For the Toledo basketball program, it’s not quite now or never.
It’s more now or ... what is it waiting for?
As the Rockets head into the postseason with hopes of turning their banner year into The Year, the stars in the midnight blue sky have aligned.
I’ll go so far as to call this Toledo’s best team — relative to the Mid-American Conference field and maybe period — since 1980, which, of course, wistfully endures as the year of its most recent NCAA tournament appearance.
Think about it.
Toledo has won four MAC regular-season championships in the past four decades, and the previous three all came with a yeah, but.
In 1981, the Rockets (21-10, 10-6) shared the title with four teams.
In 2007, they won it by a game with a 14-2 league record, but were 2-2 against against the other top five seeds, all of which resided in the MAC East.
In 2014, UT (27-7, 14-4) split the crown with Western Michigan.
So, yeah, those teams were very good — don’t get us wrong — but there was always someone else who was as good or better.
This year, there’s no fine print, no caveat.
The Rockets (20-7, 15-4) will head to the MAC tournament as the class of the league, and it’s not up for debate.
This year, they’re the team no one wants to play, the team that won the conference by two games and is at its best against the best competition (Toledo is 5-1 against the next four seeds: Buffalo, Akron, Kent State, and Ohio).
This year, they’re the team with the right March stuff.
The team with the elite veteran guards — including the best player in the league (Marreon Jackson) and the best 3-point-shooter in the nation (Spencer Littleson) — and seven positionless players who fit together perfectly. (How positionless is Toledo? Jackson, the point guard, leads the Rockets in rebounding. J.T. Shumate, the center, hits 41 percent of his 3s.)
If Toledo plays three good games in Cleveland, odds are the confetti skies will open and the drought will end.
What could possibly go wrong?
OK, don’t answer that.
As Rockets fans know, it is true, Merriam-Webster defines Murphy’s law as Toledo basketball in March.
I believe the definition was formally changed in 2019 after Willie Jackson — the Rockets’ leading rebounder that year — got a concussion on a pregame dunk at the MAC tournament, and second-seeded Toledo went on to lose its quarterfinal matchup to a Northern Illinois team that it handled twice during the season.
But it might have been the year before. I’ll have to double check.
Coach Tod Kowalczyk still wonders what might have been in 2018, when Tre’Shaun Fletcher — the conference player of the year — blew out his knee in the MAC semifinals. The undermanned Rockets, the second seed that season, too, lost to Buffalo in the championship game.
Maybe Fletcher would not have made the difference, given Toledo lost its lone regular season meeting against Buffalo. Maybe he would have.
“I thought we were the best team in the league at the end of the season,” Kowalczyk said. “I thought we were better than Buffalo. The following year, I wouldn't have said that. But [that year], when we played at Buffalo, Tre’Shaun Fletcher had 27 points in 23 minutes until one referee took him out of the game. One ref called three fouls. I’ll never ... just phantom calls. It happens, but they couldn’t guard him. Our team was really good.”
In any case, Toledo has to catch a break one of these years, right?
“You're exactly right,” Kowalczyk said. “We’re due. We're due to get some breaks. We're due for some luck. There's no question about that.”
How about this week in Cleveland?
The anything-can-happen whims of this maddest month aside, Kowalczyk likes the Rockets’ chances.
“You have to have your best players play well, and our best players are really good players in big moments,” he said. “I'm very confident they'll play well. We’ve just got to go there and play loose.”
Here’s hoping for the best, both for the joy that it would bring our community and for the sake of Kowalczyk and his program.
The truth is Kowalczyk and Toledo are not due. They’re more overdue than the Beverly Hills Cop VHS in your attic (sorry, Blockbuster).
I write that mostly as a compliment, though what I’m about to say might be taken otherwise.
You know what’s the most interesting thing about Kowalczyk’s career? He has been a Division I head coach for 19 seasons, and, despite not making the NCAA tournament, he has never been on the hot seat. That’s an almost impossible achievement, given the legacy-shaping power of March, but he is that well-regarded of a coach.
A year ago this week — back in those innocent last days when the threat of the coronavirus still seemed like a tornado siren heralding a storm that would probably blow past — we explored the paradox of his career.
The 54-year-old Kowalczyk has always done the heavy lifting, building very good programs of which fans can be proud, on the court and off. He did so in eight years at Green Bay, just as he has in 11 seasons at Toledo. Since 2013, the Rockets are 92-54 in conference games. Only Buffalo has more league wins (101).
While no one wants to hear it, that degree of consistent success is rarer and more difficult to achieve than a one-off run in March.
We know this because every MAC school but Toledo and Bowling Green (1968) has experienced these charmed runs. Every other program has gone to the NCAA tourney multiple times since 1980 and at least once since 1996.
Other programs haven’t done what Toledo is now.
And yet everyone knows the deal.
In one-bid leagues, seasons are measured by what you do when the lights burn brightest.
No player or coach or fan has ever dreamed of regular-season glory. They dream of the magic of the March.
Of opportunities like the one that awaits in Cleveland.
For Toledo, it may not be now or never, but it feels like its time, now more than ever.
First Published March 6, 2021, 11:49 p.m.
