It's never too early to start looking ahead to next season. Over the coming weeks, we will examine what comes next for each team in the Power 5 conferences and also those outside the Power 5 who could make noise on the national stage. Today: The SMU Mustangs.
Yanick Moreira didn't need to own up to anything.
By the time the SMU center reached the Yum! Center dais, the official's call that ended his team's season, and his career at SMU, already was the subject of widespread Twitter debate. It went like this: With 22 seconds left and SMU holding a two-point lead in its round-of-64 matchup against No. 11-seed UCLA, the Mustangs had defended the Bruins' back-side flare screen for guard Bryce Alford to perfection. By the time Alford caught the ball, he had to pivot out of the baseline corner; and by the time he hucked his panicked 3 at the rim, Alford was fading, well-guarded by two SMU defenders. The shot never looked good. It wasn't going to hit the rim. And then Moreira hit it.
The referees blew their whistles and called Moreira for goaltending. The replays came fast and furious. Moreira had UCLA forward Kevon Looney on his back. It seemed clear, watching at home, that Moreira had leaped as a rebounder, that he had touched the ball just after it had flown past the front of the rim, that the attempt failed to meet the requirements for goaltending because Alford's shot didn't have a prayer.
Instead, UCLA got three points, went up by one and Moreira saw his career end on a highly questionable decision.
He could have offered an explanation. He could have openly disagreed. Instead, in the 2015 tournament's classiest moment, Moreira merely apologized.
Willfully opening up oneself to the possibility of public Internet ridicule is no small thing, particularly in a moment so visible and so raw. It was brave. And, in at least some small way, it paid off. The vast majority of responses to Moreira's tweets were positive, saying that Moreira had nothing to apologize for, that he made the right play, that his career need not be defined by one unlucky moment. And, most of all, that the season preceding Alford's shot was one he and everyone at SMU should be proud of.
Those responses, supportive as they were, also were correct. The Mustangs had much to be proud of in 2014-15. They won the American regular-season and tournament titles. They played some of the steadiest, smartest, most well-rounded basketball in the country. And long before Moreira's run-in with heartbreak, the Mustangs qualified for the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1993.
That they weren't satisfied once there -- that Moreira could be rightly heartbroken when it was over -- says more about coach Larry Brown's immediate success at the school than any statistic ever could.
What the immediate future holds:
Through recruiting, transfer additions and the underrated skill of being an excellent basketball coach, Brown has transformed SMU from a generational also-ran into a weekly member of the AP top 25. Last season's breakthrough came despite potential top-five NBA lottery pick and SMU commit Emmanuel Mudiay spending what would have been his freshman season in the Chinese professional ranks instead, not to mention a raft of other unexpected personnel losses (Markus Kennedy, Keith Frazier) throughout the season.
There is little reason to expect Brown & Co. to deviate from that pattern in 2015-16. The roster is stable, for the most part. Moreira is a significant loss, as is fellow senior Ryan Manuel; the former brought quantifiable rebounding and rim protection, the latter was a solid glue guy on the wing. But point guard Nic Moore, small forward Sterling Brown and forwards Ben Moore and Markus Kennedy all are back for another season.
Kennedy may be the closest thing the team has to an individual star -- a rebound-gobbling monster who defends the rim, creates steals, finishes well and draws nearly six fouls per 40 minutes. SMU also appears likely to get Frazier back in the fold. The small forward was averaging 10.5 points and four rebounds when, in January, he was declared academically ineligible. After appeals, he was forced to miss the rest of the season, but odds point to his return for 2015-16.
The Mustangs, as has become custom under Brown, also are adding a top-100 talent this summer: No. 13-ranked point guard Shake Milton. The 6-foot-4 Owasso, Oklahoma, native isn't a Mudiay-level future NBA star, but he is a pass-first point guard who uses his size to score, and whom scouts praise as being unselfish and coachable.
Those qualities should make him perfect for SMU. Three short years ago, when it broke the bank to lure a legend in the winter of his career -- and hired away Illinois State head coach Tim Jankovich to be his understudy -- Brown's move to SMU felt like a strange experiment. How much did Brown know about the modern morass of recruiting? What was SMU's hoops ceiling? Would Brown be there long enough to see it?
Those questions seem silly now. In each of his three seasons, Brown's Mustangs have improved dramatically, culminating in the end of a two-decade NCAA tournament drought. That appearance didn't end the way anyone, least of all Yanick Moreira, would have hoped. Fortunately, SMU will be back right away. If karma is just, they'll stick around a bit longer this time.