Two-tenths of a percent chance: The inside story of Wichita State’s wild 24-point comeback
Two-tenths of one percent. That’s what ESPN calculated as Wichita State’s chances of winning Sunday with 14 minutes remaining and facing a 24-point deficit against SMU at Moody Coliseum.
Gregg Marshall had just called timeout with WSU trailing 50-26 and ripped into his players for playing so lifelessly in a game they desperately needed to win to boost their NCAA Tournament hopes.
“I can’t tell you exactly what I said,” Marshall said. “But I told them it was embarrassing.”
Exactly three weeks ago, the WSU players stared blankly back at Marshall in a huddle just like this one and didn’t make a change. The result was a 33-point loss at Houston, the worst loss in Marshall’s career at WSU, and Sunday was looking like a possible repeat.
This time, faced with the same situation, WSU’s players made the decision to push back.
“We had a lot riding on this game and when we got down big, the easy thing to do was just quit,” WSU sophomore Dexter Dennis said. “I think a lot of us said to ourselves we’re not going to go down like this. We’re going down sluggin’, not in the fetal position.”
When WSU was at its lowest, freshman Tyson Etienne proved to be vital with his positivity.
“The one guy that I kept hearing positive things from was Tyson Etienne,” Marshall said. “I just love his enthusiasm. Not everyone 100% of the time is giving me positive vibes and positive energy and I’m not used to that and I’m at the end of my rope.”
Instead of telling teammates they were down 24 points, which sounds imposing, Etienne would tell them they were only down eight three-pointers, which was still the truth but sounded much more possible because it was a smaller number.
“I know it seemed far-fetched to come back, but I never stopped believing,” Etienne said. “We weren’t making shots. There were a lot of defensive mishaps. I never lost faith though. I told the guys, ‘We’re not going out like this. We work too hard.’ I don’t care if they say we’re young. I don’t care if we had a little slide. We are a great team and we’ve just got to believe that.”
Sure enough, Etienne’s mind tricks worked with his teammates.
After the timeout, Etienne drilled a three. And then Grant Sherfield made a three. And then Dennis swished one. Suddenly, within two minutes, WSU’s deficit was down to 15 points — just five more threes, Etienne chirped at his teammates.
Sherfield was asked afterward about when he felt WSU believed a complete comeback was possible and the freshman looked confused at the question.
“I don’t know, I guess I always thought it was real,” Sherfield said. “Tyson would keep telling us, ‘Eight threes, seven threes, five threes.’ So we were always in the game, I feel like. This team that we have we can all make shots and we can all make big plays.”
It was the kind of spark WSU desperately needed, as it was starting to reward itself for spotting up and cutting better against SMU’s 2-3 zone defense. In the first half, WSU was largely stagnant and finished with 24 points on 25.8% shooting.
Although SMU’s shift to a full-time zone surprised WSU, the coaching staff was frustrated by the lack of execution by the players. At halftime, it was WSU assistant coach Tyson Waterman who tried to light a fire into the players.
“I was trying to get through (halftime) without blowing a gasket and I got right to the end, and then one of my assistant coaches blew a gasket,” Marshall said. “So I just piled on. That was probably in the last 30 seconds before they left the locker room. We almost got through it, but in the end they needed a little boot to the butt.”
What propelled the Shockers back into the game was not only their improved shot-making, a result of better ball movement and player location, but their sheer dominance on the glass down the stretch. WSU made 14 of its final 24 shots and rebounded seven of those 10 misses and turned them into 14 second-chance points.
A second chance gave Dennis the opportunity to splash a corner three off an inbounds play. Jaime Echenique kept a possession alive by rebounding a miss and finishing on the other side. Another team rebound kept the next possession alive, which Sherfield finished off with a three to cap a 17-0 run by WSU to trim SMU’s lead to 50-43 with 8:59 remaining.
After falling behind by 24, WSU scored on 11 straight possessions. More importantly, WSU’s defense delivered stops on eight times at the other end during that span.
“When we started getting stops,” Burton said when asked when he started to believe in WSU’s comeback. “We were making shots, but when we started getting stops and not allowing them to score every time they got the ball, that’s when it became real. When you’re making shots and getting stops, anything is possible.”
“We struggled to score and that’s the story of the game,” SMU coach Tim Jankovich said. “Give (WSU) credit for hitting a bunch of shots, but none of that would have mattered if we had just a remotely normal clip in the last six or seven minutes.”
And it wasn’t like Marshall was going deep into his bench, rotating players to try to wear SMU down. The Shockers were doing it with essentially a six-man rotation, as Marshall only played Sherfield, Etienne, Burton, Dennis, Trey Wade and Echenique down the stretch.
All six players delivered crucial plays for the Shockers, especially late, when Wade drilled a corner three and Burton drew a foul and made a pair of free throws to erase the 24-point deficit in a little more than 10 minutes and draw WSU and SMU level at 58-58 with 3:07 remaining.
“I’m real proud of this team and their resiliency,” Marshall said. “We shortened our bench in the second half. Those guys played through some adversity, but also through some fatigue and made big-time plays continually.”
Even though those six players had exerted so much energy in clawing back from 24 points down, the players said it wasn’t enough to just to give WSU a chance to win a game it was supposed to lose 99.8% of the time.
“At that point, we just had to win the game,” Dennis said. “We really had to.”
With WSU trailing 60-58 and the final minute nearing, the Shockers needed someone to make a play. Burton answered the call, taking an outlet pass and attacking in transition. He found an open path down the right side and glided toward the basket and laid it in while knocking down SMU’s Isiaha Mike.
Official Anthony Jordan made a dramatic pause and then gestured for a block call, awarding Burton a free throw that he made to complete a three-point play to put WSU up 61-60 with 1:14 remaining.
Afterward, Burton said he may have taken a page out of Cincinnati’s Jarron Cumberland’s playbook after he shot an AAC-record 22 free throws against WSU last week.
“When I got the ball in transition, I knew they were running back and it was an opportunity for me to be aggressive,” Burton said. “I saw (Mike) coming to take the charge, but Cumberland gets (those calls) because he jumps to the side of them. I figured I should do that at that moment and it worked out in my favor.”
SMU answered with a go-ahead basket of its own, setting up another pressure-packed, final-minute possession for the Shockers. Dennis, who had stroked a career-high six threes at that point, was the obvious choice for WSU to try to find. And sure enough, the 6-foot-5 sophomore popped up wide open at the top of the key by himself.
And for the seventh time on the day, Dennis caught, elevated, flicked his wrist and watched as his arc was pure and his aim was true and the three-pointer swished through to give WSU its final lead, 64-62, with 32 seconds left.
That proved to be the dagger in WSU’s 40-12 close to the game.
“Winning is hard and it’s easy to throw in the towel and give up,” Dennis said. “I think we showed a lot of character and toughness in the last 15 minutes of the game to pull out a win when it really looked like it was over.”
And that 0.2% chance materialized into a 66-62 victory for WSU, its largest come-from-behind win in program history and the second-largest comeback in Division I this season. The bonus: WSU improved to 22-7 overall, picked up a crucial Quadrant 2 road victory and moved into sole fourth place in the AAC with a 10-6 record.
“I just told them how proud I am of them,” Marshall said. “I’ve been very fortunate I’ve won a lot of games as a coach because I have had players that have this type of character.”
Some perspective on how incredible WSU’s comeback was: The Shockers, a team that scored 0.99 points per possession entering Sunday, finished with 40 points on their final 18 possessions for a 2.22 PPP clip. On the defensive end, WSU held SMU to 12 points on its final 19 possessions of the game.
It was a surreal scene at Moody Coliseum, as an opposing team from the AAC spilled onto the court to celebrate a victory for the first time this season. The Shockers chest-bumped and high-fived and yelled and sang on their way back to the locker room.
Newly appointed school president Jay Golden, on his first road trip, was invited back to the locker room to lead WSU in its “Movin’ On Up” celebration chant.
Had anyone ever been a part of a comeback quite like this?
“This is a first for me,” Sherfield said with a grin.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been apart of a comeback like this,” Burton said, shaking his head.
WSU looked as if it was on the way to another crushing defeat that would require some soul searching afterward. Instead, the Shockers not only found their heart but it grew tenfold after an experience so wild and crazy that they couldn’t help but feel was more significant than a single victory.
“I’m so happy for us because we’ve been going through it, man,” Etienne said. “As a team, we’re growing. There’s growing pains. But everybody rallied together.
“Nobody wants to go down big, especially with what’s riding on our games, but I’m kind of glad it did go down like this because this win is so much more special than if we had gone out there and won by 15.
“The fact we were on the road, our backs were truly against the wall, and we came back in this type of fashion is a great testament. I think it’s the fuel that we need for the last two games and the postseason.”
This story was originally published March 2, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
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