NC State, Oakland not approaching NCAA Tournament second round game as ‘Cinderella’
PITTSBURGH — If there’s anyone in 11-seed NC State’s locker room that is familiar with what the Wolfpack will run into against 14-seed Oakland in the NCAA Tournament second round Saturday night, it’s junior forward Mohamed Diarra.
A year ago, Diarra was at Missouri, which earned a 7-seed and faced 15-seed Princeton in the second round. That ended in a 78-63 win for the Ivy League champs — not the way Diarra and his teammates wanted to end last season.
But he has learned a pivotal lesson from that. Diarra said the Tigers didn’t approach the game the right way because they were playing a mid-major squad, and it cost them in the end.
This time around, Diarra wants to avoid a repeat performance of that season-ending defeat, which was the last time he wore a Missouri uniform.
“We have to approach it in a different way,” Diarra said Friday afternoon. “More concentration. If we underestimate this team, they’re going to beat us by 20. We can’t do that. I don’t want to experience that because I already did last year.”
Well, it does not seem like NC State is going to underestimate Oakland. The Golden Grizzlies sent 3-seed Kentucky packing moments before the Wolfpack took the court in the Steel City after Jack Gohlke hit 10 three-pointers in the win. That win set up the lone contest with a pair of double-digit seeds between the Golden Grizzlies and the Wolfpack in the tournament’s Round of 32.
The red and white obviously know what Oakland can do on the floor, especially after it eliminated one of the premier blue blood programs in college basketball.
While NC State is aware that Oakland isn’t a lucky mid-major, the Golden Grizzlies are not calling themselves the underdog this weekend. When Gohlke was interviewed on the court after he helped push Oakland past Kentucky, he emphatically wanted to remove the label from his team.
“We’re not a ‘Cinderella,’” Gohlke told CBS’ Evan Washburn after his career-best 32 points.
But where does this confidence come from? Oakland, a team that owned one Quad 1 win the regular season, is battle-tested. The Golden Grizzlies lost at Ohio State, Illinois, Drake and Dayton during the regular season. Those contests allowed Oakland to confirm that it could battle power conference opponents.
Oakland leading scorer Trey Townsend thought dropping the “Cinderella” label is all about belief.
“You can’t really put that mindset on yourself because you’re already shooting yourself in the foot if you think you’re lesser than your opponent,” Townsend said. “You have to have the utmost confidence and believe that you’re just as good, if not better than, the team you’re playing. I think that’s what we’ve been doing all year long and it’s gotten us this far.”
Oakland ditched the underdog title, and some thought NC State, another double-digit seed, was one too. But the Wolfpack, which is the first team to make the Round of 32 after losing 10 of its last 14 games in NCAA Tournament history, does not want it either.
“I don’t think we should see ourselves as a ‘Cinderella,’” graduate guard DJ Horne said. “We knew from day one we were a good basketball team, it was just a matter of figuring a few things out. The fact that we have it figured out now, it’s just us playing NC State basketball.”
NC State has won six straight to get to this point in the NCAA Tournament, so that is a logical answer from the Pack’s leading scorer. The Pack’s star forward, DJ Burns, wanted to reintroduce the red and white to the rest of the country.
“We never felt that way,” Burns said with a smile. “Everyone else felt that way, and that’s why we say, welcome back.”
