Air Force men's basketball will play North Dakota in CollegeInsider.com Tournament

Before the season, the men’s basketball teams at Air Force and North Dakota had to get out of last place in their conferences before they started dreaming of postseason play.

The Falcons and Fighting Sioux were each picked to finish last in their respective conference in preseason polls, but surprised plenty of people this season and will meet Tuesday at Clune Arena in the first round of the CollegeInsider.com Tournament. The game will start at 7 p.m.
North Dakota coach Brian Jones said he knows Air Force coach Jeff Reynolds a bit, mostly because before this season North Dakota ran the Princeton offense, which the Falcons run. Jones said he sees similarities between the two teams.

“They’ve been young but they’re maturing, like us,” Jones said. 

The Fighting Sioux’s turnaround to Great West Conference champs this season has been shocking because it came with a freshman-dominated team. Five of North Dakota’s top six scorers are freshmen – the Fighting Sioux get a greater percentage of their points from freshman than any other team in Division I.

“They’ve played extremely well,” Jones said of his freshmen. “The first part of the year they didn’t know how to win. It took them a half year to learn how to win at the Division 1 level. They’ve grown into that.”

North Dakota, in just its third year in Division I, went 19-14 this season. That’s an 11-win improvement from last year. In the conference tournament, third-seeded North Dakota won two games by a point and another by two points to get a postseason bid. The Great West Conference does not have an automatic NCAA Tournament bid for its conference tournament champion, but does get an automatic bid to the CIT.

“Good team who has played very well winning six in a row,” Reynolds said via text message Sunday. “Well coached with good skill players.”

One concern Jones has is how much energy his team has left. Through the end of the conference tournament, the Fighting Sioux had a 14-day stretch in which they were home for about 12 hours. They went on a road trip before the conference tournament and were stranded because of weather and plane issues. They came home briefly before flying to Utah for the conference tournament, and then their conference tournament championship game lasted two overtimes. North Dakota beat South Dakota 77-76 on a 3-pointer by Josh Schuler in the final seconds.

“Because we made postseason play, the adrenaline will kick in,” Jones said. “Our thing is how much energy we’ll have in the first few minutes until that second wind kicks in.”