San Diego State will seek its first berth in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament‘s Final Four when its faces Creighton Sunday in the South Regional final.
Oddsmakers have made the fifth-seeded Aztecs a 1 1/2- to 2 1/2-point underdog against the sixth-seeded Blue Jays. The ABC News-owned data prediction website FiveThirtyEight gives San Diego State a 46% chance of winning.
The game is a rematch of the Aztecs’ 72-69 overtime loss to Creighton in a first-round game of the 2022 NCAA tournament in a game San Diego State led 62-53 with three minutes, 19 seconds left in regulation and had a 95.6% chance of winning according to ESPN’s Game Tracker, but never scored again in regulation.
The Aztecs led 69-66 with 2:06 remaining in overtime, but never scored again.
“We’re more veterans now than we were back then, so we just are trying our best to learn from that and learn from that situation,” San Diego State senior forward Keshad Johnson said.
Johnson is among six Aztecs who combined for 40 points against the Blue Jays who remain with the team.
Creighton returns three players who combined for 46 points, including sophomore guard Trey Alexander, who scored a game-high 18.
The teams shared a plane to the Maui Jim Maui Invitational in November. The Blue Jays flew from Omaha, Nebraska to San Diego on a half-empty plane, then picked up San Diego State en route to Maui.
Aztecs’ coach Brian Dutcher and Creighton coach Greg McDermott sat across from each other on both the flights to and from Hawaii, talking “a lot” about Steve Fisher, Dutcher’s predecessor as San Diego State’s coach.
McDermott described Fisher as “a longtime friend of mine and part of an infamous poker group on the Nike trip for a lot of years with himself and (former Michigan and Arizona State coach Bill) Frieder and (former Syracuse coach Jim) Boeheim and (former Kansas and North Carolina coach) Roy Williams and some others, (former Georgia Tech coach) Bobby Cremins.”
Aztecs’ senior forward Adam Seiko is the brother of Blue Jays’ sophomore forward Arthur Kaluma.
“The timing wasn’t there” for Kaluma to play for San Diego State, Dutcher said.
“We watched him play and thought he was a wonderful player when he was playing with the Houston Hoops” youth basketball program, Dutcher said.
“Sometimes recruiting is ‘I don’t want to be greedy and stack players’ if I’ve got a player that I think fills that role because I know at the end of the day they’re not going to be happy if they’re stacked on top of one another.
“So the timing didn’t work out with Arthur as much as he is a wonderful player and could have played for us. Even if we could have got him I’m not to say that he wanted to come to San Diego State.”
The brothers were teammates on the Ugandan National Team in the summer of 2021 when they competed at AfroBasket in Rwanda. Both were starters, with Seiko averaging 13 points per game and Kaluma 13.2 points.
The Aztecs (30-6) advanced to their first Elite Eight with a 71-64 victory over Alabama, the tournament’s overall top seed, Friday. Creighton (24-12) advanced to its second Elite 8 and first since 1941 — when the tournament consisted of eight teams — with an 86-75 victory over 15th-seeded Princeton Friday.
San Diego State is also the first team from the Mountain West Conference to reach the Elite Eight. The conference began operations in 1999 and its first basketball season was 1999-2000.
The game in Louisville, Kentucky is set to begin at 11:20 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time and be televised by CBS. A free viewing party will be held in Viejas Arena with doors opening at 10:30 a.m. The clear bag policy will be in effect.
The winner will advance to the Final Four in Houston Saturday, facing Florida Atlantic, a 79-76 winner over Kansas State in the East Regional final Saturday in New York City.
