By Woodrow Carroll
In spite of a 72-68 victory over the visiting Buffalo Bulls Friday, March 8m the Northern Illinois men’s basketball team had what started out as a very promising season come to an inglorious finish.
The Huskies opened the 2023-2024 campaign with victories in five of their first six outings. Then something bad happened! After that hot start, the Northern’ Illinois men dropped 19 of their remaining 25 games. The team that stood 5-1 early on closed with a final 11-20 record. There will be no opportunity of redemption in the MAC (Mid-American Conference) Tournament this season for which Northern Illinois failed to qualify.
In the past, the Mid-American Conference conducted a conference tournament for all of the teams to determine the automatic conference representative to the NCAA Tournament. For years all 12 members of the MAC had shots at postseason glory no mater how slim the team’s prospects. Not so this season with the bottom four teams in final standings excluded from the tournament. Despite the season-ending victory over Buffalo, the Huskies ended up 11th among the 12 teams the MAC. Buffalo was the No.12 team in the final regular-season standings.
The winner of the MAC Tournament is likely to be the only conference team to make it to the men’s NCAA Tournament. The MAC’s standing in the college basketball fraternity is not similar to that of the Big Ten Conference which is pretty much assured of ending up with multiple teams in the 68-team Big Show. Think about it! It would come as a shocker if Purdue and Illinois, the top two teams in the Big Ten regular-season, were to miss selection.
Toledo finished the leader among the MAC men with a final record of 14-4. The Huskies scored a notable victory over Toledo, 72-68, on the road February 27.
Toledo wasn’t the only quality team defeated by NIU. Arkansas-Little Rock ended up tied for first place in the Ohio Valley Conference. The Trojans were defeated by Northern Illinois during the Huskies’ hot early start.
Northern Illinois ended 5-13 in the MAC with six of those defeats when league play was under way in January. After the promise of a winning season after the Huskies’ hot start in non-conference, an 0-6 record early in conference play quickly ended hopes among the Northern faithful that a winning campaign was in the offing.
Northern Illinois head basketball coach Rashon Burno has completed three seasons at Northern Illinois with a 33-60 overall record. So, you are free to draw your own conclusions.
The NIU Convocation Center (9,100 capacity) is seldom one-third third full for Huskies’ home basketball games. The Convo Center opened in 2002 and has just not had the fans attend games. The edifice is a multi-purpose facility and serves a wide variety of functions. The primary tenants for the facility are for men’s and women’s basketball.
With a 70-57 home loss to Gonzaga last week in the West Coast Conference, the St. Mary’s Gaels suffered their first conference defeat. So, there are no undefeated conference teams in Division-I college basketball. St. Mary’s ended up 16-1 in Conference, one game in front of Gonzaga.
Teams have to be bad to not win a conference game! Four teams did just that this season, Chicago’s DePaul University of the Big East, the Southeast Conference’s Missouri, Cal Poly from the Big West, and Pacific of the West Coast Conference.