The University of South Florida men’s basketball team needs two more victories to secure an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, as announced on March 13. The Bulls, seeded No. 1 in the American Conference Tournament, will face the No. 5-seeded Charlotte 49ers in the semifinals at Legacy Arena.
This opportunity is significant for USF, which is seeking its fourth appearance in the NCAA Tournament and has not won two games in a conference tournament since 2005. The Bulls enter the semifinals with a nine-game winning streak and have not lost since Jan. 31.
USF head coach Bryan Hodgson said, “We played Charlotte just the other day (last Sunday), so it’s still very fresh, and that (scouting report) is very familiar to us.” He added, “We don’t have to flip a switch. We play every game the same way. We play it to win. There’s no extra pressure. We’re not going to play differently. We’re not going to prepare differently. I think that’s the biggest mistake some people make. There’s nothing different about Saturday.” Hodgson emphasized focusing on each possession: “We’re going to really spend time looking at the things we did well against those teams, fix the things that we didn’t do well, and attack that game one possession at a time, one four-minute war at a time. That’s how you win in March… This team hasn’t lost a game in a long time because we take it one game at a time.”
The Bulls previously defeated Charlotte 83-60 in their only meeting this season, with Joseph Pinion scoring 22 points and Wes Enis adding 20 points for USF. If USF advances past Charlotte and seeds hold, they would face No. 2-seeded Wichita State Shockers in Sunday’s championship game.
Hodgson addressed speculation about an at-large NCAA bid if USF does not win both games: “I’m not going to sit here and go through the metrics because we can sit up here all day and say what makes sense to us, and it’s not going to make sense to someone else… I firmly believe that if we put our resume up against some of the other teams being talked about, we would compare well… At the end of the day, I do believe we belong, but that decision is not up to us… We’re going to control what we can control … and that’s winning basketball games.”
