INDIANAPOLIS — The team in green has clearly come to play. That’s the North Dakota State Bison, here from Fargo to face Butler. One thing we should know about the Bison: Coming into Tuesday night, they’re 1-30 all time against current members of the Big East. One thing we should also know about Fargo: It gets cold.
There’s a 3-pointer by Jacari White to give the Bison an early lead . . .
How cold? The average number of days a year at zero degrees or lower in Fargo is 43. The average annual snowfall is 51 inches.
There’s another 3-pointer by White. And another . . .
North Dakota State is in the Final Four, by the way. Of the most northern Division I basketball schools in America, that is. Up the road is the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. Out west, Washington and Gonzaga are a bit more north. But that’s it.
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There’s another 3-pointer by White. And another. And another. He’s as hot as a Fargo morning is frigid . . .
As the first half gets to the final seconds, White has 21 points, making five of six 3-point attempts. Just to make sure the message gets across, he buries another pull-up. So at halftime White has 24 points, and the entire Butler team has 23. The Bulldogs might be 7-2 and have beaten Northwestern and Mississippi State but they trail North Dakota State 44-23. “That first half by that kid is the best half of basketball I’ve ever seen,” Butler coach Thad Matta will say later. “I don’t know if we’ll ever see another performance like that kid had.”
Not in the second half, anyway. Butler turns the heat on White defensively and he makes only one more shot. In 14 minutes, North Dakota State goes from 23 points up to five points down and it looks for all the world like one of those countless games during the long season where the underdog hooks a big fish but can’t quite reel it in.
Except the Bison do. They recover in the last three minutes with a 9-1 sprint and win 71-68. Make that 2-30 against the Big East.
“It was on the board before, it was on the board at halftime and we talked about it throughout the second half,” coach David Richman says afterward. “It was ’embrace the hard.’”
Jacari White has 24 points at the half for @NDSUmbb 🔥
He’s outscoring the entire Butler team ON HIS OWN 🤯
(via @CBBonFOX)pic.twitter.com/sRINU1OnGn
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) December 11, 2024
Sure, they knew it was going to be hard, but you spend winters in North Dakota. You’re accustomed to rock hard, and that includes the frozen tundra. Maybe that’s one of the reasons Richman has kept a very nice program going at his alma mater in his 11 seasons, even if a tad off the national radar screen. The Bison have played in the title game in nine of the past 12 Summit League tournaments. They have made it the NCAA tournament four times since 2009, knocked off Oklahoma in 2014, won a First Four game in 2019. They do it in something of a freewheeling manner, too, arriving in Hinkle Fieldhouse this night leading the nation, per KenPom, with 54.3 percent of their field goal attempts being 3-pointers. They take 30 from outside the arc and 25 from inside to beat Butler and go 8-4 on the season.
So how does a guy keep a program steaming in Fargo, and what does he tell recruits about the weather if they ask?
“It’s sunny and 75,” Richman says, standing in a Hinkle Fieldhouse hallway after upsetting the Bulldogs. Relax, he’s only kidding.
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“I love Fargo. Fargo, we talk about it, it gets cold but it keeps the right people in Fargo. Part of the success of this program is the blue collar toughness that is Fargo, the Red River Valley, the state of North Dakota. We need to embrace that, and I think we do.
“Who we are starts in our recruiting process. We don’t sugarcoat anything. We put everything on the table. This is who we are. If you don’t want to join us, we understand that, We’re not for everybody, but we end up with the right people.”One of those right people is White, a senior in his third season at North Dakota State and the leading scorer at 17.8 points a game. “He was a junior college kid looking for a home. He’s embraced us, we’ve embraced him,” Richman says. “I could not be more proud of him.”
As Matta noted, White’s first half Tuesday was something special. “I just kind of like went . . . unconscious,” White says afterward. There’s something else unique about the current toast of Fargo.
Did we mention he’s from Florida? Orlando to be exact.
“I really wanted to get away from home. Making my decision, it wasn’t really hard,” he says about his college choice. Yep, when it comes to being away from Florida, North Dakota certainly seems like the ticket. That first winter had to be an adjustment, though.
“That was my first time seeing snow. I learned how to layer my clothes. I had a good coat so it wasn’t too bad,” White says. “The first winter I slipped and fell because there was ice on the sidewalk.”
And trying to drive on the stuff?
“I don’t.”
But he found a home and Richman’s program rolls on, and maybe the coach is right about the steel that can be put into a team when Mother Nature keeps committing flagrant-2 fouls. “We have to push through it. We have to find a way to make it work even if it’s cold in the gym. It’s all mental for us,” White says. For such tough mindedness, consider the late second half Tuesday when the Bison are outscored by 28 points and see their lead crumble into dust, and then find a way at the end. “We showed a ton of resilience that last 2 minutes and 50 seconds.” Richman says.
“It’ll mean something if we take the confidence, if we take the joy and use it to get better. But we can’t get content, we can’t get soft. This can’t be our defining signature moment of our season. This needs to be a confidence builder for the rest of our season.”
With that, the North Dakota State Bison end their first trip ever to Hinkle Fieldhouse and head back home to Fargo. The high the next day is supposed to be minus-three degrees.