Mark WiedmerWhen he awoke that Selection Sunday morning on March 9, 1997, then-University of Tennessee at Chattanooga basketball coach Mack McCarthy had learned from painful experience to quit worrying about where the Mocs would be seeded in the NCAA tournament.
"We were probably going to be a No. 15 or 16 seed," he said of the automatic bid UTC had earned by winning the Southern Conference tournament. "There were a lot of times I thought we deserved better than that, but that's just the way it was."
So he took off that morning with his wife, Jean, and several friends for the NASCAR race at Atlanta Motor Speedway just south of the Big Peach, having been promised by local auto dealer owner Herb Adcox that he would be flown back on Adcox's private plane in time to catch the Selection Show on CBS that evening.
"But about the time we were getting ready to leave the track to head back, there was a big wreck and one of the cars involved caught on fire," McCarthy recalled Saturday as he was heading home to North Carolina after doing television analysis during the Conference USA tourney in Birmingham, Ala.
"By the time they cleared it up and started the race back, Jean and I were back in Chattanooga at the (Sandbar, now the Boathouse) restaurant getting ready for UTC's Selection Show watch party."
What they saw that night as the regional brackets were revealed made McCarthy do a victory lap.
After receiving either a No. 15 or 16 seed in each of his previous NCAA tourney invitations witih the Mocs, McCarthy was delighted to learn his team would be a 14th seed paired against third-seeded Georgia.
"Seeding mid-majors can be really hard," McCarthy said. "Where (the committee) makes mistakes is with the high majors. Georgia had probably been a fifth or sixth seed most of the season. But they got hot in the SEC tournament (losing in the final to Kentucky). As good as that run was, they didn't automatically become a 3. But (the committee) got caught up in that run."
McCarthy's staff had taped every game of every major conference tournament, since this was the days before you could swiftly download off the internet a full season's worth of games of every Power Five conference school.
"By Monday we had every game tape we needed," he said.
And by the time the game rolled around Friday afternoon inside the Charlotte Coliseum, McCarthy's Mocs were ready to do in the Bulldogs, scoring the game's first 15 points and hanging on for a 73-70 win. Then they outscored Illinois 20-4 down the stretch of their second-round game to prevail 75-63.
Unfortunately, the Cinderella ride came to an end in the Sweet 16 against Providence and its marvelously named guard God Shammgod.
(An odd footnote from that season: McCarthy always has pointed to a pre-conference loss to Canisius and its creative coach John Beilein as a turning point for the Mocs. Pete Gillen was the Providence coach who ended UTC's tourney run. Two years later, McCarthy was the head coach at Virginia Commonwealth, Beilein was the coach at crosstown rival Richmond and Gillen was running the show at Virginia.)
But we digress, for while McCarthy won't look back to 1997 and say he saw it coming, he does note of that Selection Sunday, "Probably the least stressful of all those Sundays I was a coach at UTC. For one thing, it was something like the fourth time in five years we'd won the SoCon's automatic bid. We'd gotten used to going. It wasn't like in the years we didn't win and you're up half the night waiting to see if you're going to the NIT or not."
McCarthy also noted how experienced his team was, saying, "We were an old team, lots of seniors and redshirt seniors. The year before I'd said this was probably the best UTC team I'd coach and we didn't get it done. But a year later, we became that team."
Some mid-major team almost assuredly will become that team this season. Over the last decade we've watched George Mason (2006), Butler (2010 and 2011), VCU (2011) and Wichita State (2013) crash the Final Four.
Let a few higher seeds fall victims to upsets this time around and someone such as highly experienced Middle Tennessee State, which upset second-seeded Michigan State in the round of 64 last season, could make a deep run this season.
Slightly higher up the food chain, SMU and Butler - though Butler's Bulldogs are now a part of the Big East, same as defending national champ Villanova - also have that look this season.
In fact, enough mid-majors have advanced further than the Sweet 16 since the '97 Mocs that McCarthy says he isn't asked to relive that March run nearly as often as he once was.
"I used to get calls about it every March," he said. "But we get further away from that year, less and less people remember it."
It will never be forgotten around the Scenic City, however. Twenty years later it remains the greatest NCAA Division I run ever by a Mocs team, men or women. And with the men's program having reached only three NCAA tourneys since that 1997 squad, Mack's Mocs become more beloved and legendary every spring.
And because of that, a sports writer couldn't help but ask McCarthy if his mind drifts back 20 years every time Selection Sunday rolls around.
"I got goosebumps," he said, "just listening to you ask the question."
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com