With four teams in the NCAA Championship, The American has an opportunity to do some special things in the 2019 postseason 


by Dick Weiss

The American Athletic Conference got what it deserves this year from the NCAA Men’s Basketball Committee.
 
The committee awarded bids to Houston, Cincinnati, UCF and Temple as a reward for jobs well done shortly after Cincinnati defeated 11th-ranked Houston, 69-57, to win its second straight conference tournament championship. The American finished with the same number of bids as the Big East and one more than the Pac-12.
 
In addition, Memphis (21-13) and Wichita State (19-14), which both advanced to the semifinals of The American’s tournament, received bids to the National Invitational tournament. USF, which saw a remarkable turnaround under second-year coach Brian Gregory, accepted a spot in the CBI.
 
  --  Houston (31-3) was given a No. 3 seed and will play 14th seeded Georgia State (24-9) from the Sun Belt Friday in Tulsa.
 
-- Cincinnati (28-6) was given a No. 7 seed, which might be perceived as a slight to The American’s tournament champion. But the Bearcats will have de facto home games for the first two rounds, beginning with Friday’s game against 10th-*seeded Iowa (22-11) in nearby Columbus, Ohio.
 
--- UCF (23-8) received a No. 90 seed and will play No. 8-seeded VCU (25-7) from the Atlantic 10 Friday in Columbia, S.C.
 
--  And Temple (23-9) squeezed in as a No. 11 seed and will play Belmont (26-5) from the Ohio Valley Tuesday in a First Four game at Dayton. The winner advances to a first round East Region game Thursday against No. 6-seeded Maryland in Jacksonville.
 
Despite the loss in The American final, there were signs that Houston was starting to pick up some love from the national media when CBS sports anchor Clark Kellogg picked the deep, talented Cougars to advance to the Final Four in Minneapolis.
 
The big goal for The American, which loves to point to UConn’s national championship run in 2014, is to start advancing teams to the second weekend on a regular basis.
 
The American teased us all last year when Houston appeared to have eventual national finalist Michigan beaten before freshman guard Jordy Poole broke the Cougars’ heart with a desperate 3-point jumper at the buzzer; and Cincinnati, which won both the regular season and tournament titles, looked like it had a possible path to the Final Four when it had Nevada down by 22 points in the final 11 minutes of a second-round game in Atlanta before the Wolfpack mounted a furious rally, scoring 16 straight points over the next three minutes, then went on for a 75-73 victory.
 
But if nothing else, Mick Cronin teams are resilient. Cronin has coached the Bearcats to nine straight NCAA tournaments, and put an exclamation point on a special season after losing three key starters. The Bearcats, who lost to Houston twice during the regular season, came back to beat the Cougars on a neutral site in an ESPN nationally televised game.
 
Cronin discovered his own Marvel Comics superhero when junior guard Jarron Cumberland, the American Athletic Conference’s Player of the Year and the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player, went off for 33 points and eight rebounds for the Bearcats, who made Beale Street rock at FedExForum.
 
“Jarron was off the charts,” Cronin said. “Jarron is superhuman.”
 
Cronin gave Cumberland a green light and the junior responded with 20 second-half points, making 7 of 14 shots and shooting 6-for-9 from the line.
 
Point guard Cane Broome finished with 15 points and forward Tre Scott added 12 for Cincinnati, which shut down Houston’s offense, limiting the Cougars to just 27.8 shooting in the second half and just 3 for 18 from the three.
 
“We had three terrific games with Cincinnati, at our place, at their place and today,” Houston’s AAC Coach of the Year Kelvin Sampson said. “Obviously, that’s a difficult team to beat three times, especially over the course of five or six weeks. Watching how they played here, you can see how well we played the other two times when we beat them.”
 
There is an argument to be made that Cincinnati deserved to be seeded higher, but the fact that they play in a sub-regional just two hours from campus should create a big homecourt advantage for Bearcat Nation, who travel and were out in force for the conference championship.
 
“It’s like a home game,” guard Justin Jennifer said. “At home games, they always give us goosebumps every time you make a shot, all the fans going crazy and stuff like that.”
 
Cincinnati opens against an Iowa team that has been in freefall since February, losing six of its last eight games. Houston draws Georgia State, which made 39 percent of its three-point shots but needs guard D’Marcus Simonds, who is 19 for 64 in the last five games, to have a breakout game to have a chance.
 
UCF will need towering 7-6 center Tacko Fall to ignite an offense that has scored over 70 points just twice in the past seven games to compete with A-10 regular season champion VCU, which was 6-2 in league play and has nonleague wins over Temple, Texas, Hofstra and Wichita State.
 
Temple, which worked so hard to get here for beloved coach Fran Dunphy, who is leaving at the end of the season, will have to make sure senior all-league guard Shizz Alston Jr. is at his best if it wants to compete with Belmont, which limited Murray State’s lottery pick guard Ja Morant to just 5 for 19 in a regular season Ohio Valley victory.
 
It’s all out there for the American.      
 
All the conference needs to do is grab it.