Ed DeChellis relaxed in the Navy coaches’ locker room about 90 minutes before the Midshipmen tipped off against Virginia Tech on Friday evening in the eighth annual Veterans Classic at Alumni Hall.
It was DeChellis who came up with the idea to play a doubleheader either on or right around Veterans Day every year and to bring three good teams to the academy to spend a day as tourists and then an evening playing basketball.
The concept has worked. Michigan State, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio State, Alabama and Maryland, among others, have come to “The Yard,” as Navy’s campus is called, to take part. That’s the good news. The bad news is the Mids have had to play ranked teams most years.
On Friday, Navy didn’t play a ranked team — at least not one ranked right now — but it played a very good team, one that was more than ready after the Mids walked into John Paul Jones Arena on Tuesday and beat 25th-ranked Virginia, 66-58, to open their season.
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“It was very special,” DeChellis said of that win with a smile, the classic coach who doesn’t want to make too big a deal out of any victory. “It was a great atmosphere in there, very loud, especially when they made their run in the second half. It was cool beating Georgetown last year, but we were surrounded by cardboard cutouts, not real fans. This was different.”
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The Mids made eight of 12 three-pointers in the first half and led by seven in the second. Back came Virginia to tie the game at 55 with 8:45 to go.
Game over, right? That’s what happens when a home team gets its act together after falling behind against a visitor it knows it should beat. That’s what happens when an ACC team that won a national championship three seasons ago picks up the pace against a Patriot League team that last beat a ranked team in 1986.
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David Robinson did not walk in the door to the Navy locker room Tuesday. The Mids won anyway.
Their reward? A lot of pats on the back on the Yard on Wednesday and Thursday — and a game Friday against Virginia Tech, which wasn’t likely to overlook them after seeing what happened to its archrival Tuesday. Coach Mike Young made sure of that, showing his players the tape of Navy-Virginia on Wednesday to give them an idea of just how hard the Mids play. DeChellis knew there would be no sneaking up on the Hokies.
“They’re a team that’s very hard to play against,” he said. “They do something that’s almost unique nowadays. They do what their coach asks them to do. It’s not as if they have a bunch of No. 1 draft picks, but they play as well as you can possibly hope if you’re their coach.”
That coach is Young, 58, who was wildly successful at Wofford and is now in his third season at Virginia Tech. Young reached the NCAA tournament five times in a one-bid conference and went 30-5 in his final season at Wofford, beating Seton Hall in the first round of the NCAA tournament before losing to Kentucky, 62-56.
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Two of his Wofford players are now at Virginia Tech — Keve Aluma, a preseason all-ACC pick, and point guard Storm Murphy. On paper, the notion that players can transfer from a Southern Conference team to an ACC team and thrive is far-fetched. Young is making it work. The Hokies have size and quickness and play hard for 94 feet.
Navy does the same, only with players not as big or as quick. There were times Friday night when the Mids ran a perfect play to an open shooter only to see a Tech defender recover so quickly that the shooter wasn’t open by the time he released the ball. That helps explain why Navy shot 3 for 25 from beyond the arc after going 11 of 21 against Virginia.
This was one of those college hoops nights to savor for the near-sellout crowd of 4,784. The Utah State-Richmond game was played at a remarkably high level for a November game. Both teams will contend for NCAA tournament bids come March. Richmond led 65-63 with 5:38 left before the Aggies finished the game on a 22-9 run, playing close to perfect basketball in those final minutes.
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“They won the game,” said Spiders Coach Chris Mooney, starting his 17th season at Richmond even though he’s not yet 50. “They made big-time plays, and we just didn’t have answers.”
The game was a homecoming for Utah State’s Ryan Odom, who lived two miles from the Yard during his five years as the coach at Maryland Baltimore County, during which he turned the Retrievers around and led them to the biggest upset in NCAA tournament history, their 2018 victory as a No. 16 seed over top-seeded Virginia.
Odom and his wife, Lucia, love Annapolis so much that, after selling their house there, they bought a smaller house across the street so they have the option to come back and visit whenever they desire. “It’ll be mostly Lucia,” Odom said, laughing. “I’ll be a little too busy most of the time for extended visits.”
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One thing that will make his job much easier is the presence of 6-foot-7-inch forward Justin Bean, one of five players on the team who has been on a two-year Mormon mission — which he did right after graduating from high school in 2015.
Bean might be the least-hyped outstanding player in the country. On Friday, he had 30 points and 14 rebounds and made everything look easy. He helped create space for Brandon Horvath, one of two UMBC players who followed Odom west (the other is guard RJ Eytle-Rock). Horvath made four of six threes in the second half to finish with 18 points.
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Unlike the other visiting players who toured the Yard on Thursday, Horvath had been there before. As a high school senior in West River, Md., he was recruited by Navy and took an official visit before deciding on UMBC.
“Great to come home and play in front of friends and family,” said Horvath, who is a graduate transfer. “But also full circle for me since I visited here five years ago. It was nice to come back and remember how special this place is.”
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That’s apparent to anyone who spends time at the academy, and a lot of that comes back to the players. Navy is an experienced team and will be very competitive once Patriot League play begins, even though it has to play yet another ACC team — Louisville on the road Monday — before the schedule finally eases a bit.
The biggest difference between Navy and the other three teams in Alumni Hall on Friday night was probably best exemplified by someone who was not there. While players such as Bean and Horvath, Richmond’s Grant Golden and Jacob Gilyard, and Aluma and teammate Justyn Mutts almost certainly will be paid to play basketball a year from now, Navy’s seniors will be naval officers or Marines.
The one missing starter from last season’s 15-3 team is Cam Davis, the captain and leading scorer. Davis hasn’t gone to sea yet. He’s studying for a master’s degree in ocean technology. At MIT. That’s the place where the students chant “safety school” at Harvard’s starters when the schools play every November.
Enough said.
