine.
“(Numbers) one through four got all the one seeds, five through eight got all the two seeds. No. 9 got an eight seed. So we’ve got to control what we can control. I’m not at the point, and we weren’t (in 2018) either, of saying ‘Oh, whatever they give us is fine.’ We’ve got to roll with it, but you want to position yourself to win.
“We drew a very, very hot opponent — an ACC Tournament champ and the winner of eight games in a row, you’d think they would get a higher seed than nine as well.”
Before a report that 6-9 Georgia Tech forward Moses Wright, the ACC Player of the Year, would miss the game, Moser said he considered the Ramblers underdogs, even though they’ve won 17 of 18, are the higher seed and go in as four-point favorites. He plans to use the seeding controversy to motivate his team, but Krutwig said that’s unnecessary. The players know the committee undervalued them, but they already have shrugged it off.
“We’re not really big into that kind of stuff,” Krutwig said. “Obviously the numbers and the metrics were on our side, and it worked out how it worked out. We got a tough draw in the first round, the ACC (Tournament) champions, and they’re playing really well right now.
“That was the hand we’re dealt, and we’ve got to work with it, come out and be ready to go. We haven’t really talked about it. That hasn’t fueled our fire that much. There is a feeling on the team we thought we should’ve been higher, but hey, that’s how it works. You can’t change the past. You can only change the future and the present. I’m sure on Friday we’ll be ready to go.”
The only time Loyola has faced an ACC team in the tournament was on March 15, 2018, when Donte Ingram’s buzzer-beating 3-pointer gave them a stirring 64-62 first-round win over Miami in Dallas, kick-starting their Final Four run. By the end of the road, a loss in the semifinals to Michigan, Sister Jean had become a national celebrity and the program was no longer in the shadows of DePaul, the North Side school that staged a similar storybook run to the Final Four in 1979, putting the Blue Demons program on the map.
But DePaul became a national TV darling in the years after and often entered the tournament as a high seed, only to get upset early, sometimes in spectacular fashion. Moser’s program first opened eyes on Dec. 6, 2017, with an upset of No. 5 Florida in Gainesville, Fla., a game in which Krutwig scored 14 points.
They still managed only a No. 11 seed after winning the Missouri Valley Conference. And even after their Final Four run, Loyola didn’t capitalize by signing nationally known recruits. Playing in the MVC limits its TV exposure, and many games this season were hard to find on cable, unlike Illinois or the other Big Ten powers.
Recognition arrived late — but better late than never.
Loyola has spent the last five weeks in the Top 25, its first appearance since the Alfredrick Hughes-led team in 1985, and is No. 17 heading into the tournament. The Ramblers arrived in Indianapolis on Sunday and have settled into a routine while being limited in their activities because of COVID-19 protocols.
“It’s definitely been different (than the 2018 tournament),” Krutwig said. “The thing that kind of sucks about it is you can’t really enjoy it. You try to make the best of it, obviously, but they’re discouraging hanging out with your teammates and stuff, because you never know.
“You’re not supposed to have more than four guys in your room, and (you have to) mask up. It’s definitely a little bit of a bummer there, not to be able to hang out with the guys off the court.
“But we’re going to be enjoy it on the court and in the meetings. Just try to make the most of it.”
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