It’s Lonely at the Summit
NCAA Basketball’s Selection Sunday is a magical day for many players and fans. With the exception of the bourgeoisie at schools like Kentucky, Duke, or Kansas, seeing your team’s name light up across that CBS screen is the quintessential mark of a successful season. This holds especially true for the 20 or so mid-major teams with an automatic bid. They might be meeting a Goliath in the first round, but sharing an arena with the blue bloods from a Power 5 hoops factory will be a memory in their small town for years to come.
As an Ohio State Buckeye, the 2021 Selection Sunday show was supposed to be an exciting one. The team snuck through a stacked Big Ten to a second place conference finish and a top 10 ranking to conclude the season. Sure enough, a 2-seed card flipped over donning the Block O and Scarlett and Gray graphics. Our tournament should start in the round of 32, likely against the 7 seeded Florida, because there isn’t a 15 seed that can stop this exceptional season.
Card flips, Oral Roberts. Auto bid out of the Summit conference. An absolute mid-major buzzsaw that nobody heard knocking on the door.
The Summit League is an NCAA conference hosting only 9 women’s and 8 men’s sports across the different athletic seasons. With location settings in Columbus, Ohio, a Google search of “The Summit” puts it on the third page of results. The conference website boasts of a pole vaulting national champion, a year sending two teams to a women’s NCAA basketball tournament, and having athletes represented in no less than 5 professional leagues and circuits. Their headquarters are shared by a health clinic in a two story building in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. A lot of the facilities for the member schools pale in comparison to Texas High School football complexes. Per my own research and rudimentary calculations in Python, the geographic center of the 10 member schools falls in a creek in Iowa, a state without a member school to begin with.
The term “flyover state” is thrown around every major political cycle, but the world of College sports is supposed to transcend coastal biases. Teams like the Arkansas Razorbacks, Iowa Hawkeyes, Kansas Jayhawks, and Boise State Broncos are just a few teams with consistent presences in major sports like Football, Basketball, Wrestling, Track and Field, etc. The dedication of small towns rallying around their colors for the few home games per year has a powerful national impact. This impact is harnessed through networks, featuring broadcasting and graphics that showcase the hysteria surrounding teams in lonely areas of the country. So begins the vicious cycle of national support. A team has success, joyful fans make headlines, said team falters, graves are danced on. Spencer Rattler in Oklahoma, Texas football never being “back”, Gonzaga struggling in basketball postseason, Missouri Wrestler Ben Askren crashing and burning to conclude his MMA career. The rotating piston of expectations and the vitriol following defeat powers media giants to keep sports on screens.
For better or for worse, the Summit has completely avoided any national influences. With leagues like the Mountain West sharing rights with CBS or Fox hosting the Big East, most Summit basketball games are only accessible through the Summit League Digital Network, with a select few sneaking onto ESPN+. The networks are missing some of the most exciting ball out of America’s heartland with Summit Basketball coverage.
The current leader of the Conference is South Dakota State University. They enter the KenPom ranking aggregate at 79th, boasting a 21–4 overall record and 12–0 conference record. South Dakota State, along with the other three Summit schools with homes in the Dakotas, are renowned for their football. The lull in Power 5 action in mid-December opens the door for the teams in the northern plains to put 6 fullbacks on the field and run for 300 yards against other FCS “contenders”. The Dakota Marker between SDSU and North Dakota State is one of the most exciting days in football, as ESPN never fails to fuel broadcasts with the hysteria of fans with no other rooting interest than their blue or green state university. These high points for all four Dakota schools (North/South Dakota, North/South Dakota State) have no impact on the Summit, however, as they are members of the Missouri Valley Conference for the fall season. Once Division 1 bowl season returns, the Great Plains seem to fall back into a haze until their week in the spotlight, returning in 11 long months.
Its worth wondering what could come of these teams ignoring coastal preference and demanding respect from the national media in the interim. A quick look at current NCAA Basketball statistics gives a hint of what that would look like. Gonzaga leads the country in scoring with 90.9 points/game. Schools behind them include Arizona at 84.9, Purdue at 84.5, and Kentucky at 81.2. Registering at second out of 358 teams is none other than South Dakota State, averaging a blistering 85.4 points per game. In a sea of powerhouses who exploit lesser teams on their schedule en route to these boosted scores, the Summit has produced a run-and-gun firing squad out of Brookings, South Dakota who can shoot with the best. There isn’t many guaranteed routs on their schedule like the other high scoring teams — they do this to everyone. More impressive is the fact that they only have 5 players with over 20 games played who experience significant time in a playing rotation (a difference of about 9 minutes of average court time between the last starter and first bench player) and no player averages more than 15.5 points per game as an individual. Sophomore Guard Baylor Scheierman leads the Jackrabbits in most statistical categories, but other starters don’t trail by much. Also fascinating is the equity of size along with scoring. The shortest starter is Zeke Mayo at 6'3", and the tallest is Douglas Wilson, only four inches taller than Mayo. The team equates production across 5 equal players on the court at one time. A team scorned by capitalistic media pressures happens to practice basketball socialism.
South Dakota State’s impressive resume jumps off the page in the points per game ranking, but not too far below is a familiar name. The next non-power 5 team is their conference rival. Scoring at a mark of 81.1 ppg, seventh place belongs to The Oral Roberts Golden Eagles.
Oral Roberts’ answer to the guerilla style from South Dakota State is the MOAB Junior Guard Max Abmas. Abmas averages 36 minutes, 23 points, and 3.9 assists per game, and 55% of his 529 points on the season have come off of 3-pointers. Current draft projections have him going in the early second round of the NBA Draft if he were to leave Oral Roberts after this season. The way I see it, however, is that he has no reason to head for the show any time soon.
Abmas silenced rumors that he’d be going pro in July when he announced he’d play his Junior Season at Oral Roberts. This was shortly after he cemented himself into basketball history in March. His Oral Roberts team shocked my Buckeyes in the first round, becoming only the ninth 15-seeded team to win a game in the NCAA tournament. They followed up the overtime upset with another win over Florida, making them the second team ranked that low to ever advance to the Sweet 16. In these games, along with their narrow two-point loss to Arkansas to follow, Abmas totaled 80 points to add to his 2021 Summit Player of the Year accolade. This historic run is another bragging point seen on the Summit website, and Abmas’s return to the team certainly brings more much needed attention to the conference.
This is why an exit following his Junior season could be a death blow to any hopes of growth and success for the conference. The matchups between South Dakota State and Oral Roberts should already attract primetime coverage. The storyline of two electric offenses, one led by a hero who returned to the team he made history with and another machine that squeezes the breath out of teams with an unpredictable attack, should rival any other mid-week conference matchups. However, as of right now, their next matchup on Thursday, February 24th is not scheduled to be available for streaming anywhere. If the historic run from last March was not enough to keep Oral Roberts and their exciting counterparts in the loneliest part of the United States, they may never achieve the glory that programs like Wichita State, George Mason, or Loyola Chicago created for themselves by stringing together upsets. National media has disregarded the 4 teams with one of the strangest quad-rivalries in the Dakotas. They’ve lost out on St. Thomas Minnesota, a team who has overcome even crazier odds by elevating from Division III and experiencing moderate success in just 2 years. They’ve ignored the power of Denver in Lacrosse and affiliate member Northern Colorado producing wrestlers like former UFC interim champion Justin Gaethje. One of the schools from the only state with all four directional schools competing at the Division I level in Western Illinois may never have their stories told. Young men like Abmas and Scheierman are trying their hardest to roll last year’s momentum into establishing their conference as a staple of college basketball, but they are kept silent. A conference full of the strange and exciting has been completely disregarded by the only people with the power to tell their story.
The entrance to the Oral Roberts campus features the largest bronze statue in the world, two 60 foot praying hands meant to represent the healing power of modern medicine and strong faith coming together at the religious University in Tulsa. I remember reading a story on Twitter during Oral Roberts’s run from a former Tulsa resident in which he joked about his father taking out-of-town visitors to the hands and claimed they opened up to face the skies at noon. When nothing would happen by 12:05, he’d shrug it off and say “must be turned off”.
The hands had never moved. They will never move. As it seems is happening in the Summit League. As wild, goofy, and awe inspiring as the member schools can be, with no public media effort to showcase the corner of basketball heaven, the Summit schools will never elevate to the level of attention other mid-major legends have and will stay hidden in the lonely hills of the Great Plains.
