How UMBC pulled off the greatest upset in NCAA tournament history

CHARLOTTE — The unexplainable begins with a shot last Saturday in a gym in Vermont, Jairus Lyles pulling up a few feet behind the three-point line with a conference championship at stake, the same rhythm and routine he had perfected in after-practice shooting sessions with teammate Ricky Council preparing for the moment when he might lift his team to the NCAA tournament. 

It begins with a coach, Ryan Odom, taking over a program at Maryland-Baltimore County two years ago lacking in facilities and begging for confidence, having endured seven consecutive seasons losing 20 or more games. 

It begins with with Lyles, a two-time transfer but now a graduate student, delivering an America East title that probably wouldn’t have meant much to bluebloods such as Kentucky and Duke but would have made him a campus legend no matter what happened from there. 

And it begins with the NCAA tournament selection show last Sunday, when Lyles saw that his reward for hitting the biggest bucket of his career was a chance at the No. 1 overall seed, Virginia, the school that just so happens to be his parents’ alma mater. 

“My dad (Lester Lyles) texted me and said, ‘Maybe it’s the circle of life,’ ” Lyles said. “I don’t think it was a coincidence.”

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The NCAA tournament has made magic so regularly, for so many years, that its capacity to shock us by doing what it always does should be diminished by now. Even the final frontier, a No. 16 seed beating a No. 1 seemed only a question of time and circumstance, not possibility. 

And yet, when it finally happened on Friday night at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, the only jaws that didn’t drop to the floor belonged to those relentless Retrievers from UMBC, who put themselves in position to beat Virginia early and kept playing, kept shooting and kept shocking a nation, all the way until they had finished off a 74-54 victory that stands alone as the most stunning result in the history of college basketball. 

“They’re the No. 1 team for a reason, and for us to do it in the fashion that we did, it’s amazing,” senior Jourdan Grant said. “It’s crazy.”

It’s crazy for a lot of reasons, but let’s talk about a few. 

A good place to start is with Virginia, a team whose slow-down, defense-first style has been hyper-analyzed since Tony Bennett brought the program back to national prominence. But the context for those discussions was whether Virginia, which relies more on its system and player development than five-star talent, could win a national championship or make a Final Four, not whether it made the Cavaliers vulnerable to lose early in the tournament. 

In fact this particular team, boasting a 31-2 record and a historically good defense that didn’t yield 70 points to any opponent all season, was built in a way that should have made it even more invulnerable to an early round shocker. If there was going to be a 16-over-1 upset after 135 tried and failed since the tournament expanded in 1985, this didn’t seem like a very logical place to look for it.

“If you play this game and you step into the arena, this stuff can happen,” Bennett said. “And maybe those who haven’t been in the arena or in the competition, maybe they don’t understand that.”

But even allowing for the anything-can-happen scenario, the ease with which UMBC got the shots it wanted and scored isn’t something anyone could have foreseen. UMBC made shots, sure, finishing 12-for-24 from the three-point line and 54.2% overall, but it seemed less like a fluke than the Retrievers executing in a way that got them open shots all over the floor. 

“I was worried whether we were going to get to 30 the way they play defense,” Odom said. “They’ve held teams in the 30s.  We had to make sure we spread them out, we slipped screens and moved the ball. Our goal was to move the ball faster than they could rotate, and our guys were able to do that.”

While the conventional wisdom is that a 16-seed would have to slow the game down to knock off a more talented opponent, UMBC actually sped it up and tried to move the ball quickly enough to prevent Virginia from trapping its guards.

Two things had to happen, however, for that to be a viable plan. The first was to actually make shots. The second was to keep playing the same way no matter how big the lead got, which is where underdogs in the NCAA tournament typically get tentative. 

“Every time we made a shot, you could see their guys (throw their hands up), get down on themselves,” Lyles said. “Especially a defense as good as them, they’re not used to giving up as many points as we got. We could see that and we just kept punching them in the mouth. And you can hit those type of shots, it demoralizes them.”

Nobody did more to demoralize Virginia than Lyles, who finished with 28 points and made nine of 11 shots, wrecking any notion of UMBC collapsing down the stretch. In fact, it was Lyles’ three-pointer with 14:57 left — an uber-confident stroke in transition — when this game turned from a curiosity into a real problem for Virginia. 

“You could see they were like, wow, these guys are coming at us,” Grant said.

That shot had given UMBC a 14-point margin just 2:19 after its lead was only 29-24, and even though there was plenty of time left, the unexplainable seemed to be happening in real time. Everything started to look very hard for Virginia, and the entire UMBC team was visibly feeding off the confidence of Lyles, who scored three more baskets in four possessions to open a 47-31 lead with 10:24 left. 

Even for a player of Lyles’ talent and pedigree — from legendary DeMatha high school to VCU as a highly regarded recruit before his career went sideways — this was something different, something special. 

“I’ve never seen him play that way,” said his father, Lester Lyles, who played football at Virginia. “He was a little antsy (early), but when he made his first shot, I saw him relax into the shot and get comfortable. I think what he does is he rises to the occasion.”

In the end, it wasn’t even very dramatic. Sure, Virginia will have to own how badly it fell apart, and it will be impossible to extricate this embarrassment from Bennett’s résumé, which is beginning to pile up some ugly tournament exits. 

But in this tournament, the other side of an all-time choke job is a 40-minute out-of-body experience for someone like UMBC, which had done nothing all season to indicate it could grab its chance even if it was presented one.

No matter what weaknesses UMBC might have seen on film, no matter how many times Lyles hits big shots in practice or the America East, in the end this was a team ranked 188th in the Ken Pomeroy efficiency ratings that played like a giant for just long enough to grab one of the few holy grails in sports that had previously been unclaimed. 

This was the team, this was the time, and the only people who could have even imagined it were the ones who ultimately pulled it off. 

“We’re a really good offensive team and that’s the only thing we could have done to win that game, and that’s what we did,” sophomore Arkel Lamar said. “We made history, that’s all I can really say. I’m still in disbelief.”