By Bill Koch
As former UC coach Mick Cronin leads his UCLA Bruins into the Sweet 16 this weekend, it’s worth noting that Cronin also coached the last UC team to advance that far in the NCAA Tournament.
That was in 2012 when the Bearcats, who entered the tournament as a No. 6 seed, beat Texas in the first round and knocked off Florida State in the second before falling to Ohio State in the Sweet 16 in Boston.
The Bearcats finished 26-11 and advanced to the final of the Big East tournament, knocking off Georgetown and top-seeded Syracuse along the way, only to lose to Louisville in the championship game. They were the first UC team to make it to the Sweet 16 since 2001, and remain UC’s only Sweet 16 team in the last 20 years.
And yet, you don’t hear much about the 2011-12 Bearcats except when the topic of the brawl against Xavier comes up.
“People don’t look at it and talk about it like what we were,” said Cashmere Wright, the point guard on that team. “We always felt like any team that Cronin had wouldn’t get the respect because he came after (Bob) Huggins and people felt like that era was better. So of course we didn’t get the same respect that Huggins’ players got. That’s just how we always looked at it.
“It’s one of those things. We could go to the Sweet 16 and do things that other teams didn’t do, but it still didn’t matter. Even though we were in a harder conference and playing against better competition every night, we still didn’t get credit for the things that we did.”
The fight in the Crosstown Shootout turned out to be the turning point for UC. The Bearcats were 5-3 after falling to the Musketeers and lost four players, including forward Yancy Gates, to suspension as a result of the fight. They came back to win their next seven games and 10 of their next 11 after changing their offensive approach out of necessity.
“(At the beginning of the season) Cronin was going for more of a big-man type offense, so all the plays went through the high post,” Wright said. “When Yancy got suspended, it allowed the guards to control the offense. We went from an offense predicated on bigs to really allowing the guards to dictate where the ball goes. It was less structured.
“For the first time, he actually allowed us just to play. He didn’t care too much who shot what shot. It was just play basketball. He trusted us a lot more.
"It was enjoyable. It probably was the best year I had. It was a complete change from what everybody was used to seeing for the past four or five years.”
When Gates returned after serving his six-game suspension, he did his best to fit into the new approach. “In all credit to him, he let the team know that he was going to come back and fit in with us,” Wright said. “It wasn’t going to be a battle with us going backwards to that old offense. He said, I like what you guys are doing and I like how this is working. We made sure he got his touches, of course, but for the most part it was still predicated on the guards.”
The Bearcats finished the regular season with five wins in their last six games, including a 60-56 win over No. 17 Louisville and a 71-62 win over No. 8 Marquette, so they entered the Big East tournament filled with confidence, having earned a No. 4 seed behind Syracuse, Marquette and Notre Dame.
UC’s first game in the tournament was against No. 5 seed Georgetown. Gates, who failed to receive even honorable mention on the all-Big East team despite averaging nearly a double-double in points and rebounds, made a statement by scoring 23 points with eight rebounds and three steals in the Bearcats’ 72-70 double-overtime victory over the 13th-ranked Hoyas.
“It’s the best game he’s ever played at Cincinnati,” Cronin said after the game.
UC then knocked off top-seeded and second-ranked Syracuse, 71-68. The Bearcats held a 17-point lead with 10:27 left in the first half, but the outcome was in doubt until Justin Jackson made a breakaway dunk with one second left. It was only the seventh time in school history that UC had beaten a team ranked second or higher, and the first time since 1998, when it upset No. 1 Duke in Alaska.
“Against Syracuse (and its trademark 2-3 zone) you’re going to get open shots, you just have to make them. and we felt like we had the better shooters on our team,” Wright said. “And we did something different. We played them zone as well. We kind of gave it back to them. Once we started making shots, it slowed the game down, which made it kind of hard for them to come back and win.”
Next up was Louisville, a team the Bearcats had beaten just a few weeks earlier. UC fell behind by 16 with 8:26 remaining, stormed back to get within four, but couldn’t finish the job, and lost to the Cardinals, 50-44.
Once UC reached the Sweet 16 to face Ohio State, much of the talk leading up to the game was about how the Bearcats had upset the Buckeyes in the national championship game in 1961 and 1962. The individual matchup that everyone wanted to see was between Gates and Ohio State forward Jared Sullinger.
UC erased a 12-point deficit in the first half and took a four-point lead with 11:34 to play on Gates’ 3-point play. But OSU went on a 17-1 run to put the game away. Sullinger finished with 23 points and 11 rebounds. Gates, playing his final game in a UC uniform, scored only seven points with five rebounds. But the player who really hurt UC was Deshaun Thomas, who scored 26 points, 20 in the first half. Wright paced UC with 18 points before he fouled out with 1:38 remaining.
How good was the 2011-12 UC team?
Redshirt sophomore Sean Kilpatrick was the leading scorer with 14.3 points per game, followed by Dion Dixon (13.0), Gates (12.2), Wright (10.9), and JaQuon Parker (9.4).
Gates ranks 16th on the Bearcats’ career scoring list and 10th in rebounding. Wright, the only player in school history with at least 1,200 points, 450 assists and 190 steals, ranks first in steals. And Kilpatrick, who became a first-team AP All-American as a senior, is UC’s second-leading all-time scorer behind Oscar Robertson with 2,145 points.
The Bearcats played in each of the next seven NCAA tournaments after that season, but have yet to return to the Sweet 16, their most serious quest falling short in 2018 when they squandered a 22-point lead in the second half against Nevada.
After he left UC, Wright played overseas for four years. He lives in Cincinnati and coaches the JV team at Clark Montessori in the Cincinnati Public Schools system. He’s happy to see his former coach back in the Sweet 16 with UCLA.
“I love it,” Wright said. “He gets a chance to show all the people that he’s really good at coaching Xs and Os and teaching the game. He was a younger coach when he had us. I can tell the difference in his growth as a coach and how he coached now vs. then.
“He still yells, but you can tell he’s a little less micro-managing and more letting them play and be themselves. When he coached us, he tried to get us to play a certain way. Sometimes it made the offense look stagnant because people were hesitant to do things. When you watch his team play now, they’re not hesitant. They’re not afraid to make a mistake. There’s no quick pullout. Mick was the pullout king (at UC). If something happened, you were definitely coming out of the game.”
As former UC coach Mick Cronin leads his UCLA Bruins into the Sweet 16 this weekend, it’s worth noting that Cronin also coached the last UC team to advance that far in the NCAA Tournament.
That was in 2012 when the Bearcats, who entered the tournament as a No. 6 seed, beat Texas in the first round and knocked off Florida State in the second before falling to Ohio State in the Sweet 16 in Boston.
The Bearcats finished 26-11 and advanced to the final of the Big East tournament, knocking off Georgetown and top-seeded Syracuse along the way, only to lose to Louisville in the championship game. They were the first UC team to make it to the Sweet 16 since 2001, and remain UC’s only Sweet 16 team in the last 20 years.
And yet, you don’t hear much about the 2011-12 Bearcats except when the topic of the brawl against Xavier comes up.
“People don’t look at it and talk about it like what we were,” said Cashmere Wright, the point guard on that team. “We always felt like any team that Cronin had wouldn’t get the respect because he came after (Bob) Huggins and people felt like that era was better. So of course we didn’t get the same respect that Huggins’ players got. That’s just how we always looked at it.
“It’s one of those things. We could go to the Sweet 16 and do things that other teams didn’t do, but it still didn’t matter. Even though we were in a harder conference and playing against better competition every night, we still didn’t get credit for the things that we did.”
The fight in the Crosstown Shootout turned out to be the turning point for UC. The Bearcats were 5-3 after falling to the Musketeers and lost four players, including forward Yancy Gates, to suspension as a result of the fight. They came back to win their next seven games and 10 of their next 11 after changing their offensive approach out of necessity.
“(At the beginning of the season) Cronin was going for more of a big-man type offense, so all the plays went through the high post,” Wright said. “When Yancy got suspended, it allowed the guards to control the offense. We went from an offense predicated on bigs to really allowing the guards to dictate where the ball goes. It was less structured.
“For the first time, he actually allowed us just to play. He didn’t care too much who shot what shot. It was just play basketball. He trusted us a lot more.
"It was enjoyable. It probably was the best year I had. It was a complete change from what everybody was used to seeing for the past four or five years.”
When Gates returned after serving his six-game suspension, he did his best to fit into the new approach. “In all credit to him, he let the team know that he was going to come back and fit in with us,” Wright said. “It wasn’t going to be a battle with us going backwards to that old offense. He said, I like what you guys are doing and I like how this is working. We made sure he got his touches, of course, but for the most part it was still predicated on the guards.”
The Bearcats finished the regular season with five wins in their last six games, including a 60-56 win over No. 17 Louisville and a 71-62 win over No. 8 Marquette, so they entered the Big East tournament filled with confidence, having earned a No. 4 seed behind Syracuse, Marquette and Notre Dame.
UC’s first game in the tournament was against No. 5 seed Georgetown. Gates, who failed to receive even honorable mention on the all-Big East team despite averaging nearly a double-double in points and rebounds, made a statement by scoring 23 points with eight rebounds and three steals in the Bearcats’ 72-70 double-overtime victory over the 13th-ranked Hoyas.
“It’s the best game he’s ever played at Cincinnati,” Cronin said after the game.
UC then knocked off top-seeded and second-ranked Syracuse, 71-68. The Bearcats held a 17-point lead with 10:27 left in the first half, but the outcome was in doubt until Justin Jackson made a breakaway dunk with one second left. It was only the seventh time in school history that UC had beaten a team ranked second or higher, and the first time since 1998, when it upset No. 1 Duke in Alaska.
“Against Syracuse (and its trademark 2-3 zone) you’re going to get open shots, you just have to make them. and we felt like we had the better shooters on our team,” Wright said. “And we did something different. We played them zone as well. We kind of gave it back to them. Once we started making shots, it slowed the game down, which made it kind of hard for them to come back and win.”
Next up was Louisville, a team the Bearcats had beaten just a few weeks earlier. UC fell behind by 16 with 8:26 remaining, stormed back to get within four, but couldn’t finish the job, and lost to the Cardinals, 50-44.
Once UC reached the Sweet 16 to face Ohio State, much of the talk leading up to the game was about how the Bearcats had upset the Buckeyes in the national championship game in 1961 and 1962. The individual matchup that everyone wanted to see was between Gates and Ohio State forward Jared Sullinger.
UC erased a 12-point deficit in the first half and took a four-point lead with 11:34 to play on Gates’ 3-point play. But OSU went on a 17-1 run to put the game away. Sullinger finished with 23 points and 11 rebounds. Gates, playing his final game in a UC uniform, scored only seven points with five rebounds. But the player who really hurt UC was Deshaun Thomas, who scored 26 points, 20 in the first half. Wright paced UC with 18 points before he fouled out with 1:38 remaining.
How good was the 2011-12 UC team?
Redshirt sophomore Sean Kilpatrick was the leading scorer with 14.3 points per game, followed by Dion Dixon (13.0), Gates (12.2), Wright (10.9), and JaQuon Parker (9.4).
Gates ranks 16th on the Bearcats’ career scoring list and 10th in rebounding. Wright, the only player in school history with at least 1,200 points, 450 assists and 190 steals, ranks first in steals. And Kilpatrick, who became a first-team AP All-American as a senior, is UC’s second-leading all-time scorer behind Oscar Robertson with 2,145 points.
The Bearcats played in each of the next seven NCAA tournaments after that season, but have yet to return to the Sweet 16, their most serious quest falling short in 2018 when they squandered a 22-point lead in the second half against Nevada.
After he left UC, Wright played overseas for four years. He lives in Cincinnati and coaches the JV team at Clark Montessori in the Cincinnati Public Schools system. He’s happy to see his former coach back in the Sweet 16 with UCLA.
“I love it,” Wright said. “He gets a chance to show all the people that he’s really good at coaching Xs and Os and teaching the game. He was a younger coach when he had us. I can tell the difference in his growth as a coach and how he coached now vs. then.
“He still yells, but you can tell he’s a little less micro-managing and more letting them play and be themselves. When he coached us, he tried to get us to play a certain way. Sometimes it made the offense look stagnant because people were hesitant to do things. When you watch his team play now, they’re not hesitant. They’re not afraid to make a mistake. There’s no quick pullout. Mick was the pullout king (at UC). If something happened, you were definitely coming out of the game.”
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