By Rob Todor
todor@vindy.com
Quick — can you name the last team to beat the Butler Bulldogs in the regular season?
If you guessed Youngstown State, chances are pretty good you also won your NCAA tournament office bracket contest. Or you need to get out of the basement of your parents’ home more often.
Back on Feb. 3, the Penguins knocked off Butler 62-60 at Beeghly Center. Damian Eargle led YSU with 16 points and nine rebounds. He also had five blocked shots, leading a defensive effort that limited the Bulldogs to just 39.6 percent shooting from the field (23 of 58).
The loss was particularly unButler-like. The Bulldogs had an eight-point lead with four minutes remaining, but YSU went on a 10-0 run to finish the game.
YSU also committed just seven turnovers in that game, and forced 14 by the Bulldogs.
That was huge, according to YSU coach Jerry Slocum, who talked about the Bulldogs on FoxSports Radio’s Game Time Show with Anthony Gargano, Lincoln Kennedy and Jeff Goodman last Saturday.
“They don’t beat themselves. They kind of hang around and wait for you to beat yourself,” Slocum told the radio audience.
“They are so good at sucking the air out of the game. The bottom line is, you’ve got to be able to speed the game up in the halfcourt with ball movement and those kind of things, and then hope [Shelvin] Mack misses some shots,” said Slocum.
Since that game Butler won 14-consecutive games before losing to Connecticut in Monday’s national championship game
During that winning streak, the Bulldogs have been remarkably consistent at the end of games, holding onto slim leads or rallying to claim victory.
“They went to [Shawn] Vanzant at the point [and that] gave them another shooter. More offense,” said Slocum.
“That gave them an extra six, seven points a night. When you’re looking at three-possession games that six or seven points a night is what I feel really made the turnaround.”
By contrast, the Penguins couldn’t build any momentum from that victory, losing four straight games and seven of their last eight to finish the season with a 9-21 record, the eighth time in the last 10 years they’ve lost 20 or more games.
However, Butler’s advancement to the Final Four for the second straight helped YSU — and the Horizon League schools. The league gets about $7 million, with $500,000 given to Butler off the top. (Mainly to pay for things like travel expenses.) The rest gets split 10 ways over the next six years, although the $108,000 figure is misleading, YSU athletic director Ron Strollo said.
“As a league, we sit as athletic directors and try to reinvest that money,” said Strollo, who said much of that money gets earmarked for things like television and Web broadcasts. “Obviously the impact is good for us, but it’s not program-changing.”
Strollo typically budgets for two NCAA games — a Horizon League team has reached the Sweet Sixteen in five of the last nine years — and any extra money gets reinvested into the program. Typically, Strollo said, it’s enough to buy something like new weight equipment.
YSU’s biggest boost has from its visibility in the last few weeks. As the last team to beat Butler, Slocum has made the rounds on national TV and radio and the Penguins were even featured in the first few paragraphs of a recent Wall Street Journal article.
“That’s the kind of stuff that you can’t afford to pay for,” Strollo said. “The key to our business is recruiting and when you’re trying to recruit a kid from Florida or California, it helps that those kids are starting to hear our name.
“It’s not just that we beat them this year, it’s also that we had a chance to get them twice. We played them really well on the road, too. That has a huge impact.”
Vindicator sports writer Joe Scalzo contributed to this report.
