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Anxiety rises for Seth Meyers, alums as Northwestern nears NCAA tournament bid

Nicole Auerbach
USA TODAY Sports

Seth Meyers thought, theoretically, he’d be able to sit back and enjoy the Northwestern game against Big Ten bottom-dweller Rutgers last Saturday. His wife and son were out of town for the night; he could turn his full attention toward what has turned into quite the special season for his Wildcats.

Seth Meyers, a Northwestern grad, is tuned in big time this season to college basketball.

“I thought I would sit down and experience something I’ve so rarely experienced — a game in which Northwestern should win handily,” Meyers, who graduated in 1996 and hosts NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, told USA TODAY Sports. “Then, I was constantly switching the game off and looking out of the corner of my eye to see the score. As it got closer, I’d tune back in — then out.

“I watched it like a crazy person.”

Northwestern clawed back into the surprisingly tight game, hit the go-ahead three-pointer in the final minute and staved off a devastating defeat.

“I feel a lot like Doug Collins’ face,” Meyers said “Doug Collins’s face (during the Rutgers game) has expressed a lot of the roller coaster of emotion that surge through me throughout each of these games.”

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You can call them pessimistic, but they prefer to think of themselves as consistent. That’s what decades of Northwestern sports fandom has taught them — the understanding that whatever seems like it will be good will, most likely, end badly.

“We are all trained from the moment we stepped on campus to expect some sort of horrible calamity to befall all of our sports teams,” said Rachel Nichols, host of ESPN’s The Jump and a 1995 graduate of the Medill School of Journalism.

Broadcaster Rachel Nichols is a 1995 Northwestern graduate.

Which means, even with the Northwestern men’s basketball team sitting at 20-8 (9-6 Big Ten) and a projected No. 9 seed just 17 days remaining until Selection Sunday, Wildcats alumni are terrified that that calamity is coming. Because Northwestern isn’t going to make its first ever NCAA tournament without any drama — right?

“It’s like a psychosis; I’m always trying to figure out how we’re going to lose,” said ESPN sports business reporter Darren Rovell, who graduated from Northwestern in 2000. “I’m running through hypothetical situations in my head. A safe lead is, like, 16 points with 10 seconds left. Otherwise the college version of Reggie Miller is going to happen.

“I really think I’m going to throw up every game.”

Said a far-less-nauseous Fox Sports writer Stewart Mandel, Medill ’98: “I’ve remained very, very cautious … because I know the history of that program, and there's been a curse hovering over it for as long as I've been following it.”

Sometimes, that curse has manifested itself in odd injuries — like the one to John Shurna caused by him running face-first into a stanchion during the 2010-11 season — or a star player abruptly quitting basketball — like Kevin Coble did before the 2010-11 season. The curse even attempted to rear its ugly head this month, Northwestern fans insist, when leading scorer Scottie Lindsey came down with mononucleosis and missed three weeks of conference play. “The curse in effect,” Mandel put it as soon as the illness was announced.

“Look, I’m a Cubs fan; I’ve lived through this already this year,” said Michael Wilbon, co-host of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption and a Medill 1980 graduate. “I'm a lifelong Cubs fan, and I've been following Northwestern basketball intimately since I was a freshman in college — and that was 40 years ago. So, yes, these things are very closely aligned to me. Yes, when things don't go well enough often enough to act calmly. So, I'm not calm.”

Wilbon, like many others interviewed for this piece, worried he’s jinxing the team by even talking about potentially making the NCAA tournament. It didn’t help matters that most conversations occurred during the Lindsey absence.

Michael Wilbon, shown here in a 2002 photo, is a die-hard Chicago sports fan and Northwestern alum.

“I was like, ‘This is just the next iteration of some act of God that's going to stop us,’ ” Rovell said. “I mean, is it the flu? No. It’s mono! If the guy broke his nose, he'd be playing.”

Northwestern lost three of its four games without Lindsey — yet pulled out a shocking 66-59 win on the road at then-No. 7 Wisconsin on Feb. 12, the best win of head coach Chris Collins’ tenure and perhaps one of the most important basketball victories in this program’s history.

That’s the type of game, Mandel said, the so-called old Northwestern would never win, a game on the road against a top-10 team without the Wildcats’ best player. He considers that win — the signature victory of their NCAA tournament resume to date — proof that this is a different era of Northwestern basketball, and a sign that, yes, this really is happening.

He’s not alone.

“I'm actually strangely not terrified which scares me because there is nothing in my 40-year affiliation with Northwestern that should lead to any sense of overconfidence,” USA TODAY columnist Christine Brennan, and classmate of Wilbon, said, “Except that I, somehow, am strangely serene and feeling like this is really going to happen and … there's no way on earth I should feel this way.”

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Brennan said the origin of her unsettling sense of confidence was the hiring of Collins nearly four years ago. She’d been around him, both when he was a player and later an assistant coach under Mike Krzyzewski at Duke, and also his father, Doug, a three-time NBA All-Star in the 1970s and then an NBA head coach for much of the past three decades. His pedigree was flawless, his vision realistic. She bought in.

Mike Greenberg, co-host of ESPN’s Mike & Mike and Medill 1989 graduate, felt the same way. At the time of the hire, he told anyone who asked that he wanted the basketball version of Pat Fitzgerald, who helped turn around the Northwestern football program first as a player and now as the head coach — which meant someone young and energetic, someone understanding of the Northwestern culture but also its context. Collins, who grew up in the Chicago suburbs, is not only himself a diehard Cubs fan, but he’s someone who’s embraced the (lack of) tradition at Northwestern. From Day 1, he spoke of taking this program to the NCAA tournament.

“He’s building it the right way, with recruiting and style of play and (new) facilities,” Wilbon said. “I thought it would take four or five years. You don't get to just reverse decades of futility like that.”

It became a question not of if, but when. And when is coming ahead of schedule, likely as early as March 12.

Sports broadcasters Mike Greenberg (left) and Mike Golic (right), hosts of ESPN Radio's "Mike & Mike."

“I have never once put the television on on Selection Sunday and for one minute expected to hear our name,” said Greenberg. “I mean, literally never once in 32 years. That is just by nature going to elicit more enthusiasm than people who have kind of been there done that. You know on Selection Sunday that Kentucky is looking for their draw; they’re watching for, ‘Were we the No. 1 overall seed or not?’ "

Long-suffering Northwestern fans just want to hear their name called as one of the 68 teams slotted into the field, nothing more nothing less. They just want to see the name of their alma mater flash across the screen, signifying that Northwestern — the only school from one of the five power college conferences to never have made the NCAA tournament — is going dancing.

“We’re in a situation where it will be just such a celebratory moment to be one of 68 teams — we don’t have to do much when we get there,” Meyers said. “The people who went to Duke or North Carolina can’t believe that all we need is to hear our name on Selection Sunday.

“What do the kids say? We’re very thirsty.”

Meyers laughed.

“It’s so funny to be a college basketball fan this season more than I ever was before,” he said. “Because I would argue that Selection Sunday is the biggest waste of time to watch on television. Also, I will of course be watching it.

“I feel the same way about Selection Sunday as I did about parenting before I had a kid. I never cared about other people’s children, and now I find children fascinating.”

And Selection Sunday should be fascinating for Northwestern fans, a new marker of success for a basketball program that had very few prior to now.

“While I was in school, two basketball players were indicted on charges that they were bribed to fix games,” Nichols said. “And the idea that Northwestern basketball players would be trying to shave points in this game — I mean, it seems like a bad punchline, right? Because this is a team that couldn't control anything about a basketball team, much less the score. And the fact that we were the team that had the point shavings scandal and sort of the game fixing, illegal gambling scandal — that set the bar for me as a Northwestern basketball fan.

“I will say that even when the team wasn’t making the tournament in the years since, they still in my eyes were achievers because they did not get involved with the mafia.”

Nichols laughed. The bar has been raised significantly — and in a good way — since then. And it’s only going up.

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