MINNEAPOLIS - For the men's basketball teams at Texas Tech and Virginia, doing something unprecedented for both programs took hard work, dedication, determination - and vision.
The Red Raiders (31-6) and the Cavaliers (34-3) will meet in the NCAA tournament championship game Monday night at 9, with CBS televising the game. Neither program has ever been this close to the title, making it a rare matchup of first-timers in the final game of the college basketball season.
The most recent time both teams in the championship game had never been there before was 40 years ago, when Magic Johnson and Michigan State beat Larry Bird and Indiana State, and now another first-time champ is guaranteed. The most recent one of those was crowned in 2006, when Florida won the first of back-to-back titles.
College basketball's hierarchy - blue bloods in an array of shades from Duke to Kansas to Kentucky to North Carolina - is difficult to crack. Getting here started with Virginia coach Tony Bennett and Texas Tech coach Chris Beard believing it could be done.
"Then you've got to get people on board that really believe it and believe it in front of you, behind your back, believe it at 10 o'clock when they're out of town, on the road somewhere. Believe it in the morning, believe it when they're talking to their wife, their kid," Beard said Sunday at U.S. Bank Stadium, the day after his team topped East Region No. 2 seed Michigan State 61-51. "They've got to really believe it."
In less than a decade, Beard has gone from coaching in the semi-professional ABA to NCAA Division III, then D-II and then a couple of seasons at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock before landing in Lubbock. The Red Raiders' basketball history is solid but unspectacular. Texas Tech was where Bobby Knight landed after the volatile Hall of Fame coach wore out his welcome in Indiana, taking the Red Raiders to the NCAA tournament four times in the 2000s.
Pretty good, but Beard expected much more.
"Our goal has never been to make a tournament. It's been to win the tournament," Beard said. "It's easy to talk about, and really, really hard to do. But that's where we started this whole thing, was just trying to have the expectations and the vision where we could be relative."
Texas Tech reached the Elite Eight for the first time last season. This season, with a mostly rebuilt team around star Jarrett Culver, the Red Raiders shared the Big 12 regular-season title for the first time. Now the NCAA tourney's West Region winner, a No. 3 seed, is on the cusp of an unlikely championship.
Bennett's belief he could challenge the Atlantic Coast Conference's Tobacco Road powers came from his father, former Wisconsin coach Dick Bennett. The Badgers hadn't been to a Final Four in more than 50 years when he led them there in 2000 using a methodical style.
"Can you go and take a team and build your program in a way that you think is best and compete against the best?" said Bennett, in his 10th season at Virginia, the No. 1 seed from the South Region. "There's a way that I know works - or that I believe works. So when you get in those spots, you hope, you have a vision and you hope, but you never truly know. When you come in and say, 'This is going to happen. We're going to be a Final Four team, or we're going to win the ACC,' you believe it, and you hope it and then you just go to work."
Tony Bennett took his father's blueprint and turned Virginia into a perennial ACC contender, going toe to toe with Duke and North Carolina, but not until this season were the Cavaliers able to break through - doing so on the strength of two improbable last-second plays to beat Purdue 80-75 in overtime in the Elite Eight and Midwest No. 5 seed Auburn 63-62 in the Final Four.
Defense is the calling card for both finalists, but Bennett is quick to point out they are not similar when it comes to X's and O's, only in their results. According to statistics at KenPom.com, in points allowed per 100 possessions, Texas Tech is ranked No. 1 in the country and Virginia is fifth.
The betting total for this game was a paltry 118 points as of Sunday afernoon, and the pairing might not lure in the casual fan looking for one-and-done stars, iconic coaches and fast-paced 3-point offenses similar to the one Villanova used to win two of the past three titles.
"I think if you're a basketball fan, you'll really enjoy the game," Virginia junior guard Braxton Key said. "If you're just kind of a highlight fan, this isn't the game to watch."