SPOKANE, Wash. — This San Diego State is unfair. This San Diego State is not cool, especially when all the opponent has going for it is a fairy tale. This version showed up Sunday and put together a comprehensively unkind performance, making happy and hopeful Yale miserable for almost every second of it. San Diego State did what it usually does defensively. It also did what it almost never does offensively. It had James Jones, the Bulldogs’ coach, staring at the floor and exhaling deeply a lot.
It is one thing to get drawn into a rock fight with the Aztecs. It is quite another when they have all the rocks.
The reward, though, wasn’t the 85-57 win or the soured body language of a vanquished opponent or even the last spot in the NCAA Tournament’s round of 16. It was what lay beyond, on a night when San Diego State approached its perfect self. It was UConn. Again.
Running back the 2023 national championship game on Thursday night. Revisiting any and all regrets and having the opportunity to address them. UConn very possibly is better than it was last April. San Diego State very definitely looked terrifying in its own right four days before this rematch. It is probably no accident that Brian Dutcher, self-proclaimed man of singular focus on the next opponent, seemed singularly focused on the next opponent about 15 minutes after his team left the Spokane Arena floor.
“We’re heading to play a road game against UConn in Boston,” the Aztecs coach said in his opening statement during the postgame debrief, “and I’ve got a group that I think will be up for the task.”
All pretense dropped in a hurry. Of course San Diego State noticed that UConn was the No. 1 overall seed a week earlier. Of course San Diego State computed who likely would be waiting if it could manage two wins in Spokane. Of course San Diego State started thinking about what it did to the overall No. 1 seed last year — it beat Alabama, to jog everyone’s memories — and the confidence it can squeeze out of that precedent.
Of course everyone remembered what it felt like to fall well short — by 17 points in the 2023 title game, but who’s counting — on the last day of the previous season, to watch the confetti fall for someone else.
“A little bitter taste in our mouths,” is how Aztecs star Jaedon LeDee put it Sunday, and, sure. Just a little.
“We’re just excited we get another crack at them,” Aztecs guard Darrion Trammell added moments later. “They won a national championship last year, but I feel like we were right there. To get another chance at it, I think we’re up for the opportunity. We have the team to do it.”
That will be the tension during the next four days: Do they?
If Sunday were the only data point, it’s hard to argue.
San Diego State threw Yale’s Cinderella story into a kiln. Up 10-0 to start the game. Up 24 at halftime. Up by 31 before Dutcher started pulling rotation regulars in what was less an act of mercy than strategic preservation. The game featured a grand total of 48 seconds with the Aztecs and the Bulldogs even and zero seconds with the Aztecs trailing.
Holding a team to 37 percent shooting from the field and controlling the glass on the misses — Yale had a total of five offensive rebounds — is the expectation. This is what San Diego State does. The Aztecs’ 13 made 3-pointers were something else. That was a season-high, after coming in ranked 309th nationally in accuracy from beyond the arc as a group. The 52.7 percent shooting overall? Only the fifth time all season the Aztecs have hit more than half their attempts in a game. “Just a great night,” sophomore forward Elijah Saunders said. “I felt like that was the first time all season that we were just clicking.”
It’s difficult enough to deal with a team that doesn’t care if it misses shots because it is so supremely confident it will get enough stops to win, which it typically does. It was borderline impossible for Yale when San Diego State scored 1.288 points per possession and offered absolutely zero outs. “I said to the guys in the locker room, ‘Well, they can’t shoot 7-for-15 in the second half,’ and they went out and they shot 6-for-12,” Jones said. “So I guess I was wrong.”
This game, however, is not the only data point.
Over the course of 35 others, this Aztecs offense was not wildly worrisome. Its ability to hit jump shots at any level was … not amazing. LeDee has performed at an All-American level consistently — add another 26 points on Sunday to the mix — but the threat levels elsewhere have not been regularly high. It was not a bad plan by Yale to worry about LeDee near the rim and not so much anything else, until an anomalous shooting performance blew up the math.
So the game on Sunday was less a rule than an exception. And about the only similarity between UConn and Yale is their governor.
San Diego State needs to be this San Diego State, again, to fulfill its wildest revenge fantasies. Whether it can be remains an open question. “We’ll be ready,” Saunders said.
It is, after all, UConn. If there is a team that could grab San Diego State’s attention more than any other, if there is an opponent that could inspire the Aztecs to abnormal offensive wizardry, it is this one.
In the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s win, the players did not seem overly worried about what’s in store. They knew what was coming. And they apparently wouldn’t have it another way.
“That’s the beauty of being young,” Dutcher said with a laugh late Sunday. “I’ll be intimidated, but I’ll get ’em ready to play … We’re going to go in with a game plan and with a bunch of guys that believe they can win. And we’ll see how it ends.”
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(Photo: Kirby Lee / USA Today)
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