UCF's win against No. 15 Cincinnati put the spotlight on the Knights' ascension in The American under first-year coach Johnny Dawkins
by Dick Weiss
ORLANDO, Fla.-- The University of Central Florida’s dramatic 53-49 victory over 15th-ranked Cincinnati here Sunday ended in wild celebration with undergraduates flooding the court at CFE Arena and guard Matt Williams body surfing through the crowd.
This is all relatively new for the Knights, who had not won a game over a ranked team since 2011 when they stunned eventual national champion UConn in the Battle for Atlantis in the Bahamas. This was UCF’s first win over the Bearcats after seven straight losses since the teams started playing home-and-home in The American, and it changed the dynamics of the conference race, giving SMU (25-4, 14-1) a one-game lead in the loss column over Cincinnati (25-4, 14-2).
Both SMU and Cincinnati appear to be locks for the NCAA tournament no matter what happens at the conference tournament next week in Hartford. Houston picked up its 20th win of the season Sunday against Memphis, while UCF stands one-win shy of 20. Memphis, with 18 wins, is in the postseason discussion as well.
UCF is growing up nicely under first-year head coach Johnny Dawkins, the former Duke star, NBA veteran and Mike Krzyzewski disciple who is a legitimate candidate for The American Coach of the Year after transforming the Knights into a factor down the stretch. The Knights are now 19-10 overall and 10-7 in conference play with four straight wins heading into their final game of the regular season at USF this Thursday.
The Knights -- who are developing a reputation as Orlando’s hometown team -- feed off Dawkins’ enthusiasm.
“Coach is in great shape,” sophomore guard B.J. Taylor said. “He’s like 50, but he’s still at his playing weight. You see him jumping up and down. t gives us energy out here, seeing his passion. He’s into the game like he’s playing in it. If anybody’s ever seen him at practice, he stretching like he’s about to practice. He’s intense and we love it.”
Taylor, a local hero from Boone High in Orlando who missed seven games this season with a thumb injury, shot 10-for-19 and scored 27 points against the Bearcats. He has scored in double figures in 20 of 22 games played, including a huge step back 3-pointer against Cincinnati that gave the Knights a 51-46 lead with 33 seconds to play. “I knew they had a great defensive team,” he said. “I wanted to go out and test it, see if they were as good as they’re supposed to be.”
In a game where Williams -- UCF’s best 3-point shooter -- struggled through an uncharacteristic 1-for-11 shooting performance, Taylor wasn’t the only hero. Tacko Fall, a towering 7-foot-6 sophomore from Dakar, Senegal, who has advanced from a work in progress to become a consistent double-figure scorer, is averaging 11.7 points, 9.7 rebounds and shooting 73.8 percent. Fall has become one of the best shot blockers and rim protectors in the country.
Fall suffered a loose tooth from a shot to the face against Cincinnati and was in pain, but he finished with seven points, eight rebounds and four blocked shots in 29 minutes, playing almost every possession down the stretch in a high-energy game. Fall constantly altered shots in the back of the Knights’ zone and played a huge role in limiting Cincinnati’s two normally productive frontcourt starters -- Gary Clark and Kyle Washington -- to just four field goals.
Fall also locked up the game when he made a pair of free throws with 2.8 seconds to play after he reached up to rebound a missed Cincinnati dunk that would have tied the game.
Fall, who has a standing reach of 10-foot-5 and a wing span of eight feet, four inches, has only been playing organized basketball for four years. He was originally a soccer player who discovered Ibrahima N’Diaye, who ran a basketball academy in Senegal. N’Diaye, the brother of former first-round NBA draft pick and then-Georgia Tech assistant coach Mamadou N’Diaye, approached Fall and his mother and convinced them that moving Fall to the United States to pursue a basketball career and a college degree was a great opportunity. Fall’s father had moved to the United States several years prior and lived in Ohio. So, In a worst-case scenario, he had someone he could count on.
Fall visited six schools in six states over an eight month period before eventually surfacing as a junior at Liberty Christian Preparatory School, a small private school of 300 in Tavares, Fla. where he lived with a host family to resolve a residency issue. Fall was an excellent student who mastered English, took advanced math and science courses. He took the SAT after just three months and scored in the 95th percentile nationally.
He was on the same Nike EBYL team as Ben Simmons, the top prospect in the Class of 2015, during the spring and summer before his senior year, but played sparingly because he had difficulty keeping up with the speed of the game. But Fall attracted national attention after he shot 79.2 percent at the NBPA Top 100 camp in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attracted interest from 36 schools, including Georgetown, which wanted to add him to a long line of premier big men; and Georgia Tech with N’Diaye, who helped facilitate Fall’s move to the states.
He opted to stay local because former UCF coach Donnie Jones and his staff were the first ones to recruit him. But he then became the center of controversy. Even though Fall had good grades and entered college as a computer science major, the NCAA Clearinghouse informed UCF it was only accepting some of Fall’s core courses at Liberty Christian, which had been placed under an extended evaluation status, and Fall was would not let him practice. Eventually, the NCAA relented, giving Fall a special waiver.
Fall, who had scored double figures in 17 games so far, stayed the course and has flourished under Dawkins who played with 7-foot-7 Manute Bol and 7-foot-6 Shawn Bradley in the NBA with the Philadelphia 76ers and against goliaths like Hall of Fame center Shaquille O’Neal. Dawkins and his staff designed a program to improve Fall’s stamina and created workouts that taught him a back-to-the-basket game, concentrating on playing above the rim and staying out of foul trouble.
“Truthfully, when I arrived, I didn’t know what I was getting in Tacko, other than I knew he was 7-6 and had a lot of potential,” Dawkins said. “It’s just trying to get him to reach that potential. He’s worked very hard from the spring until now and the numbers don;t really show it. We as a staff know it because we know where he’s coming from.
The results of all that hard work came to life against Cincinnati when UCF limited the Bearcats to just 25.8 percent shooting in the second half. “Everybody was connected out there,” Fall said. “My teammates trusted I was going to be back there for them so they were able to get out more on the shooters. Altering shots is one of the things I can do every night and take pride in doing, not letting people get easy shots.”‘
Dawkins has built this team around defense and around Fall in particular. The Knights have limited their opponents to just 36-percent shooting on the year and only 60.7 points a game. “It takes time to really be coordinated defensively,” Dawkins said. “I’m a perfectionist. As as good as we’re defending, I see a lot of errors where we have to improve, a lot of reps to develop those habits so they know what to expect, know our terminology, our schemes.”
Fall’s impact on the Knights goes beyond the obvious numbers.
“He’s a smart young man and he wants to be really good,” Dawkins said. “It’s not just blocks but it’s the shots he alters, changing people’s minds where they drive in. They’ll take shots they’ve never practiced or they see Tacko and they drive back out or throw it back out. Those are all things where he influences the defensive end. It’s been fun to do analytics just to see how many things he changes. He blocks about two or three shots a game but we know he’s affected way more shots than that.”
Perhaps the best part for UCF fans? This is still only the beginning.