Sports

Five Years Before VCU, There Was George Mason

'We paved the way'

Lamar Butler watched from his home in Maryland as 11-seed Virginia Commonwealth University completed an improbable run to the Final Four of this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament, knocking off the top-seeded Kansas Jayhawks last Sunday, 71-61, in San Antonio.

As he sat there captivated by the players from this former basketball also-ran celebrating after toppling one of the country’s most storied basketball programs, his mind couldn’t help but wander to a similar scene of pandemonium five years and one day earlier.

“We paved the way for ‘mid-majors,’” Butler said, insisting that quotations marks be placed around the qualifier heaped upon teams from non-BCS conferences. “VCU might be able to get on, but we paved the way first.”

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Butler is of course referring to his George Mason Patriots, who in 2006 also advanced to the Final Four as an 11-seed, after beating Michigan State, North Carolina, Wichita State and No. 1 seed Connecticut, which happened to have five players move on to the NBA.

Five years later, that team hasn’t lost any of its luster. Each year since 2006, the analysts on ESPN’s “Bracketology” show, which analyzes the upcoming tournament, debated which team could be “this year’s George Mason.” Head on over to the official site of George Mason athletics, and you’ll see a commemorative bobblehead set of that team’s starting five, Butler joined by Tony Skinn, Will Thomas, Jai Lewis and Folarin Campbell.

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The team’s legacy even reaches across the Atlantic Ocean.

“My first year in Italy, they said the were signing Folarin Campbell from the George Mason Final Four team even though it was three years ago,” Campbell said from his home in Bonn, Germany, where he recently finished his first season with the Telekom Baskets. “That was the first thing they wrote in the papers.”

If the luster hasn’t worn off in five years, neither has the shock that a team from the tiny Colonial Athletic Association could dispatch of teams from the Big Ten, ACC and Big East on its road to the grandest stage in college basketball.

“You still don’t know us?” 

George Mason and Connecticut took much different paths to their Regional Final date at the Verizon Center in Washington on March 26, 2006. UConn dominated the Big East, widely seen as the nation’s best conference that year. The Huskies went 27-3, and despite losing to Syracuse in the Big East tournament quarterfinals, they earned a 1-seed and were the No. 2 overall team in field behind Duke.

George Mason also dominated its conference only to lose in its conference tournament. When you’re in the Big East, that’s no big deal. When you’re in the Colonial Athletic Association, it lands you squarely on the bubble. The Patriots were one of the final at-large teams to make the field of 65, but once they saw their draw, they knew they could make some noise.

“We matched up really well with those teams [we played],” said Tony Skinn, a senior guard on that Mason team who is now with the New Yorker Phantoms of Germany’s top professional basketball league, in Braunschweig. “With Jai and Will down in the post and me, Folarin and Lamar on the perimeter, I just thought we were going to be tough to beat if a team didn’t come out and play their ‘A’ game.”

Two nights before their showdown, George Mason cruised to a victory over Wichita State, while UConn had to gut out an overtime win against the Brandon Roy-led Washington Huskies. That next day, a Saturday, both teams faced the national media in D.C.

“None of their players could name anybody in our starting five,” Campbell said. Five years after the fact, he’s able to laugh about it. At the time, it was motivation. “Of course we named their starting five, and none of them could answer that question. When we heard that we were like, ‘Wow, we made it this far and you still don’t know us? You haven’t heard of us?’”

One day later, the UConn players could no longer say they hadn’t heard of George Mason.

“Nothing to lose”

UConn came into the game with the Hall of Fame coach, Jim Calhoun. It had just won the National Championship two years earlier, its second title in five years. And the Huskies had Rudy Gay (currently of the Memphis Grizzlies), Marcus Williams (Grizzlies), Hilton Armstrong (Atlanta Hawks), Anderson (Iowa Energy of the NBA Development League) and Josh Boone (formerly of the New Jersey Nets).

But there were reasons to believe George Mason could pull off the titanic upset. UConn’s three losses that season were to Marquette, Villanova and Syracuse, three teams that played a style similar to the Patriots. UConn had also been struggling, losing to Syracuse in its first game in the Big East tournament, and then squeaking past Kentucky and Washington the previous two rounds.

Plus, there was the unseen influence of the weight of the world on UConn’s shoulders.

“We had nothing to lose,” said Gabe Norwood, Mason’s sixth man, now playing professionally in the Philippines. “We saw UConn leaving the arena the day before, and it didn’t seem like they were enjoying themselves. Our whole team was cracking jokes, laughing and having a good time.”

“Shock the world”

The night before the game, Lamar Butler caught part of UConn guard Rashad Anderson’s interview on TV.

“I remember sitting in the hotel and Rashad Anderson was on TV and he said, ‘Oh yeah, we’re going to win,’” Lamar Butler said. “The fact that Anderson guaranteed the win kind of lit a fire. We play basketball too. They were just like us. We were basketball players and they were basketball players. When he made that comment, it was like, ‘OK, it’s time to show them who we really are.’”

The Patriots were confident after reeling off three wins in which they were the underdog each time. They were likely better than an 11-seed, but the loss to Hofstra in the CAA Tournament semifinals, which came without the injured Jai Lewis, likely knocked them down a few spots. They felt disrespected after the Huskies couldn’t name anyone on their team and were essentially already looking ahead to Indianapolis, the site of the Final Four. And in one of the scheduling quirks of the NCAA Tournament, they were the home team, playing in front of a largely partisan crowd at the Verizon Center in Washington.

“It really felt like a home game on steroids,” Norwood said. The Patriot Center in Fairfax is a 10,000-seat arena, and Folarin Campbell estimated the greatest attendance they had at a home game that year was “four or five thousand guys.” A quick check of the attendance records from that year’s tournament shows that 19,718 fans were in the building, and “three-fourths of the gym was covered in gold and green,” according to Campbell.

Those gold-and-green clad fans were about to be treated to one of the most historic games in NCAA Tournament history.

“Shock the world,” Butler said looking back on how he and his teammates felt entering the game. “That was our mindset. Nothing else to think about.”

“Every time they threw a punch, we threw one back”

As the teams strutted onto the court, UConn certainly looked the part of favorite. It was the final game of the weekend, and LSU, Florida and UCLA, not a 1-seed in the bunch, had already punched their tickets to Indy. Not only did UConn look like an overwhelming favorite to advance to the Final Four, but with fellow 1-seeds Duke and Villanova out of the way, the Huskies had to be considered favorites to win the whole thing.

UConn scored the first six points of the game, and led 43-34 at halftime. Mason trailed by as much as 12 in the first half.

But the Patriots had already faced larger deficits in the tournament. They trailed 16-2 early against North Carolina in the second round before coming back to win. “We were just focused on what we had done in the previous games,” Tony Skinn said.

George Mason scored first in the second half to cut the lead to seven. With 14 minutes left in the game, the Patriots had UConn’s lead down to four. Three minutes later, Mason took its first lead of the game when Lamar Butler’s 3-pointer gave his team a 52-51 lead.

“Every time they threw a punch, we threw one back,” Skinn said.

“You couldn’t have anyone else on the line”

From that point forward, the game went back and forth. Neither team had a lead greater than four points for the final 11 minutes of regulation. Trailing by two with 7.9 seconds on the clock, UConn had no choice but to foul.

Tony Skinn was by far the best free throw shooter on George Mason that year, connecting on 80.2 percent of his attempts that season. He was fouled with 5.5 seconds remaining and went to the other end for a one-and-one. If he made both, the game, for all intents and purposes, would be over.

“That ball was in the hoop, and it came out,” Skinn said. Watch the video of the front end of Skinn’s one-and-one, and you’ll see exactly what he is talking about. The ball goes halfway down before it rattles out. UConn pushed the ball up the floor, and Denham Brown’s reverse layup with no time on the clock sent the game to overtime.

“I remember going back to the bench,” Skinn began, the tone of his voice slightly changing as if he still hasn’t totally gotten over the moment. “Everybody’s face was like, ‘I can’t believe you just missed.’ In my heart, it would be my fault if we lost.”

Whether he knew it or not, his teammates didn’t see it that way.

“You couldn’t have anyone else on the line. That’s who you wanted on the line. If I had to choose between me and him, I’d say him. He was the senior, it was his year,” Folarin Campbell said.

Five minutes later, Skinn’s heart could rest easy.

“My dream came true”

Of course, finishing off UConn wouldn’t come easy. George Mason controlled the overtime period, leading by five with 41 seconds left. But a flurry of missed free throws gave the Huskies one last chance. When Denham Brown’s three pointer clanged off the rim giving the Patriots an 86-84 win and a berth in the Final Four, the very face of the NCAA Tournament changed forever.

“It was chaos, in a good way,” Lamar Butler said. “I looked at my family in the stands, and they were in tears. I can’t even describe it to this day. No one even gave us a chance in the tourney, let alone to beat the best team in the country that year.”

The ride would end for George Mason in the National Semifinals when the Patriots lost to the eventual champion Florida Gators, another roster loaded with NBA talent, including Joakim Noah and Al Horford. Even though they couldn’t take the final two steps and bring the National Championship to Fairfax, that did not diminish what they were able to accomplish.

“I dreamed about going to the Final Four and playing high level basketball in college,” Folarin Campbell said as he told the story you get the feeling he never tires of telling. “I’m thinking I’m going to go to Duke or North Carolina. I end up going to George Mason, so I’m just thinking, ‘Alright, I just want to win the CAA,’ so I can at least get a taste of the NCAA Tournament. After that Michigan State game, we just believed something special can happen. Our whole team was playing well at the right time.

“My dream came true. In the locker room it was just joy, happiness. It shows that nothing is impossible."

It also guaranteed that no one again would ever forget the name George Mason.

“We made history”

Other than Coach Jim Larranaga, who has signed on to stay at Mason through the 2015-2016 season, all the principals in the story of George Mason’s run to the Final Four have moved on. Folarin Campbell and Tony Skinn play basketball in Bundesliga-1, the top professional league in Germany. Jai Lewis plays for Rera Kamuy Hokkaido in Japan, Will Thomas plays for Oostende in Belgium and Gabe Norwood plays in the Philippines for the Rain or Shine Elasto Painters. Lamar Butler is the only former Patriot stateside and is in business with his father and brother.

The six of them stay in touch, but they don’t reminisce that often about that magical two weeks in the spring of 2006. According to Norwood, their conversations now center around “kids, business and our careers.” But when they see a team like Butler make the National Championship game or, better yet, a team like Virginia Commonwealth, also an 11-seed from Virginia, in the Final Four, they can’t help but smile.

“Now a lot of mid-major conferences know they can compete with these higher level conferences,” Campbell said. “It has nothing to do with the name on your jerseys, it has to do with the players. If you have a good unit that can play together anything is possible."

Campbell admits to being a talker. Tony Skinn described the legacy of their George Mason team more succinctly:

“We made history.”


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