Makai Mason was already living the dream of many a young basketball player, one that’s about to get even sweeter.
The Greenfield native will become the first player in Franklin County history to start in an NCAA Tournament game when his 12th seeded Yale Bulldogs take on fifth-seeded Baylor Thursday afternoon at 2:45 in Providence, R.I.
“It’s like a dream come true,” Mason said Sunday night, hours after he and the Bulldogs discovered their tourney seed. “You always obsess about playing in the tournament growing up, so it’s going to be pretty cool to play in it.”
Mason is just the third area player to participate in the NCAAs, as far as I can tell. I believe the only other local basketball players to be on a roster in the NCAA Tournament were the Burns brothers from Greenfield, older brother Ross, who was a UMass walk-on, and younger brother Tim, who was a reserve guard on the Cinderella George Mason team that made the 2005-06 Final Four. Adam Harrington never played in the tourney but did realize another dream by playing in the NBA.
I spoke to Mason back in December and at that time he said that getting the opportunity to play in the NCAA Tournament would be a dream-come-true. At that time, Mason’s Bulldogs were 5-5, since when the Bulldogs have won 17 of 18 games, their only loss coming to Princeton. The finish helped Yale clinch its first postseason berth since 1962.
Mason and the Bulldogs (22-6 overall) were one of the teams featured on CBS during the Selection Show Sunday evening. A camera crew was on hand, showing the team in the school gym when they were named a 12th seed. Mason was even mentioned by name during the broadcast, when CBS analysts mentioned that the Bulldogs were capable of pulling off a first-round upset.
There is good reason for Mason’s name to be mentioned when talking about the Yale basketball team. The 6-foot-1, 185-pound sophomore starting point guard is tied with senior forward Justin Sears for the team lead in scoring at 15.8 points per game. He leads the team in minutes (32.0) and assists per game (3.7), while shooting 43.2 percent from the field and 37.6 percent from beyond the 3-point arc.
He is so talented that NCAA.com did an article a couple of days ago entitled “March Madness: 9 guards who can lead a Cinderella run.” The article tried to predict if any of this year’s mid-majors have a guard capable of carrying a team like Steph Curry did in 2008 by putting Davidson on his back and leading it to the Elite 8. Mason’s photo accompanies the story, and he is one of the nine featured guards.
Even if he does not lead his team deep into the tournament, he has already led the team to a successful season. Yale, which punched its ticket for the tournament on March 5 in its regular-season finale on the road against Columbia. The Bulldogs needed to win that game to clinch the Ivy League regular-season title. The Ivy League is the one league in the nation that does not play a conference tournament, so the regular-season champions get the automatic NCAA Tournament bid.
Last season, Yale was in a similar position but wound up tied with Harvard atop the Ivy League at the end of the season, forcing the teams to play a one-game playoff for the automatic bid. The Crimson edged Yale, 53-51, leaving Yale on the outside looking in.
That moved Yale’s postseason drought to 53 seasons, but this year the Bulldogs left no loopholes. If Yale lost the season-finale against Columbia (the third best team in the Ivy League), it would have opened the door for Princeton to force a one-game playoff and the Bulldogs would have been in the same predicament as last season. But Mason and the Bulldogs did not let that happen. Led by Mason’s game-high 22 points, Yale smoked Columbia, 71-55, to win the league title outright with a 13-1 record in conference.
“Columbia is a great team; they’ve proved it all year,” Mason said. “But we felt like we gave away a chance last year and we didn’t want to miss another opportunity.”
Mason spent much of Sunday with his teammates but also found time to go golfing with his dad, Dan Mason. He then got together with the team in the evening to watch the Selection Show, waiting for his team to get the nopd.
“It was exciting,” he said of the experience. “We had no idea where we were going to play.”
What they found out was that they would be playing as close to home as was possible, getting slotted as the 12th seeds in the West bracket, which meant their first two games would be played in Providence, R.I.
“It’s kind of cool that it’s in Providence,” Mason said. “It’s definitely more of an advantage to be closer to home and to have a nice little fan base there.”
Mason said that initially the team thought they might be a 13 seed but had been hearing about the possibly sneaking up to 11 or 12. As for who they might have been playing, he said players really had no clue, although names like Kentucky and Maryland were being thrown around. He admitted that he would not have minded playing Duke. The Bulldogs have already played the Blue Devils this season, suffering an 80-61 loss in November.
What the Bulldogs got instead was a Baylor team that plays in the Big 12, arguably the best conference in the country this season. The Bears (22-11) are currently ranked 21st in the AP Top 25 Poll, and 18th in the Coaches Poll, and no team in the country played a tougher schedule this season, thanks to Baylor playing in the brutal Big 12, as well as non-conference foes like Oregon, Vanderbilt and Texas A & M, all tournament teams.
But that doesn’t mean Baylor is unbeatable. I’ve seen the Bears play a few times this season and spent Monday browsing some scouting reports on both teams. Here’s what I got:
Even though the Bears played a much-tougher schedule, they only won two of 11 games against teams in the RPI Top 25. That being said, Yale also challenged itself this season with games against teams like Duke, USC and SMU, but the Bulldogs did not win any of them. They did play SMU (which is a Top 25 team but was not eligible for the postseason) to a two-point loss (71-69), possibly its best result of the season. Yale wound up with just one win against a team ranked in the RPI Top 100.
The game is going to be decided by whether Yale can exploit a weak perimeter Bears defense, or if the Baylor frontcourt proves to be too dominant for the Bulldogs to handle. Baylor is huge up front, with Taurean Prince (15.5 points per game), a versatile forward, as well as Rico Gathers and Johnathan Motley, two big men who average 11 points per game. Baylor ranks 13th in the nation in rebounding, which could spell trouble for Yale if the Bulldogs’ shots aren’t falling.
That said, Yale does not have size but makes up for it in positioning and actually ranked third in the nation in rebounding margin and 17th in in offensive rebounds per game. And Sears, who Mason tied with for the team lead in points per game, is a 6-foot-8 forward (the tallest player on the team) who is the two-time Ivy League Player of the Year.
But like I said, Yale is going to need a huge game from its guards if it’s going to beat the Bears. Baylor allowed opponents to shoot 37 percent from 3-point land (295th in the nation) and also ranked 233rd in turnovers per possession this season. Oh, and Baylor lost in the first round last season and comes into the game just 5-7 in its past 12 games.
“Baylor is obviously going to be pretty talented but I think we’ve shown that we can battle those teams,” Mason said. “We’ve had a tough non-conference schedule and are a confident team coming into the tournament.”
Yale has had to contend with the distraction of having team captain Jack Montague, who averaged over 9 points per game, kicked off the team recently for allegations of sexual misconduct. On Monday, Montague’s attorney announced that the senior is suing Yale. Bulldogs’ coach James Jones seems to have the team focused, however, and Yale has been playing without Montague for a month.
There are some other numbers that go in Yale’s favor. Earlier on Sunday, before the seeds were announced, I spoke with Mason’s father, who said he was hoping Yale would get a 12-seed because over the past seven years, the 12 seeds have won 15 of 28 matchups against fifth seeds. What he didn’t say was that no 12 seeds won last year.
Baylor opened as a five-point favorite over Yale, the lowest line of any 5-12 matchups. That line had risen to six points as of Monday evening.
Anyone looking for the game Thursday can find it on CBS. The game is scheduled to start at 2:45 but will depend on when the first game of the day being played in Providence between UNC-Wilmington and Duke ends.
A quick note to those filling out brackets: in the past six years, 11 seeds have won half of the 11-6 matchups, and in the five years since the NCAA started playing the “First Four” games, at least one team emerging from those games has made the round of 32 (meaning they also won their next game), and the winner of Wednesday night’s non-16 seed matchup has never lost its second game (so we should expect the Michigan-Tulsa winner to beat Notre Dame on Friday).
Jason Butynski is a Greenfield native and Recorder sportswriter. His email address is jbutynski@recorder.com. Like him on Facebook and leave your feedback at www.facebook.com/jaybutynski.