Friday Column: Renegades Of Funk – Nittany Lions Shift From Scrappy to Surging in NCAA Opener

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Part of what made Penn State’s run to the championship final of the Big Ten Tournament remarkable was the knowledge that the Nittany Lions hadn’t even played their best basketball in wins over Illinois, Northwestern and Indiana (and very nearly Purdue). They were very much gritty, and not pretty, and though there was something meaningful in that, those who had closely watched Penn State the entire season knew the Lions had more to give.

They showed that and then some in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament.

Penn State utterly dominated a very good SEC team Thursday in both halves of a 76-59 win in Des Moines to pick up its first win in college basketball’s big tournament in more than 8,000 days. If that sounds like a long time, it probably was only slightly longer than what the 40 minutes must have felt like to the Aggies, who were little more than bystanders as Andrew Funk rained threes, Jalen Pickett, um, picked their defense apart, and the rest of the Nittany Lions filled their various roles expertly.

Myles Dread dropped couple of dagger threes (two of Penn State’s 13) off the bench. Evan Mahaffey made some impact plays at both ends. Kebba Njie got a bunny on the game’s first touch (!!) and wound up with eight points in 17 minutes. Seth Lundy and Cam Wynter, who had carried so much of the weight in Chicago, were merely solid, but that’s really all they had to be.

Most impressive, though, was the way the Nittany Lions executed their game plan and prevented the Aggies from doing A) what they’ve done for the entire season and B) whatever the hell it was they were trying to do Thursday, which never seemed to resemble A.

To wit: Texas A&M won 25 games and reached the final of its own conference tournament largely by driving the ball to the rack and piling up free throws. Against the Nittany Lions, instead of attacking a thin and rarely used Penn State frontcourt, they tossed up 34 3-point tries (nearly double their season average of 18), connecting on only 10. They shot 12 free throws to Penn State’s 11. You could see the frustration emitting from the Aggie bench as they came up empty on possession after possession, even while collecting 17 offensive rebounds.

But it’s hard to look at the game and not think that the Aggies weren’t doing exactly what Penn State wanted them to do. The Nittany Lion defense was sharp in its rotations, solid in helping without leaving shooters open, and if they left a few open behind the line, that was OK, too: A&M was a 32.7% 3-point shooting team coming in.

At the other end of the floor, it looked for the game’s first few minutes that the length and quickness of A&M was going to throw off Pickett and, in turn, the rest of a Penn State offense that had surrounded their paint-pounding point guard with shooters all season. But a series of long-range bombs from Funk showed some major cracks in that defensive armor and once Pickett found his way in, it was all over. The Nittany Lions’ All-American found open teammates, made mid-range jumpers over out-stretched arms, and coaxed in his usual assortment of YMCA layups, finishing with 19 points and eight assists. He was as in control of the game flow as Aaron Rodgers in his prime, and if A&M coach Buzz Williams made any real adjustments to stop him at halftime, they weren’t evident as Penn State pushed the lead from 16 points to 23.

It’s easy for the casual fan to look at this game and Saturday’s Round of 32 matchup with second-seeded Texas and say, “Well, the Nittany Lions aren’t going to make 13 threes again against the Longhorns, who allowed Colgate to make only 3 of 15 threes in their 20-point win.” (What an oddly specific sentence for a casual fan to say, by the way) But the casual fan might not have watched the 20 other games this season during which the Nittany Lions connected on 10 threes or more.

Texas, of course, will present yet another higher-level challenge for a Penn State team that continues to see the difficulty factor increase with each game. The Longhorns have four players who average in double figures and enough size and depth to win in multiple ways. Only two of their last six wins (two of which were over fellow Top-5 program Kansas) have come by fewer than 14 points.

But consider this: Early in the season, the Nittany Lions won with a barrage of 3-point shooting, which overcame some inconsistent defense and some forgettable games from their role players. During the run to the Big Dance, they won without a lot of marksmanship but with a methodical, grind-it-out approach that made it nearly impossible for opponents to ever truly put them away. On Thursday, on their biggest stage of the season, if not the decade, they were gritty AND pretty, showing a ceiling that just might put them on par with any team remaining in the tournament and suggesting that we might not have even seen their true ceiling yet.