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Before The Bracket Busting – Mercer

Mercer coach Bob Hoffman has led the Bears to at least 24 wins in each of the last three seasons. (AP)
Mercer head coach Bob Hoffman has led the Bears to at least 24 wins in each of the last three seasons. A win in the 2014 NCAA Tournament would tie the school single-season record for victories (27), which was set in 2011-12.  (AP)



–by Adesina O. Koiki

In the 2014 NCAA Tournament, “Dunk City” may very well be replaced by “Senior Moments.”

Mercer University, the private school approximately 75 miles southeast of Atlanta, will make its first appearance in the Big Dance in 29 years after it avenged its conference tournament final loss from a year ago and took out last season’s NCAA Cinderella, Florida Gulf Coast, in the Atlantic Sun Conference Tournament final last Sunday. Though the result might lead many casual observers to lament the extinction of a swashbuckling, chicken-dancing-on-the-sidelines redux, the pedigree the Mercer Bears possess might make them more likely than any other mid-major in 2014 to cost you your billion-dollar bracket.

It stars with their starters; each member of the quintet is a senior, and the Bears are the only team in D-1 to have started five seniors in every game this season. Guards Langston Hall (A-Sun Player of the Year) and Bud Thomas, along with forward Jakob Gollon and center Daniel Coursey (A-Sun Defensive Player of the Year) have started 102 games together while in Macon. Hall, Thomas and Gollon are all 1,000-point scorers in their careers, while Coursey is just shy of that milestone (908). The fifth starter, Anthony White, Jr., is in his second season at Mercer after transferring from junior college.

“It’s truly a blessing, because they allow us to coach them, and I get on them like crazy and I praise them when they do great things,” said sixth-year head coach Bob Hoffman, who won his second consecutive A-Sun Coach of the Year award after the regular season. “They are from tremendous families and they respond the right way, and no matter if I’m not doing all I should or maybe I’m not coaching as good as I can, it just continues to amaze me how ready they come every day and they’re willing to give their best. That day-to-day process is why we’ve been good.”

How good they have been, despite residing in relative college basketball obscurity in the A-Sun, is well known in the South, especially around Southeastern Conference circles. The Bears won in Oxford against Ole Miss on Dec. 22 on a buzzer-beating three-pointer by Hall, and last season, Mercer defeated Florida State in Tallahassee, Alabama in Tuscaloosa and eliminated Tennessee in Knoxville in the first round of the NIT. In 2012, Mercer was one of the few schools in the country to end its season with a win, claiming the championship of the CollegeInsider.com Postseason Tournament, winning at Utah State in the championship game. (Utah State had gone 100-6 in its last 106 home games prior to losing to the Bears.) In fact, Mercer has won 30 true road games over the past three seasons, and excelling while playing in unfamiliar environs – much like what occurs during the Big Dance – generally translates into, at the very least, having a modicum of NCAA Tournament success.

*All wins vs. D-1 opponents only
*All wins vs. D-1 opponents only

“We play hard every game, obviously, but being a mid-major school, we do kind of have a chip on our shoulder,” says Thomas, Colorado’s Mr. Basketball in 2009 and 2010 who fell in love with the school upon his arrival for a recruiting visit roughly 1,500 miles away from his home in Highlands Ranch. “Individually, we weren’t recruited by the bigger schools as we would have liked but we’re just as talented as them, and we play better as a team than some of the high majors we’ve gone up against. They may look at us and think it’ll be an easy game. I can’t speak for them, but if they do think that, they’re mistaken. We’ve proven that to be true in the past.”

The personnel Mercer can put on the floor, size wise, usually matches up with almost any team from a power conference. “We have a couple of 7-foot guys, 6-11 guys, and when you play high majors, sometimes, if you’re a team out of a conference like ours, you might not be able to throw big bodies in there and that could cause you some difficulty,” Hoffman said. “But we can play small or big, and that’s what makes us unique and that’s why we’ve been able to be successful against those teams, most of them winning on the road.”

Another matchup nightmare for opponents is point guard Langston Hall, one of the nation’s elite point guards who became the first player in A-Sun history to record over 1,500 career points and 600 career assists.  Hall cemented Mercer’s spot in the field of 68 with 15 points, seven rebounds and three assists in the title game in Fort Myers against FGCU on Sunday. Hoffman doesn’t hesitate to call Hall a superstar.

“He can pass, he can shoot, he can drive, he can do it all,” said Thomas about Hall.

Despite all of the victories, as well as that postseason tournament championship just a few seasons back, Hoffman knows that the perception of his team, given its mid-major status, won’t budge easily.

“We haven’t done anything in the NCAA Tournament since 1985, so I understand that we’re not associated with that, from that standpoint,” Hoffman said. “But if you took it by looking at it on paper and what these guys have done and who’ve we’ve beaten and who’ve we played this year…I’m not saying anybody is wrong from it. That’s the nature of where we are in our sport. It’s really hard for teams in certain leagues to make moves, and it takes multiple years, I think, of people believing it to finally happen.”

The sharpshooting Thomas has made five or more three-pointers in a game six times this season. (Photo: MercerBears.com)
The sharpshooting Thomas has made five or more 3PT in a game six times this season. (MercerBears.com)

Year One of that process was agonizingly close to being 2013, when the Bears, outright A-Sun champions in the regular season, hosted Florida Gulf Coast in the conference tournament title. After a nip-and-tuck first half in which Mercer trailed by two at intermission, FGCU pulled away almost immediately after the second half started to launch itself into the Big Dance – and into becoming household names after wins against second-seeded Georgetown and seventh-seed San Diego State in the NCAA Tournament South Region – and launch Mercer into a state of “What if?”

“It was definitely tough for all of us,” Thomas remembers. “We knew they were a great team. The bottom line is that all of us and all of our coaches felt like that should have been us.”

Hoffman added: “The amazing thing is that right after we got beat, in the press conference that night, I said I felt like they would have a great chance to win games in the tournament because I felt like we would. I was happy for them, happy for [then-FGCU head coach] Andy Enfield, happy for our league, but I know it was difficult to watch in some regards because you believed you could have had that chance and have that opportunity.”

The opportunity might have come one year later than they would have desired, but the chance to make their own mark in the NCAA Tournament has arrived for a team that has been through everything together in the past four seasons. Almost all of Mercer’s most productive players will only have this one chance to dance, and Hoffman knows his team will make most of that opportunity.

“I couldn’t be for a team more than I am for this one,” Hoffman said. “I’ve coached for a long time and these guys deserve it, and I hope we can find a way to get them where they want to be, because they’ve been a blessing to coach.”


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