C1 0 eZ re the washington post.saturday, april 4 , 2020
BY MARK MASKEThe initial reaction to the NFL
expanding its playoff field from
12 to 14 teams was something
along the lines of: “Watch out;
now a bunch of bad teams will be
making the postseason.”
That’s not reality, though. For
the most part, more good-but-
not-great teams will reach the
playoffs. The biggest on-field im-
plication has nothing to do with
a seventh team in each confer-
ence qualifying for the postsea-
son. It has to do with the top
team in each conference: The
path to the Super Bowl for the
No. 1 seeds just got easier.
The NFL formalized its
1 4-team playoff plan Tuesday
when owners voted to ratify it.
The attractiveness of the new
format is obvious: It’s a revenue
producer. The owners can sell
two extra playoff games per year
to the TV networks. For the 2020
season, assuming there is one,
NBC and CBS will carry the
additional games. The CBS game
also will have a separate,
k id-friendly broadcast on
N ickelodeon.
This isn’t the first time that
owners contemplated expanding
the playoffs. But there were con-
cerns about diluting the playoff
field and diminishing the impor-
tance of the regular season. This
move, after all, means 44 percent
of the teams qualify, up from
38 percent under the 12-team
format. There was wariness
among owners about allowing
bad teams into the postseason.
Those concerns probably
aren’t warranted. If the NFL’s
expanded playoff format had
been in place since 1 990,
6 0 additional teams would have
qualified for the postseason.
Only one would have made it
with a losing record; 44 teams
would have qualified with win-
ning records and 15 with .50 0
records.
The issue with bad teams
making the playoffs is tied to
winners of poor divisions, not
the wild-card teams. In a
1 6-game season, only two losing
teams have reached the postsea-
son: The Seattle Seahawks won
the NFC West in 2010 at 7-9, and
the Carolina Panthers took the
NFC South in 2014 at 7-8-1.
A bigger concern is the in-
creased advantage for the top
seed in each conference. Under
the new format, only one team in
each conference, rather than
two, gets an opening-round bye.
That means only one team per
conference will have a chance to
rest and get healthier.
“It’s definitely going to be
different,” linebacker Thomas
Davis, recently signed by the
Washington Redskins, said in a
conference call with reporters
Tuesday. “It’s going to be weird.
Essentially, the second team [in
each conference] is being penal-
ized for being a good football
team.... It just makes it more
competitive. It adds more teams
in, and it allows teams that are
hot late in the season like the
Titans to be able to make a run —
a team that might not normally
be in the playoffs [is] getting that
opportunity. I like it.”
Last season, Te nnessee was a
postseason darling, reaching the
AFC championship game as a
wild-card team. But the Titans
lost at Kansas City as the Chiefs,
the No. 2 seed, continued a
trend: Every Super Bowl partici-
pant over the past seven seasons
had a first-round bye. The 2012
Baltimore Ravens were the last
team without a bye to reach the
Super Bowl.
So the NFL playoffs indeed
have been fundamentally
changed — but perhaps not in
the way that most might think.
[email protected]sam Fortier contributed to this
report.analysis
In NFL’s new playo≠s,
top seeds’ edge expands
downward spiral. A new $90 mil-
lion state-funded arena was due
to open in the winter of 2017, and
UMBC needed to make some
progress on its old court before it
moved to its new one. Hall hired
Odom as his new coach.
In h is second season, Odom led
UMBC to its first tournament bid
since 2008. The Retrievers would
go on the board as a No. 16 seed,
lined up to have 40 minutes of
semi-fame and then simply be
added to the list of 16th seeds
who had been victims of power-
school top seeds.
I knew UMBC had no chance to
win. Stay close for a while if it
could make shots from the out-
side? Perhaps. But win? That
wasn’t going to happen. I had
written about lower-seeded
teams often in the past, and I
knew the drill. For the players,
the highlight might be the open-
practice day before the first
round.
If UMBC shot the ball well
enough, if it had a hot-shooting
night from three-point range, it
might keep the game competi-
tive. But sooner or later, the
Cavaliers’ pack-line defense
would start to extend to the
three-point line; there would be a
15-2 burst, and that would be
that.
And so I opted to go to Pitts-
burgh instead of Charlotte for the
first round of the tournament. It
made perfect sense. Easiest trip
— drive under four hours. Perfect
logistics — hotel across the street
from the arena. Plenty of column
potential: Villanova, which I
thought was the best team in the
tournament; Duke, always writ-
able; Trae Young, Oklahoma’s
freshman sensation; and a semi-
local team for The Washington
Post — Radford, which won a
play-in game in Dayton, Ohio, to
earn the right to play Villanova in
another 1-16 matchup.
And then I sat in my hotel
room and watched UMBC play
Virginia. I was going to stay up as
long as the game was competi-
tive. Once Virginia began to pull
away, I would go to sleep. Except
it never happened.
It was 21-21 at halftime, inBY JOHN FEINSTEINIt might have been the greatest
upset in the history of college
basketball. Late on the night of
March 16, 2018, Virginia, the
top-ranked team in the NCAA
men’s basketball tournament —
the top seeded of the four No. 1
seeds — took the court in Char-
lotte to play the University of
Maryland Baltimore County,
which is known to most as
UMBC.
When the game tipped off
shortly before 10 o’clock, there
had already been 135 games
played in tournament history in-
volving No. 1 seeds and No. 16
seeds. The top-seeded team had
never lost, and there was no real
reason to think Virginia-UMBC
would be any different. The Cava-
liers were 31-2. They had won the
regular season title in the ACC
with a 17-1 record and then swept
through the ACC tournament.
UMBC was playing in the NCAA
tournament for only the second
time and was thrilled to be there.
Two years earlier, the Retriev-
ers had won seven games, leading
to the firing of coach Aki Thomas
and the hiring of Ryan Odom. The
name Odom was familiar to col-
lege basketball fans. Ryan’s fa-
ther, Dave Odom, had been a
college head coach for 22 years —
at E ast Carolina, Wake Forest and
South Carolina.
A large chunk of Ryan Odom’s
childhood had been spent in
Charlottesville. The Odoms had
moved there in 1982 when Ryan
was 8 and his father had become
Virginia coach Te rry Holland’s
top assistant. The Odoms’ house
was a short bike ride away from
University Hall, which was then
Virginia’s basketball arena.
“If I was a fan of any team
growing up, it was probably Vir-
ginia,” he said. “Those seven years
were really my formative years as
a basketball fan.”
Ryan had played Division III
basketball at Hampden-Sydney
and then followed his father into
the coaching business. He r ose up
the ladder, starting as a graduate
assistant at the University of
South Florida and then moving to
Furman, UNC Asheville, Ameri-
can, Virginia Te ch and finally
UNC Charlotte before being hired
in 2015, at the age of 40, as head
coach at Division II Lenoir-
Rhyne.
Odom’s team won 21 games his
first season and reached the
quarterfinals of the NCAA Divi-
sion II tournament. That perfor-
mance got the attention of —
among others — UMBC Athletic
Director Tim Hall, whose men’s
basketball program was in a
many ways a typical Virginia
game. The Cavaliers always
played at a slower-than-slow
pace, and sometimes it took a
while for their pack-line defense
to wear a team down. I actually
dozed off during the 20 -minute
halftime and woke up just in time
to see Joe Sherburne make a
layup while being fouled at the
start of the second half to put
UMBC ahead 24-21. No one knew
it at that moment, but Virginia
would never catch up.
UMBC guard Jairus Lyles was
unconscious. Lyles had come out
of one of the great high school
basketball programs, DeMatha
Catholic in Hyattsville, 30 miles
from UMBC’s campus. He fin-
ished the game with 28 points on
9-for- 11 shooting (3 for 4 from
three-point range) and seemed to
make a basket every time U-Va.
appeared ready to start a run.
Virginia, a team that made it a
habit to squeeze the life out of
teams with second-half runs,
n ever made one.
More astonishing: Against one
of the best defenses in the coun-
try, U MBC shot just under 68 per-
cent in the second half, and
diminutive guard K.J. Maura re-peatedly beat Virginia’s guards
up the floor to set up UMBC’s
offense.
“Lyles was great, absolutely
great,” Virginia Coach To ny Ben-
nett said months later. “But the
kid we absolutely couldn’t handle
was Maura — at both ends of the
court.”
Maura was from Puerto Rico
and had been playing at a junior
college in Florida before Odom
brought him to join his program.
UMBC listed him at 5-foot-8 and
140 pounds. He w as no more than
5-6, and if he weighed 140 pounds
it was with a weight belt on him.
But Odom saw something in him
other coaches didn’t: a knack for
the game, a kind of intangible feel
for how to play.
After their 74-54 win, the Re-
trievers became instant national
celebrities. Their upset was com-
pared to the 1980 U.S. hockey
team at the Winter Olympics in
Lake Placid, unknown Buster
Douglas knocking out Mike Ty-
son in 1990 and the New York Jets
and Joe Namath in Super Bowl
III. In men’s basketball there was
no tournament upset to compare
it to, because a No. 16 had never
beaten a No. 1.The game brought up most
often was the December 1982
contest between Chaminade, an
NAIA team, and — yes — Virginia,
ranked No. 1 in the country at the
time and led by three-time na-
tional player of the year Ralph
Sampson. Te rry Holland’s top as-
sistant coach at the time? Dave
Odom.
The Retrievers, no doubt ex-
hausted from celebrating, lost
their second-round game two
nights later, 50-43, to Kansas
State. But nothing could change
what they had done. Odom be-
came a celebrity, especially in the
Baltimore-Washington area. His
name was bandied about for a
number of jobs, but none ap-
pealed to him enough to leave
UMBC — especially after Hall got
him a big raise.
When Notre Dame Coach Mike
Brey was at Delaware in the
1990 s, he described the life of a
mid-major from a one-bid league
this way: “For us, winning our
conference tournament and get-
ting to the NCAA tournament is
like a power school getting to the
Final Four,” he said. “If you win a
game, it’s like winning the
n ational championship.”College basketball has changed
since then, and experienced mid-
major teams now have a better
chance to compete with fresh-
man- and sophomore-laden pow-
er school teams. George Mason,
Butler, VCU and Loyola Chicago
have all made the Final Four and
Butler the national champion-
ship game twice. But for UMBC, a
school playing in the NCAA tour-
nament for the second time, the
Virginia win wasn’t just historic,
it was like getting to the Final
Four — at least.
“I woke up the next morning,”
UMBC President Freeman A.
Hrabowski said, “and thought to
myself, ‘Did that really happen?’ ”
It had. Now it was eight
months later, and Ryan Odom felt
he had one mission for his
2 018-19 team: “No looking in the
rearview mirror,” he said. “Eyes
on the road ahead.”
That would be easier said than
done.
[email protected]reprinted by arrangement with
Knopf doubleday publishing group,
a division of penguin random house.
For more by John Feinstein, visit
washingtonpost.com/feinstein.UMBC’s epic upset over No. 1 Virginia was pure Madness
Book excerpt
taken from
“the Back
roads to March:
the Unsung,
Unheralded and
Unknown
heroes of a
college
Basketball
season.” out now from
penguin random house.John Mcdonnell/the Washington post
The Retrievers shocked the Cavaliers on March 16 , 20 18 , becoming the first No. 16 seed to beat a No. 1 in NCAA men’s tournament history.BY SAM FORTIERIn the Washington Redskins’
remade secondary, two 26-year-
olds on one-year contracts are
returning home and feeling as if
they have something to prove.
Ronald Darby, the former Phila-
delphia cornerback, and Sean
Davis, the ex-Pittsburgh safety,
want to show what they’re capa-
ble of not just to their new team
but to their families and friends
as well.
Darby is from Oxon Hill, and
Davis is from the District. And
those close to them rejoiced
when they decided to return.
“I grew up a Redskin fan,”
Darby said Friday. “So to come
back home and play for the team
I grew up loving, it’s huge.”
The pair could play important
roles on Washington’s defense
this year. Davis expects to start at
free safety, and Darby could win
one of the top three cornerback
jobs (two on the outside and one
in the slot). Including cornerback
Kendall Fuller — a Baltimore
native and Coach Ron Rivera’s
most expensive addition — the
three confident defensive backs
who have known one another
since high school are trying to
reshape the Redskins’ secondary.
“I’m a great corner,” Darby
said. “I had to battle obstacles
and stuff like that... [but] I
know that I can be the person
that I am, that I’ve shown.”
“God blessed me with such
athletic skills — I’m so rangy, and
I’m fast and can patrol back in
the deep end [at free safety],”
Davis said. “I’m just looking for-
ward to being the deep guy, being
the one that everyone has to
depend on.”
Davis and Darby are pieces in
Rivera’s vision of a fast, versatile
defense. The coach will pair Da-
vis with Landon Collins, allowingthe hard-hitting strong safety to
move closer to the line of scrim-
mage. Darby said Redskins
coaches haven’t outlined their
expectations for him, but he will
compete with the team’s stable of
young, hungry cornerbacks: Fa-
bian Moreau, Danny Johnson,
Greg Stroman, Jimmy Moreland
and Jeremy Reaves. As the most
accomplished of the group, Dar-
by seems to have a fair shot at
being a starter.
To listen to Darby and Davis
tell it, 2019 did not reflect their
abilities. Davis suffered a season-
ending shoulder injury in
Week 2. Darby felt slow returning
from a torn ACL and struggled; i n
Week 1, Redskins rookie wideout
Te rry McLaurin burned him for
five catches, 125 yards and a
touchdown. Then Darby hurt his
hip in mid-December and missed
the rest of the season.
The novel coronavirus pan-
demic has slowed their offseason
training, but both asserted they
feel back to 100 percent. Theyhave been focusing on balance,
stretching and body-weight exer-
cises, such as push-ups and pull-
ups.
“It’s like a scary movie scene
every time you step out the front
door,” Davis said. “It sucks be-
cause it shuts the gyms down,
shuts the fields down. The other
day, they had the yellow tape
across the field in the park, so it’s
kind of hard to find access....
Kind of have to take it back old
school a little bit to the jail-body
workouts.”
The stakes of this season are
high for Darby and Davis. They’re
both in their prime, old enough
to be considered a “veteran pres-
ence” but young enough to turn
in several more years of top-flight
production. If they stay healthy
and play well, they could find the
multiyear, top-dollar contract
that eluded them this offseason.
That was part of the reason
Washington appealed to them.
“[Rivera’s] defenses have been
good,” Darby said. “Corners thathave played in his defense got
paid.”
The opportunity Washington
offered — and what it meant to
two players who grew up as
Redskins fans — was irresistible.
But Davis and Darby know prox-
imity to home presents both
pride and pitfalls. They’re pre-
pared for the challenge.
“I’ve just got to keep my head
on straight because [ being home]
can be a distraction if you let it
be,” Darby said.
Davis believes the bond will
help as the new defensive backs
do their part to establish Rivera’s
culture in the locker room. They
want to show out for the city and
one another and bring winning
back to FedEx Field.
“I’ve always been watching
from the corner of my eye, check-
ing on the Redskins the past four
years,” Davis said. “I still can’t
help it; they were always my
team.... [I’m] looking forward to
turning things around.”
[email protected]Darby, Davis back home with something to prove
Barry reeger/associated press
Free safety Sean Davis suffered a shoulder injury in Week 2, ending his 2019 season, but says he is fit.Area natives a dd
a veteran presence
to Redskins’ secondary