For 25 years, Rick Byrd has coached the Belmont (Nashville, Tenn.) men’s basketball team, but it wasn’t until last week that he was “discovered.” Beating rival Lipscomb 74-69 in overtime in the 113th meeting between the schools earned Byrd and the Bruins their first NCAA Tournament bid. Today, Belmont will find out who it plays in the opening round. That knowledge will be just the latest thrill in what was an emotional week for the personable coach.
Anthony Cotton: What was last Sunday like for you?
Rick Byrd: For about 30 hours now, there’s been a lot of changing moods. It really doesn’t – at least for me – hit you right away. When you play three games in three days (in the Atlantic Sun Conference Tournament), you’re just trying to win the next game. It was exhilarating to win and great to see our kids celebrate, but the best part has easily been the people who you don’t think about who this is going to touch. Whether it’s personal friends, family, former players or students – you can only imagine the cellphone messages, the office messages, the e-mails. I’ve heard from people I don’t even know and people who mean the world to me. You don’t think it’s going to make a lot of people happy – you’re just trying to win games.
AC: And it only took you 25 years to become an overnight sensation.
RB: I hadn’t thought of it that way. It’s certainly taken all of those 25 years for someone from The Denver Post or Seattle radio talk shows to call, or to be on (ESPN’s) “Cold Pizza,” and everything else that goes with this. Everybody’s interested when a school makes it for the first time, but even if I’d never had this, this would have been a great way to make a living. It’s a lot of stress, but it’s not really work.
AC: Would the selection committee be so mean as to match you against Tennessee?
RB: Obviously I don’t know what the committee talks about when they get in there. I think that would mean we’d have to go higher in the seedings than could happen. Where will Tennessee be, a No. 3 seed, maybe? We’d have to get to a 14, and I don’t think, looking at RPIs, that we’d be a 14. But who knows. Maybe Tennessee will win the SEC title and move up to a No. 2 seed, and we might be a 15 if there were some upsets in the mid-major leagues.
AC: I was wondering where you saw your team fitting in, in the tournament.
RB: I don’t know. For us, if all the favorites in the mid-majors … I feel pretty sure we’re not a play-in team, but we could certainly end up being a 16th seed.
AC: Historically, I guess you’d want to be a 15th seed. The 15th seed has won games in the tournament.
RB: Maybe if you look at it conversely: We could make history by being the first 16th seed to win. I don’t know how capable our team is against a No. 1 or No. 2 seed. We played Ohio State well up at their place, Oklahoma beat us pretty soundly at their place. We gave Kansas State a good game, losing by four, but they’re not an NCAA Tournament team. We’re literally going to have to get better in the next week of practice to be competitive, because we’re probably going to have to play a little differently against a team that will have significantly more size and probably more significant athletic defensive ability than the teams we’ve played in the last 20 games.
AC: Did you set this year’s schedule with the idea of being an NCAA Tournament team?
RB: If you look back since we’ve gone Division I (1997), we’ve played very good schedules, not only in terms of the guarantee games we’ve played, but also in nonconference games. A lot of teams are going to shoot for teams ranked 250 and below in the RPI to try and get some wins – we didn’t go that way to try to find wins. I have a very strong belief that you get better as a team by playing as many good teams as you can play. It doesn’t necessarily improve your overall record. Maybe if my job was in jeopardy because of that it wouldn’t be very smart, but I believe those games made our team better. Our nonconference RPI over the last few seasons has pretty much been in the top 30 in the country.
AC: One of the teams in our area, Northern Colorado, is making the same transition to Division I.
RB: We had our share of lopsided losses. We took it on the chin at Mississippi a couple of times by 40-something, Butler beat us bad, Florida pounded us down there one year. But we had some good games – Mississippi State had to make a desperation 3-pointer to beat us by one in our third year, and two years ago we went to Missouri and won. There’s been good and bad, but it’s easier now; we’ve got better players. It just takes time, slowly but surely. The first four years we were an independent, and that’s very tough. Finding the motivation for your players in that situation is very tough. I think Northern Colorado played Lipscomb this year.
AC: Was it more meaningful getting into the tournament by beating Lipscomb?
RB: For sure. Both more meaningful and more stressful. If we had lost to Tennessee State or Gardner-Webb, we would have been disappointed, but we wouldn’t have had to come back to Nashville and hear about it for two weeks. We both were faced with that knowledge; they’ve got a great bunch of folks, but I’m sure it’s been tough for them to read the papers this week and watch the news and all of that.
AC: Clearly you have a game right before you to prepare for, but long term, what do you do with this breakthrough?
RB: It’s been interesting to watch some programs that have gotten to this point. I know Sanford won this league two years in a row before they moved to the Ohio Valley Conference. I thought, “Man, with the recruiting that comes with that, there’s no telling how good they’ll get.” But it didn’t seem to have the impact on recruiting that they would have hoped for or thought they’d get. It’s hard to know, but I can’t imagine it doesn’t help to go into a kid’s high school or home. It helped when we went to the NIT two years ago. It’s tough for a mid-major to get into the NIT. This is another step; recruits will look at us, I hope, in a much more positive light. Everybody wants to be a winner, everybody wants to play in the NCAA Tournament. Before, we could only tell kids that we thought we could do that someday. Now we can tell them that we’ve proven that we can.
AC: Will it be harder to play a Vanderbilt or Tennessee on a regular basis now?
RB: I think the general feeling among those folks is to not schedule somebody who has a really good chance to beat them. Locally, there’s probably some extra issues. (Vanderbilt coach) Kevin Stallings and I are good friends, and at this point we’ve chosen not to play one another so we can talk basketball freely. There are folks out there – Oklahoma didn’t have a hard time beating us by 20. It gets harder to schedule like games, games against mid-majors, more so than the big guys, but there’ll be people who will schedule us.
Anthony Cotton can be reached at 303-820-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com.
