Note: The PDF featuring the entire MAAC Season Preview, all 31,166 words, and previews of all 13 teams, is available in PDF form at the bottom of this webpage.
The hardest press conference that I do every single year is the loser of the MAAC Championship game. I don’t have a favorite team in the MAAC, but I have a deep appreciation for every single coach, player, athletics official, and person in the conference. To see any of them heartbroken always breaks my heart.
The MAAC Championship Game is a night of celebration. The story I’ll write will focus on the winner, as it did last year with Donny Lind. It was a life-changing night for him, for athletic director Brad Davis, and for everybody who has ever called Mount St. Mary’s University home.
As the mad dash onto the court with confetti ensues, I am there to document it. It’s what I live for: celebrating the champion that we’ve waited all year to crown. Nothing in sports matches the intensity, urgency, and passion of a conference championship game in a one-bid league.
I’m not celebrating as a fan of the team that won; I’m celebrating for the people who poured their lives into that very moment for years upon years, even before I knew who they were or vice versa. It’s dapping up the mascot, the managers, seeing the coaches and players hugging whoever they can find, and crying when they embrace the family members who have supported them through the years.
It’s the happiest moment of the year.
And then, for about 15 minutes, it’s the exact opposite.
Every losing press conference in conference tournaments is difficult, but none matches the one where the team came oh so close to the prize, and just let it slip. Each of the last two years, a double-digit lead was blown in the MAAC Championship Game.
The triumphant music is still blaring from the speakers of the arena, but you could hear a pin drop in the media room in the back of Boardwalk Hall.
Any sort of smile from the high of watching a team celebrate is immediately wiped away when the empty and worn-out faces of the fallen slowly climb the steps to the podium. While it’s the hardest press conference of the year, it’s almost impossible to not feel the gravity of the situation and match the emotional state of the losing team. Because when you’re as invested in the league as I am, every single game is a win, but every single game is also a loss.
The most heartbreaking moments don’t happen on the court. It’s easy to think of the athletes as gladiators when they’re merely competing, but the human moments in the losing press conference are strong and piercing.
But the moment they walk out of the room, it’s back to the euphoric hardwood, because it’s time for the net to come down. Soon after that, it’s back in the media room, but this time, with laughs and smiles.
Every year, I struggle with how to open the MAAC Preview. I was planning on starting with a list of some of my favorite MAAC moments of last season, but if you’re reading this, you probably are already enough of a sicko that you don’t need to be sold on watching the conference.
You don’t need me to remind you about that time when Dejour Reaves beat the overtime buzzer to win a key road game that ended up being a conference title game preview seconds before Deon Perry made a 75-foot heave to knock off Marist on national television. You were watching at least one of those games. You were probably also watching Carmelo Pacheco sink a kick-out three to defeat Niagara after a foul-up-three gone wrong.
And a month later, you sat there shocked when the Mount won three games in three days without both Pacheco and Terrell Ard to win the MAAC Tournament and punch a ticket to the NCAA Tournament.
If you weren’t watching and stumbled upon the preview, welcome to the MAAC. This is the most important thing to know.
I strive to learn as much as I possibly can about the personnel in this conference to write this preview every year, but at the end of the day, this is one of the least predictable leagues in the country, year-in year-out. Throughout my four seasons covering the MAAC, every time I thought I had figured something out about a team or the league, it was almost immediately shattered.
College basketball is already a sport with high levels of variance, but the MAAC has taken that to another level over the years.
26.9% of MAAC games had a margin of three points or fewer after 40 minutes last year – the highest rate in the country. That leads to a lot of tense finishes, and we had just about every single way imaginable to end a MAAC game last year.
So why do I even care to preview the league this deeply? It’s a fair question, but I’ll redirect you to the top of the page. It’s so I can live in the moment of both the winners and the losers from November through April. So you can understand on day one exactly what to look for, and so we can have a paper of record with which the scenes of many future stories are set.
This is now my fourth MAAC Preview, and I’m not just doing it to go through the motions. If going through the motions was conducting 13 half-hour interviews and writing 2000 words on mid-major basketball teams before they play a game, then frankly, I’d be a little concerned. These players and coaches deserve to have the stories of their season told. And this is where it starts.
NOTE: Gavin Doty should be listed on the First Team, while Justice Shoats should be listed on the Second Team for my preseason All-MAAC honors.
