Yahoo Sports 
Oft-questioned Saint Mary's makes case for more respect by beating VCU
SALT LAKE CITY — As Saint Mary’s point guard Emmett Naar was watching ESPN the past few days, he noticed an aggravating trend.
“A lot of people had us losing today even though we were the 7-seed and we’d won a lot of games,” Naar said. “We wanted to go out and prove something and we definitely accomplished that.”
In addition to advancing to the second round of the NCAA tournament for just the second time in program history, Saint Mary’s achieved something else with its 85-77 victory over VCU. The seventh-seeded Gaels secured validation for a 29-win season impressive enough to keep them in the Top 25 from start to finish but not to win over the legion of skeptics who questioned if their success would translate against a tougher schedule.
Only five teams Saint Mary’s faced all season cracked the top 100 in Ken Pomeroy’s ratings. The Gaels defeated NCAA tournament-bound Dayton and Nevada in non-league play and swept three games from BYU, but they also fell at home to Texas Arlington and lost all three games they played to Gonzaga.
Atlantic 10 runner-up VCU (26-9) was undeniably the best team Saint Mary’s had beaten since November. The Gaels (29-4) led for the final 29 minutes of the game, opening up a 15-point halftime lead and then responding with impressive poise after the Rams sliced the deficit to two with 10 minutes to play.
“There’s no shame in losing to Saint Mary’s,” VCU coach Will Wade said. “They’re a tremendous, tremendous team, both offensively and defensively. As we’ve done all year I thought our guys fought extremely, extremely hard. We’re really, really tough to knock out. They couldn’t quite knock us out. But we could never get over the hump.”
What was especially impressive about Saint Mary’s was the way the Gaels managed to handle VCU’s pressure defense. The Gaels haven’t faced much full-court press in the WCC, nor do they have the quickness and athleticism to simulate it in practice, yet they carved up the Rams for much of the game, shooting 55.6 percent from the field, albeit with 15 turnovers.
“The press was impossible to simulate,” Naar said. “We just don’t have the athletes to do it. Even when we try to simulate it in practice, we’re just not very good at it. It’s not how we play, and none of the teams in our league really play that style either.”
The only time Saint Mary’s looked rattled came midway through the second half as VCU sliced into the lead with transition buckets and put-backs. Saint Mary’s coach responded by reinserting guard Joe Rahon despite four fouls, and his presence appeared to settle down the Gaels.
Standout big man Jock Landale led Saint Mary’s with 18 points, while Rahon and Calvin Hermanson added 16 apiece. JeQuan Lewis scored a game-high 30 for Saint Mary’s, but the senior guard needed 28 shots to do it.
Once they’re done celebrating Thursday’s win, the Gaels will turn their attention to their first second-round NCAA tournament game in seven years, this one against either second-seeded Arizona or 15th-seeded North Dakota. Assuming it’s the Pac-12 champion Wildcats who advance, it will be another chance for the Gaels to prove their skeptics wrong.
“A win like this definitely helps us get our name out there a little more and earn people’s respect,” Landale said “but if we come up against Arizona on Saturday night and we get that done, I think that will really solidify it.”
More March Madness coverage from Yahoo Sports:
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• Perfectly awful: Here’s the worst NCAA tourney bracket
• Vanderbilt’s foul may be the worst March Madness blunder ever
• Former President Obama has two big mistakes in his women’s bracket
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Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at daggerblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
