St. John's Rise in College Basketball: Could They Make a Run?

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00:00I think most people would be shocked to see that one of the up-and-coming teams in all of college

00:05basketball, a team that's going to probably get a pretty high seed in the NCAA tournament and have

00:10a shot to even win it all, is St. John's. They beat UConn 68 to 62. And Mike, I mean, it seems

00:17to me they're doing it in such different ways. You know, one game I see them having 80-something

00:21points. Over the weekend against UConn, they had 60 points. They did it on defense there.

00:25And Rick Pitino doing one of the best coaching jobs that he's done, probably going back to,

00:31I don't know, Kentucky, something like that. It feels like it's been a long time since he's been

00:34this good. Well, I will say that if you think about the idea that people would be surprised

00:41by St. John's having a successful season, when you remind them that Rick Pitino is their coach,

00:47then they'll say, OK, I get it. Rick Pitino's as good as there's ever been. And what's remarkable,

00:54Craig, about the success of this St. John's team is that if we remember back to the days

01:00of the introduction of the three-point shot, before the Steph Curry revolution, there was

01:05the Rick Pitino revolution. And it wasn't quite as profound, but he was among the very first coaches

01:11to say, hey, this three-point shot thing can do some things, and took Providence to the Final Four

01:17in 1987 with a higher emphasis on the shot than was common at the time. And they made that great

01:27run. And it's always been a big part of his approach. This team can't shoot. They're terrific

01:33in so many ways, but shooting is not one of them. So what they do is they defend you really hard.

01:40They execute at an elite level the baseline out-of-bounds play that they converted in order

01:47to win the game on Friday against UConn was just brilliant. And then the player who's not getting

01:53enough credit, Craig, Qadari Richmond. I had him on my All-America team at midseason. Qadari

01:59Richmond is the biggest reason. They have some terrific players, but there's nobody like him

02:04in college basketball. 6'7", very experienced, very physically powerful, and very intelligent

02:12about how he plays the game. Unbelievably coachable. The coaches at St. John's love him,

02:17and he's a huge reason why they're so successful.