There was no crying kid meme on the internet Saturday night after Northwestern was bounced from the NCAA Tournament with a 68-63 second-round loss to UCLA.
That televised moment from 2017 — when 11-year-old John Phillips, son of then-NU athletic director Jim Phillips, became teary-eyed during the waning moments of the Wildcats’ heartbreaking loss to No. 1 seed Gonzaga — went viral within moments of the final buzzer.
“Northwestern Kid” became a trending topic on Twitter, the subject of more than 20,000 tweets, and the spotlight on an NU program that had gone to its first NCAA Tournament was growing.
Most of the key starters were coming back, and the future looked exceedingly bright for a school with no basketball history whatsoever to brag about.
“You’ve got to be careful (projecting),” coach Chris Collins told the Tribune’s Teddy Greenstein afterward. “Because as I tell the guys all the time, no two teams are ever the same.”
Unfortunately for Collins, those words proved prophetic. The Wildcats struggled over the next five sub-.500 seasons, going a combined 26-71 in Big Ten play — a .268 winning percentage.
Collins’ job supposedly was in jeopardy entering the 2022-23 season after Pete Nance, the highest-rated recruit in program history, transferred to North Carolina and the team was expected to finish near the rear of the Big Ten once again.
While no one from the top explicitly said Collins needed to start winning, the whispers grew louder after AD Derrick Gragg released a statement about “the path forward” for the program, which included “making necessary changes to build towards success in the 2022-23 campaign.”
Collins insisted he never felt extra pressure to turn things around quickly.
“Only the internal pressure I put on myself,” he told me last month. “I’ve been really good at (shutting it out), I think, because of growing up with my dad (former NBA coach Doug Collins).
“I’ve always been in the spotlight of people judging and (having) expectations when I was a player. I went from playing at Duke to coaching at Duke. There’s no bigger pressure cooker than that. Every game we lost as a player or a coach, it was like the end of the world.
“I came into this year being in the moment with these guys. The loyalty, the commitment made by these guys here taught me personally. The outside noise is not going to bother me, and I’ve always been like that anyway because of my upbringing.
“I don’t focus on that. I’m not a social media guy. I live in the moment. I try to compete each day and be the best for our guys and say, ‘Hey, we’ll live with the results.’ And it’s helped me to be at my best for these guys this year.”
Collins arguably had his best season, guiding a team led by senior guards Boo Buie and Chase Audige to second place in the Big Ten and a win in its NCAA Tournament opener against Boise State before taking second-seeded UCLA down to the wire Saturday night.
For a while in the first half, it looked like UCLA’s superior talent and tournament experience would blow the Wildcats off the court. But they went on a 17-4 run to tie the game with 11:26 remaining and had a chance to win in the final minutes.
Collins told his players afterward he’d never had “more fun” coaching a team. Sometimes you teach a bunch of kids about life, and sometimes the kids teach you.
“It still stings right now,” Collins said in his postgame news conference. “I really wanted to keep going with these guys. There’s a lot of years you’re kind of OK if it ends. I was not OK. I wanted to keep fighting with these guys.
“What this group has done for me this year ... nothing about job status. I’m not talking about that. I’m just talking about how they’ve invigorated me as a coach, it was really special. I’ll always be indebted to those guys for that.”
Now the challenge is to make sure the Wildcats don’t regress as they did after the dream season of 2016-17. Princeton’s tournament success should serve as motivation. A school with high academics can succeed with the right blend of players and coaching and a belief that winning is more important than individual goals.
“There’s really no egos here,” NU assistant coach Brian James said. “Our seniors have done a good job of leading. It’s always great when you have great guards, and Boo and Chase have established themselves after going through some hard times here.
“Boo was a starter as a freshman and won three league games then, six as a sophomore and seven as a junior. He’s done an amazing job, and what I like is that he’s so mature physically and mentally about the game of basketball.”
Collins said this year’s team created an identity, which it hadn’t done in the past.
“Maybe that was my mistake a lot,” he said. “You kind of come into every year and you’re trying to figure out, ‘OK, this is our group, how do we figure out how to win?’ I never felt like we had an identity of our program.
“What these guys have done is they’ve (created) an identity of work, an identity of toughness, an identity of defense that I think will carry over.”
Buie and Audige have another year of eligibility thanks to the NCAA’s COVID-19 waiver for the 2020-21 season, but they haven’t announced their plans. Credit Buie for sticking with the program when he could’ve transferred to a school that was a safer bet to make the tournament and improve his visibility.
“We had our whole hearts into winning this tournament,” Buie said after Saturday’s loss. “We really believed, even though other people didn’t believe. We’re just going to go back, get rest, figure it out later. But our hearts were left out on the floor tonight.”
Whether they return or not, their legacy in Northwestern basketball history is secure.
No one believed in them but themselves, and that belief carried the Wildcats to a destination no one saw coming.
No need for tears this time.
