Mountain West memories: The shot that secured Bulldogs’ only NCAA Tourney trip in 25 years
Fresno State has played 827 basketball games over the past 25 seasons.
One was in the NCAA Tournament.
But it’s the game played right before that tournament appearance, to secure the Bulldogs’ only Mountain West title and automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, that really stands out, as the Bulldogs prepare to join a rebuilding Pac-12 on July 1.
It was 2016, the fifth season under coach Rodney Terry, when Fresno State beat San Diego State 68-63 in the championship game of the Mountain West Tournament.
It was an intense, grinder of a game. The score was tied eight times, the lead changed hands nine. Neither team led by more than seven points, after the Aztecs’ started the game on a 7-0 run. And, down by one, with 1:40 to go, Fresno State’s Julien Lewis came up with a steal under the Aztecs’ basket, pushed the ball up the floor, and launched a 3-pointer from the left wing.
Never mind that Lewis was 0 for 8 shooting the basketball.
It didn’t matter. It went down. “Just a dagger,” Terry said, in a phone interview.
Fresno State had led in the game, but never for long, a total of 169 seconds, or 2:49 of game time. But a few minutes after Lewis’ shot, the Bulldogs were cutting down the nets at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas and on their way to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 15 years.
The tough road
The shot by Lewis was big, but just getting there was even bigger. It was the culmination of an arduous and at times absurd climb under Terry, who had inherited a program that finished in seventh place in a one-bid Western Athletic Conference.
Under his Fresno State tenure, there were challenges where underfunded programs tend to encounter them, before and after that tournament run: Scheduling, recruiting, travel. Terry laughed for a second, thinking back. “There was a lot of navigating through a lot of land mines, but I’m proud of that,” he said.
On one trip to Nevada, the Bulldogs were not on a charter flight, not on a commercial flight, but on a bus to Reno. They got stuck in the snow on Interstate 80 for a few hours trying to get through the Donner Pass. The bus driver struggled with the snow chains. It was getting late, and it already was dark. They sat there on the side of the road with the snow falling and the traffic passing them by, before the radio team of Paul Loeffler and Marc Q. Jones helped get the chains in place and got the bus moving again.
They got in late, got up early the next day and beat Nevada.
The climb to the top of the ladder, getting to those nets after winning that conference tournament title had to feel good.
“Nothing like it,” Terry said. “You just kept chopping wood. You kept staying the course, and we did. All I could think was how far we came from the start, getting that job. What we were, I mean, I always liken it to taking a junk car. We had to put a motor in that car and we basically did it. We got that car running like a Cadillac down the highway.
“But it took a lot of work. All that came to a head when we were able to win that thing. That’s what I was thinking, all the hard work we put into this thing.”
The Bulldogs’ former coach, left for Texas-El Paso after the 2018 season. He led Texas to the Elite Eight in 2023 and is now an assistant at Vanderbilt. He looks back at that Fresno State run to the tournament fondly. Every inch of it. They developed a plan, recruited players out of high schools, including Marvelle Harris, who played four seasons for the Bulldogs and became the all-time leading scorer in school history. They hit on Paul Watson, Karachi Edo, Sam Bittner, Terrell Carter. He added in some power conference transfers like Cezar Guerrero, Jahmel Taylor and Lewis, a couple of junior college transfers including Cullen Russo.
“Our staff did a really good job of identifying what our niche was, and we got really good at it,” Terry said.
They kept it going the next two seasons with a mix of high school recruits and transfers in Deshon Taylor, Braxton Huggins, Jaron Hopkins, Nate Grimes and Bryson Williams, the Roosevelt High graduate.
The Bulldogs fell short in that NCAA Tournament, after erasing a double-digit deficit to take a lead on Utah in the second half of a matchup of No. 14 and No. 3 seeds in the Midwest Regional.
They haven’t been back since.
More recognition for that team
Terry said he would like to see that team get more recognition, and Harris have his jersey in the rafters at the Save Mart Center alongside Paul George, Rod Higgins and Jerry Tarkanian.
“When you do something that hasn’t been done — I think it was 15 years they hadn’t been to the tournament - that doesn’t just happen overnight. It’s not easy to do that, especially in a competitive league like the Mountain West. The Mountain West is a great basketball league. It has great venues. It had great coaches at that time in the league. That wasn’t an easy task.
“It was a bigger feat than I think sometimes people give warrant to. I think Marvelle is very deserving of being in the rafters there,” he said. “He was the guy that helped turn our program around.”
But Fresno State will always have that game, and that shot.
There were options on the floor, but Lewis had finished the regular season on a heater from three that carried into the conference tournament. He had hit 19 of 32 shots from the 3-point line (59.4%) in the six games prior to the title matchup against San Diego State after going 7 of 28 (25%) in the Bulldogs’ first 26 games that season.
Terry wasn’t about to stop the game. “You call a timeout, try to over-coach, now you’re giving those guys what they do best — set their defense,” he said.
“You’ve got to let it play out. That’s what we did. We trusted Juice to make a play. You let them play it out. We let the players decide the game. That was a good team, man.”