PITTSBURGH — — Jack Gohlke has no illusions of going to the NBA. Guys who spend five years in Division II before moving on to a small DI program with an NCAA tournament win in its history don’t usually head to the pros.
Don’t confuse this practicality with a lack of confidence in one’s abilities. Or those on his team. Gohlke and his Oakland teammates felt all season that they could hang out with anyone on any given night.
Any night turned into Thursday, when the 6-foot-3 grad transfer and suburban school 30 miles from downtown Detroit showed Kentucky and the country what it took to win in March.
Confident at the start and calm at the end, Gohlke made 10 3-pointers and scored a career-high 32 points as the 14th-seeded Golden Grizzlies delivered the first real shock of this year’s March Madness , defeating the third-seeded Wildcats, 80-76.
“We’ve been a strong team all year,” said Gohlke, who arrived in Oakland last fall after graduating from Hillsdale College. “We’ve won close games all year.”
But never on this stage. Yet it was the Horizon League champion Grizzlies (24-11), not the Wildcats (23-10) of the powerful Southeastern Conference, who seemed ready to face pressure from the NCAA, one and fact, anything can happen. Tournament. Oakland will face 11th-seeded North Carolina State in the second round on Saturday, ensuring a double-digit seed advances to the South Region semifinals.
Gohlke’s shooting gave Oakland some early swagger. His teammates figured it out late when Kentucky switched to a box-and-one in hopes of slowing him down.
Horizon League Player of the Year Trey Townsend had 17 points for Oakland. DQ Cole added 12, including a 3 from a corner 28 seconds from the end this gave the Grizzlies a four-point lead. Oakland never trailed in the final 14:32 to send the Wildcats and coach John Calipari to another early tournament exit.
“To define their season and our season with this game, this is the sport we play,” Calipari said. “This is what we do.”
Antonio Reeves led Kentucky with 27 points. Tre Mitchell added 14 and Rob Dillingham scored 10, but the Wildcats and their roster filled with potential NBA draft picks spent most of the night trying — and failing — to track down Gohlke.
He made 10 of 20 3-point attempts, seven in the first half, one short of Jeff Fryer’s NCAA tournament record, set in 1990 for Loyola Marymount. Gohlke’s only other points came after he was fouled – while attempting a 3. Just another night for a player who wears the number 3 appropriately and took 335 shots from the field, including 327 from the beyond the arc.
“It’s definitely a special thing to see him (make) 3 after 3 after 3,” Townsend said. “It gives us momentum and enthusiasm to continue playing hard.”
The Wildcats came in as 13 1/2-point favorites, but lost to a double-digit seed for the second time in three seasons. In 2022, it was 15th-seeded Saint Peter’s that sent the Wildcats home. This time it was a team led by the longest-tenured coach in the country.
Greg Kampe spent 40 years in Oakland. And until the clock hit zero, the 68-year-old thought the biggest win of his career came in 2000, when the Grizzlies beat Michigan in the regular season.
There is a new number 1.
“As soon as that horn sounded, I immediately changed my mind,” Kampe said with a laugh before becoming a little more serious. “We led the whole game and every time they took the lead, we came back straight away. If we were pretenders, we would have given up. We are not pretenders. We believe our place is here. »
Oakland certainly looked like it was up to the task. The Wildcats, not so much.
Calipari said his job is to take the pressure off his young team’s shoulders and place it on his own. It must have felt awfully heavy at times as Gohlke and the Grizzlies kept pace with the second-highest-scoring team in the country.
Gohlke, who has the green light to take any deep shot, won the Horizon League Sixth Man of the Year award after averaging 12 points coming off the bench. He increased his 3-point total to an NCAA-leading 131 this season. Seven of his 10 against the Wildcats came during an electric first half that had the majority of fans at PPG Paints Arena on their feet and the Wildcats on their heels.
Gohlke stuck his tongue out after his fifth 3. When his sixth fell through the net, he turned around and imitated Michael Jordan’s shrug in the 1992 NBA Finals. Gohlke then cashed in his seventh as the Grizzlies took a 38-35 lead into halftime and not everyone in the crowd was wearing roaring Kentucky blue, just like Kampe hoped.
The roars only grew louder in the final moments, when Gohlke finished the game with the ball in his hands after one last Kentucky miss as the Grizzlies became the 23rd 14 seed to win a game of first round since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985.
Gohlke, whose coach laughed when it was suggested he had become an overnight celebrity, is hardly interested in becoming a one-match wonder.
“We’re definitely not done yet,” he said.
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