Championship Tradewinds Blow BC Back To Boston With Cayman Title

GEORGE TOWN, Grand Cayman -- Oops, they did it again.

It was hard to envision how Boston College could produce an encore to Monday night's overtime win over Missouri state. The pure drama generated by first blowing an 11-point lead before coming-from-behind to erase a six-point deficit in the game's extra time was something out of a script writer's dream.

Yet as time wound down in the second half of Tuesday's championship game against Boise State, the Eagles found themselves punching with their basketball lives backed into a corner. Their foul shooting mysteriously disappeared into the island's tradewinds in the final two minutes, and with 12 seconds remaining, a kicking foul swapped a 60-59 lead for a 61-60 deficit after Alvaro Cardenas made both of his double bonus free throw attempts. Hope, at least for the moment, was lost, and a three-quarter press by the tournament-caliber Broncos made calling a half-court timeout all the more difficult after it took BC roughly seven seconds to move into the frontcourt.

The Eagles had time for one shot, so Earl Grant granted Fred Payne a trio of options on a sideline pass. The second option called for a corner three out of Beadle, a Clemson transfer whistled for the offending foul in the last few seconds. For Payne, it represented the best choice, and as he delivered the pass into the corner, Beadle stepped back and uncorked a signature three that swished the basket. One final inbound pass later, the celebration began in earnest as Boston College - the team nobody expected to win the tournament known for producing NCAA Tournament contenders - clinched its first multi-team event crown in six years.

"When we talked about coming to the Cayman Islands, the only reason we were coming was because we had a chance to compete for a championship," said Grant. "You can only do that in November and March, so we reminded each other every day that after the first round, we were here because we had an opportunity to compete for a championship. There was no guarantee that we would win it, so when we got to the last game, we looked around at getting one more and talked about seizing the opportunity."

The Boston College team now arriving home looks significantly different from the one that beat Temple and Loyola in the aftermath of its game two loss to VCU. Even with those two wins, the dark shadow from the Rams' blowout win hung over the Eagles. The heavy curtain within the analytics kept BC in the recesses of the rankings used by virtually every bracketologist and armchair expert, and earning those wins did little to positively impact or erase the sting inflicted by a singular bad game.

Those Eagles left for the Cayman Islands with tempered expectations surrounding their chances at running the table across three games. First round opponent Old Dominion aside, potential matchups against Missouri State, South Dakota State and Boise State all presented western programs capable of making runs at the national tournament. Two were part of last year's tournament, and facing Boise State in the championship game delivered a program with three straight berths to the NCAA Tournament and a fourth postseason invitation to the National Invitation Tournament in its back pocket from the year after COVID-19.

"We preached togetherness," said Grant. "We are better together, and that's pretty simple. A house divided can't stand, so I think our players really respect and appreciate when it's a certain person's night. At some point we'll be able to find three or four combinations of guys and let them play a lot of minutes, but just going off of what I was seeing in the moment, the matchups and what was going on, finding a good rhythm forced us to stick with a certain lineup for Boise State."

That lineup, for one night, centered on experienced transfers who finally started playing with the cohesion of older players seeking one last run for glory. Donald Hand Jr. took a backseat for the first time this season as Beadle and Chad Venning led the offensive charges and Roger McFarlane added a game-high seven boards. Both Venning and Beadle scored in double figures by working inside from the 3-point line, and in the closing minutes, McFarlane, Venning, Beadle, Dion Brown and Fred Payne found themselves paired together for the first time as four incoming transfers and a player who missed last season with a knee injury.

Call it hunger, but in that moment, BC forged a lineup that looked considerably different from Elijah Strong's breakout night against Missouri State. He'd been pressed in center coverage when Venning fouled out in the overtime, and the win over the Bears occurred when Payne, Hand and Chas Kelley III found him in a shifty low-high post game. For many, the growth element from that grouping illustrated the dedication of players committed to the BC program, and alongside Jayden Hastings, the new generation found a groove that didn't quite exist.

The lineup on the floor against Boise State was altogether changed, but galvanizing the iron together was part of how BC stopped the Broncos in the final 30 seconds. Beadle's foul aside, communication started to occur naturally when Brown took an area in front of McFarlane. Switching beyond the inside presence provided by Venning forced Beadle to cover and fill area, and when Brown fell down on one possession, McFarlane swapped from the frontcourt to the wing since he carried momentum from the elbow to the baseline.

"We had a hard time guarding them early on," admitted Grant. "We knew it would be a hard game, but it was pretty even until [Javan Buchanan] got hot. We had a hard time guarding them, so we changed defenses from man-to-man to zone, and then we went back-and-forth. That knocked them off and got us out in transition, and before we knew it, we looked at the scoreboard and it was a one-possession game."

The BC team now returning to Massachusetts is under a considerably different microscope because of its wins. The team once situated in the lower-100s of the KenPom and Torvik ratings is now situated at No. 112 and No. 127 respectively after beating a top-60 team on Tuesday night. A team that hadn't won an in-season tournament since 2018 is about to put new gear in the Conte Forum trophy case, more specifically from a tournament that near-annually places its champion in some form of postseason play.

"We grew a bit here over the last three or four days," said Grant. "We wanted to focus on growth. Our communication has been an area that we had to get better with because you can have five guys out there with four doing the right thing, but if one of them does something wrong, then it's a mistake. We've made mistakes, so we focused on our growth, and I thought we made steps as it pertains to that growth in our communication. Now we just have to continue to build on it."

Championship Tradewinds Blow BC Back To Boston With Cayman Title

Players Mentioned

Dion Brown

Donald Hand Jr.

Jayden Hastings

Chas Kelley III

Roger McFarlane

Fred Payne

Elijah Strong

Chad Venning

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