INDIANAPOLIS — A natural-born optimist, Scott Drew did his best to find some sort of potential positive after COVID-19 shut down his basketball team last month.
One day, Baylor was the No. 2 team in the country, unbeaten and really unchallenged. The next day came a pause that was more of hard stop with positive COVID-19 cases and Baylor going 21 days between games and 18 days between practices.
“When the pause hits, your first instinct is, ‘we’re in trouble,’ and especially a 21-day one,” Drew said after the top-seeded Bears put away No. 9 Wisconsin 76-63 Sunday in the NCAA Tournament at Hinkle Fieldhouse.
He only hoped the absence from the game would fuel his players.
“When you’re away from the game for three weeks, you’re watching everyone else play, it makes you hungrier to be back together and to be playing,” Drew said.
His one consolation, one hope was that something good would happen afterward.
Now it has.
Baylor (24-2) is back in the Sweet 16 for the fifth time under Drew and the first time since 2017. The Bears, top-seeded in the South Region, will face the winner of Villanova-UNT next.”It’s real special man,” said junior guard Davion Mitchell, basically crediting everyone in the program. “It wasn’t just us. We all came together. We all had one goal. The job is not finished.”
No, but the Bears have two wins in the tournament, halfway to a Final Four appearance at Lucas Oil Stadium.
Drew saw some of the signs he was looking for during the game and on the stat sheet, especially on defense.
Baylor forced deliberate Wisconsin – still playing a version of Bo Ryan’s vintage system — into an uncharacteristic 14 turnovers that led to 16 points.
Drew pointed to Mitchell, who scored 16 points on 6-of-8 shooting and spearheaded the defensive intensity on the perimeter. Wisconsin guards D’Mitrik Trice and Brad Davison, who torched North Carolina for 50 points combined in the first round, were limited to 8-of-28 shooting.
“You’re never going to shut out a great team like Wisconsin, but you just want to make things as difficult as possible,” Drew said. “Very similar to football, if you’ve got a great quarterback, you’d better put a lot of pressure on them, otherwise they’re going to be just running offense, and I thought our pressure really helped us.”
Wisconsin coach Greg Gard said his team got “a little sped up early,” playing faster than it wanted and credited Baylor.
“They’re athletic, they’re strong, they can put a lot of pressure on at every position, specifically when they go smaller,” Gard said. “So that obviously definitely played a factor in it.”
For a half, Baylor looked like the dominant team that many thought would be the biggest challenger to unbeaten Gonzaga in the tournament. The Bears hit 6 of their final 7 shots in the first half, including a buzzer-beating 3-pointer by Adam Flagler for a 42-29 lead.
Wisconsin (18-13) refused to go away despite falling behind by 18 early in the second half. Three times, the Badgers cut the margin to seven but could get no closer.
“We knew those guys were going to go on a run,” Mitchell said.
“They’re a really well-coached team. We tried to limit their transition, limit their shots, limit their 3s. … We did a really good job stopping the momentum, scoring back to back.”
When Mark Vital threw down a one-hand dunk off a lob by Matthew Mayer, Baylor had a 12-point lead with 2:47 to play -- and an exclamation point.
Mayer, a 6-8 junior, gave Baylor a lift off the bench in both halves with 17 points and six rebounds in 24 minutes.
“I even thought the difference was Mayer, the plays he made off the bench,” Gard said. “When they needed baskets in the second half, he answered for them.”
