By Michael A. Lough

The Sports Report

centralgasports@gmail.com
 

          There were times when it just wasn’t good, and you really didn’t get the impression it would get much better for awhile.

          The Mercer women’s basketball team was, well, unique, had gone through coaches and personalities and an interim coach and it was not good.

          On came Susie Gardner, she of the SEC playing and coaching background.

          It was hard to find a Mercer coaching hire that had a better resume than Gardner. Moreso, it was even harder to figure out why in the hell Gardner would take the Mercer job.

          There wasn’t much attractiveness to it. Sure, the money had been improved, and finally, staffing on the team and throughout the athletics department had grown to where it should have been a decade ago.

          But there were still issues all over the place, and one was a complete and utter lack of tradition.

          No, reality is that a few good years in the infancy of the program does not a “quality history and tradition” make.

          Being good-looking at 30 doesn’t make you hot at 70.

          And goodness, those first few years were brutal. A record-low two wins in Gardner’s first year, with the talent – physically, anyway – for double-digit wins.

          Success tripled a year later to all of six wins, and there was plenty of turnover. And an are-you-kidding? 86-point loss at home to Notre dame.

          Honestly, you started thinking that another year of this, and the clock would be on for the program’s seventh head coach since the turn of the century.

          Well, 132 wins in five-plus seasons later …

          Wow. Five 20-win seasons in the last six? The program had seven such years from 1970-71 to 2011-12. And only one of those seven was as an outright, pure Division I program, NCAA.

          Saturday, the best senior class in Mercer women’s history is honored. Best, until maybe next year. Shoot, the losses have dropped from 15 to 9 to 7 to 2, so, ya know …

          It’s hard to quantify how remarkable a job Gardner has done. Combine the four seasons before she got there and her first two, and Mercer was 48-131, 36.6 percent.

          The Bears covered that win total the past two seasons a week or so ago. They set the program’s record for margin of victory, 48, against Wofford – no NAIA or Division III program – in December of 2016.

          How far has this program come? It has players of the year, all-conference players, undefeated this year in conference play, quality citizens, a top-25 ranking, is huge in the community (that knows who they are) and is likely having calls for games with power-5 programs go increasingly unanswered. The cupcake days are long gone.

          Sure, they’re a clear favorite, as the outright top seed for a conference tournament for the first time ever in Division I, to win the Southern Conference event. They’ve beaten every conference team by 20 points or more at least once in the two meetings.

          That includes Chattanooga, now looking up at Mercer, and ETSU, long familiar with the Bears from their Atlantic Sun days.

          But a hump remains: winning the Southern Conference tournament, and getting past Chattanooga in it.

          The Mocs have stopped the Bears in the past two tournament championships, 65-57 and a crushing 61-59 last year, Mercer blew a 13-point lead with 2:32 left in the third quarter.

          Chattanooga went on a 15-2 run and took a 6-point lead, which dropped to 1 late. A last-second Mercer shot teased and missed.

          As good a season as it was, Mercer didn’t have enough to get an at-large NCAA bid.

          This year, should the hoops gods be against a Mercer tournament title, they are good enough to get an at-large NCAA bid. But it’ll be very, very close if they lose – and only to Chattanooga at the buzzer with a bad call – in the conference tournament.

          They can’t improve their at-large stock. The conference isn’t very strong this year, and Mercer’s strength of schedule is around 250 out of 349 Division I programs, the bottom 30 percent.

          As of 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Mercer is 59th in the NCAA’s RPI, behind co-mid majors like Florida Gulf Coast, South Dakota, Quinnipiac, South Dakota State, and American, among others.

          They’ve only played four teams currently in the top 100, and have faced five 300-or-lower teams.

          Their dominance of the conference, perfect conference record, consistency, going 2-2 against the top 100, winning at North Carolina, handling Chattanooga twice, and winning by 15 points a game while avoiding slipups all add up to a quality at-large resume. The problem is that if they lose in the conference tournament, it’s not a quality loss – Chattanooga is pretty down – and probably puts the Bears on the wrong side of the bubble  in the “first four out” category.

          Shoot, when Gardner got here, it was a good thing the A-Sun tournament was open instead of limited to eight teams. The Bears' season would have ended on somebody’s senior day.

          Instead, they have a very good chance to win 30 games – 30 freakin’ games, at Mercer, women’s hoops, one season, when it took almost a half-decade not so long ago to win 30 – and get an automatic bid and be seeded around 13, maybe 12.

          Now, it’ll be an outright shock if the Bears aren’t dancing.

          Wow.